John Walker's Electronic House

I was chatting to my sister via instant message, gently mocking her for her daft fear of the potential reality of movie monsters. To worry about zombies smashing the windows and eating her brains, at 27 years old, seems just daft. Then she delivered her winning blow.

“It all started when a certain someone told me there were wolves in the trees at Newlands Corner.”

Newlands Corner was a local place filled with grassy hills ideal for rolypolying down, and woods perfect for losing your sister’s Aerobe within the high branches. We went there quite regularly with our parents, suited as it was to picnics, bike riding (especially the amazing deep craters in the woods caused by WW2 bombing – thanks Nazis for your excellent bike courses!) and the consumption of long-begged-for ice creams. I have no recollection of ever telling Catherine that there were wolves there. But apparently I did.

“[It was] when we were little. I remember cutting through the trees at Newlands Corner to get back to the path that leads to the carpark, hearing a rustling and you telling me it was a wolf and mum and dad telling you off. Then you told me that Woofle [my favourite toy – a dog glove puppet] would turn into a werewolf on a full moon and I told you he wouldn’t and you said I was right but there were werewolves out there and then you howled until I cried. Then you howled just too scare whenever you got the opportunity.”

My response to this revelation is confusing. I feel equal measures of guilt and pride. I do feel terrible to know that mean-spirited comments made under the age of 10 could have such a long-lasting, and apparently debilitating effect. But I also feel rather strongly that I met my responsibilities as an older brother with respectable vim. Surely we all have to have someone in our lives who is required to instill a fear of imaginary baddies in our tiny brains? I was recalling yesterday about my mad terror of catching rabies, after a school friend had told me all about how one of its more peculiar symptoms was a fear of water. Such a bizarre ailment was more than I could comprehend, and I became convinced that the only means by which I might ever die would be nuclear war, or a rabid dog bite. So surely I was only fulfilling my necessary brotherly duties for Catherine?

This, unfortunately, opened the gates for other forgotten childhood crimes. Apparently, a few years later, Phillip Kett (a very bad influence on me throughout my adolescence) and I told my sister to ask my mum what a blowjob was. I remember this incident arriving after Phillip said it in front of her, and my not wanting to explain. I think Catherine recalls it as all being much more malicious.

And then I mentioned the Boggle Crime. I was sure we’d already been over this. So much so that I even mentioned it in a review a while back.

“Boggle is perhaps most orientated for a single-player mode. I don’t have to have an opponent when challenging myself to extract as many words as I can from the grid of sixteen letters. In fact, after the way I treated my little sister as a child, I shouldn’t be allowed opponents. She would look up from furiously scribbling down words and ask, “How do you spell ‘COUNT’?” and I would tell her and then say, “But there’s no point in you writing that down now, cos I have it.” And she so naively would comply. Oh god, I feel terrible. I deserve this version of the game to be such a complete mess.”

I hadn’t told her.

“I’m slightly humiliated. When I read it, I can picture me sat on your bedroom floor desperate to find a word longer than 4 letters so you won’t take the piss out of me!”

And there, there’s no pride at all. It’s horrible to remember the abuse of power of being a bigger brother. It’s something over which I have no control. I can’t go back and not be pointlessly mean to my sister now I know not to. I can’t make sure she only has happy memories of our relationship. But I was a child too. It’s so unpleasant to realise now that she looked up to me, and that my brotherly horridness had a reaching effect. Although she reassures me that overall I was a decent brother.

I love my sister very much. It’s nice to say so.

(I should add, in the interests of balance, her greatest childhood crime. At an age far too young to be so ingenious, she would stand at the top of the stairs and shout, “Ow! John! Stop it! That hurts! Stop hitting me!” and then burst into tears and run into her bedroom. An angry parent would come into my room, where I sat innocently, bemused, and would be shouted at, and then moreso for “lying” about it. That racket lasted the good part of a year before she was rumbled).