Hard-done-to youngest Brian Pilgrim is keen on revisiting his childhood

Life As We Know It No.91: Brian brings to these reminiscences a layer of almost forensic detail

Illustration by Mark Long

The junior members of the Pilgrim family are brought together three or four times a year at the parental home in East Grinstead for birthdays, christenings and anniversaries. Their number amounts to four – elder son Trevor, in his mid-thirties, twin sisters Denise and Siobhan, and younger sibling Brian.

What do they talk about, the Pilgrims, snug in their parents’ gazebo or – in fine weather – sprawled on their well-manicured lawn? The elder three, married or otherwise partnered off, favour their children, jobs and holiday plans. Brian, on the other hand, single, solitary and erratically employed in a succession of South of England garden centres, is much keener on revisiting his childhood.

And what was this like? Trevor, Denise and Siobhan, for whom these early memories have somewhat receded in the struggle to cope with the here and now, have an idea that it passed in an atmosphere of mutual appreciation and esteem, and was all pretty satisfactory. But to Brian, who brings to these reminiscences a layer of almost forensic detail, everything seems to have been very different.

Not only can Brian remember the exact circumstances of, say, a family outing to the beach in 1991, he can also recall precisely what was said and done and the particular humiliations to which he believes himself to have been subject. Thus, Denise, who always imagines herself to have been rather fond of her baby brother, is sometimes startled to be reminded that she once broke a pair of his sunglasses by standing on the jacket in which they were concealed, and never offered to replace them.

There is a lot more where this came from: Trevor not taking Brian to that Oasis concert and hitting him on the head with a baseball bat at about the time that Tony Blair formed his first administration; the twins, when charged with putting him to bed, always reading him The Hobbit.

It is not that Brian is notably reproachful, merely that the earnestness of his tone hints at the existence of a vast, mythological world fashioned around his infancy, prowled by relatives whose only concern seems to have been to mock and belittle, with himself, alone and fretful, at its core.

It is all very odd, and rather upsetting, especially to the girls, who always assumed that they did their best by Brian, only to discover, 20 years later, that their reward is bitterness and recrimination.