by David Loftus
The skull of a seagull, most of its neck vertebrae attached, found while Paros was snorkelling off the bay.
A tiny white dove from the Yria pottery shop in Parikia, from Ange.
A small, vividly verdant green anemone, again, beachcombed by the boy Paros.
About forty photos, in black and white, of Naousa, the boatyard, Agios Fokas and a laughing Jane. All timeless.
Monday 16 July
30°C, a hot and sticky Mews. Crescent moon, pink sky
A complicated day. I pay a visit to look at what is in the top drawer of my old desk on the boat and there are two cards in a bright red envelope that thwack me straight in the heart.
Postcard, postmarked Paros:
Dear David
First of all, love to all the family and hope you are well. I am sitting outside of a café in Athens, we have just been out to get me some sandals. Athens is Fab! – lots of ancient Greece and all that. Yugoslavian countryside was unbelievable (should have been one of 100 great railways series). We travelled (your eye on the map of Europe) from Belgrade to Bar on the coast (near the border with Albania). People however were really unfriendly, with a few exceptions. We picked up an American cyclist on the Belgrade platform and he stayed with us (Jeff) for a while. England is his last country in a 6-month cycle tour. The Belgrade railways however lost his bike, I think he’s sending his panniers to our house so look after them! Off to Paros (see map again) tomorrow and shall send another card,
Love John
I found this postcard, depicting a very Loftus-esque photo of an urn in a window, marking John’s first-ever trip to the island of Paros, in the top drawer. I think he was with his then girlfriend Liz, and a friend Robin. The boy he met, the American, was called Jeff, and his panniers did arrive a few weeks later, followed a month later by a bronzed and windswept Jeff, who stayed for a few weeks, forming a lasting bond with Molly which continued up to her death.
Morning, Tuesday 17 July
The Mews
30°C again, clear blue skies
Sitting in the window seat at the Mews trying to brave my way through the handfuls of paper I’ve removed from the top drawer. There are a few items too upsetting for words. Most heartbreaking is the last birthday card that John gave me on the bed, the day he was killed. So simple, so sweet. The effort in writing every letter, crossed vision and right hand not yet showing improvement, so trying to teach himself left-handed writing, is painfully obvious.
‘Dear David. Love Johny x, I. O. U, 1 prezzie.’
Johnny spelt with one ‘n’, every letter very wobbly and laboured, it’s such a painful reminder of the physio he had already started, to regain the use of his right side. I had forgotten that the card might be at the boat and I find it hard to explain the depth of my sadness as I read it now, so very fragile, heartbreaking beyond belief, stirring so many god-awful memories of his suffering. The last time he wrote, the last day he smiled, the last day he drank, stood, walked, our last birthday, all simple actions we take for granted.
Wednesday 18 July
The Mews
Letter, in a red envelope, marked ‘David, open when alone, Mum’, found in the top drawer at the boat, and unopened until now.
28 December 1987
Dearest David
I find the enclosed a comfort. Only read it, if, and when you feel ready. And if you don’t like it tear it up. The first part is from a poem Beverley sent, from the Sacred Heart Monastery, Hales Corner, in Canada. All love, Mom.
But loving brings anguish, and the deeper the love, the greater the sense of desolation at the loss – so we need time too, to grieve – and we all, including dear John, surely deserve that.
Dearest David, Dearest John
Safely Home
I am home in heaven dear ones,
I am now at peace for ever.
Then you must not grieve so sorely,
For I love you dearly still.
Try to look beyond earth shadows,
Pray to trust our Father’s will.
There is work still awaiting you,
So you must not idly stand.
Do it now while life remaineth,
You shall rest in Jesus’ hand.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The woods are lovely,
dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost
* * *
A tiny angel, handmade, attached to a card, Christmas ’87:
Christmas just doesn’t seem the same but I know that Johnny is in our hearts and if he were here he would be enjoying himself. So think of him with a smile. Try not to think of the gaps he has left us but of those he filled while he was alive.
If you shut your eyes, you can see him smiling and will always be able to. Here is your very own guardian angel, her name is Joanna. Keep her safe and she will help you,
All my love Wamfi [Samantha Connolly]
Thursday 19 July
Shooting at The Wolseley
Possibly hungover, having consumed a nasty combination of sake, white wine, rosé and Solpadeine, in no particular order, and the Solps should have finished the binge as opposed to preceding it. I tend to drink every day, but only in the evening (Paros – the island, not the boy – was an exception to the rule), and almost exclusively rosé (Paros was again an exception, discovering that I have rekindled a love affair with ouzo and mastika). I started, at 8a.m. today, at The Wolseley with an oyster washed down with a swig of Guinness and champagne (having just shot the dish, not ordered), patting myself firmly on the back for not hurling it back up onto the set, and, momentarily, I felt like I was floating upon a soft cloud, a euphoric moment noticeable for its brevity, two minutes at most, to be replaced by an imaginary roadside drill operating at full volume inside my skull.
When John and I were little boys we used to sit at the breakfast table, post-afternoon tea of crumpets and jam, drawing Numskulls inside imaginary heads. The Numskulls were a cartoon strip in a comic called The Beezer, which we were allowed to read on condition that we also read Look and Learn. The Numskulls were tiny people who lived inside a man operating different parts of his head: Brainy (controlling the brain), Blinky (the eyes), Nosey (the nose), Luggy (the ears) and Alf and Fred (who controlled the mouth). We would sit there for hours on end drawing increasingly complicated versions of the inner workings of the head with ant-sized Numskulls operating extraordinary contraptions and machines and cogs, pulleys and bellows. These would combine our love of all our comics, including Look and Learn, but also our father’s favourite of the day, W. Heath Robinson (illustrator of the absurdly complex solutions to simple tasks).
Friday 20 July
London The heatwave continues. Shooting the Principal Hotel
I’ve been going through the photograph album of our shared birth and babyhood. The hurting, crushing sorrow of it and the oh so confusing oddness of not being able to tell us apart. Sometimes Papa has inked on the back of the photo ‘John’ or ‘David’, and every time I guess which is which I get it wrong. As we get older it’s often memories of clothing worn that allows me the ability to know J from D, and D from J. At six or seven years old I went through an orange phase and look like a young Hare Krishna, next to Johnny’s all-light-blue ensemble, like a pair of hippy Joe 90s. Forget telling the difference when it’s corduroy dungarees and matching Swiss mountain jumpers and pudding-bowl haircuts. It gets easier ‘in costume’ as John is almost always Captain Scarlet and I am a Native American in full headdress and suckered bow and arrows.
Saturday 21 July
The Mews
Pascale left this morning on a two-week interrailing journey taking in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague and Budapest. Oh the worry of it! She’s arrived, with one of her best chums Marina, at her first stop, safe and sound. No writing today, too many hours of editing pictures in front of a laptop do a headache make! Another hot and close day.
&nb
sp; Sunday 22 July
The Mews
The album begins with two pictures, black and white, inscribed by Mother ‘Honeymoon Cruise – Pegasus, Greece, Yugoslavia, Greece, three months after wedding. 1962.’
Father is wearing perfectly creased Oxford bags, leather brogues, smart shirt and a jumper with a silk scarf around his neck. His hair perfectly slicked back, he is being handed a necklace by the captain of the ship. Everyone is smiling, including a smartly dressed Mother in the background. After a couple of mysteriously blank pages there are a few colour images of their wedding at Carlisle Cathedral two months earlier, Mother, Father, Mother’s parents and my cousins Susan and Michael, Uncle Almond’s children, as page boy and bridesmaid, and the Dean of Carlisle. The photographer seems to have been keen on Padre’s Aston Martin as some of the pictures show the car in sharp focus, bride and groom soft.
The next few pages jump to our birth, two identical little fat babies, squished into rather grand sitting-room chairs, wearing what can only be described as mini wedding dresses (were they expecting girls maybe?). Unsurprisingly, both of us are decidedly unsmiley and grumpily stern in our looks.
On the back of one of them Mother has written, ‘John and David 1963–4, little fat dumplings. Too much food! But happy, only a few months.’ Hilarious! The photo is next to a very smiley older picture of Mother and Father in the living room of their apartment in Queen’s Gate Place in Kensington. Mother smiling broadly at the camera while Father looks at her admiringly.
Occasionally we’re out on our pram walks in Kensington Gardens – or in our high chairs or in our carry-cots on the balustraded balcony overlooking Queen’s Gate Mews, always staring straight at the camera, unsmiling and unblinking, hair growing by the month into rather elegant quiffs, like curlers has been used down a centre parting.
One of my all-time faves, a photo of John and me sitting on a picnic blanket, our mother between us, is wonderful as it’s the first shot that just screams of joyousness, shot at The Beeches. Mother looks stunning between her firstborns, whoever is who, one of us laughing heartily while the other grins, the long garden behind us, the plum tree blurred in the grainy distance. We seemed always through baby years to toddler years to be dressed in identikit combos of elaborate lace dresses, bloomers, gargantuan nappy holders of Victorian design, or woollen tights beneath Aran jumpers in winter, archaic little leather sandals, coloured shirts or cardigans, always buttoned up to the neck, always smart next to our even smarter parents. Even on beaches our Father seems to be wearing a suit and brogues, always grinning from ear to ear with pride.
I know it’s hard to believe but my earliest memories go back to that flat in Queen Gate, to the balcony, and to John and I bouncing up and down as toddlers on the sofas in these pictures. There are some photos that follow of a rather glamorous party in Kent with my Uncle Patrick and Aunt Josephine and here I have my first memories of bonding with the cousins Sarah and Edward, also my first of many memories of wetting my pants in public, something that took me far too long to grow out of, becoming an almost daily occurrence at nursery school. (I was offered by Mother a prize for not wetting my pants, but have no memory of actually winning one!)
There’s actually a photo a few pages on of John and I in corduroy shorts and little matelot shirts, standing at the French windows at The Beeches, and the only way I can tell it’s David on John’s left is the tell-tale darker patch spreading upwards and outwards from the crotch area.
Two last images that strike me are one of us both pushing old-school wooden horses up Beeches Avenue with our lovely old artist godfather, Mr Frank, smiling good-heartedly down at us. Then one, inscribed as ever by Mother, at the front door of The Beeches, ‘1st day at Nursery, 3 years and very young.’ White shirts buttoned to the top, with matching jumpers, cord shorts, white socks and leather closed-toe sandals, both holding our favourite toy cars, our little Bugs Bunny front teeth poking over our bottom lips as we both try to grin through our fear of our first day at school, restlessly standing side by side in front of a pipe-smoking Papa.
Monday 23 July
Such a sticky and muggy day yesterday, a walking-in-hot-treacle kind of day, an off-kilter, unsettling kind of day. I dozed twice, once in the sun and once lying on our bed in front of the fan, dreaming haunting, disturbed dreams, to match the disturbed nature of the day, the sort of day that people erupt inexplicably into violence, the day when ants come from nowhere and take flight in swarms.
No shoot today so I whizzed down to see Mother who has been finding this heatwave rather hard to bear. We discussed memory, particularly the sharing of memories with John at such early stages in our life that our baby memories exist against the odds, and that I find dates so hard to remember whereas events are crystal-clear. Mother then reminded me that yesterday, the day I was studying the photos of her marriage to Father, was not only their wedding anniversary but the anniversary of Father’s passing away. It saddened me that I had been so wrapped up in my own dramas that the dates had passed without acknowledgement, without sending a note to her. None of the family had, and she had had to sit, alone, with her thoughts and memories, while sweltering in her under-ventilated flat.
Tuesday 24 July
The boat, Imperial Wharf
Forecast 32°C
‘Un ange passe’– a French expression for an ‘awkward pause in conversation,’ as an angel passes by.
I was thinking of this as I wandered over Albert Bridge in the early-morning sunshine. I felt the tell-tale brush of cool air as a plane flew between me and the sun’s persistent solar beating. I watched the shadow skit up the Thames, over the boat, westwards, like a huge falling angel, the sun so low that I could barely hear the plane’s engines at that point, I could only hear the bells ringing at Chelsea Old Church, a campanologist’s calling over the swirling rising tide as I follow the shadow boatward.
I constantly question my sanity with regard to owning a boat in Chelsea, that is until I come and sit on it. The calm I feel now as I write about angels and shadows, with the dark and swirling tide bringing in clumps of kelp from the Estuary, surrounded by tall and statuesque herons angling the muddy pools, bean geese and their goslings hassling me chirpily for a share of my muesli, the gentle breeze that always seems to follow the tides like the air is being dragged along with the flow, cooling the stickiness in the air, makes it all worthwhile again.
* * *
I’m acutely aware of my setback, at the moment, mentally, since Paros the island. I’m seeing my doctor tomorrow but I’m fairly sure the hyperactivity increase in my head, the headaches and the nightmares in every sleeping moment are not just to do with London’s heatwave, but a return of some of my symptoms of PTSD.
Wednesday 25 July and Thursday 26 July
London
Meetings, editing and Rachel Khoo’s cookbook launch
32°C in London does not a comfortable night’s sleep make. Sticky and close, trying to sleep to the sound of a noisy fan, retro and cool, but not cooling, just mildly circulating overheated and still air, polluted and heavy. Wildfires in Mati near Athens have killed many this week in scenes of biblical, apocalyptic ghastliness, young mothers and their children, unbearably, found huddling in their scores, together, embraced in their moment of death. I read tonight that twin nine-year-olds, Vassily and Sofia, are missing. Human tragedy and suffering that no one can possibly comprehend. I feel sad, terribly sad, and angry too; having no obvious outlet for that anger, I stew and overthink and stress.
Friday 27 July
London
Blood moon, 32°C
Back at Jamie’s studio today for the first shoot with him in ages. It was great to hang out together, creating some beautiful magazine covers, with the added delight that he brought my godson Buddy to work with him, the sweetest of sweet boys. I taught him to say ‘Things haven’t been so sticky since sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun’ (from Blackadder).
Storm clouds are gathering at the boat, set t
o break this heatwave with thunder and lightning. Before I shut the boat up, I just check the top drawer and stuck at the back I find an old invitation to an exhibition I had called ‘Two’. I’m not surprised I can’t remember the illustration, I was probably then at about my lowest ebb.
The introduction is written by Johnny’s boss, Peter Matthews:
It was at the Kingston Degree show of 1986 that I first came across the brothers Loftus. John’s show was the most startlingly original, most carefully considered and meticulously presented I have ever seen. I, like most other designers present, would have gladly given my eye teeth for him to join my team. As it happened all that was required was the occasional large glass of decent wine. But as I soon found out I was doubly lucky, for as well as being a staggeringly talented designer, John was to become a very close friend too.
Through John, David and I became firm friends and I quickly came to realize the strength of influence each had on each other’s work and personality. How twin brothers can be so exceptionally gifted and so damned nice at the same time I’ll never really understand.
But life’s bitter irony was to strike us all a cruel blow. John suddenly fell desperately ill. Throughout his awful suffering up until his untimely death, his humour, his bravery and David’s devotion to him shone through the horror of it all.
This exhibition, 2½ years later, is a celebration of their unique, sensitive and much imitated talent. It is proof, in my heart at least, that David ensures that John’s talent and influences lives on.
Saturday 28 July
The Mews
I didn’t leave the Mews today, I sat on our little roof terrace on and off in the sunshine. The temperature has blissfully dropped and the breeze is gusty and refreshing after so many close and sticky days. I doze, I read, I think, I try not to think. I read to take my mind off my thoughts. All is quiet.