My name is Catherine Carr and this is season three of relatively, the podcast all about potentially the longest relationships of your life.
Do you remember that?
Yes, I do. Why God, that's a memory.
I'll be bringing siblings together to talk about the connections they have as adults, as well as what it was like growing up together. This week, we're talking to kip Deval and her brother Dean, oh, Lachlan,
hunger puts you on edge, you know, you've heard of hangry be, you know, angry at the same time. And we would like that most of the time.
Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah.
It's and also talked to them separately, to get a more private take on the relationship.
Where we're sort of all banded together. You know, like people who Vietnam vets who have been out on tour together, it was a bit like, we've got each other, which I think was very important.
My brothers and sisters have given me what my parents never did, which is that unconditional affection and understanding. So it's really filled a great gap in my life.
And in a new twist, I'll be delving a little further back with the help of our sponsors find my past, the family history experts
in all the time in all the time that she's been obsessed with that, and obsessed with genealogy, she's never found a story remotely as interesting as I
know, she will literally be over the moon with that information.
Brothers and sisters are never straightforward. Also Kitt Duvall and her little brother, Dean, a to five siblings, born to an Irish mother and a father from St. Kitts in the Caribbean, the children grew up in 1960s, Birmingham, their childhood was undeniably tough, as their parents were ill equipped to provide adequate care for their charismatic and clever children, who somehow emerged with confidence to succeed. We talk about all of that about waiting for Paradise about caring for your brothers and sisters, and about finding fun, despite it all. But Kitt and Dean, who now work together as screenwriters, started by describing their very unusual form of early film, education.
So my father was a film expert, he loved classic film, you know, 30s, to 60s, I'd say. And we would sit with my dad,
one very comfortable big arm chair, in front of the TV, a sofa behind that which you sort of craned around the chair to look at the TV, heat in that room, which was a rarity in the winter, it'd be pitch black.
And so you had to sit in absolute silence. While he was watching whatever he wanted to watch, it's clearly wasn't what we wanted to watch, necessarily.
You couldn't make any sound and could interrupt the film in any way. Or you'd be rejected. And then you're out in the cold, no entertainment and no heat, which is pretty grim. There was no Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or anything, it was all film, you are generally Humphrey Bogart, George Raf, that kind of thing, complex black and white detective films,
he would turn around to you halfway through the film and say,
what's going to happen next? Where do you think that's gonna go? And you'd have to
know or did you see this or watch what happens next?
And it was like a sort of SNAP exam. That again, you had to get right because you're under pressure.
But you also love film trivia. So if it was Clark Gable, he'd say, who was Clark Gable married to? Who's Olivia de Havilland sister.
So you learned very, very early and I'm talking nine, probably nine or 10. How to take apart a plot,
you know, sort of by eight or nine, you could easily deconstruct the map The Maltese Falcon, or, you know, Sunset Boulevard or whatever you you understood, you understood the lighting, you understood the sound, you could identify David Lean film from a Tom Houston film.
I mean, I remember this product needs to remind you, and it's only just occurred to me. We made a board game about making movies when we were, you know, 1011 12 Whatever. The obsession with film was very much there and we took it very much to heart.
Can you remember what the ballgame was called?
I don't it was a hard Hollywood something would have been Hollywood something or other. Oh, do you remember that?
Ugly? Yes, I do. Oh, my God, that's a memory on No,
like Frosties packet or a packet of cornflakes.
You know, otally That's exactly what we're talking about. And, you know, one of my sisters was very good at drawing and she would draw enough Lean meats, Game of Life meats, you know?
Yes. What was the what was the point of the game? What was making the film,
wasn't it? So you hired the actors? Douglas and Tony Curtis and I'm gonna make a film about whatever.
Yes, and that would definitely be a biblical one, wouldn't it? Yeah, that one would have been and then you'd need the right director and the set and the leading lady. Exactly. Who would have been the leading lady for those two Deborah Kerr?
There you go. Fine, Nancy, no problem.
I've completely forgotten about Game of Life until he reminded me about you go up some weird little game with the cars wasn't
really what it was nothing like life.
I'm gonna say we should write and complain. It was really nothing like I
really want in life is not that much fun. Let me tell you.
And what was it like growing up is one of five. What kind of childhood Do you guys have?
We had an absolutely unpredictable, strange childhood. My mother was a Jehovah's Witness, my father, and she was Irish. My father was from the Caribbean. Absolutely wedded to the idea of going back to the West Indies as a conquering hero. We'd had a poor childhood, we didn't have materially very much at all. And we also had this very bohemian strange mother, who probably had mental health problems thinking back to me,
overriding Lee, my memory of my childhood was was fun and laughter and being very close to my sisters. And I guess that was because because it was tough. We were sort of all banded together, you know, like people who Vietnam vets who have been out on tour together, I imagine being an only child in that environment would have been absolutely horrific. And you'd probably be in a lot of therapy roundabout now.
Kate described it as really unpredictable. And I wonder if that's a word that resonates with you.
For me, it fell into a sort of rhythm in that the unpredictable nature made it predictable in a weird way. And weird things happens out of the blue quite often. But then, well, you know, one time, my mom went down the road for chips, and came back with a homeless girl who stayed for months, that kind of thing, which is like, properly odd when you think about it as a grown up. But as a kid, it was just like, you know, that's very strange. And that's happened. But let's get on with it. Because nearly everything else is strange as well.
And how did that unpredictability feel like some of it sounds fun. And maybe there was a flipside to that that wasn't so fun.
Most of it was not fun at all the unpredictability related to whether or not you would eat, whether you'd have the right clothes to wear, what moves your pet, either of your parents would be in, you couldn't feel like you were sitting or standing on solid ground at any time at all. Also, because of the Jehovah's Witness overlay, you also had this impending sense of doom because the world was going to end.
Because I think it's hard, isn't it when your children you have your universes presented to you by your parents, and you accept a lot of weird things as normal, but perhaps yours was so weird that you didn't buy all of it?
No, we did not buy all of it. We were very, very clever children. Our parents were not clever. And we could sort of see what was going on. We knew we were different in many ways. I mean, for a start, this was the 60s, we were some of the first mixed race, children is certainly in Birmingham. We knew that our mother was strange. We knew that our Father was emotionally absent. We knew this is not how other people live.
Oh, yeah, we were definitely a unique band in lots of ways. And we sort of inherited this air from our dad. And God knows how this happened. But that we were sort of special because my dad's felt like he was a bit of a bit of a special person. He always liked nice clothes and like to turn out nice and felt a bit movie star ish, even though he was a bus driver. And my mum was quite good at guarding us against racism, which was obviously rife at the time, by telling us those people have called us names were sort of lesser people than us. And we really bought into that wholesale. So it gave us this weird confidence that I think we've we've all still got really to this day.
You said you were one of the first sort of generation of mixed race children as well with this kind of identity that didn't fit here and maybe didn't fit there. So I suppose that's another reason why each other was important because there was four other people who were like you.
Yes, absolutely. every combination of being mixed race is always slightly different. Obviously. You might be half Irish half African. You might be half English, half Pakistani, but we were half our Irish half from the Caribbean, but the Caribbean was also a condition that means from St. Kitts. And we were also brummies. So if you you know, there was only my brothers and sisters who really understood what it was to be mixed race, and also only my brothers and sisters who knew what it was to have the parents that we had.
And yet there's a gap isn't there like, you know, that's not how people live. But you'll I don't know what power you had as children, often children don't have very much power to do about it.
zero power, no power. I mean, we knew it was weird, but it's not like we could do anything about it. We didn't even attempt to do anything about it, we just waited to leave home, every single one of us was waiting to leave home.
So that's easier for the ones at the top of the order, but the ones at the bottom, that must have been pretty awful to leave them behind, in a way.
No
one to doubt every man for himself, really, we all understood that you left, as soon as you got the chance.
It sounds like both of your parents had a story they told themselves about how something was going to be glorious and better. And maybe it never was,
yeah, they were both waiting for Paradise. I mean, that's all there is to it. My mother was waiting for this Paradise, Armageddon that would be brought by God and all the bad people would disappear. And my father was waiting for the paradise in St. Kitts where he returned with having built a house there and in his lovely suits, and you know that he was going to be something they were both waiting for Paradise. And so that's where they put their emotional energy, their physical energy, their material energy. And we were sort of surplus to requirements. And we definitely felt that.
That's right, they really weren't invested in the life that they actually had. They were both looking for something else as far away from sparkling Birmingham in the 70s, as you could imagine, and in the meantime, they were living in sort of semi squalor in with surrounded by loads of strange overhead, the jetty energetic, malnourished children.
Fortunately, we did have each other and we would regularly just go, you know what the fuck is going on with him too. So you did have affirmation that this was weird. This was unusual.
Do you think in a funny way, you didn't buy in, perhaps to going back the conquering hero to St. Kitts or going to paradise. But that sort of exceptionalism was sort of internalised by you in some way like,
Yeah, I do think that they were aiming high, both of them were, and I think it made us feel like anything's possible. Well put it this way, if your end goal is that God is going to change the entire world and you're going to live in paradise on it, then I think any aspiration you have under that seems very realistic. Sort of tragic. Totally. I mean, you know, our parents certainly were two very, very strange people really, as you become an adult and certainly as you become a parents, you you start to realise that they were extremely dysfunctional as parents, but not only that, they were very, very strange people.
You say that you've got affirmation from your siblings? How did that look? Practically? Did you kind of spend a lot of time together? Did you holed up in your bedrooms? Did you hang out in the park?
Yeah, we spent a lot of time together. We were poor. There was nowhere to go and no money to go out with so we literally spent hours in each other's company. Mostly getting on but not always, you know, we've fought like siblings do.
What would you fight about? Can you remember any of the argument? Um,
no, not really. I mean, sometimes it was about food who had all the food because it was so little there. I don't I mean, might have been about hogging the heater because we were always so cold. So it was very petty stuff.
It doesn't sound petty heating,
no heat and food. No pretty, pretty desperate times.
So the absolute core themes, aren't they heat, shelter and food? That's all we argued about. And there was enough argument in the house between mom and dad to go around anyway, so we didn't feel like we needed to add to that. I don't think
so your dad even though there wasn't very much heat and food I'm just going back over that had a taste for fine things.
It is. Are we here here and money. I mean, my dad had money he just didn't spend it on us. He was saving up to go to the West Indies obviously but every so often, he'd go to a tailor and have a handmade suit made for him of mohair and all these amazing things. And sometimes he'd you'd be in the room with him in his bedroom and he'd be pulling them down again all this is a so and so and that's a decent. We had loads of shoe Shoes that he used to just take out and polish and then put away. And he had quite a glamorous car my dad did because it all fitted in with the, with the image. So it felt I mean, he was obsessed with films and I think from a very early age in St. Kitts because he lived in such poverty and that's such a hard childhood. That was his escape. And I think he just took on the persona of this sort of Outcast film star who, that's who I should have been, I should have been Cary Grant or Clark Gable, but obviously a black version, but would have been that and I think that's sort of what carried him through that fantasy carried him through. And he had it till he died, you know, he had that sort of idea that he was going to go back to St. Kitts, he was going to turn up and be a soundtrack playing and he would, you know, be the person he'd always wanted to be.
This season of relatively is sponsored by find my past the online home of the 1921 census. By 1921. People from all over the world had begun arriving in Britain to start new lives. People like the remarkable Dr. Harold moody, Jamaican born Dr. Moody graduated top of his class studying medicine at King's College London, and set up a practice working from home after struggling to find a job. Perhaps there's an inspiring story in your past, find out in the 1921 census exclusively available online at Find my past.co.uk What else did you do for fun? I know that some of you went to the movies on a Saturday morning and Kitt you didn't but what are the silly ways of entertaining yourselves? Did you come up with,
um, we mostly the piss out of people, I think as far as I can remember, that was a great entertainment we used so we used to obviously go to the equivalent of churches, Jehovah's Witnesses, and there was so dry, so boring. And most of what we did then was make fun of the people that were given the talks or what they were wearing, or how much that is stuck out or?
Yeah, it was definitely we were quite vicious, I think. Yeah. You know, starving hyena risk. As you said before, you know, angry kids, I think we were angry and resentful. Yes, like, humour was very acidic. It was dark. I think.
If you're hungry, and we were always hungry, there is a sharp quality to what you do, you know, you're not going to sort of sit there and think, Oh, look at that you like, is that fucking child got a sandwich that I shouldn't have. Hunger puts you on edge, you know, you've heard of hangry be, you know, being angry at the same time. And we would like that most of the time.
Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah.
I learned today that resentment isn't really linked to anger. It's linked to envy in your brain.
I'll go with that. We were very resentful for me is anyone that had nice clothes and dinners that sort of drove me through my childhood?
Did you have friends whose families took you in a bit that you could sort of escape your own house?
I had a friend called John Burgess who lived in a massive, massive house with a swimming pool. What do I know? I don't know if I targeted him deliberately without any opportunity to go around and play with his antique tin trainsets. I just thought what a load of giant daddies or cakes. His mom was like a cake machine. Great boys cakes and bling, the anti tinkering across the room and get the cakes. I had Jamba Juice. And you had Christmas.
Yeah, so I my friend was crested and her parents were hippies. I didn't know they were hippies. My friend Cressida called her mom, Wendy. Wow. We used to be playing with Chris's Barbies. And her mom who was just so soft and lovely would come in with this tray of chocolate biscuits and crisps and squash, and she'd go up on your trade. And Chris, do you say get out and get out? What do you mean, get out? Come in. A lot of you Cressida but I'm starving. And I used to always say things were like, you know, my Barbie is really hungry. Cressida she'd say my Barbies not I'd go right. Okay. And then we just have to play with the starving Barbies aside, as I called it, so I go to their house for warmth. And I remember once going into their house, and they'd had Sunday dinner, they'd had it as I arrived. So that was bad timing. And, but what was leftover was Yorkshire pudding, which I'd only ever seen on telly with the Yorkshire pudding that was left over cressid His mom put down money. And I was like, No, I'm hoping there's a limit Are you thinking it really not? I'd beaten that with nothing. But you put jam on it.
It would have been delicious, though. Nobody would have put
I didn't know that because I've seen it with beef. And I've never tasted it. So I thought it was like putting jam on meat or something, you know, I was just like, Oh, you've ruined that. I really wanted to have a taste of it. No, it's got jasmonic. Jam.
How would you describe his role in the family? Who is
the Joker?
Practically, or just sort of clowning
every way? In every way? He's the one that would make you make you laugh. Yeah,
she's very much the mother, you know, the the surrogate mother, she was the only one who went out and got a proper job and did something to sort of get us out of the poverty scenario. So when she was working, and still at home, she'd come home with with food
Dean, probably because he was a boy was more starving than many of us and he was growing at a rate of not. So yeah, I used to go out, you know, dancing clubbing or whatever, and come home at midnight or two o'clock in the morning waking up with food and like you have to eat this.
Literally, you know, I remember being woken up many times at two in the morning when she'd come home from a nightclub to eat a kebab while I was asleep in bed.
Because your legs are too thin.
I had no problem eating.
I mean, I know you were aware of what you were doing. You were doing it because he needed food. But did the sort of magnitude of what you were doing strike you at the time? Or is it later?
No, I mean, I didn't think about I just thought, you know, if I eat, everybody eats and if I don't eat, no one eats, I couldn't imagine coming home with a full belly, knowing that other people at home are hungry or just, you know, sticking my throat. So I never, I never went beyond that. Really, it was just like, you know, let's let's spread the calories around.
I food was so scarce, she turned into this kind of early form of delivery,
which added sadness, I'm getting
a lot of added sadness. So she's very much I think the more that she's the hub of the wheel.
So I was just talking to Dean about your role in the family kit. And he described you as the hub of the wheel, and how the five of you don't work without you at the centre?
Really? Yeah, I mean, there is there is definitely that element to it, because I am the person that everybody keeps in touch with. And I sometimes, you know, disseminate people's news to one another. I think that's that's an interesting way of looking at it. Because I'm not the oldest and I'm, you know, maybe just the one that's in the middle. I'm not quite in the middle. But in many ways, I am just sort of at the centre. Yeah.
And could you have done 16 To however old you are now without them? And without that?
Oh, God, no, no, I know, that in this world, there are four people who I could go to for anything, I could have done anything. I could be starving, I could be homeless. And there are four places I can go tomorrow and be loved and taken in. And that's massively important.
Yeah. And to be sort of congratulated without any sort of patronising overtones, having come from a place of scarcity and fear, to have that ability to comfort each other is
amazing. It's really important. I mean, I think that my brothers and sisters have given me what my parents never did, which is that unconditional affection and understanding. So it's, you know, it's really filled a great gap in my life.
You say that you were Kitsis? You knew it was a bit weird as a child, but you said you definitely know as an adult, and you definitely, definitely know as a parent yourself. So from this vantage point, is it pity or is it blame? Because when you hear the bare facts, it sounds almost cruel that a man could look after himself so well, albeit in a deluded way and not look after his children.
It is it is pity more than anything else, because it was born of both that both parents were born sort of into very, very hard lives, poverty and not the right amount of love and not the right amount of care. So you sort of can make excuses for both our parents, which is what you do now. I was angry for, I don't know, 10 years, I suppose. And you sort of run out of steam bit angry that Yeah. And then you start to think what a shame that they wasted so much of their lives on very unrealistic fantasy.
And without being to sort of cut psychology ish. Have you looked back as siblings now and sort of understood why it's the effect it's had on you as adults and what it's
talking to all the time. We have. We've been having these conversations for many, many years together. We deconstruct and reconstruct To decipher, and we use our cod psychology. And we all talk about it all the time. The terrible effects that certainly growing up in a cult had on us, which I think was extremely damaging the physical effects of living in poverty, which has definitely had an effect on all of us and our relationship with food, our relationship with our parents their relationship with one another. So yeah, we talk about it all the time and find a great deal of healing in that. I mean, I've written my memoir, which was called without warning, and only sometimes a couple of people have said to me, oh, was this really healing for you to write the memoir? No, it wasn't, because there's nothing in the memoir that I have not or had not discussed with my siblings at all. It wasn't like some cathartic release. Because that's been happening since I left home.
But there's a difference between talking about things together as siblings and then putting it out there in the world. I wonder whether you had to talk to your siblings about what you're writing?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. They read it before anyone ever saw it. And they would have had the veto on anything that was in there.
When I first got it. I read about a page and a half. And it this is this is this is a term I don't use really, and you hear it a lot, but triggered to fuck I was it was absolutely. I couldn't read any more. It was it was almost like someone was reading my mind and had written it all down. So it was it took me a good couple of weeks before I could I could read it.
Is there something about it sort of being written down in a book. It's like you can dissociate from it. And you can see it for what it was a bit more.
Yes. Like I said to you before about the you know, the understanding as you become a grown up of your parents and why they were the way they were? I think it's a lot easier to get a more rounded view of my parents having read that book.
Yeah. So on this podcast, we, you know, like you've done kit, we talk about the history of a nuclear family, and we talk about the position that siblings hold in that family and about the stories of their childhood. But this season of the podcast is sponsored by find my past family history experts who are interested in the stories of the families that I talked to going way back, and they've had a little look at your family history, and I've got a couple of little stories. I wonder if I could
tell you. Yeah, we'd love to hear that.
So they have just digitised the 1921 census, but this story actually comes from 1935. So your great grand uncle William Whelan was labouring in County Wexford. And there's actually a newspaper article to support this when he discovered a really rare Bronze Age urn.
Have we got any claims to that?
I don't know because it's been written up quite extensively and I'll send you the link that he was working on an earth and stone fence at cracking Shawn in Valley village, I think is how you pronounce it in County Wexford. And there's actually a photograph from the fifth of April 1935. And he's leaning down with this urn that he discovered in amongst the peat in the mud. It's amazing.
What's really interesting about that, we've got a sister who is obsessed with the Bronze Age.
And you know, in all the time in all the time that she's been obsessed with that, and obsessed with genealogy, she's never found a story remotely as interesting as
No, she will literally be over the moon with that information.
Okay, so here we are. This is catnip for your sister. From the urn we can learn. I guess that means what humankind how compile man lived in 15,000 BC. Kim is gonna go. She's gonna go nuts at least for her birthday, you could maybe send her to Dublin and she could go and see it in the National Museum. Is it there? Yes. Oh, no way.
No way.
And so when did you and Dean sort of discover that you might want to work together and you had things to say that you wanted to say together? I know you've got a company years
ago. I mean, I don't know maybe 15 years ago, I don't know. I was writing a screenplay. And my brother at the time was a builder and you know, property designer. And I remember ringing him and just saying, look, what about this scene?
I was literally on a roof doing some roofing which I hate. I just hard work. There's a bit of danger of death thrown in there. I hate doing that anyway. And yeah, Kip phoned up and said, Had your fancy writing a screenplay for whatever 1000s of pounds it was. It was
up a ladder. And I said stop doing that. Now. You've got to you've got to help me with this scene. And you know, he just immediately zipped into it. Because it's probably nicer than doing the roof.
And I was just yet great. Got off the roof, left it half done hammer down. Yep, hammer dropped, and got a friend to finish that job. And then that was the last bit of roofing or building I did, which is great.
And so now working with Dean, you must have an insane shorthand with your brother, where you know so much about him and how he tics and how he works. Oh,
I mean, we when we write scripts together, we have an amazing shorthand, not only from classic film, so one of us might say, you know, the scene in brief encounter when she does that, and he'll go yet and it's, you know, we're not trying to replicate that scene, but we know the feeling that you want from this. See, when we even have a phrase called Chicken. Where are those chicken? Sounds ridiculous now, but yeah, so we have lots of shorthand, and woe betide the person that tries to come into that. So I
have to ask you what chicken means.
You can't explain chicken you haven't got long enough on this podcast. In a, you know, like, there's weird twins that are locked in a house sort of thing. 20 years and then they get discovered, and they've got their own language and they haven't combed their hair. 20 years. It's that sort of thing. What with more hygiene.
I mean, that's important, right? But I get what you mean. I mean, you know, siblings habit, they, you can't beat me and my sisters I said to get a Pictionary because before I've even put the pencil on the paper, they know what it is that I'm going to
say. It's exactly that sort of thing that we we are we are locked into. I mean, you could never learn that.
Yeah, but do you have a nickname for her? Yes, ugly. Genuinely, are you saying that? Oh, no,
those genuinely that's what I call it. And it's because we people have always said we've grown up that we look alike, so it's not as bad as it sounds. And nickname was aglia steal, steal, steal it. I mean, literally, if my phone rang and it's it's ugly comes up.
What's her name for you?
She did have a few I was at one point and down. I don't know how this works. It was something to do with when I was working in a house as a builder. And sort of making a whole lot of mess. I was Dr. filth. Charming, isn't it?
I didn't ask you what your nickname for your brother was?
Ugly? No, that's mine for you. Oh, no,
no, we both have that. Well.
Thank you to Kitt, and to Dean and thank you too, for listening.
I mean, we're great moaners man. Olympic standard moaners we can moan about every and anything for hours. We never really bore of it.
I'd also like to say a huge thank you to our sponsors for this season, a relatively find my past for digging into their extraordinary records and uncovering surprising and often revelatory family stories, some of which you've heard today. Find My past is the only place online where you can access the 1921 census. So if you want to start your family tree or add colour to what you know already, then find my past or co.uk is the place to do it. Thank you to Tony to tickle him for letting us use her amazing song. This is a pocket Production and Sound Design is by Nick Carter at mix sonics.com Next week we're talking today Esther Ranson and her little sister Silla. If you're enjoying listening to relatively please do rate and review or even better share an episode with your brother or sister. It really helps
tradition of love and hate same fireside there's good tradition of love and hate. Steam by the Fireside another way for your father's calling you you still feel safe inside on the moss too proud. The brothers ignoring you. You still feel safe inside of washing Solo was his yesterday as well all taken time.
