A Shout From The Attic: Siblings
"We didn’t know about sibling rivalry and I can’t remember feeling bad about my brother and sister or feel they were getting more than their share...'' Ronnie Bray recalls childhood incidents.
I think I was three, maybe four, when Ma married Tommy Scott. René says I was older, and Arthur wasn’t there yet, so no good asking him. He was born some time after they got married. When he was two, Ma and Dad went to Belgium to see some Belgian friends of Dad’s. He had met Philipé when he lived and worked at Newcastle Docks.
I think it must have been after Arthur was born that I went to sleep in the attic. Before then, I slept in a bed in Ma’s room. From that bed it was that I fell out of bed, the only time I ever remember doing so in a long life, and hit my head on a train.
Apart from hitting my head on a train I don’t remember having a train, although I do remember looking through my green eyes, made even greener at some lucky lad’s Hornby locomotive with all its shiny bits and push an pull controls. Hornby trains looked so good and detailed.
René says that Arthur slept in a pull-out chair in Ma’s room, but he banged his head on the arms, so dad wrapped them so he couldn’t hurt it again. I don’t remember Dad doing anything with Arthur, like fun or outings, but maybe Arthur remembers differently. I hope so.
We didn’t know about sibling rivalry and I can’t remember feeling bad about my brother and sister or feel they were getting more than their share, to my detriment. We were just there, but I don’t remember much about Arthur at home. I was nine when he was born and when he was getting around as a toddler I was pushing into twelve and thirteen and mostly always out of the house.
