My brothers and sister voted – literally – to save my life. When I was born, my brothers Dan and Ben were 19 and 20 and my sister Polly had turned 18 the week before – I almost usurped her birthday as well as her position as youngest child and only daughter.
She came and held me in hospital and gave me her little finger to suck and a midwife showed Ben how to change a nappy, rather to his chagrin. It would do him good, he was told, when he had a child himself – which, it turned out, would only be 10 years later. My siblings passed me from one to the other like an exotic new pet as I screamed crossly.
Until then it had been the three of them and that, my parents believed, was their family. Then they went on holiday to Scarborough, where a fortune teller took my father’s palm and said, “You have four children.”
“No,” he said, “we have three.”
“You will have four,” insisted the fortune teller.
Later, my parents went for a drink and laughed at the thought of a fourth baby because they were both in their 40s and Mum was on the pill.
I made my presence known in October 1984. My mother had briefly stopped taking the pill after a gall bladder operation. The family doctor broke the good news and said he would immediately make an appointment for an abortion.
Ben, Dan and Polly were told the news at Sunday lunch and my father, with a bow to the wisdom of Solomon, suggested they should all vote there and then on whether it was to be or not to be. All had gone pale at the idea of their parents having had sex in their old age, but Dan soon turned red and furious and denounced my father as heartless. Of course they should have the baby! So they all voted for me.
Then they all walked down to the pub, Ben muttering, “Bloody hell. Bloody hell,” unable to grasp it all.
My parents married in the mid-60s and Ben was conceived immediately, causing my mother to return a packet of condoms to the chemist and demand her money back. She sat on the step and told fellow customers that the condoms had failed until the owner came out and threw the money at her.
Ben was born at the start of the 1964 general election campaign and the Tory candidate for Stoke Central sent a teddy bear to the hospital with a blue rosette, which my leftwing parents removed, keeping the bear to be chewed and loved.
Dan arrived soon afterwards and the following year Polly arrived, a summer baby who would sit on Dad’s knee as he wrote plays and stories, telling him with bossy certainty what should come next in his tale.
Ben, Dan and Polly grew up together, walked to school together in the mornings, went swimming in the tarn near the draughty, dilapidated house miles from anywhere. There, they had a gruelling but ideal childhood, collecting wood from the forest for the fire, chopping it, kneading bread by hand and walking miles to and from the school bus.
By the time I was born, the lovely old house was lost.
To me the old place sounded like something from a fairytale: the long summer days, the times my siblings milked cows in the fields when they were thirsty, frozen winters in which the grass crunched underfoot. Years later, Ben drove me there one summer evening and it was magical. On the walk back to the car, we were accompanied by a stag, who watched us over the wall. I had missed all that.
I viewed my siblings as grownups and they regarded me as a child. Ben’s girlfriends would fuss over me, spoon feed me jelly and ice cream and read me stories. In 2005, Dan died of cancer, aged 39. I wish I had been closer to him – he was also a journalist – and talked to him about writing.
I found some of his old essays at home. In one he was asked to write a report of a meeting for journalism class, and he had written of a drunken gathering outside a pub that descended into a brawl – “Not quite what I meant,” a tutor had written by the side, “but very interesting.” It got a C-minus.
Polly’s body was ravaged by dystonia, a condition that causes her muscles to spasm uncontrollably, and she gave up her place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her first baby, a little boy called Joshua, was stillborn and she called Mum from hospital to say, “I’ve had a beautiful little boy, only he’s dead.”
I was three at the time and had no understanding. I didn’t know that love was complicated, rather than straightforward, and I went blithely through childhood not imagining that my sister felt angry resentment at this small usurper who had commandeered so much parental love and attention, when she desperately needed it.
I was closer in age to her children, Sam and Daisy (born when I was four and seven), than I was to my siblings, and they would be my partners in crime, my fellow explorers of the coal shed, from which we would emerge filthy with soot.
It was years later, when I was 21, that Polly told me in anger that I had stopped her having a relationship with our mother. We fought a lot and at times I thought she hated me. Only recently have we become closer.
Physically, we are very different (Polly is tiny and dark, while I am curvaceous and blonde) but we have similar vulnerabilities, similar dark and terrifying thoughts, and similar needs. It’s strange that it took so long to understand this and I wonder how close we would have been had we grown up together.
Ben, a successful businessman, has just turned 50. Next summer I will be 30. I’m getting to know him better, but feel I have to earn his friendship and respect.
I used to tap him for cash a little too often, and I think he saw me as profligate and silly, and not trying hard enough. It has got better since I’ve been making my own way and paying my own rent (just), and slowly we’re becoming closer friends.
I will never be as close to Ben and Polly as they are to one another. Stories that are real to them have for me the feeling of a mythology that is embroidered into the family DNA; the time the hot-air balloon came down in the field near the house; the day the Queen and Prince Philip walked up our lane alone; the spell a witch-like neighbour put on Dan – all these big events of their childhood are remote from me; stories I have heard that will never be my own.
I have a friend of 29 who has a six-year-old brother whom he loves dearly. He posts adorable pictures of the child on Facebook, but I wonder how their relationship will change as they grow – one growing up, the other growing older. How will they adjust – the older sibling seeing his brother as an adult, the younger learning the older is, in fact, a person?
It’s a difficult transition to make, but one that I think, in the long term, is worth it.
