Relatively Podcast
For most of us, our relationship with our brothers and sisters is potentially the longest of our lives.
They have seen the best and worst of us.
Catherine Carr’s podcast features conversations between well-known siblings – she brings them together to chat about shared history.
It’s not too deep and dark. It can be tender and funny. But it lifts the curtains on people’s lives – offers a sense of how they became who they are.
I chanced upon brother and sister Kit de Waal and her Dean O’Loughlin.
They work together as screenwriters and Kit has written some beautiful books with a strong vein of social conscience.
They are two of five children of an Irish mother who was also a Jehovah’s Witness and a father from St Kitt’s in the Caribbean.
It was, said Kit, an “absolutely unpredictable and strange childhood”, it was also a very poor childhood – they didn’t have very much materially – and their “very bohemian strange” mother probably had mental health problems, she said.
Dean remembered fun, laughter and being close to his sisters. Tellingly he likened them to “Vietnam vets who were on tour together.”
He said his mother went out for chips one time and came back with a homeless girl who stayed for months.
Growing up as mixed-race children in 1960s Birmingham set them apart.
Struggling for the basics of heat and food added to the mix.
They had zero power, said Kit.
“It’s not like we could do anything about it … we just waited to leave home. Every single one of us was waiting to leave home.”
Dean said their parents weren’t invested in the life they actually had.
They were living in semi-squalor surrounded by over-energetic malnourished children. Looking back, he said, you start to realise that they were extremely dysfunctional as parents.
Kit talked about arguments over food - who ate all the food - or hogging the heater: “We were cold… they were pretty desperate times.”
But their father’s gift to them was an obsession with film.
He sat down to watch and there had to be silence. Any noise and you were out of the room and heat.
At certain points in the film, he’d stop and ask: What happens next.
It felt like a snap exam that you had to get right. But now this brother and sister are screenwriters.
