Diary of a Lone Twin

by David Loftus

  —JEFFREY KLUGER, THE SIBLING EFFECT, 2011

  These were the same sentiments that Josef Mengele had, the German Schutzstaffel officer and physician at Auschwitz, his ‘medical’ facility perhaps one of the most horrifying places that the Holocaust produced. The Angel of Death was a fully indoctrinated Nazi eugenicist whose first job at the camp was dividing incoming shipments of innocents into those who should work and those who should be immediately gassed. His research at the medical institute was the study of the influence of heredity on various physical traits using identical twins. Mengele used hundreds of pairs of identical twins, injecting one twin with mysterious substances and monitoring the illness that ensued. He would often apply limb clamps on one child to induce gangrene, inject painful dyes directly into the eyes, and experiment with spinal taps. When one twin died he would kill the lone twin with a chloroform injection directly into the heart and dissect both twins for comparison, often several sets of identical twins at a time. Mengele would often stitch pairs of twins together by their backs or gouge out the eyes of twins with different coloured irises.

  Mengele was never arrested by the American conquerors, but somehow slipped off quietly to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina where he was able to lead a relatively charmed life before dying of a stroke while taking a swim in the Atlantic. Who said justice comes to those who wait?

  Tuesday 12 June

  Dinner at Colbert with old school chum Guy

  At the Mews with the lovely Meera Sodha, my first time shooting with her since Mumbai. She brought me a gift of a little golden Ganesha, god of ‘making things happen’. He’s now sitting next to Strawbod in the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ where I write.

  Wednesday 13 June

  Bath Priory Hotel shoot

  I love dawn train rides, particularly those heading west out of Paddington.

  The dawn train to Bath on a softly warm morning like today belts out of London and into open fields, far quicker than if you travel north, south or east. The countryside is sublimely green and misty. I saw startled deer, red kites, buzzards and herons, particularly along the canal. For some reason ‘The Poppies in the Fields’ by The Teardrop Explodes kept playing along in my head and, as if on cue, we were tearing through wheat fields speckled with bright red poppies, the flowers of remembrance. Thinking of the Flanders in Belgium and my father as a boy listening to the roar of the guns from across the Channel while he played with Patrick in their Kent garden, I reread several times some of my favourite poems.

  Five beautiful sights today:

  Stag standing in a misty field and our eyes locking.

  Red kites soaring only thirty minutes out of London.

  Endless fields of hogweed or cow parsnip at dawn, poisonous but beautiful.

  Looking at the pictures of photographer David Douglas Duncan, who died yesterday aged 102 having survived Korea and Vietnam, his smiling portrait of Picasso in his rocking chair, bare-chested in his studio always makes me smile contagiously.

  Hundreds of blue dragonflies, metallic, iridescent, mating in heart-shaped couplings in the bullrushes at Bath Priory.

  Friday 15 June

  Shooting at the Mews, with hip young guns Sonder & Tell

  Yesterday I was looking at a list of meanings of the word ‘truth’. There were eleven in total and they started:

  Being in accordance with the actual state or conditions, conforming to reality as fact, not false

  Real, genuine, authentic

  Sincere, not deceitful

  Firm in allegiance, loyal, faithful, steadfast . . . (and so on)

  These definitions have haunted me all night and I have slept very little. We live with not much that can be guaranteed as truth, particularly in politics, media and society. It’s become easy to lie or be dishonest and untrue. Initially I was only thinking of ‘truth’ in the case of John’s death. The failure to admit the truth was the difference between John surviving and dying. I think that the whole dictionary list of definitions, one to eleven, was broken. I suppose the ultimate question is why? Not why the injection, which was an avoidable and careless mistake made by a young doctor under pressure, not deliberate, but avoidable. The difference between two similar words, ‘intravenous’ and ‘intrathecal’, why hide the mistake? I dreamt that I was dying last night and John was holding my hand watching me. I told him not to shave me, that he would regret it in later life, but he tried anyway, and couldn’t connect the razor with my skin. He said it was because I was fading, visually, as I was dying and he could barely see me. I tried to call out but he could no longer hear me, and I cried and cried, like a child. He turned to my father and said, ‘Papa, he has gone now.’ I woke choking, it was 1.25a.m., the time of our birth.

  Saturday 16 June

  Lies and mistruths, and being ‘economical with the truth’; it seems so easy for so many and I wonder if it has always been so.

  I made a rare mistake this week that resulted in a double booking and we had to let down a new client. Ange made the call, both of us deciding honesty is the best policy, that we’d admit the mistake, apologize profusely and rearrange. The call was met with hostility, accusation of lying and a stream of vitriolic emails. Of course if I’d said I was sick and couldn’t make the shoot there would have been sympathy, frustration, yes, but little damage done except that I would have lied. To be accused of being dishonest really hurt. The client I did shoot with, hemp producers, plus home economist Rosie Scott, and two young and exciting talented branders called Sonder & Tell, were an absolute delight. The product is healthy, sustainable and ethically fabulous, so ultimately the right choice was made, including telling the truth in the first place.

  Sunday 17 June

  Pascale has finished her A-Levels and Paros is about to start second-year medical school exams. It’s Father’s Day, and a trip with Ange down to see Mother in Cheam.

  Mother looked so beautiful, almost ethereal. She’d managed to sort out some old dresses and was looking almost Jean-Marie-like, standing at the top of the stairs to welcome us. Of course the glamorous attire and bonhomie hides pains and worries, so many people to miss on Father’s Day, her own father, my father and her firstborn.

  The pain from the chemo has mysteriously returned to her legs, and she’d been in to see the doctor in the week. As expected, even though mother had persuaded the surgeon to remove part of her chest wall, more tissue than necessary and most of her breast, there is still some suspect ‘material’. Of course my bright-as-a-button mother knows the side effects of the treatment suggested, including broken ribs, collapsed chest wall, an inability to talk or to swallow and possible brain damage. It’s like the radiotherapy version of a machine gun. Quite rightly she’s decided to allow nature’s unnatural mischief to take its own course. I’m not sure whether Mother would survive any of the above side effects.

  Lovely sight of a small jay in Mother’s seed feeder.

  I realize that there is a drawer in my old desk at the boat that I must at some point tackle. It contains a pile of John’s old postcards, photos, reminder notes and love letters, all stuffed in the top right-hand drawer to be sorted ‘on a day when I feel strong enough’.

  Mother said today that she rarely dreams of John and I together but often as individuals, but she dreamt last night of John and I squabbling over who would wear our father’s blue suit at Jean-Marian’s wedding. Of course, in real life John did; he was, after all, walking Jean-Marian down the aisle in the absence of padre, and of course ten minutes’ difference being an eternity to an identical twin.

  Monday 18 June

  New day, new week, a beautifully sunny day. So many edits to do, so many prints to do, meetings to attend, the odd crisis to sort. Paros’ exams start this afternoon and he turns twenty-one this week. Twenty-one years, where did they go?

  Tuesday 19 June

  A day of shooting restaurants, first an early breakfast shoot at Colbert, then off to Scully St James’s of Mayfair, a restaurant of funky ideas and fermented fis
h and pickled vegetables.

  So much going on at the moment. I feel I need to stop, take a few deep breaths and quietly reflect on my next steps. Knowing my daughter Pascale had just finished her A-Levels, I popped over to see her on my way home for a cuddle. She looked so relaxed, so stunningly beautiful that I shot a few photographs of her at the front door, freshly painted light blue. It matched her eyes and her newly bleached hair.

  Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 June

  (Very) early morning flight in the fog from Heathrow to Hamburg to help my chum Bart to launch his Bart’s Fish Tales book in Germany.

  Alarmed during the night to receive a text from Ange who in the early evening had a second operation on her poorly arm to remove some metal pins from her ligaments. It seemed she had been left too long in Recovery and her drip of saline had run dry, forming a vacuum, and blood was seeping back from her veins to the empty saline bag. She had fallen asleep, unattended, from the lateness of the hour, the painkillers and the anaesthetic. Not exactly the time for me to be in Hamburg. I get up at 4a.m. and catch the early flight back to London, cancelling my shoot, and headed home to hug the patient patient.

  Dinner at Colbert with Paros and Tim to celebrate twenty-one years to the day that Tim and Izzy were engaged, midsummer’s day, the longest of the year, and Paros’ twenty-first birthday eve. Tim was on one of his ‘sort-out-the-problems-of-the-world’ kind of moods, keen to fix the National Health Service in one restaurant sitting, with a little advice from our mid-revision, overtired and slightly shell-shocked son and Tim’s godson, Paros.

  IT FEELS A LOT LIKE SUMMER

  Friday 22 June

  A glorious day, warm sunshine and a cloudless deep blue sky over old London town. It’s funny that soon after Mother and I discussed how certain birds have disappeared from the Big Smoke they reappear. Two beautiful little bullfinches in full song, probably the first time I’ve seen them in London in over twenty years, although they look far too small and hardly their bullish old selves. Now we need to see yellow hammers, green finches, the humble sparrows, more wagtails, goldcrests and long-tailed tits. My spirits were high as I walked down Piccadilly, past the huge red disc I now know is by Anish Kapoor, so bright against the deep blue sky, skuddled with the trails of high-flying aircraft.

  Saturday 23 June

  The Mews

  Dinner of octopus and rosé with Ange at Daphne’s. Paros turned twenty-one yesterday. A quiet celebration and a haircut and beard trim for him at Hak’s on the King’s Road, exam revision holding any more raucous celebrations at bay.

  Sunday 24 June

  Worried that I hadn’t really spoken to Mother for a few days, I jumped in a cab down to Cheam. I found her in good spirits, though she’s finding London’s heat rather oppressive. Her limbs ache a little less and though she worries about her mobility she is childishly stubborn with regards to her treatment, which I love. The hospital have written to her with appointments which she has deliberately missed, so they’ve written again outlining the treatment they’d like to perform. As expected, it’s the radiotherapy machine-gunning with all its side effects – almost inevitable, at Mother’s age and with her osteoporosis. Mother smiles calmly at me across the table, ‘You know, darling, it would be just like that poor dear chap in the bed next to John, I’d be admitted, but I wouldn’t be coming out.’

  I topped up Mother’s bird feeders and pottered through a few odd jobs she had saved for me, chattering about Kettle’s Yard art gallery in Cambridgeshire. The Pre-Raphaelites, the Bloomsbury Set and their house in Charleston, Lee Miller, Farley Farm and Roland Penrose and the British Surrealists. I tentatively asked her again why I hadn’t been called to give evidence as the only witness to John’s death, but I know it’s because she believed me too fragile to take the inevitably hostile grilling from the hospital and the General Medical Council. She talked briefly about how recently a family has taken a coroner, whom they felt had mistreated them, to task, and for the first time in history managed to have him removed from duty. Coroners always saw themselves as untouchable, and indeed were treated as such and above the law. I so wish I had been stronger at the time, and I’ve always felt that the coroner was someone I’d like to meet one day, just to ask him: ‘Why?’ We weren’t litigious or looking for some sort of revenge, we just wanted admission, clarity and truth.

  Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 June

  Flying to Amsterdam. Today is hot, 30°C in London

  Arrived late last night into Amsterdam, relieved to find that the city is 15 degrees cooler than London. Checked into an über-cool downtown hotel. The wall boasted a huge mural of a chap swallow-diving from a high board with the words ‘dive in’ pointing at a plump and over-duveted bed, so I did as the wall told me.

  Shooting with lovely Bart and his team today. In the evening there is a long (with rosé to soften the blow) meeting with stylists and publisher to discuss an ambitious project to recreate Salvador Dalí’s Cadaqués-based cookbook using present-day artists.

  Wednesday 27 June

  Taxiing out on the runway at Schiphol airport with its vast green spaces and long canals running alongside the runways, I’m always amazed, with all of the jet-fuel smells and the racket of the engines, how much wildlife one sees from the window. From where I sit I can see miles of open countryside, canals, dykes and windmills, so why oh why, as a bunny, would you choose to live between several active runways? It’s obviously not just bunnies judging by the number of kestrels. I remember once spotting an alligator chasing a rat at Miami-Dade airport and a rat chasing a mouse at Nassau.

  On the flight, I’ve been reflecting on the last few days, shooting and editing, shooting and editing. When I was at Mother’s on Sunday I asked her if I could borrow her photo albums from her upstairs library with a promise to take them, one by one, decade by decade, repair them and study them, and then return to swap for the next.

  Thursday 28 June

  ‘If a day goes by without me doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.’

  —RICHARD AVEDON

  Friday 29 June

  Loneliness is a feeling different from ‘being alone’. One can be alone and completely at peace, but you can feel lonely even when surrounded by people. When John died I was in a relationship with Debbie, I had my mother, my siblings and my friends, but overnight I became in my mind the loneliest man on earth, and my illustrations were but a brief, distracted world that I could crawl into before the suffering would overcome me. As a young man, in a large and empty house with an empty drawing board, overwhelmed by intense sorrow and guilt, in hindsight it seems amazing that I survived the first year or so, but survive I did and, though my relationship with Debbie was far from perfect, I do have to thank her for her perseverance. She was beautiful, loyal and stubborn. I find it hard now to remember much of the post-trauma period but I know that she cared greatly, dragging me out to socialize, to go to see friends, to return to the Lakes and to Greece.

  I asked Debbie recently what it was like to come over to see me and she described walking into a room with me as ‘like walking into a sea of treacle’. The loneliness of those years was never-ending, a waking and sleeping nightmare, and though I feel it so much less now, it still sneaks up on me sometimes, regardless of the number of people who surround me.

  Today was a lonely day, even though surrounded by lovely people. A cab picked me up at 5.30a.m. to drive me to Jamie Oliver’s house in Essex, a misty start to the clearest of blue-skied days. Jamie and I hadn’t shot together since finishing the Jamie Cooks Italy book last summer, and it feels like an age ago. Though Jamie loves to work with a skeleton team, he is invariably surrounded with a huge team of art directors, food assistants, hair and make-up, stylists and TV production people. With all of Jamie’s books we try to come up with something new, something unseen, knowing that whatever we do will inevitably be copied the world over. This new book is slightly
different as we had started it, but stopped it in favour of a more mass-appeal project, several years earlier. There isn’t the time to reshoot, though as the photographer I feel strongly that I would do it all differently now, six years on.

  Enormous pressure to perform, a seriously painful back, a tight budget and a twelve-hour shoot ahead of me created an almost unbearable tension within me.

  Ultimately it was a long, hot, hard day, with some beautiful and inspiring food, glorious scenery in the fields and gardens of Saffron Walden, and hundreds of photos taken. We were surrounded by black swans and their cygnets, tufted ducks and their ducklings, peacocks and woodpeckers. But it was also a day of being surrounded by people, some of whom I know very well, but feeling utterly and desperately alone.

  Morning, Saturday 30 June

  Five beautiful moments to bring back from yesterday:

  A mother taking her five ducklings for their first swim.

  The ripples in the sun-soaked cornfields reminding me of a dream on the night John died.

  A small muntjac deer suddenly exposed in the corn by the wind.

  Obsessively filming the reflections of Jamie’s small stream on the underside of the leaf canopy of his beech trees.

  Returning home to my darling wife, tucked up and sleepy.

  Sunday 1 July

  Shooting at the Mews with Clarence Court eggs, and what has become known on Instagram as #teamegg

  Another stunning cloudless day in London.

  It’s a long day with so much beauty to capture: the eggs of Burford Browns and Longford Blues, pheasants and geese, quails and ducks, shooting them with the natural elements of their diet from corn to wheat to cornflowers and daisies. Every eggshell is different in colour, gradation and inky dappling, each one uniquely beautiful and mysteriously fascinating. I shoot them against some organic, almost volcanic, glazed pottery and the combinations of eggshells, abstract glazes, feathers and wild flowers are painterly and rewarding. I love every minute.