Diary of a Lone Twin

by David Loftus

  It’s impossible to quantify love until you are so deeply ‘in love’; then the all-encompassing feeling is of limitless joy, unity and calm. My love for John was different still. He would drive me mad. Sometimes he’d get so angry with me he’d ignore me for days and I would lie crying in my bedroom, despairing of his apparent cruelty.

  Personally, I rarely show anger; I don’t swear and I don’t lose my temper. I’m always good cop to someone else’s bad cop. I don’t really dislike, I certainly don’t hate, I am needy and I hurt easily. In the last years of John’s life this was one of the few ways that we differed. It was years later that I discovered that many of his tempers and mood swings were caused by pressure on the brain from the tumour slowly developing in the centre of it. Those days when I was exiled to the ‘Coventry’ of my bedroom seem like such a wasted time now.

  Our father was the quintessential gentleman, beautifully dressed, mild of temper and impeccably mannered. He retired many years before my mother, but would always put on a tie and shave and groom for my mother’s return from the surgery. John would, invariably, get up from dinner before cheese or dessert and ask to be excused, much to my father’s disappointment.

  As he left the room, he would say, without fail, ‘But Papa, life is so short.’

  As ever, he was right.

  Friday 12 January

  Cheam, Surrey

  I spend the morning with Mother (Mutti, la Mere, Dr Jean). Such an extraordinary and formidable woman who has saved so many lives, including the resuscitation of her own husband and her own daughter Jean-Marian, as well as her own granddaughter, after they suffered pyrexial convulsions.

  We lived in a house called The Beeches, in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. My mother had a GP practice nearby, and my father was a stockbroker in the city. Growing up, beside the phone in the hallway was a lump of wood, loosely carved into the shape of a truncheon. If my sister had ‘one of her episodes’, often caused by the slightest raise in body temperature, John was to run to the phone, dial for an ambulance then run several doors down to our kind artist neighbour Mr Frank’s house and bang as hard as he could on his heavy oak door. Mr Frank would know what to do. The first time Jean-Marian had one of these convulsions and we made the run, my mother kept her alive with mouth-to-mouth and heart massage until the ambulance arrived, while John and I ate leisurely scones and lemonade with Mr Frank.

  Father (a.k.a Papa, Padré, Eric, Eggit, Farter) used to take John and I in his little Aston Martin to Nonsuch Palace, very near where Mother lives now. Behind a long walled garden of Henry VIII’s last pleasure palace there was a small enclosure of the most beautiful peacocks. John and I would run as fast as we could to see them, weaving, pretending to be Spitfires strafing the arboretums, and stare agog at their majestic beauty. Father used to delight in telling me stories about them, stories of immortality and royalty, but we didn’t really listen. I still often dream of our running up and down the avenues of trees in Nonsuch Park.

  Mr Frank once gave my parents a painting of the walled garden of Nonsuch. From afar it was a beautiful, if slightly naïve, oil of the arched entrance into the garden. On closer inspection there are two little boys, in full-tilt charge, both in blue and white sailor’s uniforms. One (me), wearing my little blue and white peaked sailor’s hat, and the other (John), wearing my father’s red wartime beret with yellow piping and two shiny brass buttons.

  Saturday 13 January

  The plum tree at The Beeches, Carshalton Beeches

  I have many memories of us running, charging, chasing, flying through the air on our wooden ‘shuggy boat’ – a swing Father built from wood that could seat four of us. It was a beautiful soft blue and would swing so high from the old plum tree at the bottom of the garden that I’m sure the childhood shrieks could be heard for miles. John and I would spend hours in that plum tree, knees grazed from its rough bark. We would pick overripe plums and catapult them over into the neighbouring tennis court, the players looking to the air to spy which bird had dropped them. Luckily our immediate neighbours, the Mugglestones, had an old dovecote so they were usually falsely accused. But we were once spotted by a fat, bald man with an extraordinarily powerful serve for someone who looked so unfit. He shouted at us up in our tree, not as invisible as we thought, and called us ‘a pair of wankers’.

  I asked my father what that meant. He said he didn’t know, but was later heard to shout at the television during a news item about Enoch Powell: ‘We fought the war against wankers like him!’ Amazingly, for us, my mother did know what it meant and none of us uttered it again. Well, not in front of my mother.

  15/16 October 1987 was the night of ‘the Great Storm’. It was also the night John suffered his bout of meningitis, and was rushed from Oncology to the neurology unit at another hospital. That night I sat in the front window of our home, watching the giant beech trees creak and groan and sway like never before. We’d been angry the week before that the tree surgeons had trimmed the trees back so violently, however it was the pruning that saved them that night; where they bent and twisted they could have broken. I couldn’t sleep for worry. Earlier, John was barely awake when I saw him, but was responding to my touch, so I think he could feel that I had been there.

  Sadly, the ancient plum tree did not survive the Great Storm. It came down with an almighty crash, destroying the path, our old sandpit and the neighbours’ fence. I never did tell John.

  That plum tree gave us an annual harvest of fresh red and orange plums, making several jars of plum jam to stir into our semolina and rice pudding. Its wasps would sting us regularly, its bark would graze us and its blossom would grace our dining table. Its roots would hide our Action Men in battle, its branches hold our swings, our tree house and our blue ‘shuggy boat’ swing. That tree held many a secret and was, to us, the best tree in the world.

  Sunday 14 January

  Marmalade Cake

  Sitting with my mother yesterday has delivered me into a deep sadness. Growing up in London and Surrey, she was the hardest-working mother I had ever come across – a full-time general practitioner with over 4,000 patients at a time when ‘on call’ meant she was essentially almost always working. If not working, she was always rushing. Now, suffering from osteoporosis and poor circulation, she has just been diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of eighty-seven. She sits calmly in her corner chair, as I sit in mine, uncomplaining and chirpy, as usual covering subjects as diverse as marmalade cake, Aristotle, the use of mnemonics in the teaching of anatomy, and the feeding habits of birds – ‘her tits on their nuts’. We did chuckle.

  While watching a pair of blackbirds, we remembered that at The Beeches there was a blackbird that liked to follow John as he helped Father water the garden. I preferred the job of trying to clean Father’s garden shed, which was an impressive Victorian mock-Tudor folly filled with a Harry Potter-esque collection of tools, machinery, bicycles, birds’ nests and bats, all under a thick layer of dust. I loved the smell, a mixture of Father’s cigars, oil paints and wood shavings. The little mullioned windows looked out from under the old plum tree, past the greenhouse, to the garden beyond. In that perpetual summer of our youth I can see John now, watering the tomatoes with Father looking on, pulling on one of his coconut-smelling pipes. I can’t remember why, but John gave the blackbird the name Marmalade Cake. Maybe he fed the bird some; neither of us could abide peel in cakes.

  The one time I managed to get John home from hospital during the three months of his illness, I walked him out to the garden and sat him in a chair under the purple hazelnut tree. It was probably the most serene moment of his illness and a rare moment of calm. Amazingly, while I was inside making him a pot of tea, Marmalade Cake paid him a visit, bringing a smile to his face. It was his last visit home.

  Tuesday 16 January

  Shooting Rachel Khoo’s new cookbook in northern Sweden

  It’s so eerily quiet here. I’m in Sweden, after a 3a.m. alarm call and a journey through snow-filled landscapes
of shades of grey. Sky, trees and more trees, all grey, framed by lakes of pure snow white. The silence here is deafening and I really don’t like it. I miss the birdsong of my youth.

  John and I grew from shared womb to shared birth to shared cot and pram and bed, to bunk beds, and eventually separation in twin beds and then the big move to separate bedrooms. This is when my separation anxiety took hold and the nights went from calm, unbroken sleep to nights of restlessness, dreams and often nightmares and fearful awakenings. I often dream now of wandering into Johnny’s room at the end of the corridor, knowing that he is no longer alive, but wanting to visit. I open his door to find the shape of his curled body beneath his duvet and I feel such joy as I notice the movements of his breathing and realize that he is not dead after all. Of course, I’m always mistaken. Often he is like a pale shadow of himself and when I reach out to touch him he is not solid and my hand passes through him. Sometimes he turns and looks at me, terribly sad and grey, and he tells me he still has a headache and it won’t go away. I always cry; deep sobs but without a sound, though I am desperate for my mother to hear me and come and comfort me.

  When I was first moved to my own room I’d sometimes try and crawl as quietly as possible into his bed. He wasn’t, by then, the most receptive cuddler – that extra ten minutes of age was beginning to kick in: ‘I’m older and wiser, you are but a small child so give me some space.’ Dejected, I would stumble back to the other end of the corridor and stealthily sneak in next to my mother, the warmth of her body giving me the comfort I yearned for. She would sleep in the enormous matrimonial bed far from my father’s slumbering form, nearer to the phone so as to cut off any ‘on-call emergencies’ before they awoke him.

  I wouldn’t really sleep, but would lie, perfectly straight, awake but content, until the first sign of morning when I would quietly sneak back into my bed. I did this for years, until I was gently persuaded that maybe I was a little old to share my parents’ bed. Eventually I replaced them with a little blue and silver transistor radio, tuned in to Radio Caroline or Radio Luxembourg, which accompanied me until morn. There I would await the first tweet and twitter of morning. The following chatter of songbirds at break of dawn would bring me such an overwhelming sense of serenity, I could finally relax. The night was over and a new day had dawned.

  Birdsong. There is none here. What a deafening darkness. Not even a whisper of the wind in the bulrushes by the lake, just ice, snow and bone-aching coldness.

  Wednesday 17 January

  A night in my cabin on the lake, endless quietness and blackness, from afternoon to mid-morning. The only light seems to be a blueish glow from the snow and the only sound the crunch of two passing deer in the wee hours. It is too much for me. Madness seems to grip me easily in the night, like a fever without a fever, along with a terrible loneliness and paranoia. I’ve grabbed a lift into Stockholm and the cackle of a group of hyperactive girls next to me is somehow better than that aching quietness.

  For many years the upstairs corridor at The Beeches was our playground. There were three pieces of furniture there: a large old Victorian mirror, a chest of drawers and, best of all, my father’s wonderfully grand gentleman’s armoire, which was a cavern of sartorial elegance. It was full of many small drawers, like you’d find in a gentlemen’s tailors. One for underwear, one for handkerchiefs, one for socks and so on, all bearing his initials, E. J. L. It smelt of hair tonics, eau-de-cologne and mothballs and there was a rail on the inside door for ties. He must have had a hundred: stock-exchange ties, club ties, ties with pheasants, planes, boats, none gaudy of colour or kipper of shape, all elegant and narrow and stylish. Racks of suits, morning suits, walk-in-the-city suits, lounge suits, even desert suits. But it was the elegantly smooth-opening drawers that held the most attention, smelling of cherry wood and age. The bottom drawer was a small boy’s nirvana; it contained my father’s medals in a beautiful moss-green velvet box, along with letters, mementos, a bullet, a star-shaped brooch, a small box of poison with ancient Chinese calligraphy, and two pistols, one ancient and musket-like, and one newer and shooting-at-Germans-like.

  Thursday 18 January

  Flying home from snowbound Stockholm to London, exhausted, creatively replenished, sad but inspired

  At least once a week there would be a call from one of us to ‘Swap Shop’. My sister Jean-Marian, menace little brother Ian, John and I would congregate in the middle of the hall with an army of swappable items, a Tonka for some crayons, a puzzle for a yo-yo. Jean-Marie always cried because no one wanted doll’s clothing. John would often instigate a game of ‘car-hee’, a version of ‘It’ using Matchbox cars. The skill was in not zooming the car too fast and putting pressure on the wheels to get an element of curve to the propulsion. Under the armoire legs was the best place and at the time it felt pretty damn skilful. Alas these games often ended in tears, particularly for the younger ones, who always wanted to use Tonkas (too big) and not Matchbox cars (more skill).

  The corridor also became the ‘cricket pitch’. As a child, when lightness came, slowly but surely, I would hear the patter of Johnny’s slippers on carpet as he ran, pretending to be Dennis Lillee, bowling a pair of tucked-together socks at my head, waking me for a day of mischief and play.

  If you stood in Jean-Marian’s room, much to her chagrin, you got quite a decent run-up to bowl full tilt and full toss at the wicket marked on brother Ian’s door. Father’s silky socks, four of them, rolled up inside each other, made the perfect soft cricket ball, especially for ‘bodyline’ bowling tactics (aimed at the head). Over the wardrobe was a six, down the stairs was six and out, worth it for the fun of it. Into my room was a four, John’s a six, Jean-Marian’s – which meant launching a shot over the advancing bowler’s head – was also six and out. Ian could rarely play for more than ten minutes without crying off to Mother with whimpers of ‘not out’, and as a result was banned from what we came to call a game of ‘sockit’.

  Father, who would sit quietly on the loo for an hour or two’s peace, reading Asterix or Tintin (you could hear the chuckles, but no flush) would occasionally sit with the toilet door slightly open. He never batted an eyelid as he watched his rolled-up silk socks fly first one way, then the other, with calls of ‘Catch it!’ or ‘Howzat!’

  Today, while walking in the snow in Stockholm I saw the most beautiful pair of jays. Such gorgeous plumage, the flash of blue wing vibrant against the skeletal greys of the snow-laden woods.

  Growing up we had the most wonderful Mrs Tiggy-Winkle of a nanny called Molly Wrigglesworth. Molly was from County Durham, about four feet tall, and possibly one of the most generous, loving women ever born. I don’t think she ever had a boyfriend; she treated us as her family and had been present for not only our four births, but also the birth of my mother. With Father working as a broker in the City and Mother a full-time GP, it was often Molly’s task to keep us dressed, fed and bathed. We loved Molly. When John was in his twenties and working as a designer in Thames Ditton she would often bake one of her famously tasty apple pies and bike it to him at work. Every one of our friends knew and loved Molly. When we were sick she nursed us, when we were stressed she calmed us. She was four feet of unflappability.

  Molly was with me the day my mother called, early on 11 November, to tell me that John had just died. Poor Molly, she was shaking like a leaf in autumn and shocked to her core. We held on to each other, too uncomprehending to cry. Molly watched sadly as my world fell apart in front of her eyes. Poor Molly Wrigglesworth of County Durham, she never really recovered.

  Friday 19 January

  The Mews

  ‘Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh,” he whispered.

  “Yes Piglet?”

  “Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw,

  “I just wanted to be sure of you.” ’

  —A. A. MILNE, THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER, 1928

  I sometimes wonder if identical twins remember more of early life than singletons. As the two li
ttle identical beings grow in the womb, so they begin to communicate with each other, forming the unbreakable bond of twinhood, sharing everything from breathing space to their mother’s heart. If I look at my skin closely enough in the mirror, I can see crescent-shaped scars. Apparently John used to hold onto my face with both hands, so tight that he drew blood. I didn’t reciprocate but neither did I cry, I accepted his hold on me and now feel glad that these small scars of babyhood haven’t faded away.

  One of my earliest memories was from our birthday on 31 October 1967. The image is as clear as crystal: us on the deck of a ship, with our parents, just off Southampton Sound. We were waving our handkerchiefs at the passengers on the deck of the RMS Queen Mary as she sailed off on her last voyage to California. I was so upset when my favourite little polka-dot handkerchief fluttered from my tiny grip and disappeared into the green-blue wake of the departing liner. Johnny was so upset for me that he dropped his too, so that they could be together forever. A red polka-dot and a blue polka-dot hankie, tossed by the swell. We watched as they got smaller and smaller, no longer upset by our loss. We had just turned four years old.

  Sunday 21 January

  Gidleigh Park, Devon

  Shooting today at Gidleigh Park, I arose early and wandered down through the early-morning mist to the banks of the river Teign rushing in full spate through the grounds. It’s a damp, messy wonderland of ponds, rooks, pools and waterfalls. Just me and a pair of wrens, every moss and blade and bare branch dripping with dew, so peaceful, even with the crashing of water over stone. I wanted to lie there today, needing some time to think. Concerned my client might fear for my sanity, I followed the wrens back up to the main house for tea and crumpets; a comfort of sorts.