Yeah, spitting on beds was quite a thing when we were kids

MY MOTHER’S eightieth birthday party - and I’m catching up with my cousins; six of them, my mother’s sister’s children, from the Italian side.

With siblings, the connections are so obtrusive, so ongoing, that you’re aware all the time they hold you together, even when you’re parking the car.

But with cousins, it’s different.

The small, essential connections that you have with cousins can be so unobtrusive that sometimes, you’re hardly aware they’re still there.

Yet when you meet up, it’s exactly the same as it is with siblings: instantly, they are your people.

Partly this is because your cousins look like your people and feel like your people, which comes of course, from sharing the same blood, the same pudding-bowl hair-cuts you had as children, and the same paddling-pool (that time you did a wee in it).

But mainly it’s because they are every bit as gifted at reframing your childhood and sense of self as siblings are.

“You lot were like the ******* Waltons, growing up,” Cousin 1 says, “no offence.”

“Christ,” I say, “I don’t remember us being like that. Well, your house was like the house of fun. We always wanted to go to it. And we never wanted to leave. Apart from anything else, there was always a chance of a telly being thrown through a window, especially at Christmas.”

“I think that only happened the once,” Cousin 2 says, “you hit lucky there.” “I’ll never forget that Christmas,” I say, “it was so disappointing having to leave. There was complete silence in the back of the car on the way home. The six of us were too excited to talk. Just Mum and Dad talking in whispers in the front, in the dark.”

“Nothing like watching your relatives fight,” Cousin 3 says. “You never seemed to fight,” Cousin 4 says, sounding disappointed.

“All families fight,” I say, “it’s just some families manage to control the fighting because they have one family-member to do it. It only takes one. With us, it was Dad.”

“We all loved your dad,” Cousin 4 says, “he was always so kind.”

“Dad could have stopped the French Revolution in its tracks with just his kindness,” I say, “he was a one-man peace-keeping force.”

“But how did he actually stop you from fighting?” Cousin 2 says. “He’d put whichever two of us was fighting in a room and lock the door,” I say.

“In our family,” Cousin 3 says, “that would have been ******* dangerous.” “With strict instructions to “think about our behaviour,” I say, “then he’d let us out and we’d have to stand in front of him and tell whoever we were fighting with that we loved them.”

“Still ******* dangerous,” Cousin 4 says. “Not only did we have to say the words, ‘I love you,’ but we had to say them ‘with meaning’.”

“What do you mean?” Cousins 1, 2, 3 and 4 say.

“We had to satisfy Dad that we truly meant it. ‘Hand on heart,’ he used to say. If we couldn’t convince him, he’d be ‘deeply saddened’ and then he’d put us back into the room to, ‘think things over again’.”

“Then what?” my Cousins say. “I’m surprised you never saw it happen,” I say, “went on all the time, until our early teens.”

“Never mind that,” Cousin 1 says, “then what?”

“We went in and out of that room - in, out, in, out - until finally he was satisfied that we’d said, ‘I love you’ with meaning.”

“Then what?” Cousin 3 says. “Then as soon as Dad had gone, we’d sneak into each other’s bedrooms, walk to their beds and quickly spit on them.”

“You’d spit on each other’s beds?”

Cousin 4 says. “Yeah,” I say, “spitting on beds was quite a thing when we were kids.

We used to do it at night, too, sometimes, when Dad said our prayers.”

I point at my middle brother Tom over by the bar, standing next to my sister Chrissy.

“For example, if Tom happened to be kneeling over Chrissy’s bed, he’d drop his head over his hands, you know - they’d be clasped together in prayer, like this, on top of the bed.”

I demonstrate, clasping my hands together and dropping my head over them, onto a table.

“And he’d be going, ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy and all my brothers and sisters and all the starving people’ but all the time, he’d be dribbling through his hands, without Dad knowing, onto Chrissy’s bed.”

I fall silent suddenly, struck by the thought that the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.

Yeah, spitting on beds was quite a thing when we were kids