UNIQ: MY CHILDHOOD EXCERPT

I was born on the 8^th of September at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane, Queensland, the second child and first born son of Mervyn Cecil Higham and Gail Dorothy Higham nee Streeter.  Some people claim to have memories dating as far back as their first breath.  Others go further still and claim to remember what it was like to be in the womb.  Others go even further and claim to remember their own past lives.  I can claim none of those things for myself.  What I will say though is that I remember what it was like to become an older brother.

One of my very first memories is sitting outside the Princess Alexander Hospital with my father, and learning that I was to become a middle child.  My mother had just given birth to a beautiful, blue-eyed baby boy, my younger brother Luke Timothy.  Rather than sharing in what must have been my parents joy and happiness, I felt only a dim foreboding.  This strange and puzzling piece of news induced in me a sense of fear and trepidation, a feeling that my life would change forever and not in a better way.  Why I felt the way I did, I shall never know, but I must have been a very insecure child from a very early age.

For most of my early life, those feelings were to be a core part of my self-identity.  Who was I?  Well, for a start, I was not-Luke.  My brother has always been somewhat of a charmer, gifted with a sense of mischieviousness and a ready smile.  People always seemed to gravitate towards him, and the spotlight of attention found him easily.  Me, I was more likely to be found crouched somewhere in the corner, always watching other people’s lives.  Consider this, I am brown eyed, brown haired, lank, of medium height, and an introvert by nature at a guess.  My brother stands at about 188 cm and weighs about 40 kilos more than me. 

              My father, God bless his soul, somehow conjured up the most charming yet strangely fitting epithets for his offspring, especially for “the boys”.  Luke was Luke the Wrecker and I was, well, I was Grant the Ant.  But that’s just the way my father was and still is to some degree.  I mean, I know that he loved us dearly, and still does, always will.  Every night before we went to bed, my father would ask us for a kiss.  He almost never failed to state uncategorically that he loved us, with the rare exception of the times when I almost completely burnt his trust.  As a father, this and many other things, makes him better than many.