by David Loftus
Today feels rather end-of-summery, it’s colder and more unpredictable, sun and showers. Paros is already back studying, medical school holidays getting shorter and shorter as the years progress. Pascale, just returned from the Edinburgh Fringe, knows that this is her last-blast weekend before finding work for her gap year. It’s funny how you never grow out of that end-of-summer-beginning-of-term feeling, even more than thirty years on.
Sunday 26 August
The Mews
Grey and cold
With Mother today. Smiling, in her corner chair, we talked of her time living in Naworth Castle and in Tarn End House, near her surgery in Brampton. We spoke of a time I came up to visit her after John had died and she had moved back to Brampton in search of the company and quietness of her old friends there. One time she found me at the tarn on my own. I was breaking off fat chunks of ice from the water’s edge and skimming them across the frozen surface of the tarn, so cold and icy under a clear blue sky; the pieces would skim for ages, creating the most beautiful high-pitched song or hum. Mother watched me for ages, delighted by the sounds I was making, but her heart ached for me, I looked so heartbroken, so miserable. Thinking back, I can remember the cold, the beauty of the moment, and the extraordinary euphoric sound of each skim across the ice. I remember the mulled wine at Tarn End with Mother and her dear friend Bill. I don’t remember it as a time of misery but as a time of great poetic beauty. It makes me realize how hard it must have been for Mother, a couple of years on from our loss, to see me there, where she had always seen two; a solitary twin making music with the ice covering her tarn, the same banks that she would sit on with her student friends and their admirers, carefree and happy, before Father, before us.
Today is the anniversary of the bomb with which the IRA killed Tim’s twin, Nick. Upon the Bay of Mullaghmore in Ireland on a clear and sunny day a bomb was planted beneath the deck of Shadow V, Tim’s grandfather’s boat. It was detonated by Thomas McMahon, one of the IRA’s most experienced bomb makers, as he and his team watched the family from the surrounding cliffs.
Lord Mountbatten was killed, as was Paul Maxwell (a fifteen-year-old local friend). Baroness Brabourne (Tim’s granny on his father’s side) was also killed, as was Tim’s elder twin, Nick.
Tim and his parents John and Patricia, as I later knew them, were all seriously injured. Tim’s eldest sister, Joanna, would later say to Tim in hospital, ‘You woke up, Nick never did.’
Nicholas Timothy was an all-important twenty minutes older than his identical sibling, Timothy Nicholas, who like me was the younger, the very slightly lighter in weight. Like us, in scuffles and bundles the elder would always get the upper hand; like us, they started and finished each others’ sentences; like us, there was a healthy competitiveness. Like us, people could sometimes tell us apart when we were together, but found it much harder upon meeting us individually; like them, we often took advantage of our being identical, particularly at school. Like them, we were often sick together, double measles, double mumps, double chickenpox. Tim, like me, was the more chaotic, more easily distracted, the more reliant on the leadership of our elder twin. And, like me, upon hearing the news of our twin’s death, the underlying feeling existed that somehow the wrong twin had died.
In the immediate years after I met Tim I would spend that weekend with him and his parents either at home in Kent or we’d fly somewhere in his little plane – Scotland or France. At breakfast we would raise a glass to ‘Nick and Grandpapa and Granny and Paul’. Somehow I believed that their collective suffering was so much greater than mine and I never admitted, other than to my own raised glass, that it was also a day that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Tuesday 28 August
A grey and still day at the Mews
Feeling stagnated and downbeat, I decide not to write today, only the second time I’ve missed a day. Sometimes the mountain that I am climbing feels too steep, then it’s time to pause, reflect, look at the view.
Wednesday 29 August
I do remember watching the BBC news report, the grainy black and white footage of the bay at Mullaghmore, the floating wreckage, listening to the fragments of information, which included, to John and my collective horror, that one twin had been injured and his elder twin killed. We walked away from the TV set and went to our separate bedrooms, unable to discuss it but knowing that if I tapped gently on the wall next to my head that I would get a reassuring tap-tap back again. We were a year older than Tim and Nick, at a familiar stage in our lives but worlds apart, but at that moment we felt the terrible break in their seemingly unbreakable bond, too painful for us to comprehend. Little did I know that years later I would be best man at Tim’s wedding and he at mine.
In hindsight I went almost immediately from meeting Tim to us being in virtually constant contact. We met in the summer of 1989, and by Easter of 1990 I was flying with Tim every other weekend. I spent the Easter holidays with his whole family in Eleuthera in the Bahamas. It makes me sad now to think that I hurt my Mother by forming such a close bond with another family and I wish that I had been more sensitive to the situation. It was another mistake in the post-traumatic fog I was feeling my way through at the time.
I remember that he mentioned that his family used to wear t-shirts with their names on, and family photos taken just before the bomb often showed Tim and Nick in their orange-labelled tees. Where Tim and Nick were often dressed alike, for the most part it’s the memory of mine and John’s different clothing that allows me to tell us apart in photographs. As toddlers, to differentiate Tim from Nick, their mother attached a small gold bracelet around Nick’s left wrist and later when Nick lost it Tim worried that there would be a lifetime of confusion, but actually, by then those close to the twins had noticed an easier way to spot difference, a mole underneath Tim’s chin. For our nearest and dearest, it was John who created tiny differences in our faces, but one had to look very closely: the tiny scars from his fingernails as he drew blood holding me close to him in our cot, and later the slight twist in my nose where he had broken it by putting into physical action the rhyme, ‘we all rolled over and one fell out’. It happened in our grandmother’s Victorian bed so it was a long way to fall flat on one’s face for a toddler.
Thursday 30 August
Surrounded at my desk by photos of John, it’s hard to imagine how alike we would be now had he survived. The wears and tears of being a photographer means that my back twists and slopes in funny directions, a bit of scoliosis, a slight hunch, an over-developed muscle behind my neck from hand-holding heavy cameras. I try not to look at photos of myself and my mirror image still haunts me enough to avoid shaving, but if I force myself to look closely, to study my visage, I don’t see much of the youth I was when John was alive. In my dreams we remain unaged, two twenty-five-year-olds frozen in time, and I prefer that image. The face that stares back at me doesn’t quite add up and somehow I imagine John would have grown up a much better-looking version. The sun damage would probably be much the same, wrinkles and creases, freckles and liver spots everywhere, ‘lentigo senilis’, which sounds far too senile. The hair is thinner and streaked with grey, but not really balding like our father was, but it’s the general pudginess, the rounding-off of the features that I find it hard to imagine John putting up with. I don’t think his vanity would have allowed that! Maybe he would have sat at his easel doing facial exercises, jutting the chin, flicking the double chin, holding back the years. I feel he would. Recently, after Hak clean-shaved me for the first time in nearly thirty years, I checked to see if I could still see Johnny’s nail marks in my skin, my tiny embrace scars. I think they are there, but when I find them hard to find I stop myself from looking, frightened I might be losing another of his legacies. The broken nose remains.
Friday 31 August
The Mews
At lunch yesterday at the Colbert with Bart, who was over from Amsterdam. I spotted Rupert Everett in the corner, still tall and elegant, but like us, a long
way from his Another Country days when John so wanted to be like him. He sat under a Jacques Tati poster, reminding me that John thought him funnier than Laurel and Hardy, which caused many a breakfast wall-building.
Woke this morning to the sound of a wren outside the bedroom window, a real chatter of rattles, tweets and chirps, bubbling away, surprisingly sharp and shrill for a bird so little.
AUTUMN
Saturday 1 September
First day of autumn
Slightly hungover on my Middle East Airlines flight to Beirut, sweating it out in the overheated and slightly fetid atmosphere. Currently flying across a dark and misty Turkish coastline, the Greek islands only just visible, barely there, towards Lebanon and Beirut. Descending towards Beirut I find it strangely calming and familiar to hear the Arabic voices excitedly chattering around me. Father used to love Beirut, he liked that he could swim and sunbathe in a warm sea in the morning, dine on fine Arabic food at lunchtime and then ski in the mountains in the afternoon, to return to party in the city in the evening.
Sunday 2 September
Hotel Phoenica, Beirut
The level of excitement is so much higher when a flight feels like it’s landing in the centre of a city as opposed to the suburbs. Low over the Mediterranean, the initial impression is that one is still high among the stars, until there is the realization that one is lower than the buildings, millions of tiny lights dotting Beirut’s mountainsides, some so close you can see families sitting around their television screens.
Today troubled me. I travelled all over southern Lebanon and saw some amazing sights and met some lovely people. I tramped in 40°C around the Temple of Bacchus, but was offered Hezbollah t-shirts outside it. I was welcomed into the homes of goat farmers, cheese makers and za’atar farmers, but stopped at more heavily armed checkpoints than you can shake a stick at. But I did watch Grace, a beautiful eighty-year-old draining the whey from her sheep’s cheese in ancient amphorae, as she has done for the last seventy years, her hands smoother than mine, telling me in Arabic, ‘As long as I go away loving her a little, she will be happy.’ The extraordinary paradox of the world we live in.
Five beautiful moments of this day:
Watching hundreds of storks flying slowly in V-shaped patterns along the Beqaa Valley against a hazy blue sky.
Crushing sun-drying bulbs of purple sumac in my hands, releasing their sweet scent, while remembering snoozing under the sumac tree at The Beeches.
Wandering around Baalbec, the ancient city stronghold of the Shia Hezbollah movement, home of the Temple of Bacchus, one of the grandest Roman temples in the world. Half an hour running around with my Leica wasn’t not long enough.
Sharing fresh labneh, figs and Arabic coffee with the family of Grace, from generations of cheese makers, and her shepherds. Travelling up into Mount Lebanon to meet their goats and the sheep with ‘fatty tails’.
Tasting the oil of za’atar, an extremely intense essential oil, so strong it hurt my tongue with just a drop on my fingertip; the deeply tanned, charming and laid-back herbalist Abu Mohammed, sitting in a huge mound of drying rosemary and lavender, with Arabic coffee and za’atar water, a ‘medicine for everything’!
Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 September
Lebanon
Beirut, heading north into the mountains in search of za’atar and sumac, honey and wine and all things fine.
Dawn rises over an orange and brown smog that seems to permanently envelope Beirut, dawn to dusk. The sun sets an hour earlier, not even reaching the horizon, the smog is so chokingly dense. It’s Wednesday morning and I’m exhausted and physically broken though I can’t help smiling as I follow a pair of hand-holding identical twins onto the plane. Matching pink shoes, pink dresses and rucksacks. Their only difference, for their parents maybe, is one wears pink spectacles, one wears blue.
I feel deflated after Lebanon and desperate to get home. Last night, feeling poorly, I sat sweatily on my hotel balcony on the twenty-fourth floor, watching the chaotic city going through various shades of Blade Runner hues as the sun faded as opposed to set.
Lebanon is not a huge country but so utterly chaotic and shambolic and disorganized that more time was spent in fear for my life on the half-built roads than wandering its ruins and villages. The Temple of Bacchus will remain a vivid memory, as will spending time high, high in the mountainous cedars and thistles with the beekeepers harvesting their honey, and the kindly and gentle za’atar growers, but I won’t miss the countryside, its beauty under threat from corruption, building and mining, and abandonment and an ever-increasing and constant ‘hedgerow’ of plastic filth. Taking a landscape photograph was nigh on impossible without the backlit sparkle of shattered glass and the silhouettes of broken cars and bicycle frames.
I suppose India is the nearest I’ve been to a country of such contrasts, chaos and constant hint of danger. Standing in streets in the Hezbollah strongholds towards Syria and to the south of Lebanon with the posters of AK47s and ayatollahs and ‘the martyrs’ of war, the only European for days, I definitely got the feeling I was being observed. Being told it was dangerous to be carrying ‘any form of camera or recording equipment’, I did have to question why I was there. I travelled light, with no laptop, so haven’t loaded the images yet and, jeepers, I hope it was worth the stress to the old ticker!
Wednesday 5 September
Evening. Home
A week shooting with Meera Sodha in London
The flight was delayed by two hours due to ‘naval operations off the coast of Syria and the firing of missiles by the Russian Navy’, not an excuse you wish to hear just before take-off. I probably shouldn’t have gone straight from such a stressful flight to a shoot in North London, but Meera Sodha is such an uplifting and inspiring food writer that I just managed to hold it together, fuelled by milky tea and a constant supply of beautiful ingredients like figs and fragola grapes to launch into the air and catch in my awaiting bouche.
Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 September
Shooting at home, the wonderful world of eggs, with lovely stylist Pip
I’ve been trying to face reading the transcripts of the operation John endured on 27 August but I can’t do it. Mother is right, there’s no need for me to read the dispassionate account of dissection and rebuilding of poor Johnny. The doctors could barely manage to describe what they were going to do so our dear mother understood. John listened, understood a little, but quite understandably failed to grasp the scale of the operation about to be performed. The surgeons did give John one choice to make, over the ‘entry point’ of the operation: it could go either through the side of the face, creating a huge scar, but potentially an easier route to the brain; or through the ‘non-scarring’ option, which sounds barbaric: to enter the face through the mouth, above his top teeth and up through the area behind his nose to the base of the brain. John and I spoke about it a few times and a scar-free option was chosen, though neither of us could really grapple with the logistics. He was just keen to get a move on as his double vision was upsetting him and his right side, particularly his right arm, was losing more and more feeling. Both of us had never been more scared or out of control in all our lives, but there was nothing we could do other than try to be positive. The twenty-seventh would be our longest day.
Sunday 9 September
Train from Paddington to Bodmin, Cornwall
Seeing dear Mother this morning with Ange, she was on such sparky form that I decided not to ask for any more details about that day. Conversations covered included my trip to Heliopolis, the sumac tree at The Beeches, Brexit and ‘that buffoon Boris’, the importance of honeybees, and, very briefly and in her gentle manner, the reasoning behind me not reading the medical/surgical records.
‘The longest day’ was extraordinary in that we had so little control, so little news; it was but an elongated blur of inactivity. Ian and I sat together watching movies and playing snooker, fed and watered by a fussing Molly, not wanting to leave The Beeches in case t
he phone rang bringing news. The operation lasted for three uneaten meals, cooked by Molly, three barely watched movies including, inexplicably, Platoon, luckily with the music on silent, at least twenty games of pool and ten of snooker, many pots of tea, several bars of chocolate, a bottle of red wine, and the cricket highlights. It was evening when the phone eventually rang, Mother telling us that ‘the operation had been long, but had gone as well as expected and that John was unconscious and in Intensive Care’.
Monday 10 September
Rock, Cornwall
Shooting Nathan Outlaw in Port Isaac
When I first saw John in Intensive Care, attached to all the tubes, drips, drains, monitors and wires, he resembled a victim of a front-on collision, his beautiful and still tanned face bruised and battered and swollen. Ten or twelve hours of pulling his face apart and removing the tumour had, apparently, been successful. There had been some frights but, according to his consultant, he was as good as could be expected.
Several weeks later, sitting under the damson tree in the late-summer sun, I asked John of his first memories post-operation and was surprised to hear that he had ‘come to’ between the operation and Intensive Care. He said that he’d felt okay. One minute he had been having his preoperative injections, the next he was coming to on a fast-moving hospital gurney, trundling along, looking up at passing strip lights. He said he had realized things weren’t quite all rosy when he saw the faces of the surgeons around him, their eyes of alarm. He remembered the rubberized smell of a mask and then nothing. Thankfully, much of Intensive Care was a forgotten blur after that.
I tried not to cry in front of him, but at times I barely made it to the ward door. The first time I saw him I cried for two hours, sitting on a bench on Wimbledon Common, hoping that my tear ducts would be dry by the time I saw Johnny. He cried every time I saw him for two or three weeks, frustrated by how awful he felt. He had expected a return of movement in his right-hand side, but if anything it was worse, and his vision was still ‘crossed’. Plus, of course he had the mother of all headaches. Alarmingly, his teeth in his upper jaw and the upper jaw bone wobbled and seemed to be unattached and loose, which the doctors couldn’t explain to me, just saying ‘it will get better’. It did, slowly, and there were now long talks of weeks and weeks of intensive rehabilitation, physiotherapy for his right side, a possible operation on his sight at a later date. Also, for the first time, there was talk of radiotherapy to ‘knock off tiny traces of the tumour left behind in the midbrain cavity’. And with that his fate was sealed.