My brother Anthony, that wily lad: he was the one who understood the situation from the start. He didn't live in hope; he was having none of it. To him a spade was a spade, and a charade was a charade. Always light years ahead of me in worldly wisdom, Anthony one day thrust my father's love–poems into my face. Oh Barbara of the bright breasts: he showed me this opening line and giggled. A Bharbara na gcíoch geal.

Headlights, he informed me, was what they called breasts in the New Houses, and my brother had friends living in that council estate strewn with broken glass. One day he told me, ‘You put your gilly in between a woman's legs and the spunk goes into her belly, and after a while a baby comes out.’ I thought that after a while maybe meant a few minutes. I was appalled: it all seemed so sordid.

Anthony took a few looks at life, and a nod was as good as a wink. OK, he said to himself; this is what it's like and I'm stuck with it. Rather than being a nomad like me, retreating through a shrivelling Platonic territory as reality made deeper and deeper incursions, he accepted the colonizer's rule as a fact and subverted it as best he could, by guile and deceit. He simply never did the things he did until they became plain as daylight and he couldn't deny them. Then, as he was about to be beaten, he'd yell, ‘Have to do wee–wee! Have to do wee–wee!’ The younger ones learned from him, and sang the same chorus as the blows began to descend. But sometimes they were so terrified of my father or Barbara that they really did wet themselves.

‘Big Din–Din wants to be molly–coddled. You have only to look crooked at him and he's off into a stook,’ Anthony would say when my father went upstairs to mope on his bed. But rather than worrying like the rest of us about my father's bad mood, he availed of these occasions to absent himself from the house, from the back yard, from homework, and go to the Fair Green, to meet Tarzan Kenneally and his buddies, council estate children old before their time.