Me 1 - Kossoff 0

I was born in March 1976, at 3.30pm on a Friday afternoon, as the rest of the country was getting ready to clock off for the weekend. My dad apparently vaulted the conveyor belt at the factory where he worked, when he received the phone call.

Elsewhere in the world that day, Paul Kossoff died, Princess Margaret announced her intention to divorce The Jones Boy, talks over the future of Rhodesia broke down, and Parsloe was interred for the first time of many in “Open All Hours” on BBC-1. The execrable “I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance)” by Tina Charles was no. 1 on the UK charts.

It was raining in Stoke.

Both of my parents were divorcees. Following a long engagement, they married in March 1975, yet didn’t honeymoon until the summer. I was apparently conceived in Torquay in June. Rather disturbingly, Karen, my then-8-year-old sister – baggage from my Mum’s first marriage (to “That Bastard”, as Mum has insisted on referring to him ever since) – was asleep in the same hotel room at the time. Children have been taken into care for less.

My father’s other children (from his marriage to a foolish 1962 one-night stand which resulted in the birth of my half-brother) weren’t such an inconvenience: their mother had denied my dad access rights and, solicitously, told the children their father was dead. My dad didn’t bother to pursue the matter. They didn’t reappear in his life until 1989.

I was lucky to have a safe, stable, normal, loving family. I’d pick up occasional, strange reminders that the girl with whom I shared a bedroom was sired by another man – I’d occasionally hear my Auntie Sheila (her again) utter something along the lines of, “They get on well together, seeing as they’re not really brother and sister.” Christ knows what Sheila would make of adoption – one thing is guaranteed, though: she’d be the one to let the child know precisely their status.

Not really brother and sister? We share a mother, we shared a house for a long time, we even have a disturbingly similar sense of humour. It’d be like saying that the pet cat wasn’t really “part of the family” because it wasn’t conceived by any of us. Stupid.

There has been a myth, developed over the years by minds more conspiratorial than mine, that Karen and I despised each other from the day I was born right up to the time that she announced her divorce from husband mk. I. What utter tosh! It’s true that we had our differences as kids – who doesn’t? She used to terrorise me on a daily basis until I was bigger than her (that’d be when I was about 7, and she was 16). That doesn’t mean we hated each other.

Being nine years older than me, she, quite reasonably, developed interests of her own – such as excessive drinking, nightclubbing and knee-tremblers with strangers in dark alleys* – while I was still playing with her Girls’ World cast-offs. We may have grown distant in that time, but that doesn’t explain why everything has to be described in extremes. Not by other people, anyway.

On a spiritual level, I was sad to see Karen leave the family abode when she got married – we still talked often, and I was going through puberty at the time. Karen was the only person I told about my first snog. Indeed, when I later lost my virginity, Karen took me to the pub. Most significantly, I am now Godfather to Karen’s son.

On a more material level, I was glad she left, as it meant I could move out of my box room and into her far more palatial bedroom.

So, not really brother and sister? Knock it off, smartarse. Talk like that fools nobody.

[*“I bloody wish I had now” – Karen, 31 March 2007.]