Who enjoys getting up on Monday morning? Especially after the grand relaxed routine, the late sleep-ins promised and delivered by Saturday and Sunday? The answer, obviously, is not many. Or, maybe one, Matthew. W. Just turned 14. Certainly not his brother Wade, two years older.

“I’m totally wasted by Monday, there’s no way I’m going to be up at five o’clock,” he confirms.

Granted that is an early hour. Even the early bird is still abed in its nest contemplating whether it is really worth shaking a tail feather, when the day is still in its infancy, merely for the purpose of chalking up that statistic of getting the early worm.

With the brothers, however, there’s incentive involved in such early rising. Their mother Ann, a self-made success, likes her two boys to be involved in helping keep the house running.

As a girl growing up in the countryside, her father, a horse trainer, didn’t keep her cosseted. She had to be up early morning cleaning the stables, helping groom the horses, dispose of bucketfuls of horse excrement.

Matthew is awake at 4.45am. Fifteen minutes later, he’s taken the four wheelie bins containing the week’s household rubbish (recyclable and general waste) out on to the sidewalk just outside the house.

It really was Wade’s turn to do the bins. But it pays Matthew to have Wade still asleep. It pays all the allowance that Wade is supposed to earn for doing this chore. Wade simply gives the money away to his younger brother. “You do it,” he says, “You can have my share of the money.”

“Wade’s just lazybones,” grins Matthew putting the money away into an old biscuit tin. The money joins his other earnings made over the weekend mowing the lawns of two neighbours. In reply to what he’d like to be when he grows up his swift response is, “Stinking rich”.

In school, Matthew is the achiever. His grades show this quite clearly. He has an all-round grasp of Maths and three branches of Science: Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

“Wade’s got potential too, I suspect, except he needs to lasso his attention, rein it in from outside the window and bring it stomping into the classroom. Otherwise, I fear the worst,” Wade’s teacher told his mother at the last annual Open House day.

Indeed his report card — except for a high distinction in English — makes dismal reading. “What are you doing lazing under the tree, come out and join us,” his friends call.

“You guys carry on, I’m just jotting down a few ideas,” is his usual answer.

His mother Ann has tried to follow up the advice of Wade’s teacher.

“Wade,” she admonishes at breakfast, “You must stop sitting around doing nothing.”

“I’m not doing nothing,” he bristles.

“Yes you are. Look at you, gazing out the window, your porridge getting cold. Your mind’s a million miles away.”

“So it’s busy, isn’t it? My mind? So you can’t say I’m not doing anything, mum.”

“Then tell me what you think about.”

“You really want to know, mum?”

“Sure I do. I’m your mother aren’t I?”asks Ann.

“Well, I want to be a writer. That’s it. I know you’re disappointed.”

Ann was indeed trying vigorously to act and look excited. Not being as qualified as, say, Meryl Streep, she failed quite miserably.

All that, of course, was ten months ago. From her bedroom, being an early riser too, she can hear Matthew hauling the bins out. With a mother’s intuition she knows what lies ahead: One of her sons will end up being rich; and one of them will be happy.

She cannot forget the look of pure delight on Wade’s face when he received his award for promising young writer from the local council competition. She also knows now that when he’s gazing out of the window, Wade is actually harder at work than many others. It’s the way most writers labour.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.