What right does anyone have to rewrite their sibling’s story? This is not the tale my brothers would tell of themselves.
Nothing in these pages will match the memories they hold. Our age, size, mood and personality will have dictated how we filed these events, and always there will be much to contest: for instance who was most hard-done-by and who remembers it best? All of us build the sort of memory that is most comfortable to live with. It is not what happens to us, says the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, but how we interpret it.
Our brains create the world for us inside our heads. I literally see things differently from the way my brothers do. A Berlin optician was appalled to discover I held a driving licence. I have amblyopia, or lazy eye. My brain compensates for the misalignment in my eyes by ignoring half the visual input, making depth difficult to calculate. I cannot park.
I also experience life differently. Our birth order, our gender, our genetic inheritance mean that the way we see our ‘growing up’ is unique. This means siblings often have disputed memories. The drowning of the mouse by paddle boat is one example. Maybe Ed was witness, or Adrian, or no one at all. I can only pretend I remember, because Sean recounted the story numerous times. I’d have to concede that watching a mouse’s long struggle to live is not in my memory, and it should be, because death is always going to be hard to watch.
One recent study on how well people remembered their socioeconomic status as children found that 53 per cent of sibling pairs did not agree about the extent of their father’s education and 21 per cent disagreed over how much their mother had worked.
When I asked my brothers if Mum ever had paid work, Adrian, because we’re not speaking, could not be included in my sample, but Sean responded by text: ‘Yes Mum was a sectary [sic] some thing like that x’. Ed listed secretarial work too amongst a list of voluntary positions – children’s panel, university kindergarten, refugee support. A second email arrived a few hours later. ‘She also ran a small private lunatic asylum. Flexible hours.’
It is probably better then to look at things in terms of intention. Philosophers draw a line between truth and truthfulness. Truthfulness is an intention to be honest and truthfulness is my intention between these pages. Fessing up over the mouse is a naïve tactic. I hope you will trust me more. Naïve, because obviously any suggestion that puts my rememberings in doubt could pollute them all.
Yet we all misremember, and most often our intention is not dishonesty but a self-serving desire to feel more comfortable with who we are. In studies of ten memories which involved disputed ‘achievement’ amongst twins, every individual claimed first place in the sprint, or the spelling prize as their own. The other popular site of argument is victimhood. In the same study only 10 per cent allowed their twin to claim misfortune. We pretend to ourselves that we are the child who was beaten up by older boys, rather than the child who fled. And it is victimhood where we Doyles find the most disagreement.
Much more important than whether I’ve lied about being in a bathroom when a mouse died will be if I’ve fully recognised the extent of my elder brothers’ experiences. I should. In our earliest years we spend more time in the company of our siblings than anyone else. With our brothers and sisters we form anxious attachments, hoping they will love us, fearing that they won’t. What we fear, Rowe suggests, is ‘annihilation’. And those best equipped to annihilate us (intimate as they are with our weaknesses) are our siblings.
Yet if I ever had heroes then Adrian and Sean were mine. I wanted them to love me. But how could they? Life had not been fair. Ed and I were proof. Dad used to say Adrian bore the rest of us resentment because he was ‘spoilt’. I imagine it was less to do with being spoilt than with finding his nest invaded by a Sean-shaped Tigger. This invasion, one sibling by another, can feel like a loss of identity. Rowe tells us that although the ignominy of being unseated may with time diminish, it will never disappear. This trauma was followed a year later by the death of Adrian’s mother.
From Dad’s own jealous account Adrian’s mother loved him so completely, it was as if there could be nobody else. ‘Spoilt’ doesn’t begin to cover the loss he must have felt.
We never escape the idea of ourselves that our family tells. To nail my siblings to the page like this may feel to them like aggression. They would probably find the account I have given unrecognisable. How would they paint me? Adrian’s final correspondence called me a bully (over an incident you’ll hear about later). To Ed I am sometimes hostile, and too preoccupied with the past, while in Sean’s eyes I will always be Miss Piggy. He does a great impersonation of her angry squeal.
‘I’ve been reading this book, Mir,’ he said to me recently, ‘and it could change your life. Really change it. Because anger isn’t healthy.’