Readers Place

What We Think

Susannah Bates on her book Honor And Evie:

As a child, I was always the lucky one. Reading came easily to me, extra piano lessons were no burden, I passed exams… and took it all for granted while my dyslexic elder brother spent most of his childhood in a constant struggle to make the grade and keep me in my place. And thinking about it now – about just how blatantly unfair it all was – I guess it was only a matter of time before the situation found itself into one of my books. Particularly when I look at the places we’ve now reached as adults. Honor and Evie isn’t about a brother-sister relationship – and there is certainly very little of me or my brother in the two characters – but it does explore what it’s like to be born unequal, and what it means to succeed.

Not surprisingly, my brother never went to university. While most of his friends (and his precocious younger sister) were developing a taste for alcohol, morning television, and the kind of self-confidence that convinces someone they can write a top-grade essay the night before it’s due to be handed in… Oliver found himself a job as a lowly desk assistant at a firm of stockbrokers in the City. At crack of dawn, just as the rest of us were crawling into bed, he was squashed in amongst the other suits on some dreary commuter train. He might have been good at sport in an amateur sort of way, he might have had an enviable knack with the opposite sex, but when it came to a career, this job – he knew – was ‘it’. He had only the most basic qualifications, and no lucrative talents. This was his chance. He had to make it work.

And as the years went by, as the rest of us left university and fell into graduate training schemes that propelled us, automatically, into jobs that were equal – sometimes even senior – to the one my brother was doing (no matter he had 3 years’ experience over us), he never once complained. When we all sat around moaning about how awful it was, this job thing… how dreary, how soul-less, how depressing… how we were only in the City until something better came along; how banking (and stockbroking in particular) was a job to be treated with a shrug, or even outright disdain – never bothering to hide our distaste for anything that resembled a ‘yuppie’ – my brother simply got on with it.

This wasn’t a case of holding his tongue, or simmering with resentment while he listened. On the contrary, I rather suspect that Oliver agreed with us. Certainly, he always had the greatest respect for university, and only seemed to date rather academic girls. But he never lost sight of the fact that, in terms of a career, he was different from his friends. He didn’t have the same choices as they did. He had to commit to his job – and, consequently, began to develop a reputation for trying too hard… for being a bit ambitious; for having more suits in his wardrobe than pairs of jeans. People were still fond of him, but it tended to be in spite of his job, not because of it. Conspicuous hard work simply wasn’t ‘on’ – especially when that hard work was directed towards something as prosaic as stocks and shares.

But Oliver couldn’t afford the luxury of maintaining that sort of attitude. And in any case, he was used to working hard at the expense of seeming cool. Ever since childhood – since his very first exam – he’d understood that he had to work three times as hard as everyone else simply to keep up. And if it meant people laughed at him, if it meant he had fewer friends, then that was a price he was prepared to pay. When my parents expected him to study in his room through the holidays – to miss his lie-ins, miss some re-run of a James Bond film, miss a nice easy trip with me and my mother into the local town… he did it. When, in his mid teens, they pushed it further and urged him to take a desk in the front row of his class away from all the fun and banter at the back… because that was the only way he was going to pass his O-levels, then Oliver – incredibly – did as they suggested. It must have taken a lot of courage (although, as it turned out, he never had any trouble keeping his mates, particularly when he grew older and taller and, frankly, quite a catch when it came to his younger sister’s friends…)

And now, when I look at where he’s got to in his career (now Head of Charities at one of the world’s leading financial organisations), when I look at the lessons he learned at a very young age – the self-awareness that means he only sets himself realistic goals; the humility that makes him such a very good listener; the self respect that comes from giving something your best shot; the resilience to peer pressure; the guts and determination to hold on when most others would quit and look elsewhere… I can’t help thinking that having a bit of bad luck at the start of life, when combined with supportive parents, can turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to a person.

As for me, I haven’t done badly. But there’s a streak of dissatisfaction in my nature. I’ve been spoilt, I think, by a university experience which can lead more weak-minded graduates into thinking they haven’t truly succeeded in life unless they’ve landed a job that pays millions, that gives months and months of holiday a year, that doesn’t mean getting up at six o’clock in the morning, that involves long self-indulgent conversations about the meaning of life… and even the finest novelists don’t tick all those boxes.

Like Honor & Evie there’s something of the hare and tortoise about my relationship with my brother… but with one important addition: which is the wonderful joy that, as the hare, you feel when a much-loved tortoise surges past – and you romp in behind them, utterly delighted.