Andrew Forster’s Brothers: Commentary Revisited-the importance of brothers!

Saddled with you for the afternoon,me and Paul
ambled across the threadbare field to the bus stop,
talking over Sheffield Wednesday’s chances in the cup
while you skipped beside us in your ridiculous tank top,
spouting six year-old views on Rotherham United

Suddenly you froze,said you hadn’t any bus fare.
I sighed,said you should go and ask Mum 
and while you windmilled home I looked at Paul
His smile,like mine,said i was nine and he was ten 
and we must stroll down the town, doing like grown-ups do.

As as bus crested the hill we chased Olympic Gold.
Looking back i saw you spring towards the gate,
you hand holding out what must of been a coin.
I ran on,unable to close the distance i’d set in motion

December 7 th is my brother Duncan’s birthday and after reading this poem again,  I experienced such a a surge of memories about our childhood, that I had to write about Duncan more or less  straight away.   This surge of remembrance  underlines one of the ways in which  reading can restore us to our lives. In fact, reading may help us not to miss our lives. For the way we miss our lives may be life itself!

For think about it. When we read, we absorb words that express emotions and behaviours relating to human experience. Our individual experience of being alive is often rediscovered(or recognised!)  when we read because the words of books help us to read ourselves. Sometimes very differently, sometimes painfully, sometimes comfortably.

In Andrew Forster’s deceptively simple poem, the poet/narrator revisits an earlier memory and gives expression to shame. And his shame seems very resonant as we have all done or felt things that we would rather forget about or bury. Writing in this poem is therefore a form of resurrection where the past is concerned and perhaps an uncomfortable resurrection at that!

The first stanza of Andrew Forster’s Brothers draws attention to the tensions between siblings; where one brother  is  feeling the claustrophobic weight of  responsibility, the unwanted ‘duty’ of care imposed on children by the adult world. It may seem as if the adults are shifting their sense of imprisonment within the family, temporarily  onto their  children, who in turn feel the loss of their freedom.

One generation displaces their responsibility onto another. ‘Freedom’ seems something very precious, almost a commodity to be bartered or exchanged.

The resentment of the older sibling in the first stanza is carefully resurrected through the resonance of certain words. Words like ‘saddled‘ and ‘ambled’, ‘skipped‘ and ‘spouting’ all give animation to the very real conflict between one brother’s perceptual position and another. Each brother is living in their own world whose words are antagonistic to the other- even if perhaps unknowingly in the younger brother’s case.

For the older brother is setting off with his friend ‘Paul’ for the relatively grown up , exciting pastures of ‘town’. This pleasure is blighted by the imposition of the younger brother’s presence  Such a presence is very irritating to the speaker as the younger brother looks and behaves like a six year old boy!

Yet the poem ends with the speaker recognising that his initial shame at being seen with his sibling in company, has changed through remembrance and reflection into shame at his betrayal. It is the tension between the self consciousness about the speaker’s public behaviour and the subsequent guilt he feels privately, that forms the drama and psychological interest of the poem.

Rereading the poem again, I not unnaturally thought about my own brother Duncan and perhaps because of his birthday smiled at several memories somewhat oddly linked to books. I say somewhat oddly only because I can remember trying to impose my love of reading on my brother from quite an early age with a rather missionary zeal. I was a book pest!  Duncan was far more out going than I was as a child and teenager,  and books were not any where near as exciting to him as I felt they should be!

For a good while until our parents’ divorced, I can remember my brother and I squabbling. My two years extra on the planet did nothing for our relationship!   Then suddenly parental chaos arrived and we took a thoughtful walk around our road, where we decided there and then upon a truce.  We were both in the new situation together and our new respect for each other led to enduring support and reliance.

Even before the truce Duncan had inspired some fierce moments of loyalty and admiration, not least with his bravery with bullies and his charismatic wit, even in the face of some very bleak times.

One especially happy memory took place in our kitchen where Duncan announced it was his O level English Literature in the morning and perhaps a spot of revision might help as he hadn’t really read Hardy’s Far From the  Madding Crowd with much interest at all.  So we stayed up all night and read about Bathsheba Everdene’s destructive romantic  passions and her eventual reformation over lots of cups of tea.

 

Duncan  passed of course as he did so many examinations , often under similar circumstances and deadlines. I don’t think I ever had the sense of embarrassment that Forster’s older brother experiences in the poem. For my part, even when we bickered  that was just between us, the world beyond was different and we were a team.

He even sorted our bargain taxi home on my 21st, after arriving back from a boys’ own holiday in Spain where he had obtained an impossibly tanned complexion and lost all his front teeth. Resourcefulness was and still is his pivotal characteristic.

I have mentioned books in relation to Duncan and aside from the cramming night filled with the delights of Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, I can remember two more books looming large in my memories of Duncan.

The first involves Solzhenitsyn’s immensely thick book The First Circle, a book I gave Duncan to read on his solitary February Inter-rail when he decided a book might just fit in his ruck sack. The book came home battered but safe, after adventures including a mugging in Morocco where thankfully Duncan escaped several knife carrying thugs whose intentions were unsavoury!  I can remember him teasing me that the book was not the most upbeat read to spend time with, but read it he had and he even brought it home!

The second book is the famous cult novel of travel, youth and dreams, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.  Duncan read the book several times and again its battered appearance suggested a fondness that Thomas Hardy never quite managed to attain!

Forster’s poem ends with his bleak admission that his early betrayal of his brother’s affectionate enthusiasm created some sort of ‘distance’ that perhaps still lingered on.  I would end this short happy birthday memory with the best Kerouac quote of all and one that in so many ways applies to my brother who fancied long ago he was Kerouac’s anti hero Dean Moriarty, but has turned out to be so much, much more. A fabulous dad, husband  son and brother.

Happy birthday Duncan!

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!