Storytelling Sunday - Vertically Challenged

Can you guess what Lulu, Kylie Mynogue and I have in common?  Natural youthful looks? An ability to look good in gold hot pants? or not being very tall?  I'll leave it to you to decide while telling you a tale from my childhood.

My sister is 8 years older than me.  This means that by the time she was a teenager, I was at quite an annoying age.  So every now and again, she would try and get me into trouble.  At least that's how it seemed to me.  Our home had a brick built storage shed attached to the back of it and we kept things like bikes, lawn mowers and dad's diy tools out there.  It wasn't very big, and it had a small window on one side.  To try and make it blend in with the garden, mum and dad had planted a forsythia hedge around it and by the time of this story taking place, the forsythia had grown the height of the shed and dad had cut a square out of it so that the window could be opened and closed.  We hardly ever locked the shed up and the key was kept in the coal bunker out of harms way. 

So one day, Gill told me that she wanted to see what it was like to be locked inside the shed.  Honestly!  That is what she said.  Being a gullible child - I didn't question her.  We went outside, got the key, she went in the shed and closed the door and I was left outside to put the key in the lock and turn it.  Now it hadn't been used much and over the years the lock mechanism had become very stiff but eventually the key turned and she was locked in.  I went off to play in the garden and after a very little while, she decided she'd had enough.  She called me over and told me to unlock the door.  Well I was only about 7, and the key was very stiff in the lock and I just couldn't do it.  She did not seem keen for me to go and tell mum what had happened so I suspect that she wasn't really supposed to be in there!  

Then she had the bright idea of opening the window and for me to hand the key over to her so she could unlock it from the inside.  Brilliant!  Only I couldn't reach.  The ground must have sloped slightly on the outside and the forsythia hedge was too tall and prickly for me to reach over and hand the key over.  I was only little remember.  I suspect she started to get annoyed with her little sister and get cross with me.  I can still see her reaching out through the window as far as she could, and little old  me on tippy toes leaning into the hedge as far as I could, and the key dangling from my fingers and oh so very nearly reaching hers ... and then I dropped it.  Our eyes met across the hedge, hers in horror and mine in 'oh no, she's going to be very mad at me'.  The key fell through the hedge and the more I shook the hedge to find it, the further into the foliage it fell until neither of us could see it any more.

At this point I obviously decided that I'd done all I could and it was time to go indoors.  And as Gill had banned me from telling mum what we were doing, obviously I couldn't tell her what had happened.  I think I may have been sitting in the dining room with a glass of warm milk watching Blue Peter when mum noticed that Gill hadn't been seen for quite some time.  Gill may have been trying to get our attention but the walls of the shed were thick and I may have had the tv on loud ;-)  I mumbled something about 'she might be locked in the shed' at which point dad arrived home from work and the two of them had to go out there and root around in the hedge to find the key and release her.

I can't remember who was in the most trouble.  Her for leading me into doing something I shouldn't or me for not telling anyone what had happened.  But I'm pretty sure that dropping that key was an accident.

Or was it?