Manners certainly didn’t apply in these fraternal disputes. I suppose there had to be some release from perpetually polite behaviour – we were lads after all – but our constant bickering eventually led to our having to be separated and given our own bedrooms. Of course I got the better bedroom and Richard was consigned to the very-cold-in-winter fibro next to the shed (or ‘workshop’ as it became known as our stepfather was very handy).
It didn’t really occur to me until many years later, and even then I had to have it pointed out to me, that I had been guilty of bullying my brother for the first fifteen years of his life. Mind you, it certainly wasn’t the impression that I had, most likely because, in contrast to Richard, I remember having a pretty marvellous time of it. I mean, how wonderful is it to go into any physical encounter with your younger brother, whether in anger or just for fun knowing that you’re going to prevail? It’s to Richard’s regret that the first time he comprehensively beat me in one of our interminable wrestles I had an epiphany and decided that losing was painful and not much fun and consequently wrestling was not for me, robbing Richard of a satisfyingly commensurate revenge.
In these days, when bullying is perceived as a national scourge, perhaps this is an aspect of bullying that needs to be recognised as problematic, for what is easily identified as bullying by an observer can simply be seen as the natural order of things by both the bully and the bullied in just such a fraternal relationship.
I can relate to you the incident that brought me closest to appreciating my casual villainy by the following example. Richard and I were staying up in Auckland with our grandparents in the August holidays as we did each year until our teens. Auckland in August was a tropical paradise compared with Christchurch and it was where we were traditionally ferried about the countryside by our estranged father (who was pretty used to endlessly driving about the countryside as he was a stock and station agent). In any case, I think this was probably our last hurrah in Auckland and Richard and I were having some noisy disagreement in our bedroom after lights out when our grandmother stormed into the room in her pyjamas and her hair in rollers to tell us to settle down.
Some of that surliness I’ve mentioned must’ve surfaced, because the next thing I knew I’d received a sharp clip around the ear from this tiny woman who scarcely mustered five feet in high heels and whom I already towered over.
I was so shocked and surprised that I actually had to consider that I was completely out of order, a difficult concept for me to grasp in the context of what I’ve already mentioned. Sadly for Richard, it was probably another three years before I finally got the message.
I suppose it sounds like there are grounds for our fraternal relations, that is Richard’s and mine, to be somewhat fractured and I suspect families have been torn apart on lesser grounds, but I’m happy to say that’s not the case. As I hinted it took a very long time for me to admit that I had been guilty of bullying but that’s mainly because I hadn’t even thought about it. Once I had realised and confessed the errors of my ways, forgiveness followed immediately. That is not to say that it’s forgotten and that there wasn’t suffering and that things mightn’t have been very different if the pain hadn’t been inflicted in the first place, but love and resentment are often uneasy bedfellows and there’s one more incident I can report that illustrates that assertion.
There was a summer when our parents decided they had better things to do over the summer holidays than manage unruly children from a previous marriage and took off to the North Island, leaving Richard and me to the tender ministrations of the happy holiday crew at Wainui YMCA camp near the picturesque French settlement of Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, an hour or so’s drive from Christchurch.
I had been a sickly child before sprouting in adolescence and regularly suffered bronchial complaints over winter, finally resulting in my coughing up an inguinal hernia, for which I’d been operated on just before we went to camp in Wainui..
As a result I was feebly limping about and trying to stay out of harm’s way, but this can simply be a provocation to a bunch of lads intent on a game of bar-the-door and I found myself in the unprecedented position of being surrounded by a taunting group of boys and unable to explain my way out of trouble.
Into this group of troublemakers charged my loyal bro’ Richard, shouting ‘Don’t you hurt him, he’s my BROTHER!’ and the group scattered in disarray with my dear brother Richard in pursuit.
Finally I should perhaps redundantly explain that the Richard in this story is in fact the Dick of Dick’s Toolbox. I gave him the pseudonym of Dick for the very reason that Richard being called a Dick in any sense is so unlikely as to be laughable. Of course, I love him dearly and I regret being the instrument of pain and frustration in his younger days. Ignorance is no excuse I know, so perhaps I could suggest that it’s everyone’s duty to call bullying out when it’s observed and help save both the victim and the perpetrator from a lifetime of regret.