Delilah Jeary - iMama's Great Debates Editor - has a theory about sibling rivalry. Actually, it is not her theory but her husband Matthew's. A social worker, his view is that if you keep telling a toddler what a fantastic big brother he is, he will strive to fulfil that role. "It is all about the narrative you tell them," she says.
Her own family narrative has been rather more complex. When Delilah was two, and her brother, Orlando, three, their mother, Lamorna Heath, hanged herself. Heath, a writer, had had depression for many years. Her husband, the writer Patrick Seale, was left to bring up the two children alone, which he did, in spite of having learned, a few months after Delilah's birth, that he was not her father. During a short period when he and Heath were separated, Heath had had an affair with the novelist Martin Amis, and Delilah was the result.
Amis knew about her. As he wrote in his autobiography, Experience, Heath had told him and had given him a photograph. "It showed a two-year-old girl in a dark flower dress, smocked at the chest, with short puffed sleeves and pink trim. She had fine blond hair. Her smile was demure: pleased, but quietly pleased."He had shown his mother, who advised him not to do anything, and for another 16 years nobody else knew, until Seale decided to tell Delilah just before she started university.
"When do you tell the person something like that?" says Delilah. "Experts say now that you tell them immediately. You coo it over the cot. But for me, under the circumstances, I wouldn't have wanted to feel more different from how I already felt. My brother and my dad and I were this thick little unit, really close. I don't think it would have been a particularly helpful thing to have known."
