by David Loftus
He was a true gentleman in all senses of the word – kind, empathetic and quietly softly spoken. I never knew him to get really angry. He was intelligent, fun and funny, with an infectious passion for so much – art, music, travel, film, clothes. His laugh was a very distinctive hiccupping chuckle, eyes screwed tight, head thrown back and shoulders heaving up and down. He would often draw me little cards – cheer-you-up pictures, just-saying-hello sketches – the precursor to text messages!
John was incredibly popular with both sexes, as well as his tutors. He was a skilled draughtsman and the bright star of our year. I remember an assignment he completed about the Sir John Soane Museum. It was meticulously researched and drawn – exquisite drawings of Greek sculptures and classical portraits – showing his love of all things Greek!
He was a bit of a style icon too. This would have been before The Smiths, and their take on 50s style. John’s look was preppy-meets-Greek-fisherman – classic cable jumpers, slim jeans turned up (always with a tanned ankle and anklet showing). Fabric shoes, woven bracelets and a floppy quiff with short back and sides. We thought he looked amazing. He could be incredibly debonair too, at my twenty-first he wore a dinner jacket with a woven bowtie, and he loved to dress up when Sam and I would put on one of our dinner parties. He always had a great tan, even throughout the winter. The only time I saw him look pale was when he was ill, he had migraines quite frequently and would go as white as a sheet. I have always wondered if they were a precursor to the tumour.
John loved music. Bronski Beat’s ‘Small Town Boy’ was the one song that would always have John up on the dance floor and he had the Jimmy Somerville moves down to a T. Other favourites were Fun Boy Three, Ben Watts, even Elton John’s ‘Too Low for Zero’ and strangely even the soundtrack to Cats! It was John who introduced me to the soundtrack from the obscure film, Bilitis – he absolutely adored this.
The last time I saw John was after his operation. He was sitting in bed, bandage around his head, bright and cheerful, considering what he had been through. We hadn’t seen each other for a while and I suppose, what with the gravity of his operation, we got into quite a deep conversation. He told me he’d been thinking of the past and then said something which I never really understood,
‘I always thought if things had been different, Naomi, we might have got to know each other better.’ These were the last words he said to me.
Rarely a week goes past when I don’t think of John, which is proof of the indelible impact he had on my and so many other lives. The church I go to is at the top of Copse Hill, so he is often in my thoughts on a Sunday – chuckling away in that indomitable way he had.
Naomi Lowe
Tuesday 5 June
I was so moved by Naomi’s account of her time with John, and his last words to her. I sat for a while calming myself in a lavender bath. It never works for me, but I try. I cried for a little while. So much in the letter to reread and to allow to sink in.
Last night I dreamt of Cubs, as in the Baden-Powell precursor to Scouts. John and I were members of ‘Brown Six’ for a couple of years and hated every living second there. I remember quoting Baden-Powell’s diary to Father many years later, ‘Lay up all day. Read “Mein Kampf”. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc, and ideas that Hitler does not practise himself.’
I asked Mother today why on earth we ever became Cubs, but she can’t remember. She was so busy being a mother of four youngsters, wife and cook to a retired, dodgy-hearted husband, and a full-time doctor. I suggested it was so she could listen to The Archers Omnibus in peace. She chuckled and changed the subject as the tallest jay I ever saw launched a solo mission to devour the complete nutty contents of two bird trays and a hanging basket. In thirty frantic ornithological minutes we saw jays, wood pigeons, a wren, two robins, several coal tits, a pair of blue tits and one solitary sparrow.
Leaving my mother post-cuppa, cuddle and chatter, I decided to walk for a while. So much was on my mind. I walked down into Cheam Village and headed north-east, towards Carshalton Ponds, the River Wandle and Beddington, home of our old school Wallington. It was an ominously close and grey morning. North points towards the hospital, south to the cemetery, I’ll save those for a truly rainy day.
Initially all was very suburban, as remembered. Many of the grander houses have become flats, the cinema where Father and I watched Diva, and John and I saw our first X-rated movie, the first Alien, was now a nightclub called Wonderland promising ‘Anarchy Tuesday’ and, rather oddly, ‘Skint Friday’. The village hall where I played with my first band, Last Hurrah, was now a mosque. Rather upsettingly, Mr Redings, the second-hand bookshop where my father bought all of my old photography books, and where John and I really started our book collections, was but a derelict shell, neglected and, it seems by the pile of waterlogged ‘For Sale’ signs, unwanted.
A group of girls from St Philomena’s was picking wild flowers from the rubble around the shell, and it made me smile to see that the nuns still insisted on the most hideous brown uniform with long skirt and what we, as boys, always called ‘poo brown’ socks – to make them less attractive to us at the boys’ school. It worked, we always chased the girls from Wallington Girls’, or the richer girls from Sutton High or Nonsuch. Walking past the school and round towards Carshalton Ponds it struck me how everywhere felt greyer, slightly drabber and dingier than I remembered it. I broke off to walk along the Wandle, past the ‘tallest plane tree in Britain’. The Wandle was dank and foul, clogged with weeds and rushes, the irises, yellow and purple, distracting me from an overwhelming feeling of neglect and decay. As I walked to the waterside I realized that the sadness that I felt was actually tinged with an anger that the Ponds, and the river, had died. The children playing by the river had empty nets; they looked as disappointed and confused as I felt. I said to their father, ‘This was once full of sticklebacks, pike, frogs and tadpoles.’ ‘When was that mate?’ he replied . . . ‘Well, forty years ago . . .’
There’s a scene, an old Super 8 movie, of John and I in enormous baggy pants over our nappies, wild curly hair and smiling faces, feeding the geese and ducks beside a bridge over the Wandle, overlooking the church, my grandmother’s old home and the pub. If you wait for a while, till there’s a gap in the traffic, and you blur your eyes and close your ears, you can almost see how it once was, but looking down into the water, where brother Ian once nearly drowned, where we fished for sticklebacks and studied the herons, there is nothing. No rocks, no weed, no rushes, no life. I was going to follow the Wandle into Beddington to see more of where we learned to dam and to swim and climb, but passing the unbearably neglected Watermill, unkempt, covered in nettles, a tell-tale shopping trolley wedged into its ancient blade, I changed direction and headed north, to Carshalton station and home.
Wednesday 6 and Thursday 7 June
I’m shooting Gennaro’s new book in Walthamstow after a dawn shoot at The Wolseley. So good to spend two days shooting with him – such a kind soul, always inspiring, always a hoot and the pictures are full of life and colour. As a father of young non-identical twins, who are incredibly close, he always speaks kindly and softly of John, sensitively and gently, holding on to the back of my hand firmly in a fatherly way. These are tender moments, rare among many of my good friends and contemporaries and they give me strength.
Friday 8 June
Cardiff. Train from Paddington
Arrived late and walked to my hotel in Cardiff. The walk is dark, bleakly rainy, and the atmosphere outside the late-night bars feels dangerous and tense and close.
‘The journey changes you, it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully you leave something good behind.’
—ANTHONY BOURDAIN, NO RESERVATIONS, 2007
Anthony Bourdain hanged himself today, in France. He was a complicated man whom I met a couple of times, in his mellower, later
days rather than his wilder younger days, though he still drank us under the table. I had the oddest night ever with him and his girlfriend Asia, who had a knife and fork tattoo on her neck, in Miami. Jamie Oliver, Danny DeVito and Mario Batali were also there. Speeding through the late-night streets of Miami high on tequila and zero sleep, we bonded over our love of walking barefoot, regardless of temperature or terrain. Jamie had to appear the following morning on Good Morning America, streaming live from Miami Beach, and we were so late in that night I forced Jamie to have an hour’s sleep, ran him a bath, ironed his trousers and ran him down to the beach, hungover as hell, with Diane Sawyer, who was then the main presenter, saying live to the whole of America, ‘Here comes Jamie, and who’s his friend in his pyjamas, he just has to be English’.
We joined her later for a ‘hair of the dog’. I photographed a cover for the Independent on Sunday of a slightly green-around-the-gills-looking Jamie, surrounded by leggy cheerleaders on rollerskates on the art deco boulevard. Jamie decided he wanted sushi so I took him to the Shore Club, which a friend, Andrew, had designed. We walked into Nobu, which was closed, but unbelievably, it was that kind of weekend, Nobu himself walked in and, even though he’d literally jumped off a jet-ski in a break in filming, broke into his own kitchen and made us the most extraordinary sashimi. I saw Anthony once more, years later in New York and we laughed over meeting, as we did, on South Beach, and how nervous he had been because he’d previously said so many bad things about Jamie. I told him I thought he’d handled it well, blaming his demons rather than himself, and we sat in the bar at Soho House in the Meatpacking District drinking wine. Barefoot.
The dreams that include John, I hold onto and cherish. The nightmares continue to haunt me years after I have them. Monday’s was more a dream, but with a constant threat of menace that never really appeared. We were trudging up to Cub Camp on Box Hill in Surrey. I remember it so clearly; John and I must have been about ten or eleven and it was our first time camping, first time away from home. The experience was so ghastly that it often seeps insidiously into my night-time wanderings.
The walk up to the camp at Box Hill seemed endless. Our Brown Six walked together, led by our Sixers, and our Seconder brought up the rear. There must have been thirty boys in total, mostly away for the first time, all with blisters from newly purchased walking boots from Millets, tiny shoulders rubbed sore by heavy canvas rucksacks filled with Cub stuff. The Sixers were our team leaders and they were teenagers, who in my opinion, should have known that this whole set-up was no one’s idea of fun.
John and I shared an old grey canvas tent with our Sixer, a chap I’ll call Christopher Robin. Now, this Christopher Robin didn’t want to play with Pooh, Piglet and Tigger, he wanted to kill them all, and bring them home to show us. Christopher was a big chap, bigger than both of us put together, and he spent most of the night terrifying us with stories of the mad axeman that roamed Box Hill at night, but said we would be okay as he’d armed himself with his mother’s kitchen knife and a squirrel-killing slingshot. On our first night in our leaky tent he told us that he needed hugging because he’d just seen a strange man hidden behind a tree next to the Box Hill Long Drop, the remote corrugated-iron dunny hidden behind a tree next to the forest, and the only place where one could take a solitary dump.
And so progressed a lifetime of dreams, for us both, of desperately needing a poop, but being unable to find a place to go. Now, an older teenage boy needing a hug from two ten-year-olds in their matching pyjamas seemed innocent enough at the time but when he asked us to stroke the erection protruding from his novelty underpants, we politely asked Akela for a rapid tent transfer. No such luck, John and I were forced to trudge back to Christopher Robin’s fiefdom, also aware that he knew that we had dobbed him in. He was contrite and tearful, and would we forgive him with hug . . .? No we wouldn’t do that, so a long night stand-off, or sit-off, occurred, where two damp and fully clothed Cubs sat in a puddle at the back of the tent, and a sweaty teen in Superman Y-fronts sat blocking the only exit, weeping occasionally, angry and belligerent the next.
At about 3a.m. according to Timex, the two now absolutely busting for a pee Cubs were given a ‘final ultimatum’, or catch-22. We could either pee in a bottle, which he would hold and watch, or, horrifically, we could whip his arse with the leather pouch from his sling shot as hard as we could. We watched through hands over our eyes as he removed said Ys and pointed his large, hairless arse towards us. I was so desperate and ashamed I just took the slingshot from him and thwacked him hard across the bare bottom, making a satisfying welt across both cheeks.
‘Not hard enough.’ I couldn’t believe what was happening. This moment, whenever John and I, rarely, spoke of it was known only to us as ‘Christopher Robin is saying his prayers’. So he tucked his nut sack like a couple of billiard balls and a baby hedgehog between his legs and spread his butt cheeks as wide as possible, and shouted ‘Hit me!’
I did, as hard as I could, right on his tightly squeezed nuts. He let out a groan, a horrible silent but violent fart, and collapsed into a quivering heap as John and I rushed past him and out to freedom, a pee, and eternal shame.
The abuse, and abuse it most certainly was, Akela, ended that day. Christopher Robin had tried to spoon us in the night but we kicked him off us, walking boots from Millets are tough and now we knew his predilections we weren’t just aiming for the balls.
The following day all the adults were off somewhere in the woods so the Sixers divided us into two teams and we made camps either side of a babbling brook. All the Sixers were on the same side and we could see Christopher Robin laughing and joking with his Cubby cronies. John knew that one thing he could always ask me is, ‘Can you hit that with a ball or a stone?’ and I could, regardless of distance, within reason. One shot, one hit. He asked me to aim a mud bomb the twenty or thirty metres over the brook, into the fire they were sitting around, toasting marshmallows.
Desperate for revenge, I did as I was ordered by my elder and wiser half and lobbed a fairly hard mud bomb up into the forest canopy. Fifteen little scruffy faces, like the cast of Lord of the Flies, watched its slow-motion trajectory up into the leaves and down, landing with a direct hit into the middle of the fire, showering the Sixers with embers, molten marshmallows and scalding hot chocolate. A roar went up from us, but immediately we were silenced as a cloud of rocks, stones, sticks and mud was violently launched back at us. Hiding under logs and behind trees, it seemed to go on for an eternity. Several had been hit, blood had been shed, and all fifteen of us were in tears. I knew I couldn’t face it any longer, and that the next night was now surely going to be worse for John and me. John tearfully turned to me and handed me a nasty-looking piece of flint, like a Stone Age axe-head, black, crystalline, sharp-edged and nasty.
Christopher Robin was in such a violent fervour that even though it was autumn and cold and damp, he had removed his top and was bellowing like a chubby Tarzan, animalistic and feral. As he bent down by the stream to arm himself with more rocks, I ran round to the edge of the trees and launched John’s flint into the foliage. It came down with a sickening thud and a muted scream and the forest was silent like the world had stopped spinning. Christopher Robin lay face down in the mud, an almighty bruise already forming in the middle of his shoulder blade.
The fifteen innocents ran straight back to camp and John and I back to our tent to await the inevitable fallout. After an hour or so one of the adults came squeezing into our tent. It seemed that our Sixer was sick, injured quite badly in a terrible accident and was now in an ambulance on his way to hospital, and no, he wouldn’t be coming back.
‘Akela! We did our best!’ We hated Cubs.
Sunday 10 June
Home at the Mews
I’ve decided on a last-minute experiment with my chum Hak, my partner in crime at Hak’s, a barber shop in Chelsea. As I’ve mentioned before, shaving has become, to me, as avoidable as the dentist. Looking in the mirror is kept to a minimum
. Since shaving John in hospital I’ve used an electric (sorry, Father). Set at no. 1 or 2, one can shave without a mirror and feel stubble length with one’s fingers. Today I went for my monthly hair trim, short back and sides, long on top. It’s wonderfully old school, run by Hak and his girlfriend Lou who gently massages my neck, gives me the sweetest manicure and pep talk while Hak works his charming magic on my barnet. Today he suggested the full monty and I went for it: massages, cleanses, hot towels and a cut-throat razor, warm, loving and as gentle as ever, an hour and a half of unadulterated pampering. They know me and my aversion to mirrors, and carefully presented me with my own clear-skinned self, shining and polished, staring back at me. I was dumbfounded really. I barely recognized myself, and I left the barber shop quietly and sadly, over a sun-soaked Albert Bridge and home.
Later, sitting on the roof terrace in the afternoon sunshine, I received a reply from Hak following my thankful text, it being my first full shave in twenty-five years: ‘Oh God bless, that’s so special. My dear friend honestly I’m telling you from the heart. I honestly felt there was something heartfelt when I was shaving you David. I felt very calm, joyful and you may find this crazy but a voice whispered in my ear to shave you David. I felt something that I can’t describe, only to say that it was beautiful. I’m feeling that this is what John wanted. Thank you sincerely for allowing me to do so.’
Monday 11 June
Shooting at The Wolseley. At breakfast with the owner Jeremy King
‘Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences or personalities are likely to have been acquired, not innate.’