by David Loftus
My earliest memories of snow are from when our young family stayed in my Auntie Ailsa’s cottage in Frosterley, somewhere in Weardale, County Durham. Ailsa is an enigmatic cousin of my mother, frosty herself and rather fierce. She suffered no fools and ran a charity under the patronage of the Dalai Lama, helping refugees from Tibet. I remember her trying to persuade my elderly mother to join her in a Hercules transport plane to Bosnia during the genocide of 1995. I had to step in and explain that I wasn’t sure Mother could even make it up the aircraft ramp, let alone trudge through the refugee camps of Bosnia and Croatia.
Frosterley was Ailsa’s bolthole, a tiny terraced Victorian cottage on a hill leading up the wild heather-swept moors. The first snow was at Easter, following two days of warm sun. John and I raced up onto the moors to build our first ever snowman, using flints as eyes, heather as a purple-rinse hairdo and rabbit poo as buttons. We didn’t go up into the moors after that day because a small plane crashed and was reported missing and John and I were convinced that it had crashed near to our snowman and we didn’t want to be the ones to find the pilots. Frosterley was also the first time we saw an adder, the first and only time I heard our parents argue, and the first time I pooed in the outdoors. Or was it John?
Shooting at the Mews again today – great to be in the same place, at home, to catch up and catch my breath. Last night I dreamt of Frosterley and the crash on the moors. It’s hard to believe that somewhere so close to civilization was so wild and dangerous. The dream included a moment with John. In dreams he is always there, alive, but not healthy, his life on hold somehow, semi-transparent, often sick. Sometimes I hear the ornamental cow bell he had beside his bed when he’d come home from hospital, the chime signalling that his headache was too much to bear and, as in my dreams, I would rush to him down the long corridor. In last night’s dream the corridor went on and on and on, but I got there eventually to find that his room was the room the two of us shared in Frosterley. John and I would hide under the covers of our bed in the inky darkness of countryside night-times and use our matching torches to form circles of moving light across the walls and ceiling of our little attic room. ‘This is the voice of the Mysterons,’ we would whisper in our deepest unbroken voices, a line from Captain Scarlet indicating baddies were coming to take over your body, scaring ourselves as much as each other.
The bed seemed massive but was probably just a normal double bed, and it had several sheets and blankets and one of those old-school quilts that ultimately became a duvet. All were tucked so tightly that once tucked up for the night one could barely move. We had this funny routine where we would push ourselves to the extremes of the bed to get as much air under the sheets, then we’d spoon each other, on our sides, John in front and me behind and we’d start to cycle, legs going round and round in unison, pretending we were on a bicycle made for two. It was a great way to warm the bed. When older, hot-water bottles were more efficient but less fun. I remember once waking in complete darkness and the covers were so tight I couldn’t move. However hard I tried, I couldn’t raise my head, whatever way I turned it just seemed to get tighter and tighter and more claustrophobic. Ultimately I panicked and cried out and John stood up in bed, ripping the sheets free. I’ve not slept under tucked-in sheets since, and upon arrival at a hotel the first thing I do before getting into bed is untuck the sheets at all four corners.
The following Christmas John got a Captain Scarlet uniform, which I was mighty jealous of, although my yellow and brown Native American uniform with red and green feathered headdress did grow on me. What was annoying was that, in fights, he would always kill me with his pistol before I’d even reached for a suckered arrow in my quiver. Ten minutes older, always.
Tuesday 27 February to Friday 2 March
The Mews
After John’s death, I found an interesting reluctance in our friends to communicate with me about our suffering. There was a feeling that John was the one that had suffered, not us, and therefore we should get over it and on with normal life. But life was anything but normal. Somehow I was managing to finish briefs, albeit rather tardily, but I can barely remember my social life. Most of John’s friends, after an initial period of sympathy, had faded away. Many were designers and occasionally I would pass one in the lobbies of design studios. I came to hate their look of surprise and shock upon seeing me, still at that point wearing one of John’s shirts or jumpers, like a sartorial comfort blanket. What followed their shock was a mixture of confusion and fear, followed by a muddle of ‘must meet ups’, followed by a hasty retreat and eternal silence.
Many of my own friends weren’t much better. Peter, my best friend, would do his best to drag me out for a drink or ten. The first time I saw him after John died he met me at Sloane Square station and we wandered up the King’s Road to a bar at the Chelsea Drug Store, while he excitedly told me about a Stephen King novel he had been reading on the Tube. ‘Listen to this,’ he said with relish. He then proceeded to read a passage describing insects creeping into a freshly buried coffin to devour and return the body to the earth. It was vividly, stomach-churningly ghastly and I sat in shock and disbelief that Peter, my dearest of friends, could be so unfeeling. I realize now it was the nervousness of filling quiet with chatter and not intentional insensitivity.
We are still the greatest of friends but that day is seared in my memory for all sorts of terrible reasons. It had started relatively conventionally. I’d shaved with John’s electric razor so as not to look in the bathroom mirror. Mother, amazingly, had gone into her surgery to work, and Molly had made me a cheery crumpet breakfast. They knew I didn’t want to go into town, but were glad to see me trying. I had tried, it seemed unsuccessfully, to leave my girlfriend Debbie, but she had just ignored me, putting it down to my unstable state of mind. She had called Peter to persuade me to come out and I had thought at least he would cheer along proceedings.
I caught the train up to Victoria and then the Tube. I had a few errands to run before meeting Peter, so out I jumped at Monument station and walked the long tunnel to Bank. It seemed like the whole of London had the same idea and the platform was an ungodly crush, so I let the first train go and wandered right down the platform to the back of the train. As the train slowed I was aware of my reflection in the glass so I bowed my head and waited for the doors to open. I stepped in, keeping my head down, and the door closed behind me. As I raised my head to look up, a suited man in front of me, indeed the only other passenger standing, dropped a sheet of papers and books onto the floor. The windows between carriages were always kept open, the stale wind between stations preferable to the stagnant stale smoke stench of the carriage. There he was. As the swirling papers fluttered to a slow-motion halt it dawned on me that I was facing Dr S, the doctor who had given the fatal injection that had killed Johnny. He looked utterly stunned. Shocked. He opened his mouth, but didn’t make a sound. I stood, staring at him, also unable to speak. As the doors opened at the next stop I turned and walked out, leaving him standing in a sea of legal papers bearing my twin brother’s name. I looked to the skies and thought Lord! If there is someone up there moving us like chess pieces on a board then I had just heard him say ‘checkmate!’
Sunday 4 March
Time to talk about Timothy
Last night I met up at the Colbert with my best chum, Tim Knatchbull, walking there, from the Mews over Albert Bridge and along the King’s Road to Sloane Square, buffered by an icy wind and horizontal snow, the creaky crunch underfoot an alien sound to a Londoner when dirty slush is the norm. Arriving slightly early, I wander across the square to peruse the often-ignored fountain at its centre. Completely frozen, this unloved sculpture is now an iced sculptured beauty. Water frozen in mid flow, Venus has regained her looks.
Tim and I sat in our favourite corner, he with the weakest gin & tonic known to man – ‘I’d like half a measure of gin and two bottles of tonic’. He instantly chattered fondly of our first meeting back in September 1989, an extraordinary tur
ning point in our lives. In later years I described it thus: ‘we talked for hours like long-lost friends, reunited after forever apart, twinship, youth, muddles and mix-ups, shared loves, life, childhood experiences. The fear that it would be a meeting of tears and pain was completely unfounded and instead I found myself laughing like I hadn’t laughed in ages. We became very close, very quickly, Tim helped fill the vast chasm that had opened in my life’.
I’d met Dr Elizabeth Bryan in the summer of that year. She was a colleague of my mother’s and worked at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, where John and I had been born, as Director of the Multiple Births Foundation and Vice President of the International Society of Twin Studies. My mother had written to Elizabeth after John died and it was Elizabeth who suggested I meet Tim. He was the twin who had survived the assassination of Lord Mountbatten. We were two men with a terrible sorrow, each born an identical twin, a source of unbridled happiness in childhood; we were never lonely, always a focus of attention. And then in different, tragic and dramatic ways our twins had died.
When Tim was given my phone number it sat on his ‘things-to-do’ list for almost six months. He’d met a couple of other lone twins and found that he had nothing in common with them, and was worried that there was little that he could offer me. I stalled too, worried for Tim, not wanting to revive ill-feelings for him.
Finally Tim called and we made an agreement to meet in a pub in Knightsbridge, walking distance from his parents’ home and from the home in which John and I had lived upon our birth. We arranged to meet for half an hour but ultimately spoke for hours. As Tim said later, ‘David put me in touch with feelings that had lain dormant. It wasn’t easy to cry in a pub where everyone else was having a good time and throwing blunt instruments at a dart board, but it was as if no one else existed. It was an absolute turning point. I knew that David would be my closest male friend for the rest of my life.’
Years on, married with children, and godfathers to each other’s firstborn – me to Amber, Tim to Paros – we are still inseparably close. We used to sign each other’s visitors books, and once, out shopping, the manager said to us ‘You must be twins.’ ‘We are,’ replied Tim, adding quietly, ‘Just not each other’s.’
Thursday 8 March
Poole, Dorset
More shooting for the British Heart Foundation. Today we are in Poole and my subjects are a young teacher who had a heart attack as she was about to finish running a marathon, and a young, athletic kite surfer who suffered two heart attacks and a stroke that had stolen his ability to speak. Both lovely, charming, caring and good people who were struck very young with heart disease, while doing the exercise that they loved. Both remind our little team how lucky we are.
‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’
—J. R. R. TOLKIEN’S, THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, 1954
Sitting in Ange’s lovely Fifties chair, I think I know what Tolkien means. Too tired and distracted to write too much . . .
Friday 9 March
When John came to from his operation in Intensive Care he took several days to vaguely acclimatize to his surroundings. He floated between sedated and restless sleep and very emotional moments of awakening. He cried a lot. The operation had been enormous and he couldn’t understand why he still had a headache, why his vision was slightly wonky and cross-eyed and why the lack of feeling on his right-hand side had not improved. There were no answers but the doctors said that everything should return to a more normal state after a period of rehabilitation and therapy. John wasn’t convinced but met the reassurances from those we regarded as experts with his usual calm stoicism. As a right-handed drawer, writer and designer, his greatest fear was the lack of feeling in his right hand. But he had started writing a bit with his left hand, and his speech, though initially slurred, had returned to normal. He was told he might need an operation to correct his line of sight.
I sat beside him for many, many hours holding his right hand, urging him to, ‘Squeeze, squeeze as hard as you can.’ Bit by bit, little by little, tiny improvements began to happen and his lop-sided face would break into a moment of relative smileyness. Of course fate had other plans and his efforts were in vain, but during my last happy moments with him, opening our birthday presents, I was in awe of how determined he was to do things himself. Each parcel opened represented a small victory, each card read was a step forwards.
Enter Doctor S.
Sunday 11 March
Today’s shoot is for the British Heart Foundation. Our subject today was a young girl suffering a syndrome called DiGeorge, a gene disorder, luckily very rare, which causes congenital heart problems. Photographing someone so tiny with a heart disorder that necessitates her having to breathe through a tracheotomy in her windpipe was obviously upsetting for us all. While we were with her we all remained chirpy and upbeat. Her three young sisters played around her while her kind and loving parents watched on. It was hard to imagine the stresses that the young family had been under, but there was so much love and joy in the house that the spirit of the place was infectious and it was only afterwards as we walked back to the station that we communally sobbed and hugged each other. Sometimes ill health just seems like some sort of bizarre reverse lottery in which entry is compulsory and losers are picked at random to spend their life in suffering.
Today is Mother’s Day and I feel bad that I have not seen my mother for days. I miss her and our sits at her window watching the jays and the wood pigeons. I shall go to her tomorrow after my shoot, making hay while the sun shines.
Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 March
Cheam, Surrey
Finished my shoot early yesterday so hopped into a taxi and trotted off to see Mama. Subjects of chatter ranged from the hopelessness of book choices at her book club to the Greek gods of mischief, to the unexplained reasons behind missing chromosomes. We sat overlooking the communal garden so were occasionally distracted by the birdlife in the wood that frames its edges. Sitting very close to her she seemed so tiny compared to the doctor I used to see constantly on the run in The Beeches, her body almost impossibly concaved to the point of toppling over. The cancer treatment, which is thankfully just in tablet form, is making her very sleepy and causing very painful joints in her feet and her legs. I was shocked to see how much her circulation had deteriorated – her hands a vivid purple and I assume her feet are much the same, even her nose was blue beneath the little puff of concealer she’s tried to hide it with. While we talked she ate her lunch, tiny little cubes of cut-up ham sandwich, one of the few things her stomach still lets her digest. I could see a little wren in the hedgerow below us and felt how similar they seemed. It seems impossible that someone can eat so little and still survive with such spirit.
When I hug her carefully upon taking my leave, I always hold her by the shoulders, partly so I can gauge her weight loss. She is so thin, so skeletal, I can only feel bone through her floaty jumper. As I was leaving I said my usual, ‘Love you Mother, watch your feet’ mantra. John always used to quote from his favourite series Hill Street Blues, where the sergeant would say as the officers all got up after their morning briefing, ‘And folks, remember, let’s be careful out there.’
Mum looked at her feet and chuckled, ‘Trouble is, I spend so long worrying about my feet and not tripping that I’m now worried I’m going to bump my head.’ She pronounces ‘head’ in a remnant of her County Durham accent, ‘heed’, long and drawn out. So I turned as I walked down the stairs and said, ‘Okay dearest Ma, from now on, it’s “watch your feet and watch your heed.” ’ And, as always, ‘I love you’, and then, in memory of John, ‘Be careful out there.’
She always watches me while I hop in my taxi and waves until I’m out of sight. Normally she looks rather serious and sad, but this time she was smiling broadly as she waved goodbye. Maybe it was because my taxi driver was also wa
ving, but maybe it was the reminder of John and his love of Hill Street Blues.
Wednesday 14 March
The Mews, day ten of shooting in a row
The stress of shooting every day – weekend included – is getting to me and I’m making small mistakes in exposure or focus. After five days of intense concentration I notice that my eyes tire and almost become lazy, and I’m finding it harder to focus on this writing. Occasionally, on thinking about John, I cross my eyes like we used to do at school. It’s hard to imagine John’s disappointment upon awakening from his operation to find that not only had the feeling in his right-hand side not returned, but that his eyes were crossed and he was suffering from double vision. Such a cruel double blow to a talented right-handed artist and designer.
If I cross my eyes now I get an instant headache, and bad memories of ringing cow bells and lumbar punctures return, pinning me to my chair in a sad and miserable funk. It’s extraordinary how, after over half my life, these painful memories are so vivid and clear. Fifteen or so years after John’s death I spoke to his girlfriend Samantha at a family party and she told me that she barely remembered the days spent nursing him in hospital. Part of me was envious of her memory lapse, part of me unsure whether it was just good old British stiff upper lip, part of me disappointed that such a shocking and desperate time could be somehow blanked out of her memory. Quite rightly and thankfully, though, she had moved on and married Richard, a kind and thoughtful man, and had children and moved away from London.
As I journey through this process I’ve thought that I might sit down and chat through memories with John’s friends and ex-girlfriends. But I can also see that some should be left quietly to forget, and I think Samantha is one of those people. When she married Richard I understood that a chapter in my life was closing and that she, quite rightly, was moving on with the rest of her life.