Living in the Shadow of a Giant

The three of us.

When you grow up with an older brother you become the sideline. The second child, the middle child, whatever your order is. You stay second.

You can fight it. That is the usual way — the ordinary civil rivalry, scrapping for the light, competing for your parents’ attention. It works well enough when you are fighting a rival.

It does not work when you are fighting a giant.

A giant casts a shadow, and a shadow hides you. It can take your power away before you have worked out what your power was. You cannot outgrow a giant and you cannot outshine one, and anyone who has tried knows how that goes.

But there is another word for the same thing.

Shade.

In a forest, the big trees make the shadow and everything beneath it is called the understory — a whole layer of life that exists because of the shade rather than in spite of it. It is not small firs waiting their turn. It is different species altogether, things that could only ever have grown down there.

Foresters have a word for the big one, too. A nurse tree: a mature tree left standing on purpose to shelter the seedlings underneath it from sun, from frost, from wind, until they are strong enough to stand in the open.

That is what I got.

I did not become another version of my brother Peter. I grew into something else, on the sidelines, in the shade, out of the weather.

And it took me most of my life to ask it the other way round. Was he taking the sun? Or was he bearing the frost?

He was bearing the frost.

He was strong enough and smart enough to realise his own potential early, and to work out that the leaves which came up after him might need some help. He never made me compete with him. He made room.