j

e

r

e

m

y

s

e

a

b

r

o

o

k

j

e

r

e

m

y

s

e

a

b

r

o

o

k

j

e

r

e

m

y

s

e

a

b

r

o

o

k

ALIENATED AFFECTIONS 

  My twin brother and I were separated at birth, even though we lived in the same house, with the same mother for the first 18 years of our lives. I returned recently from India to learn that he had died. I heard only indirectly, since there had been no communication between us for many years. Indeed, we had not spoken since our mother’s funeral 15 years earlier.

  The story of sibling conflict is an old one; but this version had a particularly cruel inflection. A profound temperamental difference, a determination of our mother to keep us apart, and a social system that supported division – our relationship was doomed from the beginning.

  Or even before that. When our mother was already in her mid-thirties and still childless, she discovered her husband had tertiary syphilis. She had had two miscarriages, and since the treatment of syphilis in 1940 was injections of mercury and arsenic, there was little prospect that sexual relations between them would ever resume.

  She befriended a man who was working on a building site nearby. One day, he came to the kitchen window and asked for a bucket of water. She decided he would be the father of the child she so much wanted; and in due course, she developed a relationship with him. Within months she was pregnant.

  This was no easy thing. She lived in a state of double terror. In charge of a butcher’s shop in wartime, and at the same time nursing a man whose shaming illness would certainly have ruined her livelihood if it had become known. She had had twins as a result of a casual encounter with a stranger; and there was another secret to be at all costs concealed.

  Her principal preoccupation was to keep the two men in her life apart. Who can tell what shadowy possibility she foresaw in her twin boys, that they might combine or conspire against her?

  This was one good reason why she ensured that my brother and I should grow up as strangers to one another. Once, when were about four, we were giggling in the corner over some trivial thing. She parted us angrily. Significantly, she told me to go and look at a book and my brother to play with the dog.

  The causes of my estrangement from my brother were woven into childhood experience; but they were also strengthened and reinforced by social circumstances which, in the 1950s, assigned me and my twin brother to different social classes.

  How far this was a consequence of our mother’s role-ascription and how far it corresponded to the very different individuals we were, it is difficult to say. We were physically and psychically divided. I was clever and he was beautiful. No more malign separation could be imagined.

  He slept in a room of his own; I continued to share a room with our mother; frightened as I was of the dark, of shadows, of death. One day, in primary school, he was ill and had to be taken home. I asked for someone else to go with him, since I didn’t want to miss my lesson.

  At eleven, he went to Secondary Modern school, a scruffy holding centre for the wayward youngsters of an area known as Windy Ridge. I went to the Grammar School. While my brother struggled in the C stream, I raced through my studies. He left school at 15, to be apprenticed to a carpenter and joiner. He left home every morning on his bicycle, with a tin box of sandwiches and an apple, disappearing into the icy January dawn, while I remained in bed, anticipating the pleasures of the subjunctive of French verbs. At eighteen, he was called up into the army. I was spending the time with my friends acting in plays, discussing the iniquities of Suez and the uprising against the Soviet Union in Hungary, before going to Cambridge. By the time I finished, national service had been abandoned.

  I envied him his looks. My friends found my brother fascinating, and were attracted to his silent beauty. It irritated me, for he had a mysterious power to draw people to him which I certainly did not possess. If he coveted that which came to me so easily, I was bitterly resentful of that which he had never earned. How little we value what we do without effort or merit; and how we long for what is not granted to us!

  Even my brother’s first marriage was arranged; not in the way that match-makers or extended families in India make marriages; but an acceptance by decent people that it was in the natural order of things, that they were made for each other, the silent handsome man and the homely girl who wrote to him every day while he was stationed in Germany. It proved to be a ruinous and one-sided relationship. He went to work in Zambia, and there met the woman who was to become his second wife. It was only with her that he began to know himself, to discover who he was, and to become self-determining. She gave him confidence and strength, and his second marriage was a kind of re-birth. Unhappily, it meant the death of his former self, and all those who had been involved in its making; and he detached himself from everyone and everything that had gone before.

  He literally re-made himself, and in the process sloughed off his birth family and all those connected with it. The rift, which had run through our childhood, became final; reinforced by our upbringing as effectively as if we had been under laws of apartheid. A few clumsy gestures at reconciliation, an occasional meeting full of suppressed anger and unspoken resentment, brought us up against the intractable estrangement that nothing could dissolve.

  When our mother died, he came to the funeral. I held out my hand to him. He said ‘I’ll shake your hand and that’s it.’ I knew I would never speak to him again. I grieved for him after that; for three years, I woke up in the night, unable to believe that this was how our somber and oppressive childhood had resolved itself, weighed down with our mother’s secret sorrows and fears. An imperial personality, she had divided and ruled.

  As the years passed, I thought about him less often. When I received the news that he had died, it was like confirmation that the body of a missing person had been found; as though he had vanished fifteen years earlier; and the remains washed up on the shore of the time that divided us were confirmed as his.

  There was another bitter irony in his death. He died of mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer. When he finished his apprenticeship, he had worked on building sites, involved in the construction of multi-storey car parks, which were built with the new fire-proof miracle-substance, asbestos. His early working-class occupation also, years later, claimed his life.

  The class destination of our early years was transformed over time; the separation ceased to be so clearly based on class, and mutated so that it became a kind of cultural conflict. He was dedicated to work, was prosperous and, I believe, happy with his family in a converted parsonage in the West of England. I had fulfilled my mother’s ambition, and became a writer; although, since I wrote about poor people, it never pleased her. Nobody, she predicted, quite correctly, wants to know about all that.

  The man who we did not know was our father until after his death also contributed significantly to the irreconcilable difference between us – a practical demonstration of the power of heredity, since neither of us had the faintest idea of his role in our lives until we were in our late thirties. He had been a craftsman, a builder and restorer of churches and historic buildings, and my brother inherited his abilities. He had also been a vehement Leftist, a member of the Communist Party: among my mother’s books I found volumes of socialist writings he had given her – anti-Fascist tracts, George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to various –isms, William Morris and John Ruskin. I have always hated the orthodoxies of the age, and have been alienated from mainstream politics, a compulsive dissenter from all revealed ideologies and received wisdom.

  George Eliot once wrote of Nature, as a great tragic dramatist, which unites people by flesh and bone and then divides them by temperament and character. The sensibility that divided me from my brother was supported and exacerbated by social arrangements which emphasized separation and division. That after an unhappy childhood and youth he found himself and was content at last is a consolation; that we were unable to reach out in reconciliation and understanding means that death has become one more, final, aspect of the injuries of separation that dominated our lives.