Bonds with brothers grow and strengthen over time
AT THE risk of showing my age, it’s the game of ‘‘typewriters’’ I remember most. One or other of them would pin me to the floor, sit on my stomach, knees pressed into my outstretched arms and with their fingers they’d pretend to type on my yet unformed chest. Then came the carriage return — the playful slap across my left cheek, hard enough to produce sound but not so much it would hurt.
It’s on such lame games and equally pitiful jokes that my sibling relationships were fused. And like most of us, I never gave it much thought. They were just always there — brothers: annoying; pranky; smelly.
More than 25 years have passed since we shared the same house; 20 since all three of us have lived in the same country.
But by the time you read this we’ll be together in the mountains in Japan and in some quiet unsayable way we will have reconnected. It always happens— we slip away from spouses, children, and as we walk and talk, or share a drink, threads from a lifetime ago are reknotted.
This time it matters more. Ayear ago the elder of my two little brothers was diagnosed with the early stages of bowel cancer. Nobody panicked — least of all him. It’s not what we do. But it’s telling that while none of us can afford it we’re all — including Mum— joining Kev for New Year at the home he shares with his Japanese wife and children.
I’ll ask him a hundred questions — because that’s what I do; my younger brother will sling an arm around him and talk rugby — because that’s what he does.
And Kev, who was given the all-clear a few weeks ago, will pour red wine and tell us all to shut up.
While I now have a family of my own, my brothers are like a safety net strung across the globe. We talk only occasionally, checking up on each other via the convenient but impersonal megaphone that is Facebook. But like wire holding together fence posts we know each other is there: supportive; steadfast.
My brothers are a certainty when everything else isn’t. Not because of shared parentage or characteristics — they are far more decent than me — but because, whatever happens, they havemyback.
I was reminded of the intensity of a brother’s love this week as Dominic Lawson furiously defended his sister Nigella. Writing that it was his sister who was effectively on trial, Lawson said he was overwhelmed with admiration at her calm and control.
‘‘I could not imagine having the strength in such circumstances,’’ he wrote.
‘‘It made me wonder if my conceit over a lifetime of see- ing myself as the stronger of the two of us might have been wrong all along.’’
The brother-sister relationship is ever-evolving. For a long time I lorded it over mine but recently I’ve grown in awe — of Kev’s implacability, of David’s emotional intelligence and instinct for what genuinely matters. My little bro strikes up conversations with anyone; it’s taught me to do the same.
I don’t understand sibling estrangement — what a waste of good emotional ballast. The reasons are almost always petty, or hinged around money which is the most ugly and diminishing of conflicts. Jealousy, too, corrodes. I’ve long loved Michael Morpurgo’s assessment of brotherhood in his affecting young adult novel Private Peaceful. ‘‘ Being his real brother I could feel I live in his shadows, but I never had and I do not now,’’ says the character Tommo of his brother Charlie. ‘‘ I live in his glow.’’
Sometimes you see that glow between siblings. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal have it. Jennifer Lawrence has it with her brothers Ben and Blaine, as evidenced in pictures after her Oscar win. Donny and Marie Osmond have it — though that might just be their teeth.
But for a truly compelling portrait of brotherly love you only have to turn to the actor Samuel Johnson who is riding around Australia on a unicycle in support of his terminally ill sister, Connie.
Three years ago Connie was diagnosed with breast cancer, having twice beaten cancer before. But this time it has spread — to her lungs, liver, pelvis, spine and knee. She has two young boys who she will not see grow up.
When Sam, who starred in The Secret Life of Us, Rush and Underbelly, asked her what she wanted her legacy to be, she told him she wanted to raise breast cancer awareness. So Sam rode. And rode.
He’s cycled 13,288 of his 15,000km goal and raised more than $ 1 million for breast cancer research.
We talk about bloodlines and songlines but the pink route map showing where Sam has cycled reads like a line of pure love.
Earlier this week Connie was exhausted when I spoke to her. She turns 37 on Saturday, a birthday she thought she’d never see.
‘‘Sam has put his life on hold for three years so that other mothers won’t have to say goodbye to their children like me,’’ she says quietly. I ask what her brother means to her: ‘‘He makes me feel like my life was not wasted. Thanks to him I can die with some peace inmyheart.’’
To help Sam and Connie raise money and awareness, go to loveyoursister.org