Cue card

The person I want to talk about is my aunt Vera, who is my mother's older sister and who, slightly unusually, taught me more about work than either of my parents did. I've known her all my life, obviously, but we became close when I was about fifteen and started spending summers at her flat because it was near my school. She ran a small bakery at the time — six tables, nothing grand — and I helped out at weekends, mostly washing up and eventually serving. What she did that mattered was refuse to let me be careless. If I stacked the chairs badly she would make me redo it, not angrily, just as a matter of fact. She had a phrase she used constantly, which translates roughly as "do it properly or don't start", and I heard it several hundred times that summer. The influence has turned out to be quite deep. I'm not especially talented at most things I do, but I finish them, and I finish them to a standard I'm willing to put my name on — and that came from her rather than from school. I still catch myself redoing small tasks that nobody would have noticed, and I know exactly whose voice is in my head when I do.