In which I remember my brother

CANDID, CONFESSIONAL, CONTROvERSIAL

On Saturday night, late, I got a WhatsApp message.

‘Hello Liz. Fifty years ago today, your brother Nick played an early Cockney Rebel show at the Roundhouse. Time passes. Stay well, Steve H.’

Nick has been dead for 11 years. He would have been in his early 20s when he played that gig in Camden. Steve Harley once told me my brother had a nickname in the band: Shoe Gazer. Because he would play guitar on stage without once looking up at the audience. Nick was painfully shy. He didn’t even tell anyone when he got married. He became a recluse in his final years.

He wanted to be a writer but couldn’t get anything published. He was too belligerent to remain in a band for long; at his funeral a friend who first met Nick at Essex University described him as ‘crazy, angry but hugely articulate’. No wonder my brother was expelled.

As a child, I used to dread Sunday lunch. My mum would have been in the kitchen for hours, face red from the steam (I was always dispatched to the veg patch to pick leaves for the mint sauce), but the meal she slaved over for hours was always ruined, as Nick and my other two brothers would be arguing with my dad. As a man who had fought the Nazis, who was always smartly dressed in pressed chinos, an ironed Viyella shirt, a polka-dot cravat, his sons, whom he referred to as long-haired layabouts, enraged him.

My brothers were often mean to me, too. Flying into a rage if I touched the spools on their tape machines or didn’t know the difference between Bob Dylan and Donovan, though in a rare moment of altruism, given he was obsessed with Bach, Nick bought me my first LP: The Monkees .He only mellowed with age. When I was living in a slum clearance area in Brixton and woke to find someone had tried to jemmy open a front window, Nick slept on the floor each night in case they returned. At his funeral, a former bandmate told me that when our dad died, Nick sold his last guitar so that he could chip in to the cost of the coffin.

Nick was so handsome that he had a succession of beautiful girlfriends who inevitably lived in

Hampstead mansions. Each time a relationship broke up, he’d be homeless again. He never had children, but was close to our nephew, who was named after him. He would write long, funny letters to Little Nick, who dreamed of being a film director when he grew up. He died aged 21, before he could make it.

We only get to hear about the people who are successful. We can’t read an unpublished manuscript (I still have Nick’s novel in my wardrobe) or hear an unreleased record. I’ve been kept buoyant these past ten years by the hope I will, one day, make it. But more often than all those stories you hear about how it took years to get Mamma Mia! off the ground is the fact nothing happens and then we die to be buried, like Nick, in a cardboard coffin. He had hopes and dreams of becoming a rock star, but they died long before he did. No one makes a pilgrimage to my brother’s graveside in an eco cemetery in Essex.

Most of the writers I started out with have fallen by the wayside: they became mums, or retrained as reiki healers or breath gurus or relationship counsellors. Nick never tried to do anything other than music and writing; he wouldn’t even teach, as he felt that was beneath him.

I’ve got a meeting with another publisher on Tuesday about my novel. I’m going to give it one last push. I know she wants to soften the sex and the ending, and as someone who is precious about even an ellipsis being changed into a full stop, I will swallow my pride and do what it takes. I’ve decided to dedicate the book to my brother. At least then he won’t be completely forgotten.

Nick wanted to be a writer but couldn’t get anything published