I shot my brother with an air rifle after a row

Children were unwashed, we cycled home at dusk with no lights and I shot my brother with an air rifle after a row: Author Charlotte Edwardes' debut novel set in the sweltering summer of 1976 is inspired by her own 'feral' childhood

I must have been around seven, mucking about on the grassy ‘rec’ with a group that included my brothers and a bunch of boys from our village. Doubtless I was in my green Dunlop wellies, burgundy nylon tracksuit, my brother’s hand-me-down green parka with the orange lining and broken zip. And doubtless I was swinging upside down on the municipal bars, colour flooding my face, long hair brushing the dirt. I don’t know what that one boy said that I found so offensive. I know that it ended with ‘…because she’s a girl’.

My mind fast forwards through the exchange that followed and then I’m chasing him across the expanse of the rec and knocking him breathless to the ground. There – and my brothers recall this even more clearly than I do – I pinned him with my knees and beat him with fists. His gruff demands to ‘get off’ eventually dissolved into tears. What was so bad about being a girl, I wonder? Maybe I enjoyed hiding in their midst and didn’t want to be unmasked. Maybe I had no choice but to infiltrate their ranks – it was a means of survival. Either way, this was the beginning of the end of my honorary membership of the brotherhood. Shortly after, I was sent to an all-girls’ convent boarding school.

…read the full article on The Daily Mail