My friend John Vernon

This is a very personal piece about my friendship with John Vernon who died on July 7^th 2012. It was written in the weeks immediately after his passing away. John was a loyal friend, and is sorely missed.

John has left us. I heard last night. This morning I didn’t go to work, but put on Elgar. That’s who we listened to in his study at St Lawrence College in the autumn term of 1976. We were both studying for the Oxbridge exams. The music went with the falling leaves, as John wrote in his memoirs¹.

‘The dry summer was broken by torrential rain in September. I looked out of my study window at a large, storm tossed horse chestnut tree, listening to Elgar’s late music – the Cello Concerto, Sting Quartet and Piano Quartet. The autumnal view and the elegiac Elgar music formed a perfect whole, and an indelible memory.’

We had first met in the fourth form. My hair was long, his was short; I smoked, he didn’t; I loved David Bowie, I wasn’t sure he’d heard of him. John was a prep school boy - proper, polite, and sensible. He didn’t like me when we first met:

‘There was one boy in my class I disliked and avoided: a rather wild and intemperate boy from Grange House called Tom Hawksley. He had even worse acne spots than me, and eluded the barber more successfully. He would lash people with his tongue, taking pride in swearing and using shocking words. He made clear he was a smoker…Tom was obsessed with David Bowie and would scream out the songs of Ziggy Stardust in the school corridors.’

We shouldn’t have become friends; but we did. It began with competition. John was much brighter than me, especially in Maths and Science. If he’d done the sciences in the sixth form, he would probably just be another vague name from my school years. But he chose History, English, and Geography, the same as me. So as I could string a few sentences together and hold my own in most arguments we found ourselves vying for the top spot, especially in history. There were only four of us in the class, so we weren’t exactly surrounded by competition.

‘Every week we strived for a higher mark. I say ‘we’, but the only competition that counted in this were myself and Tom Hawksley. He was the only intellectual challenger.’

In my sixth form years John was everywhere: leaning against the radiator waiting outside the English Literature classroom, opposite me in that classroom reading aloud Hamlet, Othello, G.M. Hopkins (Thou mastering me God), and edgy e.e. cummings. We were together in the Scott library during free periods writing endless notes. In the evenings I would often climb the four or five sets of stairs to visit him in his clean and civilised study at the top of the school. I will never forget him once in that study, sitting behind his desk describing the excitement of raising his ink pen over a clean, untouched piece of paper. At the week-ends we would often be together in the same pub, usually the Ellington Arms. That’s the pub John remembered:

‘At the Ellington Arms we sat around and had animated conversations, heightened by the exciting sense of breaking the rules. People like ‘Toj’ (real name Michael Winter, see below) and Tom Hawksley formed this group. Girls from other schools joined us.’

We edited the School Magazine; and the Poetry Magazine, with plenty of very good contributions from John. He was a fine poet. We organised debates, threw ourselves into the house drama. And at the start of our second year in the VI form in October 1975 we were thrown together in grief when our History master Patrick McFarlane, a diabetic, suddenly died.

‘Tom Hawksley and I were stunned. Our mentor had disappeared from our lives. We consoled each other in Tom’s study and I cried at his funeral.’

John and I were also librarians. I don’t remember much of what we actually did – but I certainly remember this scene described in his memoirs:

One year I was so incensed by the list of over 200 library books missing that I stormed into the dining hall and slammed the list down in front of the Headmaster, Mr Harris, and shouted, ‘Two hundred library books missing!’’

He really did shout. The whole school, eating their lunch and talking loudly, fell silent and looked up, and there was John, red faced, standing over the headmaster.

The Headmaster just quietly said, ‘Come to my study after the meal’, and calmly went on eating, though there was an awkward and electric atmosphere around the high table’.

I had no idea of what all the drama was about. I just knew that John had shouted at the headmaster in front of the whole school. He had to be in trouble. Well, it would be something to talk about as I made my way after the meal to the Green Lats² where the smokers gathered. But as soon as the meal finished, John was in front of me telling me I had to go and see the headmaster with him – because I was a librarian. As John explains here, it was, as I knew, really to shelter him.

My self-righteousness had cooled, and I knew moral support was needed. I asked Tom Hawksley to come with me, which he gamely did. With two of us visiting the Headmaster’s study, surely I received less of a rocket than if I had gone there on my own.’

At St Lawrence we even fell in love with the same girl. She was pretty, vivacious, and along with other girls from a neighbouring school, she shared all our classes. But I never knew this till thirty six years later when he sent me a draft of his memoirs. John was gracious.

‘Tom rapidly fell in love with a girl, very friendly and energetic, always smiling in social situations. Tom confessed his love to me, but I was also falling in love with her. He was more pushy…I knew that particular race was lost, but it did not block our friendship. Indeed sharing confidences cemented our friendship’

John though soon had a girl-friend. They met at one of those inter-school discos

‘We danced closely and I suddenly switched on some previously little used charm. So I took the initiative and I got myself a ‘girlfriend’. The key to getting a girlfriend is not to kiss, but to get her phone number...’

We didn’t go back to St Lawrence much, but about three years ago John encouraged me to go with him to the Old Lawrentian dinner, saying rather dramatically, but in all seriousness, that it might be his last chance as he was thinking of having stem cell replacement treatment. This has a 60% death rate. He drove us down in his comfortable Volvo, and as it was autumn, he put on Elgar. Before going to the school we walked around Ramsgate and ended up at a tacky café on the way down to the harbour. I found it all rather depressing – just as, in truth, some of my school days had been. The only encouragement that afternoon came when I went to check on what had happened to the flea pit cinema I sometimes went to. The building was now a church. As for the Ellington Arms, we drove slowly up and down the dark narrow streets in vain. It’s gone.

During the drinks before the dinner both John and I spent some time chatting with John Binfield. Apart from the white hair he was much the same: witty and playful, but as he had been thirty years ago, always slightly reserved. At the dinner we sat with Andrew Winter, not so much our friend, but the brother of Michael Winter whom we were both close to. John remembers Mike with respect in his memoirs about his school days:

‘Mike Winter was somewhat unusual to me. He seemed older and more independent than the rest of his year. He had a laid back, intelligent, and sophisticated air. He smoked a lot, had a great sense of humour and seemed much wiser than me’

The dinner with Andrew spurred John and I to meet up with Mike that Christmas. He was still smoking, and had that laid back, intelligent, and sophisticated air. Thirty odd years had passed, but it was an easy, enjoyable, and interesting afternoon of talking.

The speech at that dinner was dire. So much so that John then persuaded the President of the OL Society to invite my brother Humphrey in his capacity as a well known BBC journalist to come the next year to be the speaker. Humphrey obliged, and his speech was a great success. Before Humphrey got up, Nick Marchant the OL President had some fun and read out all the prizes John had won at the school. Nearly all of them.

Our Oxford journey began together. John Binfield, sent us both up to St Edmund Hall, I think in the summer term of 76, to visit his old tutor, Reggie Alton . I remember we looked round the library, and then in the professor’s study either I or John was told off for generalising. John had better memories:

‘Reggie was friendly and welcoming. He talked about Anglo Saxon as a requirement on the English course and pointed out that Ethelred the ‘Unready’ meant ‘the ill advised.’ This kind of esoteric knowledge appealed to me.’

The connection was made, and John ended up going to Teddy Hall to read English Literature. I got into Balliol to read History.

At Oxford John’s Christian faith, always sort of there at St Lawrence, flourished. I had become a Christian after leaving school, so now this drew us closer together. We would see each other at the Oxford Christian Union meetings on Saturday evening, and then often on Sunday morning at St Aldates. Later John’s faith faded, but I will never forget his joyful and optimistic face when he visited me one October afternoon in Balliol after spending some time with the mission group Operation Mobilisation. Our studies now weren’t in the same buildings, but, especially when we were both living in our colleges we often dropped in on each other, as he did that afternoon, probably about once a week. I think he enjoyed the buzz of the Balliol JCR, though he was never taken in for a moment by some of the champagne socialism that dribbled around there.

John was with me and other friends when I first saw Oxford’s hostel for homeless men, Simon House. We were both shaken a bit by the ‘wet’ end where those still drinking could stay. And unnerved by Johnny Tosh, a young Irish drunk, who drew pictures of the devil on the wall. I think John visited a few more times, I ended up working there for a couple of years after university.

Though I fell in love once at Oxford, it all stayed firmly in my mind. I believed I was meant to go abroad on Christian mission work, so there was no point in starting anything romantic. John though had three different girl-friends at Oxford: delightful, charming, and all highly intelligent ladies. But even though I was single and John was attached, this made no difference to our friendship at all.

At school, at university, and we were often together in the holidays: so many memories. At Glebe Farm, Sternfield, John in the drawing room lying back in one of those long reclining arm chairs, always reading. And very long talks on the landing above the kitchen when his Christian faith wavered after he’d been travelling with a girl in Italy. John on the beach at Thorpeness, refusing to let me use his towel, which was in fact a Hawksley towel. At 2 The Rest Aldeburgh, enjoying an intense discussion with my sister in law’s mother about Charles 1^st. He came another time with a group of friends to help me decorate the flat, and stayed on for my baptism at Aldeburgh Baptist Church.

John in London – going to see Othello. We were both disappointed. The play was better in our minds. John came up to the holiday home. ‘Banks’ in Westmorland. A lonely house in the hills. Again it was reading and walking. Peter Geddes joined us there, and so after Banks we went and stayed with his parents in Burrow in Furness. About three years later Philip was murdered by the IRA bomb in Harrods. He joined the Daily Mail and was going there for the story. John was very angry. A young talented life taken, an old couple numbed by the loss of their only son. Many years later John went alone to visit Oxford and attend an annual lecture in Phil’s memory.

I once stayed with John in a little cottage in Kent. Again walking and reading. And often I went to stay in his parents’ house in Beckenham. A good group of friends gathered there just after Oxbridge for a dinner party. It was a lot of fun, but we knew one thing was ending, another starting. This is how John puts it in his memoirs –

‘After the meal everyone left in a car. I waved them goodbye in the street, and pretended to run after them. It was more than a pretence.’

After Oxford, separation. I went to Pakistan, John went to Japan. But we kept in touch by hand written letters – on the thin paper for airmail. But Japan, and then banking were worlds I never shared; and Pakistan and Christian mission wasn’t really John’s worlds. So when we both found ourselves back in the home counties at the end of the eighties, it could have just been another meet up with an old friend, and then we’d have drifted apart. But the bonding from our school and university days was too strong. So probably about every month or so we’d get together, usually for a drink, sometimes family parties, occasionally a play or concert in London. I remember seeing ‘The Madness of George III’ with him at the National, which we both thought was brilliant. We saw Henry IV Part One at the Globe. I had forgotten how vulgar Shakespeare could be. There was Mahler’s First in Guildford Cathedral. And most recently we met at St Martin’s for some and Bach and Handel. Afterwards we walked to my parked car via Lancaster House. We wandered in, enjoying the space and fountains in the middle of the noise of the city. John was determined to enjoy every moment of life that came his way.

John always joined a few of us at my brother’s club, The Travellers, for dinner and robust argument. At the first one a few years ago my brother, Humphrey, and John clashed over the role of the IMF in Argentina. John’s language, under the grand chandeliers of the dining room was what footballers call, ‘industrial’. The drama was wonderful: John intense, analytical, and heated; Humphrey provocative, enjoying the duel, and always ready with a witty riposte. When these dinners started John’s health was a concern, but for the last two he was struggling, indeed the last one was after two bouts of chemo. Humphrey generously made sure John didn’t have to pay his share.

Writing about his school days John wrote, ‘Books, and the knowledge that gushed from them, were my passion.’ The passion never died. He was always reading about six books at the same time. For the last few years he’d been sending out ‘Read Any Good Books Recently’, reviews of this reading. There are nineteen titles on the list for ‘up to September 2011’, some of them re-reads. The list has Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’ and Frank McLynn’s ‘Napoleon’, over 900 and 600 pages respectively. As well as Bleak house there are two other novels there, Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Penelopiad’ and Amis’ ‘House of Meetings’, but the rest are history, philosophy (Popper and Descartes), and six titles on Christianity, three by C.S. Lewis whom John admired. There was also a review of Philip Larkin’s ‘High Windows’ (Miserable git?) and a review of Paul Omerod’s ‘The Death of Economics’. John doesn’t seem that impressed with Economics – ‘I have had sincere doubts through most of my life about what Economics can achieve’. I don’t think he had such doubts about Mathematics. He loved the purity of numbers, their inability to spin or persuade.

I was not able to share any of his delight in numbers, and am uneasy with philosophy (mortals claiming to know how we should see the world). John though did join in one of my summer email discussions ‘Philosophy is usually useless and sometimes evil’. He didn’t really approve of my hostility to the subject and was quite certain I should try and read some Popper.

Our shared love was history. He had a great interest in the Anglo Saxons. He loved Emma, the Queen who brings together Vikings and Normans and Anglo Saxons. He strongly protested against my general argument that as imperialism generally did more good than bad, so the Norman Conquest was probably a good thing for England. He dismissed this completely, and always referred to the Normans as uncouth thugs. Such was his interest in the Anglo Saxons that he started to write a novel based on the Battle of Maldon, and this interest gave us an excuse to visit Suffolk together a few years ago. We stayed with my brother Jeremy and sister in law Caro in Framlingham – plenty of Tudor history and lively discussion there. And on our last day we set out to London via Sutton Hoo and then we went to the site of the Battle of Maldon, and finally, as the light was fading, we found the small ancient church that commemorates the Anglo Saxons who fell in that battle. John read their names by the light of his mobile phone.

There was also a plan to visit lots of cathedrals together. I know John visited some with his father. We made it to Canterbury together. By now the shadow of John’s sickness was growing larger, and I remember as we knelt together and John heard the familiar words of the communion liturgy in that most beautiful of buildings he shed tears. We went up to receive the sacraments from the Archbishop. After the service we met up with Katie Cox, a good old friend from our St Lawrence days, also remembered in John’s memoirs of his school days, when describing a night out:

‘We visited the house of a particularly lively and gregarious girl called Katie Cox. She played Faure’s ‘Requiem’ to us on her dad’s hi fi. At Katie’s house I remember a rather wild party, this one fuelled with lashings of alcohol…’

Thirty odd years later Katie was just as lively and gregarious as ever and John and I enjoyed her company. We wandered the Canterbury streets, and then drove over to Whistable for lunch and a walk along the beach. About a year or so later we met up with Katie and her friend Simon at Tonbridge. As always, John had worked out the best pub to visit. He was particular about beers. It was in a small village. A perfect day. We were looking forward to meeting up again. It was not to be.

John wasn’t really into sport, but as I started to enthuse about the long bike rides I was doing and he became interested. He said he’d enjoyed cycling as a boy. Eventually he got his bike into working order, and we met up in Shere and enjoyed a great ride in the Surrey countryside. A few weeks later we met up in Guildford for another ride. When John got out of his car, he was walking stiffly and complained about the arthritic pain attacking his legs. He still tried to get on his bike, but it was impossible. So we decided to walk up St Martha’s hill. The ascent was fine. But John slowed down dramatically during the descent. To have a coffee afterwards we stopped very near a café in Shamley Green and John could only walk with his hand on my shoulder. He somehow drove himself home to Purley.

About a year and half earlier he had had the opportunity of having a stem transplant to sort out the disorder in his bone marrow. But the doctors refused to change the grim odds. If he signed up for the operation he had a 60% chance of dying. Then he was feeling pretty good. Why sign your own execution papers? So he didn’t have the operation, hoping to be able to have it before the blood disease transmuted into leukaemia, as was its wont. With hindsight we should all have screamed at him that this arthritis meant his body was going haywire and it was time for that operation. But the dear old NHS didn’t join up the dots. As I understood what was going on, I might be wrong, they tried to diagnose the arthritis separately from the blood disease. John spent hours enduring the shifting pain of the arthritic attacks, sometimes it was his legs, sometimes it was his hands, so bad he couldn’t put on his trousers or clean his teeth. And he endured hours of having tests done.

In the autumn he was admitted to hospital and the cancer was found in his balls. His stoicism with a slight smile was very much in evidence as he described how the morning after the very painful investigation, he and his private parts were on show for the morning round of the female consultant and her students. Much of the rest of John’s life was now to be in hospital, mainly at King’s on Denmark Road.

When he was well enough he wrote very precise ‘Tweets’. John gave us his medical situation in a couple of lines:

Dec 2nd: The diagnosis is Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. The treatment is heavy Chemotherapy. Starting any day now. Probably in here for 5 weeks, min.

Dec 20th. I am Neutropaenic, meaning lacking in white blood cells and neutrophils that fight infection. Current problem is an inflamed throat.

And his suffering

Dec 10th Problem: Coughing and lack of sleep has been a continued torture, though slept a bit in the early hours. Seem to be improving.

May 7th Since plagued by a variety of minor issues: difficulty sleeping, itchy/tender skin, back pains (kidneys?), urological and rectal pains

His love of literature remained to the end. Shakespeare comforted him –

Dec 10th Whoever Shakespeare was (John believed the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays), he imagined and expressed human suffering with compassion and profundity. Read 'King Lear'

April 29th Listened to 'Romeo and Juliet' on the radio last night. A beautiful, profound, sad and superb play. Perfect.

And a line from Eliot that had got caught in his mind as a teenager, re-appeared. Remembering his school days John wrote,

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock seemed to speak straight to our adolescent confusion…

Let us go then you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table…

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michaelangelo

This was adult poetry. This was important stuff. This was Wisdom – though curiously contradictory wisdom. I strode through the ‘spinney’ from my room to the classrooms, with this catchy poetry ringing in my head.

Few of us thought the line for John would finally appear like this:

Dec 29th In the Ward the nurses come and go, Talking of fluid flow.

John also painted watercolours in hospital. He used his plastic pill pots for the different colours. One painting was like a cathedral stained glass window, full of pictures of Bible stories. He was very pleased with it. When I visited him he let me take my time naming all the stories.

We didn’t talk much about ultimate things during this time. In his head John saw his suffering as random chance; but in his heart I think he also knew there was another journey going on, hence the painting of Bible scenes.

Once the ultimate issue was mentioned in his tweets.

April 6th The WiFi log-in says 'Buy time'. Where can one buy time? I will pay any price.

More time wasn’t for sale, and what was left went very quickly. I was travelling for three weeks in June when the remission ended and the leukaemia returned. When I returned, on a very bad mobile line, John momentarily lost his usual stoic composure and wept as he told me that the doctors had said he only had two weeks to live.

Mojdeh kindly came with me to King’s on the Wednesday evening. The room was small and stuffy and John, thin and bald, was in pain. He used the word torture. Atsuko, brave as always, was there. She had visited John nearly every day since he had been admitted to hospital back in the autumn. John’s father, Peter was also there. John’s humour was still around. At one point he didn’t think his catheter was working properly, so his father got onto his knees to fiddle with the tube and soon the urine was flowing well. John peered at it and said, ‘We should try and have a urine race with some other patients.’

I had bought a book of Gerald Manley Hopkin’s poetry John had given me for my birthday in 1978. John had some water and a few bites of bread and then I asked if he would like me to read some, ‘Sounds good’ he said. So I read him ‘The Windhover’ –

I caught this morning’s morning minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple- dawn-drawn Falcon, in his

riding

And God’s Grandeur – ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God…’

After about half an hour, for different reasons Atsuko and Peter left the room. Mojdeh and I knew we would soon be leaving, so I asked if John would like to pray. As always during his sickness when I asked this, he said yes. I said a short prayer, saying we didn’t understand and only brought our tears to God, trusting He knew best. We then said the Lord’s Prayer and The Grace together. John said ‘Amen’.

There had been talk of John moving to a hospice that week-end, so as I left I said, ‘John, I’ll be seeing you again’. And that was the plan. But he left us on the Saturday.

I still wonder though – almost every day – whether I will see John again.

There was standing room only at the funeral. John’s daughter, Erica, spoke poignantly, saying that as John left the world, ‘our small family of three, became two.’ John’s father spoke with great dignity. He took us through John’s life, his love of family, friends, books and life and ended very fittingly with that line from Hamlet:

‘Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’

Before the hearse arrived, I had seen John’s business friend Clem walking towards the chapel and went to greet him. He was very warm and emotional. And he said something that perhaps explains why I feel as I do. Clem said, ‘John of course had Graham as his younger brother, but he always considered you Tom as his other brother.’

1 John sent me his draft memoirs about his school days about a year ago.

2 The older part of the main toilet block where the doors of the lavatories were green.