Amanda Brookfield

As a child, it always pleased me that I managed to push my way into the world thirty minutes before my brother. I was the oldest! But that never stopped me – or him – from enjoying the fact of being a twin. It felt ‘special’. Different. Although parental attention had to be shared – not to mention birthday parties and bedrooms – we never minded. Nor were we envious of our two elder sisters, with their later bedtimes and bigger amounts of pocket money, because along with such perks came burdensome expectations, like having to set a Good Example. If we all got up to mischief – which we frequently did – they were the ones to get told off, while we, as the not-old-enough-to know-better twins, took full advantage!

Even now, aged sixty-four, people sit up a little if I mention having a twin. Are we alike, they want to know. Do we communicate telepathically? The answer is no, and no. But that does not diminish the strength of the bond. Nine months bobbing in the same amniotic fluid, all the years of pram and buggy sharing, of side-by-side cots and bunk beds, of being in the same classrooms – how could there not be the deepest of connections? When, just short of our ninth birthday, my brother got sent away to boarding school (we were living abroad and it was the ‘olden days’), the shock was seismic.

My latest novel ‘The Twin’ does not contain my brother, and thank goodness because the torments endured by Cath and Rob are a world away from our own wonderful upbringing. But, being a twin, I certainly understand the closeness, and the distress of rupture, and how – no matter what life throws at you – that loving bond never ends.