There’s no deeper (or more complex) bond than that between sisters
You love then loathe them in the blink of an eye. No one will ever know you better. That’s why, says JULIA LAWRENCE...
THE coat hanging on the stand by the back door was my undoing, apparently. Up until that point, I’d been very, very brave; as brave as a three-year-old little girl, on her first overnight trip to Nanna’s house alone, could be.
I’d packed my essentials — my koala bear, the bread-tin on a string I’d turned into a car for him, complete with safety harness in case he fell out (I was a cautious, box-ticking being, even back then) and my dog-eared ‘comforter’.
I could do this. I could sleep at Nanna’s house on my own, without my mum, dad and older sister Heather. I wanted this. I’d begged for it for weeks. I wouldn’t cry.
All was going swimmingly until Nan found me crouched on the floor, hugging my knees, looking pitifully at Heather’s old duffel coat on the stand and whimpering: ‘Fevva’s coat, Fevva’s coat’ over and over again, like a mantra.
I really wanted my sister. It was like an ache, and it wouldn’t go.
No matter how much homemade bread and raspberry jam was proferred, and trips into the vast garden to see the rabbits and pheasants hanging in Grandad’s gamekeeper’s lodge — things that usually thrilled me — I couldn’t be comforted.
The trip had to be abandoned. Dad had to come and get me.
Forty-seven years later, I still get that ache. I’m getting it now. As insistent as an addict’s craving. Sometimes I just need her.
She gets it, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if she calls me in a second or two — that’s what usually happens. We call it our ‘witchy’ moments.
The bond between sisters is a powerful thing; it’s inspired some beautiful words and sayings. My favourite describes a sister as the keeper to one’s identity, the only person with the keys to one’s unfettered, more fundamental self.
Another whacks the nail more directly and always makes me smile: if you don’t understand how a woman could both love another woman dearly and want to wring her neck at the same time, then you didn’t have a sister.
It inspired one of this season’s more weepy Christmas adverts, as Boots charts two sisters on their ‘journey’ up to their parents’ house to spend the day at their modest childhood home.
To the soundtrack of Alison Moyet’s Only You, you see what went before — the pair of them yomping like pioneers through the Seventies, fighting like cats in a gravelly, knee-shredding playground, dancing at fuggy discos, saying goodbye on station platforms as the other headed off to pastures new, and tending each other’s bridal hair — to arrive, decades later, with a gift only the other would understand.
Heather and I watched it and, yes, we misted over. I’m sure I recognised a truly authentic nasty acrylic Seventies jumper we used to share too (well done, stylists), but what we liked about it most is that it isn’t totally sugar-coated.
Your sister, as I’ve said, allows a woman access to her truly unfettered self. I reserve my worst behaviour for my sister, and she does the same for me, knowing we’ll still love each other when the storm passes. AS
children, we tore lumps out of each other’s scalps, set about each other with tennis rackets. We’ve taunted, teased and goaded each other to savage, demonic rages.
I’ve hated her. I’ve sent telepathic messages to passing alien spacecraft to please, please, please come and take her, no payment necessary: but at the same time I’ve always known that I would die for her in an instant.
That is what sisterhood really is about. I don’t have a brother, so I can’t speak from experience, but I imagine it must be different. By definition of his separate gender, he can never be your mirror image. Your sister, though, is like your other hand.
To look at us, Heather and I are totally different. We share our father’s small, tidy feet and people often muddle us up on the phone, but that’s all.
She was born four years before me, and six weeks prematurely, which was a big deal in the early Sixties.
Always small and thin for her age, and terribly short-sighted, she must have thought someone was playing a bad joke on her when I arrived — fullterm, robust, loud, strong and sporty. I was not the little sister she ordered. Physically, I was her match early on. She could not thump and bully me into submission, so my sister became a master mind controller. She could wind me up with a look.
Two fingers walking onto ‘my side’ of the back seat of the car, followed by a half- cocked sneer, could spark a conniption that nearly ripped the roof off — and had me confined to our bedroom for the afternoon.
And that was the strange thing. If one of us was in trouble — even at the other’s instigation — we instantly became co-conspirators and plotted against our jailers. Seeing me puffyeyed on my bunk, she’d suggest a game of Cluedo or getting the felt tips out, and my heart would burst.
FElT TIP pens! Ah, is there a more evocative smell of home and sisterhood? We didn’t have much in common but we bonded over art. Heather carried it on — today she’s a brilliant bridalwear designer, while I took our creative gene into writing.
At the start of the summer, Mum would buy us both a foot-long, rainbow ordered, packet of felt tip pens — and that was us happy for six weeks.
They came on holiday with us. Some of my happiest memories are of Heather and me sitting in the back of a VW camper van in the middle of a boggy field in the lake District, the rain hammering on the roof, while we immersed ourselves in an elaborate underwater seascape: Heather drawing the seahorses and anemone while I took on the mermaids and fish.
Dad, a planning engineer, would come home with vast sheaths of paper on which a discarded plan of an engine had been plotted. We’d take turns to lie on the paper while the other drew round our body. We’d then have two, life- sized replicas of ourselves to clothe, colour in and decorate.
I kept my pens tidy and put the lids on: she scattered hers all over the table. Inevitably she’d lose one down a seat cushion and try to steal one of mine as a replacement.
‘Oh, but it’s mine, definitely mine,’ she’d say, and then came that sneer … and a hissing, biting, scratching scrap. Poor Mum would literally have to prise us apart.
We lost each other, a bit, during our school years. Four years is a big gap when you’re 16 and 12. She’d ignore me in the school corridor, or ‘ have a quiet word’ with me at home, saying she’d ‘heard I was wearing ridiculous eyeliner’ and ‘ please could I stop it because I was embarrassing her’.
That’s a good thing about big sisters. They tell it to you straight, and it’s advice worth hearing. If I was messing about at school, my teachers or friends pointing it out wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. But with your big sister you listened.
Meanwhile, to me, Heather was my muse, my siren. She had the most beautiful, long, thick chestnut hair. I’d watch it sway as I secretly followed her down a corridor.
Oh and her clothes! Money was tight but Heather could sew! The clattering
of the sewing machine heralded a big night out. She’d plot the outfit on the Friday night, buy the cloth on Saturday morning, and be picking the pins out as she dashed out of the door that evening.
By the time I’d reached a suitable level of maturity, aged 16 or so, when Heather was in her early 20s, we became a formidable force socially. I recognise those sisters in the Boots advert, at discos, sharing a crafty cigarette, being circled by boys like sharks. If one got a look in, it was with the other’s say- so. I’m sure there’s a support group out there for the Cooper girls’ spurned boyfriends.
And then we didn’t live together any more … there was no big separation, we just gradually drifted away from our home in Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. Not too far, just to London, but then a little bit further. We saw each other at weekends; then not every weekend; then just once a month.
At the end of 1990, Heather headed to Australia for an adventure, while I was working as a local newspaper reporter in Colchester. We wrote letters — gosh, remember them? — me about the snowdrifts in February, she about the size of the sandwiches and beers (I still have them now).
The distance didn’t feel too brutal. I knew she’d be home, I just didn’t know how soon.
Then in March 1991 came the moment which I think solidified our relationship for ever. Heather was having fun in Sydney while I visited our parents for Mother’s Day. We’d picked up Nanna — my Mum’s mum, the same one in whose house Fevva’s coat had hung — and were heading back to ours for Sunday lunch when a moment of blind stupidity tore our little family apart.
Two teenagers had stolen a car and lost control of it on a bend on a country road. They hit us headon. Dad was killed instantly. Nan died shortly afterwards. Mum was terribly injured, while I, somehow, escaped largely unscathed.
And so it was me who made that long-distant call, summoning her home. Hearing her voice, frightened, disbelieving, asking over and over if Mum was really alive. Was I really alive? She flew home, and we’ve rarely been apart since.
The teenagers were jailed, the funerals arranged, and Mum’s body was slowly patched back together. Heather and I clung together as if we were on an imaginary life raft.
Nowadays, I can’t go more than two days without speaking to her. If I spot something in the shops, I have to share it with her. If she has a grievance with someone, she’ll send me an email saying there’s someone ‘ we’ don’t like. There’s absolutely no conversation or meeting too important that I won’t break off to take a call from her.
She was chief bridesmaid at my wedding in 1995, and I at hers in July when she finally married an old childhood friend from Clacton — one I definitely approved of. My children, Lois, who’s 21, and Joe, 17, adore her.
This Christmas, just like in the ad, we’ll be together. I know exactly what to buy her. I’m so excited — I can’t wait for her to open it.
And you know what? She did just call. Just to say hello … just to let me know she’s there, and always will be. My sister; my other hand.