“The last time I saw John was at my daughter Laura’s 40^th celebration, a lunch out at the end of November. Seated at either end of a long table, I went to talk to John between courses. He told me a story from our childhood that I hadn’t heard before. It involved the fire brigade being called out on Christmas Day, the first year that we moved to the house in Ebbisham Road. I had no memory of it. ‘You would have been too young to remember,’ John said. As the oldest of us, John held many stories that only he knew, many that will remain untold. I am glad that I heard just one of them, the last time I saw my big brother John.”

The passage above is from ‘One of Five’, a tribute to my brother John, which I read at his funeral last week. A life is made up of stories. Some of them die with a person, untold. Others are told repeatedly, like the story of when our father brought Belfast home for Christmas dinner … a man who lived in a shack in the woods and who drank at Dad’s local. Our mum gave Belfast (and Dad) short shrift, and the poor man, who already had a Christmas dinner lined up at the White Horse, ended up with no dinner at all. John retold that story, too, the last time I saw him, as well as the new one I hadn’t heard before.

The celebrant leading the funeral asked John’s four siblings to contribute stories to allow her to compose a eulogy, ‘The Story of John’. We each added them to a shared document, filling in the gaps that one couldn’t remember, correcting details that another had misremembered. Or had they? Listening to ‘The Story of John’ at the funeral, something didn’t seem right to me. The celebrant said that John had left England to go travelling at the age of twenty, after completing an apprenticeship as a tool maker, This puzzled me, as I have a photo of John at his 21st birthday party, held in the garden of the house he still lived in with me and my family, in the hot summer of 1976. I also remembered that he was living at home when I left to study at Thames Poly. He was 23 then. He had, though, left for a while to live in a shared flat, taking my records with him. Much to my annoyance. We fell out over that, never having had a cross word  between us before. The records were returned; peace was declared. As soon as I bought my own record player, with my first grant cheque, the records moved out of the home we had shared and moved into my room in the Halls of Residence.

How can I piece together John’s timeline, and get the details of his story straight?

At John’s wake, old stories were retold, new ones emerged. A tale from a cousin of how his brother helped John cover up a love bite by hitting him with a piece of scaffolding, turning the offending mark into a more acceptable injury. That was new to me. The same cousin and I shared the well known story of how John used to hide his Doc Martens under a hedge in a nearby alleyway, changing out of his ‘respectable’ shoes into them after leaving home, as our mother didn’t approve of his ‘bovver boots’. An old friend of John, who seemed to have hardly aged at all since I last saw him in the late ’70s, shared that he and John had worked together in Jersey. I knew that John had lived out there, but hadn’t been aware that Glenn had been there with him. Jersey is where he met Angela, the girl who was to become his fiancée, though they didn’t marry in the end. Angela was at the funeral, as was another of John’s exes. A third ex was to find me, through this website, in the days following the funeral, and between us we pieced together John’s timeline, the story of John.

I was indeed right: John had not gone travelling until his twenty-fourth year. I discovered that he left for Jersey after an unseasonal snowfall in England. He had been fed up for a while, and when it snowed at Easter, he left almost immediately, to join his friend Glenn. Google supplied the year: 1979. John was 23 then, going on 24.

John’s middle years were unhappily fuelled by alcohol. I saw little of him, with him being abroad for a few years – in Jersey, on kibbutz in Israel, in Holland, and for a year or two he lived with Angela in Australia. She tells me that they returned in 1984. By then, I was pregnant with my second child. Our lives had grown apart, and then I found it hard to be around him, when he was drinking so much. Sometimes, when I visited my childhood home, John was there, where he had returned to live after his travelling days were over. Other times, he was not. One time, I travelled to see him, knowing that he had been going through a bad patch. When I arrived, he had decided instead to go shopping for some new clothes. I felt let down, angry. Another time, he failed to turn up, having promised to take my children swimming so as to give me a break on Mothers’ Day. I ended up in the pool with my kids and my nephew, full of resentment.

John and I didn’t see one another for a few years; we reunited after John got sober. I think of John’s last twenty years as his third act. He was a different man without the booze: loving and kind, though plagued with lifelong anxiety, which he managed by working hard, keeping busy outside of work, and walking his beloved dog Rupert for hours and hours on Epsom Common. Although past retirement age, John continued working – to pay for Rupert’s vet bills, he said, but also because he wouldn’t have known what to do if he were to stop working. Rupert died last summer, John six months after him, taking some stories with him, untold.

I think I’ll be piecing together John’s stories for some years. I almost wish for a re-run of his wake, on an annual basis, so as to gather new stories. A life is made up of stories, and I don’t know half of John’s.