Maggie Gee - Pieces of Me

Novelist Maggie Gee was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1948 and completed two degrees in English at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1982 she was selected as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' by the Book Marketing Council. Her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She is the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in London with her husband, the writer Nicholas Rankin, and daughter Rosa. She is currently writing a memoir, My Animal Life, and a new novel, My Driver, set in Uganda, the sequel to My Cleaner (Telegram £7.99).

1) Wedding photo with confetti in our hair and Mexican bride & groom

In August 1983, Nick and I eloped to Cambridge Registry Office, telling nobody except our two witnesses, Barbara and John. The four of us had an al fresco reception in the Botanical Gardens: I wore a Victorian nightie, Nick wore cheesecloth pyjama trousers. They made speeches on the picnic table. Afterwards, we rang our family from Liverpool St station and told them we'd done it, and my Dad gave us the money that he would have spent on the wedding to go on our honeymoon. I keep the Mexican bride and groom beside it - birth and death, because the Mexican Day of the Dead is November 2^nd, my birthday.

2) Photo of my father and mother kissing on a stile.

One of us kids, probably my older brother, may have taken this as it's totally out of focus. It must have been the early Fifties from the cut of the coats. They're laughing, I love that; they laughed a lot. You don't always see your parents in an intimate moment, having fun together. Mum looked after Dad till he died, at home, but sadly, she died in the same year.

3) Russian doll

This used to contain some of my mum's ashes, until my daughter Rosa, aged about seven, innocently opened it up and spilt the 'dust' inside. Fortunately, we had scattered most of the ashes on the bluebells in Norfolk. Mum said: "I grew up in the woods and fields, so put me back in the woods and fields."

4) Photograph of my maternal grandmother, May Davies.