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Daniel Day-Lewis pictured with his sister Tamasin Day-Lewis at the BAFTA's where he was voted best actor for My Left Foot in 1989
Childhood, like love, is blind. Children don’t see the world outside. They live in their own world, making up their own story as they go along. Often, the only person who truly penetrates into a child’s reverie is a sibling.
And as I know, the blood tie between brothers and sisters lasts for ever. The bond is about love, hate, trust, honesty and lies. Strong stuff, its influence is relived through memory for the rest of our lives.
If I think back to my own childhood, the security and certainty of that bond with my younger brother, Daniel, was something I never questioned.
I’ve learnt, though, that whatever you become as adults is irrelevant to your real relationship. Dan might now be accepted as one of the most gifted actors of his generation â€" indeed, he’s just been nominated for an Academy Award for his new film, Lincoln, which is released here this month. He has already won two Oscars for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood.
But to me he will always be a person, my younger brother, not an actor. No matter how many billboards he adorns, or awards he wins.
Our bond was forged in the strangeness of childhood. Grown-ups were a mysterious race to us, but we discovered a world of our own where our imaginations ranged, solidarity ruled and a sense of being fellow conspirators disobeying the rules gave us excitement in an otherwise often dull, monotonous and strict upbringing.
Surreptitiously hiding the food we hated in our pockets (in my case corned beef hash, which reminded me of cat-food, and in Dan’s the dreaded fish pie with anchovy essence) before flushing it down the loo, imitating our mother’s walk by playing grandmother’s footsteps behind her .?.?. those first small steps of rebelliousness taught us what we could and couldn’t get away with.
< span>Where sisters quarrel, brothers and sisters fight. But brothers have all the tools for a fight; in our case Dan had tomahawks, suits of armour, swords, guns.Â
Winning performance: Daniel Day-Lewis has been nominated for his role as Abraham Lincoln, pictured right with Sally Field as his wife Mary, in a new historical drama about his life
Actor Daniel Day-Lewis accepts his award for best actor for his portrayal of Lincoln at the 2012 New York Film Critics Circle Awards earlier this week at Crimson in New York City
However, older sisters are wily. They can be cruel with words, getting their brothers to do things that will get them into trouble.
What neither of you want is interference from the parents. Somewhere between you, there is already an instinct for wanting to sort things out for yourselves. The moment our parents interfered, we would face them down with denial, secrecy and a united front so as not to get a good hiding or be packed off to our bedrooms separately.
I still remember the Christmas we all stayed with friends in Dorset. I suggested that Dan walked across the iced pond ahead of me to the fallen tree in its middle. I learnt as much of a lesson as he did when the ice cracked and he went under. Thank God he managed to climb his way out.
However much you come to blows as brother and sister, the bond is, if you’re lucky, the superglue of your childhood. I can’t imagine it coming unstuck, or being without it like an only child, as my father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was.
If you take this bond through to adulthood, you also take a sizable chunk of your childish self with you. Thank goodness for that. After all, who would want to discard memories of childish behaviour with brothers and sisters? Everyone is comfortable with them, and siblings do not judge like outsiders.Â
Growing up together: Former Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis with his wife, Jill, daughter Tamasin, then 14 and son Daniel, then 10, at their Greenwich home in 1968
Family holiday: Tamasin Day Lewis, right, and Daniel Day Lewis, left, with their father Cecil on a trip to the beach
The very act of remembering your childhood is, to me, a release. With a sibling, you can still sing the same songs you have sung to each other for years with silly voices, still make stupid faces, write elaborate cards and texts in your own invented language that would leave a code-breaker clueless, delight in puerile profanities, have a private, exclusive world. The world of brother and sister.
When Dan and I were growing up in Greenwich, in the Sixties and Seventies, there wasn’t the emphasis there now is on filling every minute of your time frenetically with sport, improving hobbies â€" or indeed, the flip-side: being left passively in front of a screen of one sort or another.
We were left to our own devices in a near-solitary world where the imagination ruled. We had to invent our own games and plays, inside or outside, in the garden or the park. Neither of our parents nor our nanny got involved †" they just left us to it.
We egged each other on and cycled much farther than we were allowed around our neighbourhood streets so that we could knock on people’s doors and run away with impunity, or go to Mr Harris’s sweet shop nearby and consume obscene quantities of chocolate, flying saucers, shrimps and livid blue ice pops that tasted bizarrely of raspberries.
Dan’s and my children have observed our relationship over the years and, despite questioning their parents’ sanity as they clearly do, I think they rather enjoy the fact that we haven’t entirely grown up.
Family outing: Tamasin Day Lewis, pictured far left, and Daniel Day lewis, pictured right, with their grandmother, mother, father and grandfather
Close siblings: Daniel Day-Lewis and his sister Tamasin Day-Lewis pictured shortly after his first Oscar win
It is an indication of a kind of closeness that we can’t cultivate for them, but hope they may for themselves. It is tribal.
Indeed, I believe that the power and pleasure of this sibling bond strikes you most forcefully when you experience it the second time around â€" not through your own eyes, but through those of your children.
I remember feeling the moment my second child, Harry, now 28, was born, that I had a major part to play in how he grew to like and love his big sister Miranda, now 30. I was conscious of how she, as the eldest, would be the one who influenced and led him. It all changed again when Charissa was born five years later.
The dynamics are slightly different with my children, as there are three of them, and there were only two of us. Â
‘I love Miranda and Harry exactly the same,’ Charissa tells me, ‘more than anyone in the worl d, though Harry and I are the most similar in appearance and temperament. We are always more honest and upfront with each other than we are with anyone else. We don’t lie to each other because that’s how you brought us up.’
When Charissa was born, Miranda insisted on having her in her bedroom, changing her nappy in the morning and bringing her to me to feed. ‘Miranda has looked after me ever since I was born. She has an instinctive looking-after thing,’ Charissa says.Â
Still in touch: Tamasin Day-Lewis pictured with her brother Daniel in 2001
One of the best actors of his generation: Daniel Day-Lewis last won a best actor Oscar for his role in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood in 2008
Before Harry went off to boarding school, ‘he was a bit mean,’ she continues, clearly hating to think anything mean of him, ‘but he missed me. When he came home, you and Daddy were divorcing [my husband and I split ten years ago] and even though he was a teenager we stuck together, he never made me feel I had to do anything that wasn’t myself. I didn’t have to be cool.’
The three used to disappear into the Quantock hills on their bikes, which they still do. In fact, last Christmas, they got lost all day and arrived back muddied from toes to tops, exhilarated, exhausted, utterly happy.
Like Dan and me before them, my three have spent all their childhood summers running wild in Co. Mayo in the west of Ireland. After a lifetime of crossing the Irish Sea from our home in England thanks to my father’s Celtic roots, I bought a house there over 20 years ago.
Oscar No 2: Daniel Day-Lewis poses with his Oscar for best actor in There Will Be Blood in 2008
Just as Dan and I did, my brood have played on empty beaches, climbed mountains, braced themselves for the Atlantic breakers, caught mackerel out at sea, made local friends and, above all, enjoyed a freedom that only wild places can imbue your soul with.
All three behave like children when they are together, still have their jokes, the things they ridicule, the characters, old and new, with whom they carry on making fun of the world.
When they were little and we had the long drive to and from the west of Ireland in the summer, only the occasional quarrel punctuated the non-stop soap-opera in which all three took on parts, accents, comic roles. It would bring me right back to the magical childhood Dan and I enjoyed.
Each family is bizarre in its own way, its private jokes incomprehensible and opaque to others. Even though I am a privileged observer of children’s riffs, I can’t pretend I fully understand them all. But I’m not meant to. You’re not supposed to join in as an adult, but you are welcomed to the exclusive show. After all, you are your children’s best audience.
The parents’ job is ultimately about letting go, as my father so succinctly wrote in his poem Walking Away, which ends:
How selfhood begins with a walking away
And love is proved in the letting go
Yet brothers and sisters stay close. And we relive so much of our childhood through our own children and through helping them create their own deep bond with each other.
Put simply, I feel I have passed on the baton. My three children have forged a chain-like link, much like Dan and I did before them, that goes well beyond the obvious blood-tie or cliche of unconditional love.
It’s a thing of fun and joy and memory that will last for the r est of their lives.
Lucky he changed his mind: Daniel Day-Lewis reportedly twice turned down the role of Lincoln which may win him his third best actor Oscar award
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