FAMILY INK
‘Where’s all the dancing and singing?”
Our routines were verbal games. In the earliest, starting when I was four or five, he was a boy, Castle, and I was his tyrannical mother. (He’d been called Castle at primary school by kids who couldn’t pronounce his real name, Karlson.) It was a scenario full of jokes and great fun. He was hopelessly dim and stupid, and I was a cruel and scathing old bag, continually beating and punishing him and telling him off for being a moron. It was all farce. I was a reasonably good mimic and I discovered early on I could make him laugh.
No one else in the family had this kind of exchange with Karl; it was uniquely ours.
He liked to sing and I liked to dance, and we both tended to exuberance. When we got older, Margaret and I would crank up the stereo and dance around the sitting room and sometimes after a few wines he would join in with full comic verve.
I used to say to him, “Where’s
