Some families are born of Kings: Danny Dyer’s, for example. Some are born of D-Day heroes. Mine, on the other hand, is born of ditch-diggers and shoemakers.
Nevertheless, even ordinary families have their legends. And there’s a legend in our family that I ruined my brother’s life.
But this isn’t a story about me tying him up naked on his stag night and making him miss his wedding. It’s not a story about me blaming him for some heinous misdeed of my own and seeing him locked up in my place.
My crime was simply to be conceived too early.
We’re very close in age, Bill, and me. He’s only 16 months my senior and, according to my sainted Grandma Harris, my arrival thrust him immediately and untimely into the role of Responsible Older Brother, thereby (and I quote) “Robbing Him Of His Childhood”.
The thoughtlessness of my birth whilst Bill, the first and therefore Golden Grandchild, was still barely able to stand burned with Grandma Harris right to the end. Almost her last words to me, as she pondered our equally undistinguished lives were, ‘I can only think that you were born too soon’. Thanks, Grandma.
In the bible, Matthew’s Gospel, weirdly, starts with a long list of Jesus’ ancestors. It seems an odd way to begin his story – why not the Angel and the stable and the donkey?
The thing is, in those names – the Aminadabs, Jehoshaphats and Zerubbabels – are all the stories that made Jesus who he is – the heroes, the doting grandparents, the jealous siblings, the kings and the refugees.
Families are like that. The generations gaze across history with a mix of fascinated incredulity and mutual incomprehension, and they tell stories. They report; they embroider and embellish; they make things up. And in their truths and their wild inaccuracies we find the shared narratives that sustain and nurture us, the histories we cherish and the jokes we laugh at; the things that make us who we are.
So maybe whether or not I ruined Bill’s life isn’t for me, or Grandma or even for him to decide. Maybe it’s one of those stories that our family will keep, those stories that I reckon all families keep and give to one another and which, in the telling and retelling, keep us alive from generation to generation.
There are no pictures of the ditch diggers in our family, who were Perrys, working on the land in and around the Bedfordshire village of Aspley Guise in the 19th century. But the photo (above and below) is of my great grandfather, Herbert Harry Harris, standing outside his father, Harry’s, boot and shoe maker’s shop in Lockhurst Lane, Foleshill, Coventry, with his mother, my great-great grandmother, Mary Jane Harris, in the early 1890s.
