It wasn't until after Nana died that Papa really started telling us stories. By then we were too old for Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and the rest, so he told us his stories.
You could never tell if the stories Papa told you were true or not. He sat in Nana's old chair, one knee crossed over the other, middle finger caressing the ash from the ever burning cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Occasionally he’d pause to pinch a crumb of tobacco from his lip or run a smoothing finger over his Clarke Gable moustache. Even more rarely he’d actually put the smouldering tube to his lips.
Most of the stories Papa told were outrageous lies, designed to fool his credulous Granddaughters. (We of course were far too sophisticated to fall for any of them). ‘That’s not true,’ we’d say. ‘That’s a porridge drawer story.’
According to Papa, in Scotland everyone ate porridge all the time. If you didn’t finish it, it went into the porridge drawer, to be sliced up and eaten cold between two slices of bread later. We didn’t believe a word of it. No one, we insisted, would eat porridge cold, and only a crazy person or a sadist would have invented cold porridge sandwiches.
Imagine how shocked we were to find out it was true?
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