by David Loftus
Thursday 1 February
Shooting Clarence Court eggs at the Mews
Lovely evening with my daughter Pascale and one of her friends. They are free in their openness and questioning, including ones about ‘Uncle Johnny’. It is fascinating how little my children, Paros and Pascale, really know about my twin. It saddens me that Johnny will never meet them and they will never meet him.
Saturday 3 February
Flight to Mumbai
A lingering headache behind my eyes, I’m on a flight watching a blood-red sun setting over the blue, snow-capped Zagros Mountains, halfway between Baghdad and Tehran. Apparently it’s –73°C outside and the air is clear and dark. Every little town in the valleys and hills seems to have a pyre burning, forming a vivid pattern as far as the eye can see. They must be enormous to burn so very bright.
My destination is Mumbai to shoot the lovely food writer Meera Sodha with art director John Hamilton in the markets and bazaars of the city. I’m always slightly nervous flying to a city I’ve never been to before, particularly so far from home. Carrying a camera can single you out for rough treatment and I’ve had my unfair share of scrapes. Terrifyingly, in Morocco I was accused of being a Tunisian spy and in New Orleans I had my head slammed into a silver burger van; my beloved camera punched from my smarting eyes and stamped into pieces. The New Orleans police force not only witnessed the beating, they ignored it, later claiming that if they had intervened I would probably have been shot. Ironically, recovering from the concussion, I was actually shot two days later by a huntsman as I tried to photograph him shooting an alligator in the head. Getting a little too close to the action, he fired a small Colt pistol at an alligator trying to untangle itself from a chicken-trap. The bullet ricocheted off the critter’s skull, scraping across the top of my head. I looked down to see my favourite white shirt sprayed with blood and turned to see his stunned-looking face: ‘I think you might have shot me!’
* * *
Now flying over Muscat, just the Indian Ocean left to cross – an inky darkness outside. My head pounds and I break out the Solpadeine (or ‘Solps’ as we’d call them), thinking to myself that I must work on kicking my painkiller habit. It’s hard after so many years. Johnny suffered awful headaches that would send him under his duvet for hours. Of course, his last terrible headache was the one from which he wouldn’t recover. I remember a trip he had taken with his first girlfriend, Liz, to Florida. They must have been about seventeen. He’d suffered a terrible, crippling migraine that lasted several days. When John had his operation, years later, the surgeons found some dried blood on his brain, which, extraordinarily, they had been able to date to that holiday in Florida. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage, unbeknownst to anyone, probably caused by a slowly growing malevolence in the centre of his brain. He must have been in so much pain. It’s a shame, in a way, that he met it with his normal brave stoicism and didn’t make more fuss – a calm trait inherited from our mother.
Sunday 4 February
In Mumbai watching the Eagles soar
3p.m. arrival at the hotel with a 6a.m. call time – hells bells! I’m in Mumbai shooting the Sassoon Docks, which proved to be as terrifying as predicted. Within three minutes I am threatened with a severe beating, being thrown into the sea and the destruction of my new Leica. Located on a filthy promontory jutting into an equally rancid-looking sea, the smell is undeniably foul. Rats scurry about freely in the filth as boatloads of fish are auctioned and quite literally fought over by some of the fiercest and most menacing women I have ever come across. Photography is not encouraged since the Mumbai terrorist attacks but I manage a few shots before being forced to give up by the sheer stinking crush of it all, the noise, the chaos, and the outright hostility. Of course my dear art director, who remains ‘ashore’, immediately says ‘I hope you got the shots’.
The filth is hard to cope with. This morning I photographed the early newspaper sorters at Victoria station. Everyone in India still seems to read a paper and there are so many dialects and languages. The editions all arrive by train, and are then thrown onto the side of the road opposite the station. Somehow, through the chaos and the darkness, they are sorted and bundled and dispatched to their destinations, by overloaded bicycles or by foot.
Whole families openly sleep in the gutters, millions of commuters every day stepping over and past them. I find it hard. Why them, not me? Although I am staying at possibly the grandest old hotel, my job over these few days is to photograph the ‘real’ workers of new Mumbai – the tiffin wallahs, the paper wallahs, the street-food vendors, the fishermen and women, the flower and vegetable stall holders. All live in utter, abject poverty. Just the price of my camera alone makes me feel wracked with guilt.
I wonder what Johnny would think. He was on my mind a lot today as I journeyed to one of the ancient Koli fishing villages that jut out like ugly crab pincers into the grey murk of Bombay’s waters. As I walked through the slum-like alleyways out to where they sort the fish and repair the boats, I was reminded of a drawing I have of Johnny’s of Paros, Naousa, of the old Kaiki boatyard. I wonder if it still exists. I will go there to draw this summer. Knowing John, he would have produced beauty even out of the horror, the privilege of the artist. Sadly for my client, hard as I try today, the camera does not lie easily.
Wednesday 7 and Thursday 8 February
2.20a.m. flight from Mumbai to London
Ange’s face waiting for me at the Mews brings an overwhelming feeling of love and relief. Home feels good. Seeing the horrors of Mumbai has left me hollow and dry. Witnessing the injustices, the corruption and the extraordinary gap between rich and poor has left a truly foul stench in my mouth. Here I am, writing about my own demons and loves, and the process of trying to access some sort of acceptance and understanding of what I have been through, and it now seems like a perverse indulgence, a privilege. Yesterday I was stepping over distressed and undernourished babies and parents and grandparents, literally living in the gutters of the fastest-growing city on earth. I try never to swear, but it is quite simply fucked up!
Saturday 10 February
Riad of the Storks, Marrakech
Here in Marrakech to shoot a Moroccan cookbook, I have arrived at the Riad of the Storks under the walls of the El Badi Palace where storks perch precariously upon an intricate nest of jungle-like constructions. At the dawn’s call to prayer they tilt their beaks and delicately rearrange enormous high-rise nests that lean impossibly exposed. Hawks constantly circle the nesting pairs, I assume looking for egg-stealing opportunities. I’m instantly missing home.
As I left early this morning I grabbed a handful of papers. One of them is a testimony of the sequence of events that led up to 11 November 1987, written in legalese. As the year progresses and anniversaries (operation, recovery, birthday, injection, sickness and death) come and go, I want to approach those moments conscious of their full emotional impact on me. I’ve only read this document once, soon after the coroner’s controversial handling of the case. A psychologist would probably say being hugely overtired and stressed is the wrong time to reread it, but I’m not sure there is ever a right time for these things.
The mosque’s call to prayer has awoken the storks and they are a-clacking!
Sunday 11 February
This evening I walked past the Berber Market and round the city walls, past the Koutoubia Mosque and round to Riad El Fenn in the dying light of day. The roads were crammed with horse-drawn carriages, buses, motorbikes and cycles. Often when I walk in a city in the early evening, wherever I am in the world, I feel strangely detached from reality. If you’ve ever suffered déjà vu, you might understand the unreal and discombobulated state; almost like being tipsy without drinking. For many identical twins who have lived and worked together, as we did, the death of a twin can leave the surviving twin feeling so utterly bereft as to doubt whether they have the ability to ever function as a complete person. Many feel they have become half a person. Some are able to abso
rb the strengths of the lost twin and endeavour to become stronger as a result. I have done this to a limited extent, but mostly I have always felt a half-person, walking in the shadow of my lost brother. It’s almost akin to an out-of-body experience, as if I’m somewhere else, watching myself walking through the overcrowded streets. One thing is clear, I don’t feel that it is John watching over me.
John and I spent a great deal of time during our youth mucking about in the Lake District. Our parents loved it in Cumbria and we had many a Swallows and Amazons-style birthday in the Lakes. After John died I didn’t venture out for a while, but Peter Hornsey, my oldest chum, persuaded me that a long, boozy weekend in the Lakes was just what I needed. We decided to walk from the banks of Wastwater at Wasdale Head, up the valley to climb Red Pike, one of the tallest Lakeland mountains. While everyone bundled into the pub after a long walk, I wandered over to St Olaf’s Church, which is rumoured to be the smallest in England. I’d never been in, but knew that the graveyard, surrounded by beautiful yew trees, contained many a climber who had lost their lives in the surrounding fells and that the beams of the roof are made from the wood of Viking longboats. It seemed as good a place as any to get away from my friends for some peaceful reflection. The door was open and no one was within so I sat quietly at one of the pews in front. Prayer did not come to me and I no longer felt even an inkling of belief, but I sat there for a while thinking about the disastrous events of the past months.
As I sat there I felt a presence in the tiny church. I turned, but the heavy door was still closed behind me, and the nave was cold and silent. I rested my head again. I was desperately, overwhelmingly sad and broken. Within seconds I felt a presence, like a hand on either shoulder. Every hair on my body stood on end and I shivered violently. The pressure remained only for seconds but what initially felt so cold and terrifying ultimately became warm and comforting. It’s the only time since his death that I sensed that maybe, just maybe, I had somehow felt the presence of John. Writing about it now, having never told a soul, it seems slightly fantastical and makes me wonder if it was my overemotional tiredness that conjured up this mythical moment. But I don’t think so. John is buried with my father in a ghastly communal graveyard in Sutton. The place has no meaning to any of us, but it seems dying in London doesn’t guarantee a space anywhere but the council cemetery. When my time eventually comes, maybe I’ll make all my chums row me out onto the waters of Wastwater and scatter my ashes within full view of St Olaf’s Church and its centuries-old yew trees.
Monday 12 February
Waking up to the ever-present ‘clacking’ call of the storks and my tiny, damp garret room bathed in a stained-glass yellow light, I romantically imagine myself as a real writer, a Hemingway or Dumas, working in conditions of relative discomfort.
For a long time after Johnny died I barely put pen to paper. The last thing John wrote was probably his birthday card to me. John was killed while we were opening our birthday presents and his last birthday card lies on the top drawer of an old desk on my houseboat, which is a kind of refuge for me. The drawer is filled with his small paintings, letters and postcards, and that last card.
After the operation on his tumour he found his sight was badly affected, slightly cross-eyed, and needed a lot of retraining. This upset him greatly and his tears upon opening his eyes are seared into my brain. His card to me reads very simply, but powerfully, as it’s obviously written with his left hand. ‘Dear David. Love Johny x, I. O. U. 1 prezzie.’ Even seeing it now, after all these years, tears me apart. The wobbly nature of each letter and the concentration and effort it must have taken to write it.
This was 31 October, our birthday. I had given John and Samantha a joint present of train tickets on the Orient Express to Venice, returning on Concorde, and had collaged a card with images of his toy trains and old Venetian postcards and stamps. The departure was booked for the following Easter, by which time the experts in the neurology unit believed he would be fully fit to travel again. He loved his present and was so happy. Easter didn’t feel that far off in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, within eleven days he would be dead, cancer-free, but with a brain violently struggling under the effects of a fatal dose of the antibiotic gentamicin.
Thinking of that wobbly but carefully written birthday greeting reminds me of a moment at the breakfast table many years before. Bounding down the stairs we would lean forward, holding on to the banisters on both sides, attempting to get down while touching as few stairs as possible. Our record was five, but that day John, bragging about his all-important ten-minute age gap, somehow managed to complete the task in four. For the next hour I tried and tried to do the same, but failed, much to my dismay. Finally admitting defeat, I sat down for porridge and honey at the dining table. Facing John, I was immediately aware of a difference. I wasn’t sure if it was his wry smile of superiority, but something was off. It was only when he went to butter his toast that I realized what was wrong. He was using his left hand, and dextrously so.
‘Johnny boy, you are so not left-handed.’
‘Oh Davy boy, I most certainly am.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since forever, born and bred.’
That teenage desire to be different must have meant hours and hours of training himself to be left-handed. Poignantly, the only time he ever needed that skill was upon our last birthday together, writing ‘I. O. U. 1 prezzie’.
Tuesday 13 February
Riad of the Storks and El Badi Palace, Marrakech
I was looking at my mother’s deposition last night; it left me desperately sad at the thought of her being dragged through a coroner’s inquest and giving evidence, alone, post John’s death.
One event missing is the beginning of the whole sorry train of events that led to John’s death: the cricket match in Richmond Park. I had just met a new girlfriend and was keen to introduce her to John, so I’d accepted an invitation to the Nucleus staff get-together. It was one of those perfect late-summer days really – deer roaming the park, the smell of cut grass and barbecue, and enough space to indulge in a cricket match without spoiling a family’s picnic spot. I introduced John to Debbie, my new girlfriend, and there was that inevitable moment of disbelief at the similarities and differences between us, the slightly forced chumminess and platitudes. John had been with Samantha for a while by then and we had all assumed that an engagement couldn’t be that far off. I knew immediately that he wasn’t sure about my new girlfriend, but there was always a ‘cooling period’ upon introduction. He had thought that a previous girlfriend had been the bee’s knees, whereas I had known her to be a total nutter with terrifyingly violent interludes, so he could hardly show me the way to girlfriend enlightenment.
John and I were competitive cricketers; we both believed passionately that we could out-bat and out-bowl each other even though most of our cricketing experience was either from our on-the-upstairs-landing-rolled-up-socks cricket matches or from watching and listening to Grandmother eulogizing about Derek Randall’s Test match-batting acrobatics. We were both on good form – me showing off my stylish new girlfriend, he showing off that he had a ‘real job’ and new work chums. I have to admit, I was actually very jealous; he was surrounded by such lovely people. His boss, Peter, was charming and had also brought half a cellar of fancy wines with him – this was no ordinary office party but a classy picnic that we would always remember. Sadly, of course, I remember it not for its poetic late-summer haze, but for the moment someone, I can’t remember who, tonked an attempted six into the outfield. The ball flew high and fast into the ebbing sun . . . John ran one way to catch the ball, Mandy, his chum and work colleague, ran the other way, both with eyes on the ball, both unaware of each other’s trajectory. They collided with an almighty crash of heads, thumping into each other and collapsing side by side. Mandy was bruised but okay, but John was much worse. He lay there for a while, stunned and slightly unaware, and was slow to recover and return to his feet. We stopped the game and
returned to our picnic blankets, but I knew something was not quite right. He complained that his head hurt, but not just where he and Mandy had collided, his whole head hurt. We took him home to Mother and he lay quietly on the sofa, downing a couple of fizzing Solpadeines, clutching his forehead. I can still remember every detail of that evening as clear as day: the living-room doors open to the garden behind us, him lying with a cool flannel upon his forehead, the birds singing in the plum trees, Sally, our corgi, sitting comfortingly beside him, Samantha slightly impatient with him. None of us yet understanding that at that moment of collision, a fraction of a second, none of our lives would ever be the same again.
Wednesday 14 February
Riad of the Storks, Marrakech
I’ve come across the letter from Dr H, the consultant clinical oncologist at the hospital (who will remain nameless), addressed to my sister Jean-Marian, who was reluctant to return to nursing after these events.
8 November 1999
Dear Mrs Crate
I was grateful for the opportunity to meet you on Friday. I know how devastating the loss of John is for you and your family. It remains a nightmare for me; it was the worst episode of my whole career, which is now coming to a close. All I can say personally now is how sorry I continue to be for all that has happened.
On Friday I was left wondering whether the meeting in a group really achieved your objective of becoming more comfortable to return to nursing. I can at least reassure you that pharmacy procedures and control of drugs on the ward have been tightened considerably, and that it is now much more likely that rogue or incompetent doctors will be identified more quickly. However, if you would like more information and explanation of the notes I would be only too willing and indeed would welcome the opportunity, of meeting you again on a one-to-one basis. If so, please do not hesitate to contact me.