It started with a sports bra. It’s admittedly not that much of a loss: I could have gone down the road to Sports Direct to get another. Despite this, I searched the whole house for it. It could have easily fallen down the back of my bed, or slunk to the bottom of the growing pile of laundry in the basket. For a few weeks there was no sign of it: then, one day, I opened Instagram to find a video of my sister at a pole dancing class, hanging upside down with MY precious sports bra peeking out from under her top. She had left for university a few weeks before, and, in a state of mild annoyance, I imagined her breaking into my room while I was at school, rummaging through my fluffy socks to find a little souvenir to take with her. I did what any 17-year-old girl would do: went straight to my mum and had a massive gripe, followed by an equally massive cry about how much I missed her.
Our journey together started in June 2004, when I appeared in her life, a pudgy, big-eyed, mute doll which, I think, both fascinated and terrified her. My sister was the bold one: she proudly wore fairy wings to school every day, and wanted to move to America. I, on the other hand, sat at the kitchen table with Mum, chewing biscuits and claiming I would never leave home. There’s a particularly funny camcorder video of us in the bath blowing bubbles, where she belts: “I’ll go first and you go second – deal?” That was the way it was: she was the trailblazer, I her willing companion.
Sisterhood, according to Delia Ephron, is “essentially uncivilised”. I think that sums it up — two wild animals thrown together into a random family, similar enough to annoy each other, different enough to fight each other, mad enough to love each other more than anything else. The Ephron sisters, Nora and Delia, formed a creative powerhouse, collaborating on plays and films as writers and directors. In Delia’s memoir Sister, Mother, Husband, Dog, the word “Sister” appears first in the title, underscoring the central importance of that bond in her life. “I had titles for things before I had things… it would be sister first, because [those were] the most important relationships in my life.” My sister and I, like the Ephrons, attempted many amateur cinematic endeavours, the most memorable of which was our original take on Titanic. We’d never seen the film before, and managed to slightly confuse the story with ‘Jaws’. The finished product was a Blair Witch Project-style, found-footage documentary, filmed on a Kidizoom camera, where our youngest sister featured as the shark with a cardboard fin taped to her back. The premiere (held in our living room), received mixed reviews from the audience of family and friends. Two “essentially uncivilised” girls who spent the whole summer riding around on scooters, with scabby knees and gap-toothed smiles, carting a neon-pink camera around the village with illusions of grandeur.
We weren’t always quite so kind to each other. In a house full of girls, arguments were frequent, especially in our teenage years. I read a Wendy Cope column in The Guardian where she states: “I remember getting angry with my sister and sitting on top of her and banging her head on the floor.” We enacted similar scenes of petty violence: the classic younger sibling move was windmilling my legs in the air like a horizontal sprinter to defend any sneaky attacks. We recently found my diary from Year Five , where I described her as a “moody old cow” and lamented “it’s her birthday tomorrow. I wish I hadn’t bought her that hairdryer”. Those were the introspective years, each of us complaining in our diaries about how awful the other was. We would ignore each other in the corridors at school, sit on opposite sides of the bus home, and eat dinner in silence. It’s complicated to grow up as two girls in the same mould. All the excitement of childhood is swept under the rug, Kidizoom cameras replaced with training bras and tampons. It’s easier to fight with the people who know you the most, who you know would never hold a permanent grudge. And so we fought, or we simply ignored each other. It was easier than trying to explain whatever was going on inside our heads, or to try and recreate the magic of when we were young.
October 25th, 2025. I’m standing on the lawn linking arms with Mum and Dad, watching my sister in a cap and gown graduating from her Masters. We’re both a little bleary eyed: we spent last night in the pub, talking about boys we fancy, places we could visit together, plans for the future. Part of me wonders what she’s done with my bloody sports bra. And part of me is bursting with pride, because I’m not just looking at my sister. I’m looking at a proper grown-up woman, the kind of person we used to pretend to be, shuffling around the kitchen floor in Mum’s shoes and skirts. She still laughs like she did when she was 10. But she’s changed, and I suppose I have too. We’ll always be tethered together by our strange, ever-changing sort of bond. Two women, still as essentially uncivilised as we were when we were kids. I’m smiling through tears at her, my formidable, talented, and wonderful sister: partly from how proud I feel, and partly from the knowledge that her Brandy Melville top is tucked safely in the corner of my wardrobe, waiting in eager anticipation for her to notice it’s gone missing.