by David Loftus
At Wallington, John and I were occasionally bullied for being twins, any difference from the norm making you a target for the eagle-eyed bully. The main offender was an older boy we nicknamed Tufty after his spiky mullet haircut. I could never take Bruce Foxton of the Jam seriously as a musician, purely because he had exactly the same haircut. Tufty was smaller than us, but had a gang of three others who were as thick as thieves, and as thick as pig poop. He was a horrible little racist who would ambush us on our way home from school and steal our pocket money and scare the crap out of us. We hated him so much.
Wednesday 16 May
Old Basing, near Basingstoke
Today was a day of cowboys, vintage Austin Sevens and MGs, loud rock music, fire and smoke and more bearded boys and pretty girls, doing a shoot for the hat-makers and whiskey brewers, Stetson. I don’t shoot a great deal of fashion these days and sometimes when I do it reminds me why I fell out of love with that world, but not today. It was exciting, fun and at times it was roll-around-on-the-ground funny.
I was thinking deep into last night, Ange still in great pain and sleeping restlessly beside me, about the bullied boy of yesterday. It’s so hard, as the bullied, to stand up to a bully, and even harder to admit to others that you are being bullied.
Thursday 17 May
So lovely to see red kites flying over Old Basing yesterday. Such beautiful birds of prey, endlessly soaring, reddish brown, with particularly dynamic forked tails, they were hunted to extinction in the UK, killed not for their meat but because they were believed to be vermin. The location for the shoot was an old garage, stuffed to the gills with old MGs, Austin Sevens and collections of number plates, petrol cans, gas station signage and car parts. It was beautifully madcap, next to fields and an old mill. It was like a little slice of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Friday 18 May
Shooting in Ramsbottom, half an hour out from Manchester for a foodie client, Kyla, who tells me that it rains every day here. Today, though, is beautiful, with warm sunshine and a gentle, cooling breeze. My grandmother on my mother’s side would count ‘up north’ as above Hadrian’s Wall, as far as her spiritual home in the Orkneys. My mother and Molly’s ‘up north’ would be Northumberland, County Durham, Cumbria and the Lake District. My ‘up north’ would be anywhere north of Manchester, the Peak District, the Yorkshire Moors and the Pennines. For my father it would have been anywhere north of Barnet where he was born. Until he met my mother he had spent his whole life heading south, to Surrey, to his flat in Knightsbridge, and anywhere warm and cultural south of the English Channel.
The landscape around Manchester, Leeds and the Midlands is an area unknown and unexplored by me, but every time I go it reminds me of what I am missing illustratively and photographically. Always rushing to a shoot or back to catch a train, I often desperately want to stop the car. There are so many beautiful old factories with their towering brick chimney stacks, derelict and silent and now smokeless, framed among the weirs and mills and hillsides of the moors. I realize now that as a young family we had skipped this ‘up north’ in favour of holidays in the Lake District, Cumbria and Northumberland, my mother showing us, but also my father, the places and people she loved so much.
I have such fond memories of walking with my family up the River Eden in Cumbria and hearing the first curlews of spring, swimming in Talkin Tarn in the freezing peaty water, and climbing Hadrian’s Wall and exploring its hillside forts looking for Roman coins, convinced that the centurions would have flung them asunder like confetti. I remember us walking the length of Lake Windermere and Derwentwater, hearing tales of Sir Malcolm Campbell and Swallows and Amazons, of exploring Beatrix Potter’s house, and Tarn End house where Mother lived as a junior doctor. Of visiting Naworth Castle where she lived in her ancient tower when she first met our father and cycling across the causeway to explore the upturned boats that had been turned centuries earlier into fishermen’s huts on the lsle of Lindisfarne. John and me sipping surreptitiously from my father’s glass of mead, made by the islands monks, climbing over the bracken-rich moors in search of a downed aircraft, and swimming with adders in the freezing pools of nights so dark that the whole universe seemed illuminated.
Saturday 19 May
It’s the end of Mental Health Awareness Week and the day of the Royal wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. It’s gloriously sunny, Paros and Pascale are revising and I’m shooting for Observer magazine – a cover for their Food Monthly. I have more editing to do than I’ve ever had before, the part of my job I most dislike. On top of this, my Aunt Josephine has been rushed into hospital for an operation. Mother is apparently restless and sore after her tumour removal, and Ange is in pain, her bandaging is too tight and the pin holding her wrist, thumb and broken ligament is painful at best. The ladies are weathering a perfect storm of pain.
Mother just told me over the phone that I suffer from hypnotic dreams, the vivid images that come to us in the spaces between sleeping and waking. But why? I know they can be a sign of depression. There is too much that we do not know about the brain and its workings, about stress and depression, about mental illness and the nature of grief.
Sunday 20 May
Flying late to Stockholm after a gloriously sleepy Sunday
Visited Mother. The operation on her tumour was deemed a success so hopefully she can come off the drugs that are causing her so much pain, though she still has to wait for various tests to be carried out. She was weak and exhausted, but otherwise on good form, wearing a rather glamorous kimono with Japanese scenes in shades of gold and bronze. The operation, though complex to you or me, was relatively everyday to the surgeon and anaesthetist, who kept Mother awake during the whole operation, presumably to their regret as apparently she chatted throughout – I think as much to remind them that she was still compos mentis and therefore ‘aware’! Behind what she described as a ‘rather nice, calming linen tablecloth’, the surgeon removed a ‘walnut-sized’ tumour from her breast and part of her sternum, ‘a slice’ apparently, then checked her lymph glands for signs of cancer and sewed her back up. Mother, being Mother, requested to see the offending tumour and the lady surgeon dutifully held it up for inspection. Somehow I expected it to be brown or black and evil, but apparently not, it was more like a small pale kidney or, apparently, a testicle.
Doctors always do make the worst patients, and Mother was probably overcompensating. I bet the surgeon has never before conducted an operation where the patient discussed with her the paintings of Corot and their soothing effect on the walls of a patient’s room. Mother was, as usual, uncomplaining and calm, as John always was. She had coped well with being back in hospital as a patient, but there was no way that she wanted to be kept in, so she was home again in time for tea and biscuits.
Once I was back at home Paros and Pascale came over for a hug and we planned a little more for our Parosian adventures. I could feel my own excitement rising as I described to them the Cycladic architecture, the beaches at Aliki and the octopus hanging outside the restaurants of Naousa.
Venus has been so bright in the London sky the last few evenings, it seems to be growing.
Monday 21 May
Story Hotel, Stockholm
I’m back in Stockholm shooting for a cookbook called Happy Food 2 and spending a fabulous day working with Niklas Ekstedt, who is always so inspiring: he only cooks on an open fire, caveman style, or using pickling and marinating. He is nothing short of a genius, reminding me how lucky I am to work with people like him, who make my life so easy by presenting their wares so beautifully I am but the recorder of their talents.
John never visited Stockholm but he would have thrived here. Childhood holidays got us as far as Denmark and a day trip to Helsingborg from the castle in Helsingor. We stayed with Elizabeth, one of our au pairs, in Copenhagen, learned to cycle fixies before they were hip, and fell in love with numerous Scandinavian girls, none of whom we had the courage to talk to.
Sitting now in a
jetty in the city centre, water surrounding me in the early-evening sunshine, all that I can see would have been ‘right up his Strasse’ as he would say.
Tuesday 22 May
Stockholm
I’ll never tire of Stockholm in the summer. I take a walk before work, sit quietly and ponder, and read and write in the early evening. Yesterday was to the gardens of Rosendals, the achingly beautiful park in Kingsholmen, the King’s Island. Today I walked over the Strömbron bridge, past the grand Palace and the changing of the guard, along the water to the Old Town.
Wednesday 23 May
Stockholm
I wonder how many weeks of my life I have spent staring into water, from rain-filled quarries and pools in Orkney to Scandinavian ports; from Old Father Thames, ice-filled Newfoundland seas, Lakeland tarns and Bahamian lagoons to Cycladian deep, blue oceans. Hours, weeks, maybe months, staring, regardless of the weather, my poor retinas scorched from gazing at the bright white sparkle of a twinkling ocean in the midday sun. Sunbathing, water gazing and star watching, combined with beachcombing. These are the four chances of mindful me-time when I can rest, focus on little and clear all dramas, when I can lose myself for hours of vacant thought.
As children, John and I would always insist on being beside water. We put it down to our very distant Nelson ancestry, because it sounded cool. Long walks in the Lake District were rejected, unless the paths were next to a babbling brook and ended either in the source of the brook or a hilltop tarn. Best of all would be around a lake, or up a brook via multiple pools and waterfalls, and if there were no pools, then damming the brook for hours to make pools, then up to a tarn and a swim around the tarn. Oh, and the water had to be clear, not peaty and dark. Our main source of walking information was our father’s collection of Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, a fell wanderer’s companion of handwritten and illustrated guides, meticulously written and drawn, a page a day, for over thirteen years.
Thursday 24 May
Last day shooting with Niklas Ekstedt
A list of countryside activities according to two young twins:
Find rivers or brooks, preferably babbling, clear not peaty, with pools of crystal water in which to bathe.
If no pools exist create pools with vigorous damming.
Later destroy the damn dam with large rocks, singing the theme tune of The Dam Busters at top of unbroken voices, under the mistaken belief that we are returning the fragile eco-system to its former glory.
Look for fishes, frogs and snakes, for observation only. (We despised fishing.)
Read Wordsworth, Arthur Ransome, Kenneth Grahame and Wainwright and absolutely nothing else.
See how long one can stand under waterfalls, which were always freezing so record remained about three seconds.
Take an airbed up and float from source to mouth. This was discussed for years and never tried but remains up there on the bucket list.
Muck about in a coracle. Hilarious round boat that just goes round and round.
See a pike. A pike to us was like a shark is to the Jaws generation thanks to the mishaps of Jeremy Fisher.
Pretend to be Mole and Ratty – I always had to be Ratty, annoyingly. Father was Badger to us, but sadly we never told him.
Friday 25 May
The Mews
Day of printing in the studio, editing, and catching up. The flight last night was delayed, spoiling my early-evening views of the archipelago of the city, which is always a glorious way to start a flight home. From 28,000 miles a big, fat, red Japanese sun reappeared over the horizon, impossibly blue, the archipelago’s lagoons just catching its reflection enough to satisfy my hungry eyes.
Saturday 26 May
The Mews
On a lovely walk with Ange through Battersea Park last night to the Battersea Power Station, we discovered the most amazing twisted and gnarly tree, a type of willow maybe, that formed a speckled sunlit canopy over us as we explored the peaceful and dark glade underneath. It was a magical Singing-Ringing kind of tree that seemed to demand respectful silence under its twisted bows.
Today has been a quiet day of printing for a small exhibition and restaurant pop-up with our chums from The Norman in Tel Aviv, reading on the sun deck and rest. I dozed for a while in the baking sun, but awoke restless and disturbed by a dream in which I was being bullied by someone on a work shoot. I realize that bullying slightly obsesses my waking and sleeping moments. I guess it’s not just having been bullied as a child, as twins, and even as an adult, but also because it’s the bullying in adulthood that contributed to my weakness in the minutes leading up to the moment of John’s overdose. Was I afraid to tell the doctor ‘no’? Yes I was. Was I afraid of him? Yes I was, and John was too. Both of us were weak when it came to physical and mental pressure from others, but that was the moment when I could have protected him, and I didn’t. Sometimes I think all John’s friends disappeared into the woodwork because they too believed that I should and could have protected him from death.
Sunday 27 May
The Mews 8 o’clock after a night of 50,000 lightning bolts
There is a painting called Sunbaker by Max Dupain that always reminds me of John. It’s such a simple and striking image, a young man lying on the sand, beads of water on his bronzed skin, midday sun so that the shadows are dark and deep. The bather’s head is resting upon his arm as he lies flat on his stomach in the sand. I can’t think how many times I observed John just this way, from near and afar, lying on the Parosian sands in the baking midday sun. In the last couple of years before his death he had converted a pair of our father’s green-striped cotton pyjamas into a pair of long shorts to wear on the beach; they must have been awfully sweaty!
He’d often fall asleep in sun (wearing the pyjamas probably helped), whereas I would read, both oiled in our Factor 4 lotion, carelessly hatless and sunglasses-free. Thinking back on those long summer days, his sleeping beside me always makes me feel terribly sad. I can see him now, lying on his side, fiendishly brown-skinned, his head cradled in his arms, wearing his hippy cotton friendship bracelets around his wrists and ankles, sleeping silently, the gentle sound of the waves and the wind through the casuarina trees, his three-day-old Independent newspaper as a pillow to his slumber.
It reminds me of my favourite Hemingway quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940:
I had an inheritance from my father, it was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world, the spending of it is never done.
Monday 28 May
The Mews
Storms asunder, and so much thunder. Visited Mother at home this morning. On a scrappy piece of paper on her desk, among the trove of poems, lists, musings, book-club critiques and curiosities, there are several lines of writing, aimed at me, for me, but unsigned and left for me to see. The paragraph reads so:
As a nation we are becoming more vocal in expressing personal grief, sharing it and commemorating it. The grief of a bereaved twin is an experience no one else can share, or comprehend, except by another bereaved twin. David’s loss was profound, compounded by what we perceived as a lack of care in John’s treatment. I felt hopeless to cope with his grief, my own, and that of John’s other brother and sister. I read an article in the Telegraph about Dr Elizabeth Bryan, who cared for multiple-birth situations and bereavement. I wrote to her, and as was her nature, she actually took the trouble to phone straight back. David tells the rest of that story. She was a wonderful person and the link she set up for David, with another twin, was life-changing. The need continues, thirty years on. I hope expressing this in the book will be of some comfort.
But there can be no end.
Tuesday 29 May
Stormy night, lightning and thunder
Shooting with a crazy early start at Fortnum & Mason after a late last night of framing prints in preparation for an exhibition of images of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea for a pop-up restaurant at Carousel in Marylebone.
As
I gaze out of the windows at Fortnum’s today, a huge red disk, enormous and bright, is being painted in the forecourt of the Royal Academy, adding a glow to an otherwise grey and oppressive day.
Morning, Sunday 3 June
Sitting on a little roof terrace after an overnight stay at Shoreditch House, hot sunshine over the brutalist landscape of supposedly groovy East London. Deciding to end the day on another ‘out of comfort zone’ experience, Ange and I watched The National play at Victoria Park, long enough to sing along to ‘My Girl’, which was our first dance song at our wedding in Marrakech, before fleeing the drunken throng for an overnight pampering and breakfast of Shoreditch fare on our sun-baked terrace – coconut yoghurt, chia, avocado, pressed celery, beets, kale and nuts, every trendy food stuff was covered bar turmeric, and I’m sure that was available in a mocha latte from somewhere. We were hip for twelve hours, but I find the severely brutal architecture with its achingly hip graffiti and filth, plus the literally thousands of pissed and stoned youth too much to bear, and I yearn for home. Trying to hail a cab in Hackney last night Ange turned to one hipster, aware that we might be stepping into his hailing patch and asked him, ‘I’m sorry, were you trying to hail that cab?’
‘Oh no, but thank you, I was hailing a prostitute.’
Monday 4 June
The Mews Mother’s birthday – eighty-eight years young today
Today I received a letter from Naomi, John’s ‘post-Liz’, ‘pre-Samantha’ crush.
Dear David
Memories of John
I first met John in September 1982 when we both started at Kingston. Our friendship was an immediate and easy one and continued until his death. Along with Sam [Connolly] we became inseparable – just enjoying each other’s company, being part of a vibrant time in youth culture and relishing being able to study something that we all loved. We were actually all quite ‘swotty’ about our work – none more so than John, who would work all hours, but always had his finger on the pulse.