Outside Shakespeare

“We must have seemed a typical nuclear family of the time, those years after the second world war. Mum, Dad, my elder brother Ivor and me. Naturally only Dad went out to work while Mum stayed at home in the traditional role of housewife and mother. Granny came to live with us for the last seven years of her life, so, to be strictly accurate, there were five of us, not four. And then, Dad was eventually killed in a car accident, and, later still, Ivor was murdered. So, for these reasons at least, you’d have to say that we weren’t in the end that typical.” This is the beginning of an unusual family history, involving one man’s attempt to understand the brother he scarcely knew. Part of that investigation evokes the complex interactions of the individuals who made up the family, but the search draws on a larger picture of the era of the post-second world war. Finally, the investigation raises, even if it doesn’t resolve, questions about whether his brother’s death was in some sense fated.