Wednesday's Words on a Friday

The original Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and eventually taken over by a moveable feast of participants when Delores had computer troubles.

The aim of the words is to encourage us to write, a story, a poem, whatever comes to mind.
If you are posting an entry on your own blog, please let us know so we can come along and read it.

This month the words are supplied by Cindi and can be found here.

This week's words are:

1. birthday

2. robbery

3. earthquake

4. execution

5. Pooh

6. Paris

and/or:

1. Hepburn

2. ferry

3. murder

4. rolling

5. ledger

6. Tobruk

Here is my story:

As a child I learned from my mother that I had been named Audrey because I had been born on May 4th, the same day as Audrey Hepburn, the actress. After learning that her mother was an actual Baroness, I always imagined Audrey Hepburn as a princess, so by that reasoning, I was too, since I shared the name and birthdate.

Looking back now, I see how silly I was, but four year olds are always fanciful aren't they?
I remember the year my 6th birthday party had a "Breakfast at Tiffany's" theme, with mother asking that all birthday gifts be wrapped in pale blue paper, just like Tiffany's famous "blue boxes". 

There was outrage at the bakery however, when mother ordered a pale blue cake and was informed of the cost. "Highway robbery!" she exclaimed, "I could fly to Paris and back for that cost!"
Which probably wasn't true, but she did calm down and pay for the cake, much to my relief, because the other option was having mother make a cake herself and we all remembered that disaster! 
Raspberry jam and red icing all over the kitchen, prompting my Grandfather to ask had there been a murder while he was out. 

He went out once a week, my Grandfather, on the Manly Ferry, rolling to and fro on the waves as it made its way across the bay. In vain I tried to tell Grandfather it was a Harbor, but he insisted it was a Bay until the day he died.

Every week, he would take his ledger in his briefcase and have lunch with his old mates from the war. The Rats of Tobruk, he claimed they'd been, but there was never any proof apart from his stories. I suppose they could have been true.

The ledger contained notes on all the lunches, who had attended, who had died since the last one, who was there in place of a father or grandfather. The execution of these 'minutes' as he called them was very precise.
No detail was left out and the pages often featured small pencil drawings of the mates and the food too.

I still have it somewhere. The ledger I mean. It was one of the things I managed to save during an earthquake years later, after I'd moved to New Zealand with my mother after Grandfather died.

She wanted to be near her own family again for some reason. I'd never even known about them until she mentioned moving there.
Apparently there'd been some sort of trouble and she had run away with my dad when I made it clear I was definitely "on the way". 

When we arrived in New Zealand, my Grandma, mother's mother, presented me with a small 'Winnie the Pooh' bear, saying it had been my mother's and was now to be mine.
I still have that too, but very little else. The earthquake took almost everything.....