The time Mrs Johnstone is due is the time when Mr Lyons comes back from his business trip. This places Mrs Lyons in a prime position and Mrs Johnstone into a “catch 22” situation. Mrs Lyons convinces Mrs. Johnstone that she can’t afford two new children so she offers to buy one and tell Mr Lyons it was hers all along. If Mrs Johnstone says no, she would get fired, but if she says yes, she will regret it and although Mrs Lyons says she’ll see the baby all the time, she knows she won’t.
Mrs Johnstone decided to give Mrs Lyons a baby so she doesn’t get fired but after a while she gets fired anyway because she concentrates on the baby, not on her work. So in the end she loses her baby and her job.
Mrs Lyons tell the very superstitious Mrs Johnstone that if the twins were to find out they were twins, the shall both immediately die. This is just a trick but Mrs Johnstone takes it seriously and makes sure that the twins never meet. After that, the narrator talks about cracked mirrors and walking on pavement cracks once again to tie in with the theme of superstition.
The next time we see the twins, Mickey and Edward, is when they are aged seven. Some people think seven is a lucky number so superstition is covertly making an appearance again. Mickey starts playing near the park and the expensive houses where Edward lives so Mrs Johnstone tells Mickey off because if they meet and find out they are brothers, they will both die.
When Edward and Mickey do meet, Edward is bright and friendly but Mickey is a bit suspicious. They find out that they have the same birthday and declare themselves ‘Blood Brothers’. Mickey could tell straight away that Edward is from the posh houses. When Mickey asks for a sweet, Edward gives him one straight away, which Mickey thinks is soft:
“Round here if y’ ask for a sweet, y’ have to ask about twenty million times and you still don’t get one”
Mickey is more streetwise than Edward because Mickey is allowed to mix with the other children in the area but Edward is shielded and protected by Mrs Lyons. Mickey calls his mother “me mam” whereas Edward calls his mother “my mummy”. Later on, Mrs Johnstone tells Edward to go back home but he will not, so she says:
“Beat it, go home before the bogey man gets y’”
When Edward gets home, he asks his parents how ‘bogey man’ is spelt but Mrs Lyons says it is nothing to worry about:
“It’s a - a superstition. The sort of thing a silly mother might say to her children”
This shows that Mrs Lyons is not superstitious and she does not want Edward to become superstitious. Without knowing it, Mrs Lyons is saying that Edward’s real mother is a silly mother.
When the children are playing cops and robbers and Indians, the rules are you have to cross your fingers and count to ten, otherwise you can’t get up. This was new to Edward because he couldn’t mix with the ‘riff-raff’ and play games with other children. When Mickey got shot when they were playing, he didn’t cross his fingers but he got up anyway. Linda got upset with this and brought it up with Mickey. He replied by saying the ‘F’ word. He didn’t cross his fingers when he swore so he will go to hell. All of his friends know this apart from Edward because they are all superstitious because they all have a similar background to Mickey. Edward didn’t understand this because he has been brought up thinking that superstition was nonsense. Although playing with guns seemed like a game, it turned out to be deadly later on in their lives.
Later on, Edward, Mickey and Linda get spotted throwing stones at windows by a policeman. When the policeman takes Mickey home, he tells Mrs Johnstone how bad Sammy and Mickey have been:
“Well, there’ll be no more bloody warnings from now on. Either you keep them in order Missus, or it’ll be the courts for you, or worse, won’t it?”
He is very stern with Mickey and very lenient with Edward:
“And er, as I say, it was more of a prank really, Mr. Lyons. I’d dock his pocket money if I was you (laughs). But. one thing I would say, if y’ don’t mind me saying, is well, I’m not sure I’d let him mix with the like of them in the future”.
Mr. Lyons even gives the policeman a glass of scotch so he feels at home. This a prime example of the class divide in Liverpool.
As the Lyons family are moving further into the countryside, Mrs Lyons sees a magpie on it’s own:
“Don’t mummy, don’t look. It’s a magpie, never look at one magpie. It’s one for sorrow.”
The reply from Mrs Lyons is:
“Edward .... that’s just stupid superstition”
The Lyons family think they have broken away from the Johnstone family for good and they are all glad (apart from Edward). They were wrong. Soon after the Lyons family move away, the Johnstone family get re-housed to the same area. Is this a coincidence or was it due to the magpie and superstition?
The next time we see Mickey and Edward is when they are fourteen (another gap of seven years). While Mickey is getting told off at his secondary modern school for not answering a question, Edward is getting told off for wearing a locket at his very expensive boarding school. (The locket contains a picture of Mrs Johnstone and a picture of Mickey; or is it Edward himself?). This shows that although they go to different schools in different classes, (working class and middle class) they are still the same at heart.
We next see Linda, Eddie and Mickey at the age of eighteen. Mickey has found a job and Edward is preparing to go to college. Mickey thinks he is lucky to get any type of job, even if it is making cardboard boxes but Edward is doing the sensible thing and setting the foundation for his future. This shows the class divide again. Mickey knows that although his job isn’t good, if he complains, they can just get someone else from a long line of candidates to fill his boots. Edward, on the other hand, will have a change to get a good job after university with his qualifications. His father could possibly pull a few strings and find him a good job but that isn’t the case for Mickey.
Whilst Edward is at university, Linda gets pregnant and she and Mickey get married. Edward is upset because he has always loved Linda and although he knew going to university was the right choice, he has missed out on getting together with Linda.
Mickey needs to earn some more money so Sammy suggests he helps him with a raid:
“Fifty quid Mickey. Fifty quid for an hour’s work! Just think where y’ could take Linda if you had cash like that”
The raid goes horribly wrong and Sammy ends up shooting someone with the shotgun he kept under the floorboards. Mickey got sent to prison for seven years and had to take anti-depressant pills which he eventually got addicted to. During this breakdown of Mickey’s life, Edward finishes university and gets a steady job as a councillor. Imagine how two twins raised in different backgrounds could have such different lives.
When Linda meets up with Edward, Linda realises she made the wrong choice going with Mickey and decided to spend more time with Edward. Mickey takes this the wrong way and he thinks Linda is having an affair with his ‘Blood Brother’. Mickey even thinks Edward is the father of their child.
Eventually, the pills take their toll and Mickey has seemingly gone mad. He takes the gun from under the floorboards and he runs to the town hall where Edward is addressing his colleagues. But when Mickey gets to the town hall, he has second thoughts:
“What am I doin’ here Eddie? I thought I was gonna shoot y’, but I can’t even do that. I don’t even know if the thing’s loaded”
Mrs Johnstone then runs up to the pair of them, along with lots of policemen and marksmen. She breaks the news that they are brothers and Mickey if furious with the news:
“You!. Why didn’t you give me away! I could have been .... I could have been him!”
At that moment, Mickey waves the gun at Edward and the gun goes off, blowing Edward to pieces. The gun was loaded after all. Seeing this, the police marksmen in turn shoot Mickey to death. Mrs Lyons was right, they both died almost immediately they found out they were brothers.
Was the death of the twins due to class or superstition? I think it was due to class. If they were brought up in the same family, none of this would have happened but as they were brought up in different classes, they both envied each other. Mickey was streetwise and a bit of a ‘lad’ but struggled to get through life, whereas Edward had had an easy life but he had to learn the ways of life through books and TV, not from his under-qualified parents.