Chaotic joy of 15 being one of 15!
Growing up the daughter of a bohemian poet, Raffaella thought she had four siblings. Only later did she discover the astonishing truth . . .
Of course, I knew we were a big family: I was the eldest of five: me, then Alexander, roderick and sam, with Lily, my little sister completing a wild bunch of raggletaggle children, offspring of the poet George Barker and his wife elspeth.
We ranged through the Norfolk countryside in the seventies, sometimes on our wayward donkey duo, flowering Gold and her daughter Matilda (it was all very hippy in our house back then), or on bikes mended with string and optimism by our father.
I was usually dragging the baby, whichever one it was, in a small tumbrel-like cart behind us. our dog, a large black Doberman, went with us, baring his teeth at any strangers who might have wanted to approach. He frequently imprisoned passersby in the village telephone box and mounted guard until we dragged him off.
We swam in the river and caught sticklebacks in jam jars. We had a pet slow worm, two goats and my cat had kittens in my bed; we were almost feral, but we had weekly ancient Greek lessons after school, taught by my mother, who was a scholar with no one who shared her specific talents.
We had no idea how weird we were, nor that among the many adult visitors at the wild latenight gatherings my parents were known for, were more of our siblings: ten more to be exact.
It turned out I wasn’t the eldest of five. Well, I was, but I was also the 11th of 15, in the middle tranche of my half-Irish poet father’s many children. I always thought I was number ten. It was only about five years ago that my mother put me straight on that.
But the facts stand thus: in my family, there is one father, four mothers, and 15 children.
from my eldest half-sister Kate, who is 86, to my youngest sibling Lily, who is 44, we are as follows: Kate, Anthony and his twin Anastasia, both 80 or so now. Then Georgina (born in 1941), christopher (1943), sebastian (1945) and rose (1947). They are the children of the writer elizabeth smart. Next was Jimmy (1961) edward (1962) and francis (1963), the sons of Dede farrelly, followed by me, 53, Alexander, 52, roderick, 50, sam, 46 and Lily, 44.
THIs rugby team-sized band of brothers and sisters has artists, writers, an archeologist, photographers, a dancer and a scientist on our roll call. Not much sign of anything practical, although my half brother sebastian was a carpenter as well as a poet.
The births span 42 years, from 1932 to 1974. We were brought up in far-flung destinations from New York city to Norfolk, and rome to rural essex. some siblings I knew well, but assumed they were family friends.
We didn’t have full family gatherings — perhaps it was just too emotionally freighted. family revelations and fault lines can surface at any time.
My father and his first wife Jessica were just 19 and not yet married (scandalous back in the Thirties for catholics) when Jessica became pregnant with my eldest sister Kate.
My father and Jessica were childhood sweethearts from London who parted in 1947 on the West coast of America, where they had gone to live after the war, and from where he famously ran off with the canadian novelist and poet elizabeth smart.
I say famously, as By Grand central station I sat Down And Wept is her renowned novel about their affair.
Thankfully, I didn’t know it was about my father when I found it at home and read it aged 17. The embarrassment when I found out was consummate. My father and elizabeth moved to a mill in the essex countryside, and here the reality of their lives gets buried in mythology and stories told and retold in film, biographies, poems and novels.
But one thing is clear: I don’t think at that stage, my father was much use as a family man.
He departed to the pubs and bars of soho. elizabeth worked as a writer at Queen magazine and juggled, like every single mother does to bring up their four children, Georgina, 77 now, christopher, now 75 and sebastian and rose, who would both be in their 70s had they lived longer.
My father and elizabeth enjoyed a strong friendship for the rest of her life after their affair was over. she is part of my childhood memories, softspoken, dressed in jeans and a faded fisherman’s smock, smoking Gitanes cigarettes and dancing in our kitchen. she was also a good friend of my mother’s, something I never questioned until I became an adult.
Many things we didn’t know about as I was growing up seem unlikely now, when transparency is the preferred state of communication, and technology flows us from cradle to grave, but it’s worth remembering one feature of a large family is the possibility of being lost in it, disappearing,
swallowed by the bigger picture. So it was for us. We were firmly absorbed by our immediate siblings, then by relationships with those who visited and whom we began to meet.
By nine, I was curious about the regular Saturday night parties at our house, which mainly offered opportunities for us to do just as we pleased while no one was noticing.
I led my brothers (my sister was still in her cot) to sit at the top of the stairs and peer between the banisters as guests wandered through the hall.
I had silent crushes on Sebastian and Christopher, Georgina and Rose, who were frequently there. I remember a grey fur jacket of Georgina’s, and some pink suede boots of Rose’s that I coveted. I don’t remember anyone telling me these elegant creatures were my half-sisters. Why would they?
And then, when they did, it didn’t seem a big deal.
It was never clear where our family (by which I mean the five of us, who were my mother’s children) ended and the others began. I still don’t know all my siblings’ birthdays, but people came and went, and sometimes we were told they were our siblings.
The final three in the monkey puzzle of our family tree were Jimmy (born in 1961), Edward 1962 and Francis 1963, who lived in Rome with their American mother Dede Farrelly, whom my father vanished to visit every few months.
We did not meet these three, nearest to us in age, until Edward arrived aged 19, his first visit to his father’s house, and his first meeting with his five younger siblings.
EDWARD was cool, with an American accent, clever, funny and exotic — and his brothers, when they came soon after, were the same.
Meeting him changed my life: I was 17, the right age to fall under a new spell. Within two years I had a job cooking for a film crew in London, thanks to Edward’s friends, and I moved out from the sprawl of my family and began my own life.
It would not have happened like that without his influence at that precise point.
Family matters. I learned this all through my life. I’m a mother of grown children now, and will never stop learning it.
I will also never stop being shaped by my family. I have never lived alone, I am happy when others are around, I thrive on the chaos of too many people, a kitchen full of chatter, a house full of movement and voices.
I don’t have to be involved in what they are doing, I just like them there. The solitary solace so many writers yearn for is anathema to me.
I had my first child when I was 23. I effectively moved from being in the litter of my siblings to parenting my own litter, and it is only now, when they are all grown up, that I find I am alone more than I like to be.
There are many ways to deal with belonging to a big family, and if I have a need for calm it is internal; writing transports me.
Nature also gives me immeasurable joy, a legacy of my wild outdoor childhood around the fields and valleys of our home, not missed by parents preoccupied with work (my dad) and babies (my mum). Home was always there, but we could go anywhere, do anything, or so we thought.
There was safety in numbers. We survived falling in the river, crashing our bikes and climbing too-high trees, and learned how to help one another out of a scrape. The belief that anything is possible was born in me then, and it is a source of confidence, no matter how confusing situations might appear.
There are more questions than answers in the myths and legends of my family, but some things are clear. My mother (who was 22 when she met my father, then 50) was incredibly welcoming and generous to the extended family she inherited.
She was younger than three of my siblings, but displayed great maturity and love, and made sure they were always welcome, and no one was ever left out.
She saw no difficulty in the blended family — in her eyes, all my father’s children needed time with him, and she made sure it was possible.
I cannot speak for my halfsiblings, but my younger brothers and my sister and I took our lead from her and welcomed them with equal measures of curiosity and acceptance. They belonged with us, and this sense of fraternity remains with me as something secure, something I do not need to question.
My father died in 1991, so we have had a long time without his presence. This perhaps unites us further, as, given the peripatetic nature of his relationships with the women he loved and their children, he was largely absent from most of my siblings’ lives.
He was vividly present in ours, as he was with my mother for the last 28 years of his life, so we noticed his loss and felt illequipped to handle it when he died aged 78.
The complexities of a family are never more vivid than when a patriarch dies. When you throw so many offspring into the mix, the situation could become unbearably tense.
Surprisingly it wasn’t, though I couldn’t help wondering, at his funeral in the village church in Norfolk, and later at the grand Catholic memorial service at Brompton Oratory, whether, among the throngs of mourners, there might be more siblings.
Maybe there were. In a big family, anything is possible.
Come And Tell me Some Lies by Raffaella Barker is out now (Bloomsbury, £8.99).