by David Loftus
Best wishes,
[Signed Dr H]
As the only witness – I was actually in the same room, but behind a curtain that had been drawn between John and me – I still marvel that I was not called to the coroner’s inquest, nor was I ever written to by any of the protagonists in the misadventure. For some reason, after John died, even though I was the eldest now, and the surviving identical twin, I was excluded from all correspondence and face-to-face meetings. For a long time after Johnny’s death I suffered alone and in silence. Dosed up with a concoction of Solpadeine for recurring headaches and my mother’s sleeping tablets, I somehow continued my work as an illustrator. I was eventually prescribed Seroxat by a clinical psychologist who diagnosed me as suffering from post-traumatic stress, a drug that I have been unable to wean myself off.
Writing this now under a clear blue Moroccan sky, the events running up to Johnny’s death are still seared into my memory. The night after his death my mother came in to see me in my bedroom. I had spent a couple of hours holding the cooling hand of John’s dead body, utterly bereft and heartbroken. She and I were now alone in our big house. Mother gave me several sleeping tablets to try to rest my broken mind, but as I eventually fell asleep, I knew that I was willing myself to die.
Thursday 15 and Friday 16 February
Riad of the Storks, Marrakech
At the time of John’s death I was an illustrator, constantly busy with complicated briefs from around the world. I worked from my bedroom at an old desk filled to the brim with acrylics, gouache and brushes and a huge architectural-plan chest (drawing cabinet) filled with ancient ephemera, from stamps to maps to banking notes and certificates. I drew and painted my illustrations on my old art-school drawing board, colouring them with fragments of the colourful papers in the plan chest. This method worked, thankfully, and I became well known for my collages, illustrating book covers, album covers and design brochures. I was happy, but not fully content. It was a lonely existence, particularly in the pre-digital time: just me sitting with a blank sheet of watercolour paper, waiting for the phone to ring. Luckily it rang often. After John’s death I started working in John’s room – it was bigger and brighter, with three large windows looking out over the back garden. John had painted his room white with hints of deep Grecian blue, his personal homage to the island of Paros. All his model soldiers were still out on the shelves next to any Airfix models that had survived the bruising battles of childhood fights, along with seashells and rocks and design books, pressed flowers and terrariums of tropical plants. It was a joyful room filled with a design ethic far beyond his years. Bit by bit I moved my art materials into his room but I always felt like I was trespassing on his space.
During summer I would work late into the night on overdue deadlines and often accidentally fall asleep on his bed. For some reason I would always awake with a jolt at 1.25a.m., confused and disorientated. I told my mother about my midnight awakenings and she told me that this was the time of John’s birth, with me following ten minutes later. I would return to my own room and sleep restlessly until I’d hear the first calls of the birds.
Saturday 17 February
Late flight from Marrakech – glorious sunset over Casablanca – to home
I spent the afternoon cuddling my beloved Ange; nothing quite compares to the cuddling of a loved one. Ange is holding a small white rabbit by its floppy ears. My own grey childhood teddy sits above my mother’s living-room cabinet and watches over her while she sits and reads. Johnny’s brown bear watches over me from the corner of my bedroom. Johnny’s other, special, teddy was called Strawbod, a scraggly and slightly moth-eaten yellow teddy with a worn brown nose and a scarf of light brown wool knitted by Johnny when he was nine or ten. When the question, ‘What item would you save if your home was on fire?’ is raised, I always immediately answer, ‘Well, Strawbod of course.’ Ten inches of well-worn teddy bear with a badly knitted scarf and beady little brown eyes. Daft, I know, but to me one of the most important objects on earth.
Sunday 18 February
At Mother’s
Ange drove me down to Mother, still frail but uncomplaining. Discussion ranges from El Greco to Alexander McQueen (‘Oh, I did love his work at the fashion exhibition at Belsay Hall in 2002’) to how moved she was by a tiny drawing of the crucifixion by Rembrandt at the Royal Academy (there are tears in her eyes as she describes it).
Grey teddy sits watching over her, next to a framed black and white photo of curly-haired, baggy-nappied twins, shot in a professional studio. I only know the difference because I’ve been told so many times: John is playing with a teddy, me with a set of plastic keys. Mother believes grey teddy is John’s and the brown one is mine. Maybe she’s right and it’s me who’s got it the wrong way round. It doesn’t really matter any more.
Monday 19 February
The Mews
Today as I was going through Mother’s papers I braved the obituaries:
Obituary, Kingston Art College:
It was with great sadness that the school of Graphics and Design learned of the death of John Loftus after three months of illness. John was an outstanding student from 1983–86. He obtained First Class Honours and was employed at Nucleus Design Associates where he quickly became an invaluable member of the design team. He was a superb draughtsman, a fine typographer and filmmaker. He won a Thames (TV) Bursary for Television Graphics in his second year and we have a marvellous visual legacy of his work on film and slide. The funeral took place on 20th November. It is hoped that a memorial tree can be planted in the grounds of Knights Park Centre.
Notice in The Times and The Independent:
Loftus, John William (1963–1987) such a special person. A wonderful friend, so loved and so much missed. You may not be with us now, but your spirit lives on.
Small card given at John’s funeral:
JOHN WILLIAM LOFTUS 31ST OCTOBER 1963 – 11TH NOVEMBER 1987
We seem to give them back to thee, O God, who gavest them first to us. Yet as thou didst not lose them in giving, so we do not lose them by their return. Not as the world giveth, givest thou, O Lover of souls. What thou givest, thou takest not away, for what is thine is ours also if we are thine. And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
Fr. Bede Jarrett O. P.
It’s ironic that this card was probably given out at the funeral because John was an atheist, and quite vociferous in his arguments against organized religion and the damage it can do. Where I shied away from religious argument, for fear of some divine intervention, he was quite happy berating the Catholic Church particularly, but all religions almost equally. He would have probably preferred a quote from The Lord of the Rings or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince or even Winnie-the-Pooh.
Tuesday 20 February
Morgan & Mees Hotel, Amsterdam Shooting seaweed with Bart van Olphen
I’ve shot with my chum Bart for over two years now. He is a food writer, presenter and conservationist; his big issue is the sustainability of fish in our oceans and he fights for it with passion and great gusto. He’s a native of Amsterdam and I’m here with him working on a project called Sea Green Netherlands, to try to get people to eat more seaweed. Many of the trips I’ve been on with him have been the hardest of my life. They are often extremely dangerous, and have involved slippery decks, rough seas, sinking and decrepit boats, Kalashnikov-waving militia and shark-infested waters. Bart writes about our adventures while I nervously photograph them, and seaweed farming sounds like a breeze in comparison. It’s a very bonding experience when you jump back onto dry land from a Bart-organized trip and he says, ‘I really thought we were going to die out there.’
Each time I travel with my work I take a few papers with me from my mother’s file. It’s a strange and eclectic mixture of Samantha’s highly decorated illustrative cards, Johnny’s postcards from Paros, letters from friends and relatives from after his death.
This time Jean-Marian has sent me a small poem she wrote to John after he died:
When darkening clouds fill
Skies so grey
When childhood memories
Of a now gone day
Still laugh and cry
In a far off place
In my mind
I still miss you xx
Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 February
Zeeland, the Netherlands
Today we’re off to the south to explore the seaweed of Zeeland. The sea is a soft shade of aqua blue and Toine, our seaweed scientist and surf dude, bravely jumps in. The temperature scale on my phone says –2°C and the sea, where it meets the shore, is frozen into the sand, making faux constructionist patterns that crunch underfoot. My hands are almost frozen to my Leica and the wind blows cruelly from the sea. After an hour or so we can bear it no longer and retreat to the local surf club, Natural High, for hot chocolate.
The cold pain in my hands reminds me of the cruel days of winter at school. John and I went to an all-boys grammar school called Wallington, in Beddington in Surrey. Academically it was great and artistically it was fabulous, thanks to a few talented and passionate artists on its staff. But we found it a cruel and bullying environment when away from the art room. Sportsmen were rewarded and pampered while the more sensitive were often victimized and vilified. John and I hated the sports field and detested the masters that used the pitches as their stalking grounds. We often joked that because we’d had to share certain cells and brawn in our birth we were definitely destined for the weedier teams.
There was zero tolerance of weakness or sporting ineptitude. One master, known unaffectionately as Jock, was particularly nasty. He was in charge of five years of compulsory Scottish sword dancing, a hellish hour of dancing in pairs over two crossed swords, in bare feet to encourage a lack of mistakes, a wrong toe here or a wrong toe there and the pain was sharp and quick. If you turned in the wrong direction he would pull down your shorts and spank your bare arse with the blunt side of the sword, heating the left side if he wanted you to turn left, or the right if it was right, screaming into your face ‘Hot side first, hot side first!’
John and I were picked on because we were twins. He called John ‘Mark I’ and me ‘Mark II’. I think he hated everyone, but he hated the weaker, non-sporty kids most of all. After sword dancing we were made to strip in the cloakrooms and run naked across the corridor to the showers, which he would turn up to full heat. The secret was to run as fast as possible through the steaming streams of water – because there was so much steam you could flatten yourself against the tiles behind and avoid a scalding. If you returned dry, Jock would slap your bare arse with a table-tennis bat and forcibly propel you back into the scalding steam of the shower room. Across the corridor you ran, always naked, embarrassed and ashamed, often bumping quite literally into your favourite (female) French teacher.
It was miserable, in the freezing cold, ice or snow, and if you forgot your shorts you were made to play in your underpants. There were no boxes or gum shields, if you fell you bled. The plunge pool afterward was, like the showers, kept ridiculously hot but you had no choice, you plunged or you were pushed. I cried so often. Sometimes our hands would become totally incapacitated by the intense heat straight after the cold and we would, weeping, help each other button our shirts and straighten our ties. An unbuttoned shirt merited more punishment and one felt punished enough.
Yesterday was the first time in a long while that I felt that same pain in my hands and I’ve shot in sub-zero temperatures on the glaciers of Iceland and the ice floes of Nova Scotia. It’s not easy to shoot wearing gloves and the little metal Leica camera soon matches the temperature of the outside air, but at least one can take breaks and run in for a welcoming hot chocolate. That regime at school probably wouldn’t be allowed now. There were plenty of parents who believed the experience would be ‘good for us’ and ‘toughen us up’, but it didn’t work for us.
During our second year at Wallington, John complained about constant stomach pains, particularly on Mondays and Wednesdays. Monday was Latin, Wednesday was Jock. After tests, a psychiatric assessment and a barium meal, John was eventually diagnosed with a peptic ulcer – stress-induced, I am sure.
Eventually we turned to our father for help. He, like us, had gone to an all-boys school, but bullying had not been tolerated there, between boys, or boys and masters. John’s peptic ulcer essentially got him off games. I, however, being his identical twin, could hardly claim the same ailment. So Father came up with ‘Osgood-Schlatter’, a satisfyingly rare inflammation of the knee joint that got me a good four months of library time versus Jock and his cronies time. When the ‘Schlatter’ was eventually called into question my father kindly wrote to one of these teachers, (a nasty little sadist who liked to scream in your ear ‘Run like the shit!’ – the first swear word I ever heard). He said, quite simply: ‘David will be excused from rugby this Wednesday, and all future Wednesdays, because he is suffering from general malaise.’
It was genius, and the look on Sir’s nasty, pinched little face was a picture!
Friday 23 February
Island of Texel, the Netherlands
I’ve always wanted to visit the islands that hook up from northern Holland into the North Sea. Shooting the seaweed and the people who make seaweed their passion, I see it in a new light. I know, to many, seaweed is just a slippery and slimy plant that fills rock pools at low tide, but to these people it’s not just a food source of rare minerals and umami, it’s also medicinal, a fertilizer, and quite possibly a future source of fuel.
I do love the Netherlands and its extraordinary man-made landscape. So flat, so ordered, that you can see the sun rise and the sun set on the horizon. When the weather is this beautiful nature provides a haze-like filter to the endless trees. Ice-covered dykes criss-cross the land between the canals with their ubiquitous Chitty Chitty Bang Bang windmills everywhere. And the birds. I awoke to hedges filled with tiny birds (coal tits, wrens and robins) and our drive through the countryside passes fields filled with bean geese and colourful Egyptian geese, framing heart shapes with their necks. Also spotted are owls, buzzards, several herons and a pair of flirting great crested grebes. No one in the car shows even the slightest interest in my ornithological sightings, but I list them mentally to tell Mother on Sunday.
Saturday 24 February
London
Today’s shoot was for the British Heart Foundation, photographing portraits of young survivors of chronic heart disease. First a lovely comedienne and her wonderfully moustachioed husband and sidekick, called Short & Curly. Young, funny, utterly charming and inspiring, followed by a shoot with a sixteen-year-old tap dancer called Jayden, three years on and dancing like a young Fred Astaire, after having been found dead by his father and resuscitated with CPR by him. All normal but extraordinary people, amazing stories and a truly inspiring and uplifting day. The British Heart Foundation seem nervous but pleased.
Thinking of the randomness of the tumultuous events that have affected these people reminded me of an event when John and I were Jayden’s age. We loved The Persuaders! I wanted to be Roger Moore and he wanted to be Tony Curtis. We would sit, side by side, in our pyjamas on a Sunday morning and vow to own their cars, live their lives, and reside in a mews. But I cannot drive. My father was a car enthusiast, racing Astons and Jaguars, but John and I never quite recovered psychologically from an accident we witnessed in Germany.
We’d been driving, as a family, from Grandad Opa’s near Toplitsee – the lake where the Nazis hid all their stolen bullion – a joyous trip of sunshine, edelweiss-pressing by John and lazy lake swimming. Father was at the wheel when we were overtaken by a very fast BMW with its boot held closed by a piece of string. Suddenly, simultaneously, there was a flash storm and the boot of the BMW pinged open, launching suitcases and holiday paraphernalia into the windscreens of the following and oncoming traffic. In a blur of seconds that seemed like a slow-mot
ion nightmare, cars and lorries piled into each other. We saw a VW Beetle cartwheeling down the other carriageway, a man in a white shirt crisscrossed with bloody stripes, a lorry careering towards us, two little boys gazing up at the driver in horror, swerving sideways at the last minute, screaming and sliding past us and down the bank. It was our father’s skill as a racing driver that saved us, but for many it was the last moment they saw before they passed into never-ending darkness. What struck me, and has never left me, was the lack of control, the sheer lottery of the moment, between life, serious injury, and death. It wasn’t a fear of driving that stopped us continuing with lessons, it was the unpredictability of the road and the fact that one person’s mistake or careless recklessness could cause such random mayhem and ensuing carnage.
Sunday 25 February
Cheam, Surrey
Took an early cab down to see the mother. She had a small list of ‘David-to-dos’: buy a few books for her Kindle, pop a few arty books back on the shelf, put fresh bird seed out for the tits. We discussed Simon Barnes of The Independent and how he managed to move gracefully between being their cricket correspondent and their birdwatching expert, my grandmother’s love of golden-covered Royal Coronation albums, Derek Randall, the then acrobatic and unpredictable England wicketkeeper, and white sugar on freshly buttered bread, to which my mother stood up in her dressing gown and brandished her antique walking stick, impersonating Sir Ian McKellen playing King Lear, naked, at the back of an empty stage. ‘Never! Never! Never!’ she roared with Gandalfian splendour. She never ceases to amaze me.
Monday 26 February
The Mews
The press talks of the ‘Beast from the East’ arriving today, ‘Snowmageddon’ – jeepers, these people talk crap sometimes. London was warned to ‘be home by 6p.m’. It’s now 10p.m and the sky is clear and black and blue and the stars are bright.