David Loftus on the pain of being a lone twin
After losing his identical twin 30 years ago, David Loftus tells Peter Stanford about the struggle of being a lone twin
‘Ididn’t kill John, but I was part of the process that killed him, and I live with that every day.” David Loftus says this very calmly, but his words still make the room stand still. The death of his identical twin 30 years ago, this award-winning photographer acknowledges, remains the seminal event in his adult life. It is why, since the start of the year, he has been spending an hour each day, “putting myself through the mill”, writing down his memories of the two of them together and reflecting on the deep emptiness he has felt since his death. He hopes it might even make a book. He already has the title – The Diary of a Lone Twin – and since he mentioned the project on social media a few weeks ago, he has had publishers lining up to talk to him.
We are meeting in Loftus’s eclectic mews house in south-west London. This gentle, self-effacing 55-year-old has been a successful photographer for the past three decades, but he’s best known for his long-running collaboration with Jamie Oliver, providing the sumptuous photographs for the chef ’s bestselling cook books.
On the painted floor in front of us is a carefully arranged – and, no doubt, very expensive – range of handpainted ceramic tableware, waiting for his camera to find its best angle. But the shot will have to wait. Today, all he wants to do is think about John.
The identical Loftus twins were the oldest of four siblings. They grew up in prosperous Carshalton Beeches in south London where their mother was a GP. “John was the oldest… by 10 minutes,” he laughs. “That was always very important to him.”
As young boys, they dressed in matching clothes and communicated in their own invented shared language. On their fourth birthday, David remembers, on a visit to a busy harbour they were given special spotty handkerchiefs to wave at the big ships. When David dropped his into the water by accident, John immediately threw his in after it in an act of unconscious solidarity. The two were still living side by side, at the family home, when they were in their 20s.
“We had tried as teenagers to be different,” David pleads. “John taught himself to write with his left hand. We had different hair lengths and different fashion sense. He liked classical and choral music and Ennio Morricone, so I hated them but, of course, now that is what I listen to all the time.”
Both chose to do graphic design at art college. David opted for Chelsea but John picked Kingston and had a year off. “He was on Paros, a Greek island, on his own and I sensed that something was wrong. There were no mobiles in those days, so I went to find him. He was in a tent and in a terrible state. He just burst into tears when I arrived. He couldn’t bear being alone and made me promise there and then to never to go travelling without him.”
On graduating, they worked as an inseparable pair – John as a designer and David as an illustrator. The two brothers had been opening their presents on the morning of their 25th birthdays, October 31 1987, when everything would change.
Over the previous two months, John had been successfully treated for a brain tumour, but had then contracted meningitis. He was on the mend, and was down to go for a routine injection at the hospital. David went with him to his appointment.
“The doctor who came to give it to him we’d already had a disagreement with,” recalls David. “When I saw him, I told him he couldn’t give John the injection, but he explained there was no one else available. So I accepted that, and let him go ahead.”
The doctor then proceeded to inject John, directly into his brain, with a dose of the drug gentamicin that was 90 times stronger than the recommended limit. Almost immediately John threw up violently. Soon he was in a coma. Twelve days later, he was dead.
“My mother,” David says almost casually, “believes if she had been there, John wouldn’t have died. She was a GP and would have refused.”
The doctor who gave the injection never faced any sanctions because it was officially deemed a terrible accident. But David says he will never stop feeling guilty. “I have beaten myself up about that moment when I said yes,” he says. “My mother was telling the truth. That is one of the things I am having to confront in writing this book.”
Suicide is common amongst lone twins, especially those in their 20s. There were times, David admits, when he would sit on the back of his houseboat, “look into dark water and think, ‘I could just drift off ’.”
What kept him going was his anger at what had happened, and being there for his grieving mother. But his brother’s death continued to affect everything he did. “Illustration is a solo job. I couldn’t do it after John’s death. I needed to be with people, but in my early photographs, without even knowing it, I was still doing everything in pairs. If I was photographing flowers for Gardens Illustrated, I never shot one. It was always two, and they were entwined.”
Two years after John’s death, David was introduced to someone who could really understand the emotional struggle that he was going through – Tim Knatchbull.
“Tim needs David, and David needs Tim,” a friend of both their families told David’s mother, “so let’s introduce them and see how it goes.”
Like David, Tim had lost his identical twin, Nicholas, in 1979 when the IRA blew up the boat carrying their grandfather, Lord Mountbatten, and his family on a fishing trip off the coast of County Sligo in Ireland. “We became best friends, brothers and then godfathers to each other’s children. I see him every week. His mother used to introduce us to people by explaining, ‘they’re both twins’.”
The bond with Tim, he says, is built on “understanding that broken DNA pathway from when an identical twin dies. It is something that we feel is impossible for what we refer to as ‘singletons’ – people who aren’t identical twins – to comprehend.”
Even future happy events, like having children of his own, were clouded by the loss of his twin. “For a long time,” David reflects, “it was very hard to have children, to consider that you will love them as much as you loved your twin.”
Aren’t they two different kinds of love? “It’s a tough one to explain…” He pauses. “And I’m not sure if I can… the feeling is of being empty. Always. There is something gone. It doesn’t go away.” And it is still there today, he says, in the everyday details of life. “Shaving for me is really strange. I don’t tend to look in mirrors generally, so shaving is always hard.”
It is hard, he says, to look at his reflection and not see his brother. “I was recently persuaded to take part in a TV programme,” he explains. “When it came out, I only saw him. I didn’t see myself at all. I was doing the gestures I thought only he did, and my voice sounded just like John’s rather than how I thought of mine. I couldn’t cope.”
It is clear that the feelings he has now are as raw they were 30 years ago. Why then exacerbate the emptiness by delving back into such heartbreaking memories for his writing project?
Because, he suggests, he no longer feels so alone. He recently remarried, to the stylist Ange Morris. “She is,” he says simply, and redemptively, “the love of my life. She will ask me the right questions at the right time, is fascinated by John, and is very supportive of my writing. She is the only one who has read it so far. Once it is all out, if I could be on a desert island with my kids, my mum and Ange, I think I might be truly happy.” lonetwinnetwork.org.uk
‘I needed to be with people – without knowing it I’d do everything in pairs’