A tale of two tragic sisters – by the brother who drew the winning ticket at birth
right. She had stayed in Yorkshire, literally next door to their parents, while he had escaped to London and the literary high life. He was clever, she was thick. He passed the UK secondary school entrance exam, the 11 Plus, while she had failed and was shipped off to boarding school. As a boy, he even got bigger helpings at dinner. Later, and with spectacular unfairness, she went blind.
Can any of this be true? Morrison excavates their shared past and realises, shamefacedly, that he grew up barely registering Gill’s unhappiness. To discover whether this is common, he trawls through some of the most famous brother-sister pairs in history.
There is William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, who acted as the poet’s devoted secretary and greeted his marriage with a nervous breakdown. Or Felix Mendelssohn, who enjoyed a career as a musical prodigy while his more talented sister Fanny was obliged to stick to the shadows.
Morrison even returns to the nursery classics Jack and Jill and Hansel and Gretel for clues about power dynamics in siblings.
His description of his sister’s decline is unflinching. Of how she gives the local taxi drivers her debit card so they can drive into town, pick up several boxes of wine and deliver them back to her for a binge. Of how, in her teens, she started shoplifting, which progressed to stealing from family and friends. Of how, once, her father shut her in the cellar for 36 hours to get her to admit she was a thief. Of how she died wedged between her bed and a radiator and went undetected for hours because her ex-husband was so used to her being comatose that he assumed she was simply sleeping it off.
The story of Josie, Blake Morrison’s halfsister, is eerily parallel. One of his strongest childhood memories involves being taken to the hospital to see this baby whom his mother, of all people, had just delivered. Of his father’s proud expression and of how Josie and her mother Beaty became extra members of the Morrison clan as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
It was not until Blake and Josie took DNA tests, after their parents’ death that their suspicions were confirmed. They were indeed half-siblings.
Sadly, the knowledge seems not to have brought Josie any happiness or peace. A few months after the DNA revelation, she booked herself into a hotel and killed herself, leaving behind two children. Was it the knowledge that her biological father had never officially recognised her that tipped her over the edge? Or could it be the fact that her husband was currently having an affair with, of all people, a doctor?
Two Sisters is not an easy book to read, but it is a bracingly honest one. Blake Morrison is unsparing about how cold and critical he became of Gill. Of how baffled he was at having the local publican’s daughter tagging along on family expeditions.
Above all, he is candid about being the one who drew the winning ticket, the one who survived this toxic family psychodrama more or less unscathed.