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For my niece, Anna Ure, and for Susanna Buxton, who both helped.

Contents

Dedication

Shrinking Violet

Shrinking Violet

I am a twin. Unfortunately! It is not always easy, being a twin. People expect you to:

look alike

think alike

dress alike

talk alike.

They also expect you to:

sit together

walk together

play together

and

LOVE EACH OTHER TO BITS.

Some twins, I suppose, might do all these things. We don’t! We try our hardest not to.

My twin is called Lily. I am called Violet.

Spot the difference! We are not identical. If anyone thinks we are, it is because they have not looked properly. “Oh! (they go) They are like two peas in a pod! How ever do you tell them apart?”

LOOK AT THE PICTURES. That is what I say.

Lily says you would have to be blind to mistake her for me. But just to make sure, we always try to wear different clothes. When we can! Like, for instance, Lily will wear black jeans and I will wear red ones. She will wear an orange top and I will wear a white one. We can’t do this at school because of the uniform, but most people at school have learnt to tell us apart. They know that Lily is the LOUD one and I am the quiet one. It’s only, sometimes, new teachers that get us in a muddle. But not for long. If one of us is shrieking, they know at once that it is Lily!

Dad calls her Lily Loudmouth because of all the noise she makes. He claps his hands to his ears and goes, “Here comes Lily Loudmouth!” She loves to dance, and sing along to her favourite music. I do, too, but I only do it when I am at home. Lily does it all over. At home, at school, in the street, in the shopping mall… everywhere! I would be too embarrassed.

Dad teases me and says I am a shrinking violet. Mum says I live too much in Lily’s shadow. Lily just says I am a twonk.

Twinkle twonkle, little Vi, How I really wonder why Lily’s brash and you are shy!

This is a rhyme that I made up, but it is in my Secret Filofax that I keep locked with a key. The key hangs round my neck on a special silver chain. I wouldn’t want anyone reading the things that I keep in my Filofax! Also, I hate it if people call me Vi. I only did it for the rhyme. Violet is bad enough, but Vi is the pits.

The reason we’ve got these weird names is that Mum is a huge gardening person and her two most favourite flowers just happen to be the dear little shrinking violet and a great big blustering lily thing that is covered in spots and grows about eight feet tall.

How she got to be Lily and I got to be Violet was just a mistake. I was supposed to be Lily! I was born first (by five whole minutes) and L comes before V in the alphabet so Lily was going to be me. But what with us being twins, and all babies looking the same anyway, Mum went and got us mixed up. Our nan – Big Nan – had knitted this cute little violet suit for one of us and a sweet little white one for the other, and Mum dressed us in the wrong ones! The only way that she could tell which of us was which when we were first born was by this brown birthmark thingie, in other words spot, that Lily has on her bottom, if you will excuse the expression. It is just as well we have now grown up to look so different because who would want to keep gazing at Lily’s, pardon me, bottom all the time? Ugh! Yuck! What a sight!

On the day of the christening, Mum says she was in such a flap, “I couldn’t remember which of you had the spot on her bot!”

Then she laughs like she thinks it’s really funny. Imagine! A mum not being able to tell her own babies apart! But I was the one that had to suffer. I mean… Violet. It’s a granny name. Well past its sellby date. Lily, I think, is quite cool, though Lily herself disagrees.

“Lily! Yuck. It’s like skimmed milk… all white and flabby.”

Dad once said that we should count our blessings. He said just think how much worse it could have been.

“Imagine if your mum’s favourite flowers were nasturtium or geranium!”

Except that then I could have been Geranium, shortened to Gerry, which would be neat, and she could have been Nasturtium, shortened to Nasty. Which would suit her!

She’s all right really, I suppose. Sometimes she can be quite nice, like when our cat Horatio went missing and I thought we’d never see him again and I cried and cried and couldn’t stop. She put her arms round me and said, “Don’t cry, Violet! He’ll come back.” Of course we were only little, then. It’s as we’ve got older that she’s got horrid. Mum says ten is a bad age. She says, “When I was young you didn’t start throwing tantrums till you were twelve or thirteen. Now it’s happening when you’re ten.”

She said it the other day when Lily went into a simply tremendous sulk about not being allowed to go to a party wearing a skirt that didn’t even cover her knickers. Mum and Lily are always having battles over stuff that Lily wants to wear and that Mum doesn’t think is suitable. The reason I don’t have battles isn’t that I’m a goody goody, which is what Lily says, it is just that I would be too shy. Like with singing and dancing in Tesco’s! She swung upside down on a handrail the other day, in full view of absolutely everyone. I just nearly died! But Lily is a natural show off. She will probably be a movie star when she is older.

Well, anyway, that is about me and Lily. Now a bit about Horatio, that is our cat. Horatio is what Mum calls “a grand old gentleman”. He is two years older than Lily and me! Black, with a white bib.

Horatio is a good cat. He is a kind cat. Once when I was ill in bed he came and snuggled under the duvet with me and stayed there till I was better. I thought that was so sweet of him! Dad laughs and says, “Don’t kid yourself! He just knows when he’s on to a good thing.” But that isn’t true! He didn’t go and cuddle with Lily when she was ill. Just with me because he knows how much I love him.