Elisa Segrave: PERSONAL HISTORY
I found my brother’s things in a box in my mother’s attic. She must have put them there after he drowned in our grandmother’s pond on my seventh birthday in November 1956. He was five.
I found the box recently while sorting out my mother’s house. She has Alzheimer’s and has had to move.
I took the box into my own possession with dread and fascination. Dread, because the death of my little brother knocked our family sideways, so that it never recovered. Fascination, because I was breaking a taboo.
Finally I was free to touch and examine the objects which for years had been held sacred by our mother and kept apart from us, the remaining three children. I hoped I might make some sense of the catastrophe which had changed our lives for ever.
Today my parents might have had grief counselling. Instead, my father died in his 60s of cirrhosis of the liver. My mother also drank.
My second brother, nearly three the day of the accident, suffered all his life from knowing that it was the older boy who remained my parents’ favourite son. He died of an overdose on his 24th birthday and my third brother, a baby in 1956, has not been happy.
The first object I saw when I opened the cardboard box was my little brother’s school satchel. I had had one exactly like it, of chestnut brown canvas.
Inside was a brand new, bright blue pencil case containing a pencil, a rubber and two sharpeners, a pair of scissors and his name on a bit of paper, in an adult’s neat capital letters.
We were only 18 months apart. We went to the same little school and we lived on a common in a rented house outside a Berkshire village. There was a rookery near our house and I still associate the cawing of rooks with happiness.
I searched for something which would remind me of my brother’s personality. After all, he had been my closest companion. Surely now, with my mother no longer in the picture, I could put my childish jealousy behind me and see him as he really had been to me, a friend?
Here were his exercise books – arithmetic and writing. One of the books had my name on it, and a date, July 1956. Then his name had been added, with a subsequent date, October 1956. Why had my book been passed on to him?
I had the disconcerting feeling, recalled from early childhood, that we had been almost interchangeable in the minds of the adults who looked after us. I remembered the way our parents had often talked of the two of us together, in what seemed like one word – ElisaandRaymond.
In a shoe shop where my mother had bought us Start-Rite sandals, the assistant had asked: “Are they twins?” We both had light-brown hair and were almost the same height, though he was younger. My eyes were grey; his were blue like my mother’s – another reason to make my mother prefer him, I had thought.
I leafed through this last exercise book, the one with both our names on it. I noted that my brother had been doing sums in it right up to November 20 1956, four days before he died. We must have been removed from school before the end of term, to go straight to our grandmother’s.
The house that my parents had bought, half an hour away from her, which was to be a family home for us four children, still wasn’t ready. That was why we had gone first to gran’s.
My brother, like other boys in the Fifties, had a Hornby train. Here was a certificate from the Hornby Railway Company, dated 1954. This was the kind of boyish prop, like his Dinky car, that sometimes divided him from me.
Here was his writing exercise book: “I am Raymond. I am a tall boy.” In his drawing of himself, he was all in blue, and he had bunches of bananas for hands.
Further on were other drawings, with short sentences underneath: “I played with my trains”, then “I went to a circus” – rows of spectators’ heads – then “We went to Hope”. This was the seaside village in Devon where we went every year, where I still go today with my two teenage children.
My brother had drawn a crab or starfish with six legs, a boat with yellow and red sails, the sun, a dark blue sky and some sandcastles. Were these two figures on the beach meant to be me and him? I wasn’t sure. I wanted to believe that they were. But as I continued turning the pages, I had to admit that probably he had not drawn me, his sister, anywhere.
I then found something which shocked me – my own drawings, which I remembered executing, and even a short story I had written, which started: “Once there was a farm with some children. They were not very small.”
Here was my illustration to the nursery rhyme Mary Mary Quite Contrary, with orange flowers like suns (marigolds) all in a row, and here there was another drawing by me, of myself and my two younger brothers and a row of other children, all holding boxes tied with big bows.
I had depicted myself as much the biggest; I was giant-size, and I was eating a box of chocolates. When I looked closer, I realised the scene was meant to be my own future birthday party, and those other, much smaller children, were lined up to give me presents. How horrible my next birthday had turned out to be in real life!
Why had my drawings been shut away with his? My mother couldn’t even distinguish between her only daughter’s drawings and those of her favourite!
I was torn between rage and pity – pity when I picked up a postcard that he had written to her in hospital where she was having her last baby in June 1956.
“Dear Mummy. I am doing 100s, 10s and units at school.” Five months later he was dead. Perhaps because I have had small children myself, this postcard – with its poignant note reminding me that he was just a little boy who should have had a future like I had – was the only thing in the box which moved me.
In 1957, my mother put three of his fluffy animals on a shelf near her bed, under an enlarged photograph of him. The little shrine stayed like that for nearly 40 years.
The smiling child is holding up a ball. When she moved, the photograph went with her and now hangs again in her present bedroom, where she has to spend all her time.
I am supposed to be a mature woman making decisions about my mother’s affairs, but when I see that picture up again I want to kick it to pieces. The dead child was so obviously my mother’s favourite – she even told me so once, when I was nine, on holiday in Devon – and, in someone who was already so escapist, that was her ultimate escape.
My brother’s small pile of possessions rests on the floor in my workroom. I have searched in vain for some trigger which will bring him back to me. I have found nothing. He, and my mother, have shut me out.
I can’t forgive him. How dare he go down to that green water alone on that dark November day? We were supposed to be inseparable.
How dare he leave me, for ever, on my birthday?