by David Loftus
It’s only the first sleeve and immediately I seemed to lose the feeling in my legs, plonking myself clumsily on the floor, disorientated by what I had found. Extraordinarily, at the same time, my phone pinged through the speakers, the first message from Samantha since I told her I’d started writing my ‘diary’. Oh, how I wailed, a sobbing mess of a man, lying spread-eagled on the cold-chill garage floor surrounded by papers and photos and all the collected crap of a career I’ve had without him. Utterly, utterly desolate and heartbroken, tears flowing freely and uncontrollably wailing like a kicked dog.
It was the simplest of messages, accompanied by a photograph, insignificant to anyone else, a picture of a tiny scrap of paper, the back of an envelope, written in fountain-pen ink, blotchy and scrappy, the ink seeping and smudged and as if written by a child. It just reads ‘I found your pen’. Though barely legible, you can see the strain and patience it must have taken to write it, next to little experimental curls and strokes, practising his handiwork, together with a note from Samantha that reads, ‘The last words John wrote.’ ‘I found your pen’, enough to send me hurtling back to that last week of horror at the hospital. I curl myself into a weeping ball, the shape we were in the womb, the spooned shape of our babyhood, the shape I’d find him, sleeping and curled in his bed at the hospital, the shape I resort to in the corner of my bed, face to the wall, when I try to find peace among the turmoil, somehow believing that the smaller one can make oneself the less it will hurt.
Monday 13 August
The Mews
Shooting at the Mews for a cancer charity with a chef who has been fighting thyroid cancer.
It took a huge effort and an hour-long hug from Ange to heave myself out of my curled-up ball of sadness. God, it’s amazing how something as benign as four words can send you spiralling to the depths of despair. I can’t say whether it was the fact that it was the last message from John to his beloved Samantha or the wonkiness and spider-like erraticness of his type or the banality of the message. As the message pinged through the speaker I had just pulled out an A2 piece of card, a hand-painted poster for Merlin the magician, made when John was seventeen or so, and the first time he had experimented with a technique both of us used in his designs and my illustrations. Type was our thing, not the standard typefaces of art college like Times Roman, but scripted type, hand-painted, inked or drawn. Our technique was to take words of letters and repeatedly inscribe them on paper, carefully, carelessly, slowly or hurriedly, scraping and scratching the paper, causing splatters or pools of ink, smudges and mistakes, but using fine pens, often Rotring pens which were so fine but had a habit of catching in the paper if you were, deliberately, careless. We’d then blow these up on a copier, tear them up, paint over them in coloured gouache paint, then shrink them down again, thus creating our own typefaces, unique to us, legible of course, but somehow both antiquated and modern at the same time.
On the Merlin poster, the type is just that, enlarged, ragged letters: The Magic of Merlin by Philip Pullman (I had no idea that John knew of Philip Pullman), mixed with finely drawn portraits of a Gandalfian Merlin, like frames from a contact sheet mixed with highly enlarged letters of magical symbolism. How he knew that Pullman would write such magical books that would mean so much to Ange and me I do not know.
Often we’d create huge intense backgrounds of colour with chalk or gouache. John was better at graduating colour with it than me, so I’d use chalk and still do if I need uniquely colourful backgrounds for my photos. We’d then finely mottle them with splatters, cut them into strips, and rework the pieces like an overlapping jigsaw, creating a sort of constructivist textured background. When John made his Merlin poster I had illustrated an imaginary stage set for On the Waterfront. Again – though the technique was similar, intense colour, dissected typography, collaged images, overworking and layered, splattered and distressed, yet perfectly golden in ratio – they were so different in their final interpretation, his light and animated, almost cartoonish really, whereas mine was so dark and gloomy, dingy dockland walls and peeling posters. When our parents saw our Foundation Show at Wallington, same age as Pascale is now, eighteen, I remember our mother looking at me, rather concerned, ‘Darling, why is it you have to make everything so terribly dark?’
Ultimately, as I became well known as an illustrator I used that same style, same technique, to illustrate book covers, magazine covers, ads, record covers and wine labels, but absorbing John’s more refined and lighter approach, I learned to write script in multiple styles, studying illuminated manuscript and ancient styles of calligraphy while John became successful at Nucleus using those same techniques in a much more commercial and graphic way. His style was so ahead of its time, to constantly invent, by hand, your own typefaces rather than just choose them from the Bumper Book of Everyday Typography.
Tuesday 14 August
Charity shoot at the Mews
Sitting in the Cabinet of Curiosities listening to Talk Talk, one of the few bands both of us were allowed to love in equal measures. Simultaneously, my makeshift desk is scattered with snapshots and papers, ephemera of our shared lives, the pictures spanning twenty-five years. John and me, topless and arm in arm, skinny and bronzed, long hair soaked, both laughing hysterically as we play in a swimming pool, Niagara Falls, aged fourteen. God we were happy on that trip. John and me at The Beeches, September 1975, in uniform, nervous smiles, first day at Wallington Grammar. Me, alone, far too brown, wearing shorts and a punk jacket, hair slicked and moody, underneath the arches at sunset in Parikia town, aged about twenty-three. The last is John, in black and white, shot on my favourite sepia film, close up and handsomely moody, aged twenty-four, in the garden at The Beeches. I remember taking the shot on my old Nikon, one balmy evening. He had decided to dismantle Lofty, his Monkey bike, to clean its elements and put it back together. I was just so happy that it was off the road for a few days. It’s so hard to believe that this beautiful boy was less than a year from dying.
Thursday 16 August
Shooting at The Wolseley, after breakfast at Colbert with Tim
A rare, endlessly grey and rainy day in London; how we have become used to the long and balmy summer days. The day started with breakfast with Tim in our favourite quiet corner of the Colbert. Over old-school tea and toast, Tim explains that he has ‘hit a wall’ and plans to take some time out, something I had deep down expected since his dear mother died, as he is now the sole survivor of that terrible day in Ireland, as well as the sole surviving twin. We hugged outside in the rain for a while and I watched him as he walked slowly down towards Sloane Square station knowing that I wouldn’t see him for a month or two, and that sometimes we just have to accept that, though we have so often propped each other up through stormy times and though we are so in tune with the complexities of each other’s grief, it’s too much to expect of the other to be the whole cure. We’re just an important part of the process of curing.
It’s a dark day, a gloomy day. It was at exactly this point last year that the idea of this book came to me, to write down my memories of John, my love letter to him, marking what was the thirtieth year I had lived without him. It was a while before I fully made up my mind to do it and I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered stopping, downing pen, on an almost weekly basis. Sometimes it’s just all too bloody painful and mind-numbingly, chest-crunchingly, sad. This morning, I thought of my father, standing on the station platform at Carshalton Beeches station, looking up at his firstborn twins, waving his bowler hat at our school caps, that proud smile on his face. I thought of Mother, staggering on the stairs at The Beeches, admitting to herself that Guillain–Barré syndrome could no longer be ignored. I thought of sitting on the bend in the staircase, waiting for Mother to return from John’s brain scan. And then I thought of us both, he with Samantha, me with a new girlfriend to introduce for his approval, on a sunny day in Richmond Park, surrounded by his new friends from work, and his boss, Peter; a picnic with wine and laughter, f
ollowed by a cricket match.
I thought of John, colliding with his friend Mandy, trying to catch a high-flying ball, watching the ball and not the impending thwack of head against head. And it was then that I realized that it had been now, the second week in August, thirty-one years ago, that on a beautiful summer’s day in Richmond Park, that unbearable chain of events had begun.
Friday 17 August
Catch-up day at the Mews, flying to Scotland
Flew out of City airport to Aberdeen and drove with Ange through the darkness to Douneside House.
Beautiful moments of the day, with my beloved Ange:
Pistachio porridge with local honey for breakfast, post-lovemaking.
A circular walk, along the brook that runs through the estate, beneath giant canopies of gunnera, up onto a pathway, raised upon ancient stones, along endless avenues of beech trees, known as ‘the beech belt’, close together the trees for a perfect ‘infinity’ path, Tolkien-esque and atmospheric, leading to nowhere. It runs along steep fields of corn, long due for harvest, wafting gently in the gusting wind, the shadows of clouds scudding hastily along the rippling crops.
Memories of dreams of John.
Bullfinches, Mother’s long-lost favourites, in the hedgerows fringed with violently pink fireweed, or willowherb.
The dark and peaty River Dee, wide and free, flowing beneath the old stone bridge at Aboyne. Threatening clouds fail to darken a bright and breezy day. I spot a trout in the ripples.
The marriage of Andy and Foxy, two old chums of Ange, to the sound of a young boy on the bagpipes. A great deal of wine, laughter, Scottish dancing and merriment. Yes Jock, the dancing reminded me of you and if there is indeed a hell I imagine you might be there, dancing over hot swords, the devil crying ‘Hot side first! Hot side first!’
Sunday 19 August
Flying home to London with Ange, tired and happy
Apparently today is celebrated as National Aviation Day, commemorating the birth of aviation; it’s actually the birth date of Orville Wright, which must have annoyed Wilbur.
Monday 20 August
At the Mews, a day of editing
Tim, my mate Jeff and I are very much ‘The Three Musketeers’. I tried to speak today to Jeff, but he was high above Arizona in his helicopter with his doors off so all I could hear was the clatter of the rotors and the violent gush of the wind. From flying loops through rainbows, snow storms and hurricanes, low over lakes and oceans, buzzing beaches and waves, through the middle of forests and cities over waterfalls and mountains, we’ve shared some extraordinary travels and adventures together as pairs or as a threesome. We are all godparents to each other’s firstborn children, and are more like brothers than friends, Tim was Jeff’s best man, Tim mine, and me Tim’s and it was Jeff who read the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry passage at our wedding in Marrakech.
‘Tout pour un et un pour tous.’
—ALEXANDRE DUMAS, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, 1844
Tonight I cooked a risotto using dried porcini and hazelnuts. I made it up as I went along, as I always do when on rare occasions I make supper. I don’t enjoy the process but feel that I must have absorbed so much culinary knowledge over the years that it’s a great test of that know-how to concoct something hopefully special for Ange. I’ve been trying to remember if I ever saw John cook, but I don’t think I can. Living at home, Mother or Molly provided for our hungers and thirsts and John was always first to leave the table, much to the annoyance of Father. ‘No meal is complete without cheese’ versus ‘Life’s too short, Papa’.
Tuesday 21 August
At the Mews, shooting with cookbook writer Mini, my client Kyla and a gay pug dog called Elvis
John had no interest in food other than as a fuel to function, to be eaten at speed, the table to be left as soon as manners dictated for an unoffended Father. When we were little and if I was annoying him at the breakfast table, John would build a wall of cereal boxes between us, sometimes as many as ten or twelve, a cereal Hadrian’s Wall, and would get so upset if I breached the wall, the punishment was the silent treatment all the way to school. Poor Richard Eaton, one of our mutual best friends, sometimes called for John and I to walk to school with him and would then have to walk between us, a Richard Eaton wall replacing the cereal wall. John would still do the same in later life, the wall between our bedrooms, the closed door, a wall of silence, sometimes I’d annoy him enough that it would last for days. I’d sneak into his room sometimes and leave him little apology notes, which he would rarely acknowledge, but eventually he would bring the walls down, painfully, brick by brick, though they would cost me in humble pie. (He loved pie.)
Wednesday 22 August
A day spent in Andy Harris’s Vinegar Shed near Pitshanger Lane, photographing him and his homemade lovage vinegars and his dried herbs and spices and his busy bees who are about to produce their harvest of urban honey. I spent a quiet half-hour sneaking inch by inch to the mouth of the hive. There were hundreds of bees, the hive full of honey, swarming and unpredictable, but I like to get so close and so calm that I’m ‘part of the woodwork’ and they ignore me. I love to film them in slow motion, so close you can hear every beat of their wings, and when they swagger back, legs laden in ‘bloomers’ of pollen, drunk and ungainly, bumping into the hive, trying to enter by the front door but aimless and woozy. Occasionally they get stuck in my hair and I try hard to ignore them in case they panic and sting my head, but mostly they just buzz around my eyes and ears, hundreds of them, focused on the job in hand and not the massive inquisitive interloper with his camera, a hive of activity bringing so much joy.
Thursday 23 August
Dinner with Paros and Ange at Colbert after a windswept shoot up The Shard, a day of several seasons. And more bees.
Friday 24 August
Shooting at the Mews today, clear blue sky, missing Tim on his sabbatical, all is calm and quiet. I feel a weekend of sitting on the boat coming on if the sun still shines. I’ve worked my way through the next family photo album, which covers the years 1974 and 1975 and our first day of school at Wallington. Summer 1974 was driving across Denmark after sailing on the overnight ship from Harwich, possibly at the time the most terrified I have ever been. There were rough seas, and John and me shared a cabin below the waterline, allowing two teenage minds to run riot with thoughts of icebergs and U-boats, sinkings and drownings. I seem to remember Father beneath the waterline too, the sounds and smells of the engines and the alarming lurching of the hull, although in photographs he remains the epitome of cool in dapper suit, tie and brogues. The pictures tell of a cultural trip across the islands of Denmark, visiting castles and Viking settlements, Elsinore, the Royal Palace, Roskilde and Legoland, John dressed in head-to-toe-purple, me in a rather stylish pair of flared cords and a white zip-up cardigan. It was the happiest of road trips, ending with a few weeks in Copenhagen. Father was in his element, freezing lakes and seas to bathe in, grand castles to explore and the wrecks of Viking longboats to peruse, his health good and the four of us behaving ourselves and not squabbling for a change.
The album then skips a year to the summer of ’75 and what was probably his favourite road trip, though it did end with the autobahn pile-up that put me and Johnny off driving for ever more. Pictures of us bathing in the Moselle, Luxembourg, the Black Forest, the Danube, the Dachstein Glacier, Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden, Toplitzsee, the lake of sunken Nazi gold, and then back via Belgium and a stay in Bruges. Though we were just thirteen I can remember the trip as if it was yesterday, particularly the grand hotels on the Mosel and the Rhine, the endless summer days and late evenings boating on the Austrian lakes, the reminiscences of Father and our Uncle Patrick, the tales of concentration camps, hidden tanks in the woods and the legendary gold sunken under layer upon layer of drowned forests. It was a Boy’s Own dreamworld. There’s the first picture of me using a camera, a Kodak point and shoot, a snap of edelweiss flowers growing on a mountain side, the moment John started hi
s obsession with pressing flowers in old books and flower presses. Worried that he had gained a hobby where I had not an iota of interest, I took to collecting small metal badges to nail to my newly purchased ice axe, which had the bonus use of terrifying Jean-Marian and Ian.
Saturday 25 August
The Mews
Carnival weekend in London, both Paros and Pascale will be dancing with a can or two of Red Stripe, with their chums, in the streets of Notting Hill. For some reason, in Chelsea, growing up, Notting Hill felt like another world, and when visiting London from The Beeches John and me saw the King’s Road as our spiritual home. 1978 and the opening of Rough Trade Records saw our first forays into Portobello, queuing up outside for the new releases of bands like The Monochrome Set and Subway Sect, but there was always the warning that you shouldn’t wander far from the main roads. I remember asking a policeman the way to All Saints Road where John and I were signing on with a film-extra agency for one summer and the reply being, ‘Even we don’t patrol down All Saints.’
We only got one decent job from the agency, but those couple of days’ work earned us enough for our flights to Paros. The film set was the old Nine Elms railway station, then a vast semi-derelict terminus beneath Battersea Power Station, sprawling and atmospheric. John and me, along with Paul Allen and Richard Eaton, were soldiers, marching up and down, climbing onto steam trains, off to war. The actor Donald Sutherland was playing a spy, weaving in and out of us, The Eye of the Needle. Oh, the disappointment of the fleeting moments on screen when the film came out a year later, blink and you missed us, and of course we’d built up our involvement into virtually starring roles. Paul fared rather better, promoted by virtue of his good looks to platform conductor and therefore a uniform that stood out in a sea of marching khaki.