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THE BOY WHO NEVER GREW OLD
As an authority on JM Barrie, Andrew Birkin wanted his
son to grow up a poet like the real-life inspiration for
Peter Pan. When Anno Birkin blossomed into an exceptional
creative force, his father's wishes were granted - until
tragedy struck in a cruel echo of the past. By Jessamy Calkin.
Photograph of Andrew Birkin and Thomas the cat by Gautier
DeBlonde. Photograph of Anno by his mother, Bee Gilbert,
in April 1998.
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In
February of this year, a little club called West One
Four in West London hosted an unusual event: the posthumous
launch of a CD by a band called Kicks Joy Darkness.
The evening was also a tribute to a 20 year old musician
and writer called Anno Birkin, who died in a car crash
with two other members of his band on the freeway
outside Milan in November 2001. As the evening unfolds,
some of his extraordinary poems, both visceral and
delicate, are read in fits and starts by friends,
family and admirers, including Hayley Mills, the writer
Bruce Robinson, and actor Ian Holm. There is some
live footage of the band and a video projection of
Anno's aunt, the singer Jane Birkin, reading one of
his poems. About 100 people are there, including his
brothers David and Ned, and some of his cousins, and
the actress Milla Jovovich, one of Anno's greatest
loves. The event has been organised by his mother,
photographer and writer/producer Bee Gilbert, and
his father, Andrew Birkin. Tall and thin, handsome
in a ghoulish way, Birkin is waving his arms around,
directing operations, dancing like a wayward spider.
Film maker, writer, anarchist, alchemist, archivist
and intellectual, Andrew Birkin is an obsessive man
whose life has been redefined by the death of his
son. He's an eccentric and talented man, a film maker
of high repute and low profile, a sought after script
writer, and the world's foremost expert on J M Barrie
and Peter Pan. He is probably best known for
his film The Cement Garden, and most recently
he has been adapting the book Perfume for the
producer Bernd Eichinger. But for the last 18 months
his world has been taken over by something else: creating
a monument to his son, Anno: collating all the music
and words he ever wrote, every photo of Anno, putting
out a CD and getting his poems published. This total
immersion is typical of Birkin - when he wrote a script
about Napoleon he read 88 books in six months; more
than just an expression of grief, he says, it is a
way of coming to know his son, of researching every
facet of his short life, of creating a new form of
biography.
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Anno
in 2000, photographed by his cousin
Kate Barry |
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Anno
was born in London on December 9, 1980, on Andrew's
birthday, which was also the day that John Lennon died.
("When I arrived at the hospital and saw all the
long faces, I though Bee must have had a miscarriage,"
says Andrew laconically.) When Anno was two, the family
moved to Wales, to an old abandoned farmhouse on the
Lleyn peninsula, a place so remote that at night there
were no other specks of light visible anywhere on the
horizon. It was never meant to be a permanent home,
says Andrew, who has always thought of himself as having
no fixed abode, but nonetheless he has lived there ever
since, although Bee (from whom he has now separated)
lives in London. The farmhouse – in a glorious
place, looking out over fields and hills, there is a
stream and horses, a wood – is like a gothic museum.
A native Welshman called Ken has been doing it up for
nearly 20 years now.
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Around the main house is a collection of outbuildings,
containing Andrew's laboratory, his wine cellar, a recording
studio, an art room. There is Ned's toy museum, the
children's library, which resides in a gallery above
the chapel/cinema - a screening room with a lectern
above ("I
raided a church for the furniture") - and some original
photos of J M Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies brothers who
were the inspiration for Peter Pan. It was here that
Andrew showed Anno the film The Bicycle Thief when
he was 17, and was moved when Anno, who'd been so quiet
throughout that Andrew thought he'd fallen asleep, burst
into tears and ran up the nearby mountain. It was the same
mountain from which Andrew fired Anno's ashes into the sky
in a rocket, three years later. Next to the screening room
is Andrew's library, which houses his 8,000 books, one wall
of which is dedicated to Napoleon. In another building,
through a trapdoor and down some stone steps, lies the wine
cellar which, as well as bottles of 1808 Madiera, 1914 Yquem
and 1945 Lafite, contains the ephemera of bottles previously
drunk - little bunches of petrified grapes, and their corresponding
corks, the seals from the bottles. It is, says Andrew, the
closest he's ever come to keeping a diary. In an outbuilding
next to the cellar is his laboratory, built when his son
Ned dropped out of school due to dyslexia and Andrew decided
to teach him chemistry, physics and biology. It is a beautiful
place, a laboratory out of Gormenghast; stone floors
and wooden shelving on which perch a stuffed fox, bottled
specimens (a lobster in a jar bears the words "Do Not
Eat - Ned"), and the walls are lined with a myriad
of glass bottles and jars - Hydrogen, Sodium, Neon, Argon,
Krypton, Gallium. It is like poetry. There is Niobium, Zirconium,
Germanium, bunsen burners and petri dishes in which Andrew
knocks up a few impressive experiments, an alchemist in
his lair, extolling the virtues of certain properties with
real love in his voice. Plastic models of clusters of molecules
hang from the ceiling - "That's Vitamin B12, that's
ecstasy..." says Andrew, pointing to them. He loves
chemistry. When he met his girlfriend Karen a couple of
years ago, the clincher for him was not her remarkable beauty
but the fact that she had done chemistry A-level. Opposite
the cellar is Anno's original recording studio which has
been turned into the HQ for the Anno archive, and it has
become the beating heart of Andrew's life. Here, for the
last 14 months, he has been cataloguing his son's work -
collecting, sorting, sifting, transferring, transcribing.
All Anno's poems - or his words as he used to call them
– his songs, everything he ever recorded. Thousands
of photos of Anno since he was a baby, all scanned onto
computer. Film and video of him throughout his life; box
files of his schoolbooks line the shelves (Holland Park:
French and Mathematics, Malibu High: English), files labelled
"To be Sorted" and one called "Everything
Else". CDs, cassettes, DATs, computers, photos of Anno
on the walls: Anno with blonde hair, dark hair, long hair,
short hair. Anno in a mask, in a hat. A magazine picture
of Milla Jovovich with Anno's handwriting scrawled across
it: "In my heart she will burn like a lie for life
/ Like a scar, she's for life..."
| What
is he going to do with this meticulous archive of
his son's lost life? He is releasing the CD, and is
publishing a selection of Anno's poems,
but there is clearly more to it than that. He rolls
a cigarette thoughtfully, it is as skinny as he is.
"Given the fact that I can't put the clock back,
I've learnt so much from him, and by going through
all his poetry, all his thoughts, he's taught me as
much - if not more - than I ever taught him."
Later I hear something similar from Ian Warwick, Anno's
English teacher who became his mentor and friend, and who now teaches the teachers of gifted children.
"I learned easily as much from Anno as I taught
him," he says, "and I can't think of another
student of whom that is the case." Birkin's friends
are united in thinking that it's something he's got
to do - after all, it's not out of character. We are
talking about a dedicated and solitary man. It's just
the way he is. When he was 20 and all his friends
were out partying, he went and camped out on Lundy
Island for three months and wrote a script of Jude
the Obscure, living on Pro Plus and Weetabix.
"Whatever gets you through the night," says
Bruce Robinson, his friend of thirty years. "That's
how he's getting through his night. Andrew's a very
obsessive man; he's either obsessing about mathematics
or Napoleon and now he's obsessing about his dead
son. And that's a place I can't go with him. I adored
Anno, I've known him since he was born and I've seen
him grow up. Andrew's coped with his death as a project,
he's coped with it in a creative way even though what
he's done doesn't immediately strike you as a work
of art; he's used what he knows - his creative ability
and his research skills - to survive. I can well imagine
that most |
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Top:
Anno Birkin with his mother, Bee Gilbert, in 1982.
Above: Anno, aged 7, at the farmhouse in
Wales with his brother Ned, 3, and cousin Lou
Doillon. |
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people,
myself included, would have been too devastated to do anything
constructive, but out of the tragedy he has made ... well,
there's no gravestone for Anno, but there's an enormous memorial,
isn't there?"
* * *
Andrew
Birkin likes to talk, and he often takes a long time to
get to the point, though he gets to it in the end, usually
via a dissertation which might involve a mad mathematician
called Kurt Gödel and his Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle, Michael Faraday's maths, non-maths,
irrational numbers and degrees of infinity. Napoleon is
likely to come into the conversation more often than not,
and he may well touch on quantum mechanics, non-locality
and dark energy. Sooner or later he'll get round to answering
the question. But whatever we talk about, the conversation
invariably comes back to rest on Anno. When we talk about
the finality of death for example, Birkin says: "When
it comes to this kind of phenomena - and I have to be careful
here not to sound like I know a lot about science, because
I don't, I just skim the surface - but everything I've come
across in quantum mechanics leads me to suppose that life
and death is simply one way of looking at something, and
that there is another way which is non-reducable, which
cannot be articulated mathematically. And when it comes
to life and death (and there are those, of whom I was formerly
one - an atheist - who would put themselves very squarely
in the set of knowing that death is the end) the reality
is that we cannot possibly know. Cardinal Newman wrote that
death is a horizon, and what is a horizon but the limit
of our sight?" "He's an exceptional man,"
says Bruce Robinson. "I find him utterly fascinating,
yet exasperating - one of the most exciting blokes
I've ever met - he's all of those things. I am one of the
few people who can say 'Shut up, who gives a fuck about
Schroedinger's fucking theory.' We laugh about it. He knows
I'm always on his side."
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| Andrew's
laboratory, which he built for his son Ned's science
lessons after Ned dropped out of school. Photo:
Gautier DeBlonde |
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Birkin
was born in 1945, the son of actress Judy Campbell and
ex-SOE member David Birkin, and brought up on a farm
on the Wiltshire/Berkshire border with his younger sisters
Jane and Linda. "The interesting thing about the
Birkins," says his schoolfriend, the actor Simon
Williams, "is that all their brilliance and eccentricity
seems to stem from an incredibly tight family unit,
and however they arrived at being who they are, it all
comes from the fact that they absolutely adore each
other." Jane Birkin remembers their childhood as
an idyllic time. "I don't think we ever got over
it," she says. They were all three at boarding
school but the holidays were "miraculous. We had
our fun like savages; we'd get on our bikes at dawn
and be gone for the day. We had an eccentric and wild
childhood which was what I tried to recreate for my
own daughters. If Andrew could find an abandoned house
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were in
it. I was very lucky to have such an adventurous brother because
I was always rather safe - he was the chief and Linda and
I were his lieutenants, standing guard and whistling should
anyone come along." Andrew went to Harrow where he didn't
deliberately set out to break rules, he was just oblivious
to them. Williams remembers him as "the most exhilarating
person I've ever known. He was dangerous, funny - he was just
better than most people. I remember being in the sanatorium
with him, sitting there on our antibiotics taking turns to
play the Paul Scofield part in A Man for All Seasons.
He knew all the dialogue." When Winston Churchill was
due to make an appearance at the school and cancelled because
he had a temperature, Birkin sold the story of his illness
to the Evening Standard in order to buy his first film camera.
His father was appalled at such behaviour and persuaded him
to give the money to charity - then bought him the camera
anyway. "We made a little film which was really designed
to accommodate my attraction to his sister Jane and his attraction
to my sister Polly," says Williams, "but it was
just an excuse to do a lot of running about and snogging really.
I think there still exists about 20 minutes of completely
superfluous footage of me and Jane kissing on Battersea Park
boating lake which Andrew then very sweetly agreed to re-shoot."
Andrew is only a year older than Jane, and Bruce Robinson
thinks of them as the masculine/feminine versions of each
other. "They have a real beauty about them. Well, Andrew
looks like something the cat brought in now - he's the worst
dressed man in England - but when he was young he was very
handsome. He has an astonishing sense of self, but no vanity
about that self." Birkin's first job was in the mail
room in 20th Century Fox, and his first major revelation was
working on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrick was his mentor, who took a delight in educating him
cinematically. As a teenager, Birkin was never obsessed with
sex, he was obsessed with love. "I was profoundly in
love, from the age of 15 to 21, with the same girl [Hayley
Mills], who wisely left me for an older man. By that stage
I was working on 2001 and my love for her became a
great love for cinema." Sitting in the Kalahari desert
he wrote his first film script. Birkin has always been a nocturnal
creature with an appetite for the darker classics: Huysmans,
Maldoror, Tarkovsky. Bruce Robinson used to nickname him The
Embalmer, because of his general demeanour and habit of getting
up with the setting sun. "When I first met him he had
somehow purloined a whole section of his sister's three-tiered
wedding cake and he lived off wedding cake, coffee and cigarettes.
And he sometimes used to turn up with a live sheep in his
car. It was his pet, it lived in the car and came out and
fucked about then went back in there..."
In 1968
Birkin worked on Kubrick's aborted Napoleon (which
spawned his lasting adoration of Napoleon; 20 years later
he wrote his own script which got shelved after Gerard Depardieu
made his own version for French TV. It sank without trace
and Andrew is confident that his own will re-surface). In
the 70s he wrote screenplays for
David Puttnam, including Inside the Third Reich which
he spent two years researching
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with Albert Speer. For various reasons, this film never
saw the light of day, and Birkin's next big project
was The Lost Boys, an exquisite and beautifully
written five hour trilogy for the BBC, telling the story
of J M Barrie and the five Llewelyn Davies boys who
were the inspiration for Peter Pan. Birkin had
first become intrigued by Barrie when he had the job
of co-adapting the story for an American musical. Mia
Farrow was playing Peter and Birkin fell in love with
her and made himself into a Barrie expert in order "to
stay in her orbit". He developed this into an outline
for The Lost Boys and then his researcher tracked
down the last survivng Llewelyn Davies brother, Nico,
with whom Birkin exchanged 600 letters, and he discovered
a wealth of material. The film, which became a book
– J M Barrie & the Lost Boys –
starred Ian Holm as Barrie, and Holm's partner Bee Gilbert
subsequently became Andrew's for 20 years and the mother
of Anno and Ned. Birkin continued to write screenplays
and made a brilliant short film, Sredni Vashtar,
which won the BAFTA award and got an Oscar nomination,
wrote and directed The Burning Secret, and wrote
the screenplay for The Name of the Rose. He is
probably best known for his 1992 project The Cement
Garden, from the book by Ian McEwan, which won him
Best Director at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival. It was
the last film he directed. He has always said he would
prefer the company of an intelligent child to directing
Faye Dunaway, any day, and he just wanted to be with
his children in Wales. And in the same way that Barrie
dedicated his life playing with the Llewllyn Davies
boys, |
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| Andrew
(cast as a monk) and Anno in 1984, during the
making of The Name of the Rose |
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photographing
them, recording what they said in notebooks, so too did Birkin
with his children and their cousins and friends. Ned and Anno
mostly grew up in Wales, sometimes joined by their half brother
David (Andrew's oldest son by a previous relationship) and
it was there too that all their cousins would often congregate
in the holidays - Jane's three daughters Kate, Charlotte and
Lou, and Linda's three sons George, Henry and Jack. Much of
Ken's work back then was to build tree houses and other contraptions
for the children. And in the middle of it all would be Andrew
playing with them, madly. When he was seven, Anno wrote a
poem:
My Papa
is so tall and thin
He dos not have a dubble chin
His hear is black and getting grey
He dose not see a lot of day
he sits and rits all through the night
and dose not like the site of lite.
He likes to play like a child
And really is very wild
We have adventures all the time
I'm really very glad he's mine.
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| Anno
and Ned with one of Ned's lizards (1990) |
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It
must have been something, growing up in this magical
place, with a father like that. "If there is such
a thing as reincarnation, I'd like to come back as one
of Andrew Birkin's children," says Simon Williams.
Jane warmly remembers summers in Wales with everyone
racing around in the middle of the night on wild adventures,
led by Andrew, having mud fights, water fights, playing
Manhunt, which involved being chased through the woods
- Andrew still plays that at 57. Bruce Robinson marvels
at Birkin's rapport with children. "He's a sophisticated
intellect, and always has been, but at the same time
he can make gear shifts that I can't make, wherein he
can be perfectly comfortable with kids at their level
of functioning and do what they do - you know, rushing
off to the woods with flashlights, whereas I'd rather
be sitting in front of the fire with a bottle of red."
In Andrew's films of Anno playing with his cousins,
there is always Bee's voice in the background, intoning:
"That's enough now," and then "Be careful
now..." And then, "Stop before someone gets
hurt!" "You can often hear her saying that,"
says Andrew, smiling. "While I would just carry
on filming." Bee was the voice of reason, the one
with the blankets and the hot bath after the midnight
games. Andrew was more reckless. It is hard to separate
the real Anno from his father's vision of him, but talking
to anyone who knew him you can hear their voices break
under the weight of their anguish at losing him. "He
was like light," says Jane simply, "in that
if he came anywhere near you, you felt better. He had
very wide arms that he used to hug you with, and everyone
remembers his hugs, and everyone remembers that he always
had time for them. |
And his
time was very precious, but we didn't know exactly how precious."
"I have both your madnesses inside me," Anno wrote
in Close to the River, of his parents. "I am in
constant disagreement with myself ..." This is the poem
that Jane is currently reading on her world tour, Arabesque.
"He seems to have conjured up in just a few words what
every adolescent feels," she says, "and how most
of us have forgotten what that feeling's like. I don't think
I'm being over sentimental. I think he had something very
great in him." It is true that his poems have a wonderful
type of rhythm and an evocative resonance which is very sophisticated
for a boy of his age:
She
drew me my dreams, and with ease she unrumpled
a mind convoluted and crumpled
that was mine then but now is for none save the one
who shall someday receive me completely.
So with eyes to the floor I stand, sorry and sore,
and I long for that sleep to defeat me,
so the whole world may breathe me as you did so easily,
silent in moments of knowing. ... Anno
was 18 when he wrote that. Andrew had heard his music
and read lots of his lyrics, but it wasn't until after
Anno's death that his words emerged in notebooks and
on scraps of paper, everywhere. "He was exceptional,"
says Ian Warwick, who now works with gifted children.
"He was always two steps ahead, and he was way
wiser than his years. As a writer myself, I used to
look at his words and think, My God, I wish I could
write like this." "He was a serious talent,"
agrees Bruce Robinson, "there's no question about
it - there was a proper poet emerging there, if not
already emerged. His poetry is very sophisticated
and it has tremendous signature. He was the sweetest
man. And he's gone." |
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| Anno
in 1996, aged 15, with his English teacher Ian
Warwick (left) |
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* * *
Andrew
had always hoped that one of his sons would be a poet. In
his introduction to the new Yale edition of J M Barrie
& The Lost Boys, he writes: "My son Anno was
born on my birthday in 1980. As he and his brothers grew up,
I came to experience first hand the joys that Barrie had so
longed for - "my boys". I secretly wished that one
of them would be a Michael - the poet among the five Davies
brothers - but as a boy, Anno seemed much more like George,
with lashings of Nico's humour. Then, around his 15th birthday,
a sort of miracle occurred, and Anno suddenly blossomed into
a poet and musician of great originality."
The figure of Michael has become almost totemic in Birkin's
life. Barrie had been besotted with the entire Llewelyn Davies
family, and when the boys' parents died he adopted them and
paid for their education, but Michael had always been his
favourite. In May 1921, Michael, by this time at Oxford, went
bathing in the river Thames and drowned. He was one month
short of his 21st birthday. Barrie heard the news from a reporter,
and was thrown into a slough of despair from which he would
never completely emerge. "What happened was in a way
the end of me," he wrote to Michael's tutor, "and
practically anything may be forgiven me now." Michael's
death had a profound effect on everyone who knew him. "I
am sure if he had lived he would have been one of the remarkable
people of his generation," wrote Lytton Strachey to Ottoline
Morrell. "The uselessness of things is hideous and intolerable."
Michael was buried in Hampstead cemetry. Eighty years later,
Andrew went there to find his grave. That day was the last
that he saw Anno alive. Anno went off to Amsterdam with his
brother Ned, then to Venice with Milla, and then to Milan
with his band to record their first album. Hours before his
death, Andrew spoke to him on the phone for a long time, and
was struck by how happy he sounded. At the end of the conversation,
Anno said: "We'll see what the morrow brings," which
had been Andrew's father's last words before he died nine
years ago. Anno and the rest of the band – Alberto, Lee
and Billy – went out to dinner, where Anno sat writing
a poem on a napkin, which he then - oddly - entrusted to Billy,
who had decided not to to accompany them to the club they
were going on to because
he had a headache. They were driving in thick fog on the autostrada
outside Milan.
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| Kicks
Joy Darkness in July 2001. L to R: Anno, Billy,
Lee and Alberto |
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Alberto - completely sober - was at the wheel and Anno
was asleep in the back with Lee, when their car went
into the back of a lorry which had earlier been involved
in another accident. No one had cleared the first car
off the road, and in swerving to avoid it, their car
hit the lorry. Anno, Lee, Alberto and a friend, Giorgio,
were killed instantly. Anno was one month short of his
21st birthday. The driver of the car who caused the
original accident had fallen asleep, Andrew later learned,
and is now being prosecuted by the Italian authorities.
Andrew has posted the following message on the KicksJoyDarkness
website: "As Anno's dad I have no real interest
in who was at fault ... the man who fell asleep has
the
rest of his life to live. So if anyone in Italy knows
the driver involved, be so kind as to pass on this message:
it could so easily have been me at the wheel, and your
son on the back seat." |
Andrew had just returned from a camping trip to Scotland (he
had been to the island of Eilean Shona, where Barrie had spent
his last summer with Michael in 1920) when Alberto's mother
called him with the news. When Andrew phoned Bee in London,
she cried "Not Anno, Not Anno ..." because she was
always more worried about Anno than the others. He went straight
to her flat in Iverna Court, and shortly afterwards to Italy
with his sons David and Ned, and they went to visit Anno in
the mortuary and saw that he'd cut all his hair off, shaved
it to the bone before he died. They had some time alone with
him and Andrew had Anno's hands cast in plaster by the man
who cast Toscanini's hands – and he has them now, in
his sitting room in Wales, in a little shrine. Andrew had
brought some of Bee's hair to put next to Anno's skin, under
his shirt, in the coffin, and they also put in his front door
keys, a penny (for the ferryman - and a pound in case the
price had gone up) and a very big joint. (When Andrew opened
the ashes later - and it was no easy task, you're not allowed
to scatter ashes in Italy, so the box was lead-lined and doubly
sealed - he found the penny still there, everything else gone.)
Bee remained in London. "She couldn't have come,"
says Andrew. "She made it through in a different way.
There was a constant stream of people at Iverna Court, it
was open house: Bee's friends, Anno's friends, all being very
supportive. Bee was ... perfect, but she's different from
me, in some ways enviably so. I would like to be the sort
of person who needed to just close my eyes and feel the hands
in the darkness; as it was, I was the one with the tin opener
having to open the lead-lined box ..." He brought the
ashes back to London and later Billy came back, bringing with
him Anno's precious notebooks and his guitar. "That was
the thing that completely broke me and Bee up," says
Andrew. "Not the ashes, the guitar. Anno had travelled
everywhere with that guitar. That was the howl of grief."
"I never, ever again want to see anything as terrible,
as sad, as his parents at that time," says Jane. "They
were so generous with Anno - flinging open their house, his
recording studio, his words, his ashes, his everything - to
his friends and cousins. Andrew and Bee have been so impeccable,
you feel they are doing it the way Anno would like it."
Jane no longer calls Anno her nephew. "I call him my
brother's son, so as not to ever, ever pull his light or his
glory onto me. He was theirs, he was theirs. And the sadness
is theirs."
Ten days after Anno's death, Andrew returned to Wales along
with about 80 people - Anno's half brother Barnaby Holm from
LA, his half sister Lissy, his friends and cousins, his Milla
and his Honeysuckle - the two girls he had loved most at various
times – and Ken built a huge bonfire and they let off
20 huge rockets, the biggest you can get. Then Andrew took
the nose-cone off the 21st rocket and put in a great wad of
Anno's ashes and fired it from the top of the little mountain.
"It was a cloudy evening except for a patch of sky that
suddenly cleared to reveal a single star, and the rocket took
off in the direction of this one star, and suddenly it burst
over the Irish sea - it was extraordinary. And we could hear
a great wave of sound coming up the mountain -- a huge cheer
from all the people round the bonfire." Anno's ashes
have now been scattered all over the world by his family and
friends.
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| Anno
and his brother David in April 2001, photographed
by their grandmother, Judy Birkin |
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They
have been thrown from a coral reef in the Indian Ocean,
off the coast of Kenya, into the Pacific, the Nile,
off Kiwayu. They are under a chestnut tree in France
and by a stream in the Luxulyan Valley in Cornwall,
and they grow through the roots of a silver birch tree
that Bee planted for him in her garden. "By his
side," she writes tenderly on the memorial page
of the KjD website, "is a maple tree for dear Alberto
and a prickly holly for the prodigal Lee..." Later,
a year after his death, she has added: "365 days
and not one when I didn't think of you, my darling Anno."
Not long after the rocket ceremony was Andrew's birthday
– December 9 – which would also have been
Anno's 21st, and there was another gathering of friends
and family in London, and Andrew opened a jeroboam of
1982 Beychevelle. "To say that it was wonderful
is the wrong adjective. I don't think there is an adjective
that describes that occasion in one word ..." he
says now. Shortly after that he was anxious to start
"rescuing Anno's stuff." He and Ken retrieved
hundreds of bits of paper and notebooks and cassettes
from Wales and London and collected them all together
and Andrew's work had begun. He spent months collating
the music and the words, putting stuff onto the website
with Nao, one of Anno's friends, selecting and transferring |
music
onto CD,
copyrighting everything, choosing poetry with Ian to anthologise
into a book. There were 57 recorded songs, 20 hours of mini
discs, over 1,200 poems and lyrics. The cataloguing alone
ran to 1,000 pages. It is, he says, the most concentrated
work he's ever done ("except possibly Napoleon, which
was the training for it"). For
a year he didn't see a film or watch TV. "It was every
waking hour, and I was on the telephone a lot - to Ned and
David, Bee, Milla - but because I was surrounded by all the
material up here, I didn't feel the loss, the separation,
perhaps as greatly as they did, because they immediately had
to get on with their own lives." Jane asked, "Do
you miss him?" and Andrew said, "He's with me all
the time, he's on my shoulder." An entry on the KJD website
from Andrew reads: "At 4 am this morning I transcribed
the last of Anno's words from the vast amount he left behind.
I was dreading the moment, and secretly hoping it might have
some special significance." This
is what he found:
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My whole life hangs tonight – like water –
swelling to the final drip.
My grip on nature fumbles – as I
stumble backwards – over rhetoric & rhyme.
The rumble in my heart could uproot heaven,
and all their ghostly judgement is like air –
is naught at all.
The dust that is my body shall be
one dust once – again –
with all things, not soon... not soon enough –
Ring the bells of murder –
Jesus sleeps –– in every one of you.
Wake!
Wake sweet prince & sing!
Fill
the avenues – with laughter.
Scream your words of
goodness in my ear –
let me hear – what I have done.
I seek just closeness with my fellow man.
|
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| Anno
in 2001: a passport 'self-portrait'. |
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In some
ways, Andrew says now, it will never be finished. "I
just keep finding Anno and discovering more about him every
day." If it had been another of his sons, he says, it
might have been harder to bear, because they wouldn't have
left all this creative archive behind. He sympathises deeply
with Alberto's mother, who only had about eight photos of
her son. Andrew, by contrast, has so many hours of film and
video footage of Anno and his brothers that it would take
him three months to watch it all, 24 hours a day, seven days
a week. He acknowledges that the awesome scope of technology
available to everybody has enabled all this archiving (he
has never, for example, so much as kept a diary himself).
The KjD website stands as the most extraordinarily moving
tribute to his son and the band, a kind of living gravestone.
But
now that it's kind of finished, and the CD is coming out,
and the poetry will be published, he can return to one of
his unfinished projects: J M Barrie. (He bequeathed all
his royalties from the TV film and the book to Great Ormond
Street Hospital but still has a wealth of research material,
which will be auctioned on behalf of the hospital next year
to buy incubators in Anno's memory). He has always felt
that his relationship with Barrie is not yet over. He's
got a producer, he's got a title, he's got a story and he
recently wrote the first ten pages. He's even got the beginnings
of a cast – he wouldn't consider anyone else but Ian
Holm for the role of JMB, and he recently met someone he
thought could play Michael. Anno, whom he once considered
for the role, always felt that his father shouldn't make
another Barrie film unless he had something new to say.
In his introduction to the reissued book, Andrew writes:
"I don't remember reading Peter Pan to Anno
or his brothers. I don't think he ever saw The Lost Boys,
or read the book. He didn't need to. Whether I make another
Barrie film remains to be seen, but yes Anno, I do have
something new to say."
* * * * *
Who Said The Race Is Over? by Anno Birkin - a selection
of poems with Introductions by Bruce Robinson and Ian Warwick - is published by Laurentic Wave Machine @£8, and is available through bookshops or via this link at Amazon.co.uk. All royalties go to Anno's Africa.
Dreams of Waking by Kicks joy Darkness, with a bonus
CD of Anno's earlier songs, is distributed by Cargo in the
UK and is available through record shops or via this direct link at Amazon.co.uk @ £12.99. All royalties go to Anno's Africa.
J M Barrie & the Lost Boys is published by Yale University
Press (reviews). Author's royalties donated to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. The website is at www.jmbarrie.co.uk.
The Lost Boys - Birkin's award-winning BBC trilogy - is available on DVD, both in the UK and USA. Author's royalties donated to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. (reviews).
View/download Sredni Vashtar (350k, 28 min)
Copyright
© 2003: Jessamy Calkin & the Telegraph Magazine.
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