My handsome, brave (and very jammy) older brother made life seem effortless. To him death was a bore, a fleeting phase. His final soothing words to me were: See you on the other side...: QUENTIN LETTS
Drizzle was falling on an English cathedral city as a 62-year-old contemplated his terminal cancer diagnosis.
Drizzle was falling on an English cathedral city as a 62-year-old contemplated his terminal cancer diagnosis.
After a few glasses of wine-bar hock he was tottering homewards when he saw a notice for cathedral evensong. He slipped inside the vast, medieval church and chose a discreet pew.
The cathedral choir was practising the Nunc Dimittis. His imagination started to run.
The Nunc, as musicians call it, is the canticle about Simeon, an old man in 1st century BC Jerusalem who is told by an angel that he will not die until he has seen the Messiah.
The years pass. One day a young couple from Nazareth bring their baby to the temple. Simeon lifts the child into his arms and realises this is the Messiah.
The harder truth is that his own life will now end. Simeon accepts this. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, he says, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.
Simeon was the first fatalist of the Christian age. You could even call him the first Christian.
Quentins jammy brother Alexander Letts back in 1996
A 1971 shot of the Letts siblings, left to right, Quentin, Alexander, Penny and Melinda
What sort of man was he? How could he accept death so equably?
That drizzly cathedral city scene opens my short new novel NUNC!. The book is, I hope, a cheerful read.
It tries to sketch King Herods Jerusalem and it is intended to make people smile; but writing it I shed the odd tear. While the Englishman of the book is a fictitious figure he is based on my millionaire brother. Alexander would have been 66 last week.
Jammy. That was one word for him. Four years older than I, he made life seem effortless.
He was handsome and clever all his days. He was a school prefect, head chorister, a natural games player. In 1978 he swanned up to Oxford university with a classics exhibition which he mislaid after a year because he was having too good a time.
And yet he left with a good degree and made a fortune in advertising, fintech and banking.
At Oxford he won a half-blue for fives. He skied like Franz Klammer, batted like David Gower, tanned like a hazelnut and drove convertible sports cars that tousled his hair.
In the early days he had a Triumph Spitfire and an MG. After selling one business he bought a new Aston Martin. What a machine that was. He drove it well: fast but responsibly.
As his chubby, plodding under-strapper I watched all this and was thrilled. Fraternal rivalry is said to be a thing but I never knew it. To be Alexanders younger brother was to have a direct line to stardom.
I revelled in his success. He was good to me. At school play-times he looked after me. When I had a problem he sorted things out one way or another.
Before his 34-year marriage his girlfriends included the James Bond actress Katie Rabett and Robert Maxwells daughter Ghislaine, now languishing in prison
in America for sex trafficking. Twenty-something Ghislaine was intelligent and beautiful. She was sweet to people less fortunate than herself. Ghislaine had a vulnerable side. She would worry about her frocks being not quite right. She was daunted by her demanding father.
But there was nothing unkind about Ghislaine. I find the things said about her in recent years impossible to believe. As for Alexander, he was, on the face of it, a golden playboy. Except playboy suggests arrogance. Playboys do not work hard, as he did, or keep an eye on their smelly little brothers. I prefer to think of him as one of Lucks princelings, ushered to the front of fates queue because of his sunny temperament.
But what could my glamorous, jammy brother – he happily used that word against himself – have in common with the prophet Simeon?
To answer that it is necessary to start not with his drawn-out death from cancer in 2021 but to reach back to the 1960s. Alexander and I shared a bedroom at our childhood home.
Alexander holding his grandson, Ludo Letts, in 2021
Wed spend hours there playing games: Subbuteo, draughts, LAttaque. A godparent gave us a chemistry set and we nearly set fire to the carpet.
Alexander had a miniature traction engine. To make its steam you had to boil water using inflammable meths. Its a wonder we didnt burn down the house.
We were impish. Alexander had an air rifle and we shot at the voluminous knickers on our neighbours washing line.
On skiing holidays, at chair lifts, he taught me the art of queue-barging.
His escapades did not always succeed. As an undergraduate he ventured into the Oxfordshire countryside to borrow a sheep which he intended to shut inside his colleges quadrangle.
He thought it would be amusing if the Master, Lord Goodman, a rotund political fixer from the Harold Wilson years, came down to breakfast to find a ruminant mowing the grass. Instead the Oxfordshire sheep eluded Alexanders grasp and he ended flat on his handsome face in ewe droppings. He laughed for days.
Back to our childhood bedroom. Rudyard Kiplings poem If hung on the wall.
On the bookshelf, alongside the Rider Haggard yarns and Alistair Maclean novels, was a Childrens Bible.
It had large, colour drawings of Biblical scenes. One showed Moses leading the Israelites through the parted Red Sea, beached fish gasping on wet rocks. In another the Queen of Sheba, a ringer for Liz Taylor, met King Solomon.
And in St Lukes Gospel there was a drawing of that moment at the temple in Jerusalem when Simeon held the infant Jesus in his arms. I was always gripped by the story of the Nunc Dimittis but never imagined how starkly its truths would hit home half a century later.
Again, the years passed. My brother and I tended to see each other a few times a year. He was busy building businesses. We both had growing families, in his case four fine sons.
We lived a hundred miles apart yet Alexander was always there if I needed advice. If I was dithering about some work dilemma he would give me the necessary prod.
When our father died in 2010 it was Alexander who was with him when he breathed his last. When our sister Penny died of cancer in 2017 it was Alexander and my other sister, Melinda, who saw to the doleful admin that follows any death.
After selling his insurance-technology firm he started an internet bank in Sheffield. He reckoned there was a business opening and a social need for a bank that served the under-privileged. Investor-wise it was a hard sell and the venture brought a torrent of stresses. Those hassles did nothing for his health. Yet he maintained his usual breezy ways.
When he and his wife moved to Northamptonshire he started another enterprise, this time in healthcare. Always such dizzying drive. Always such optimism.
And then, during the Covid lockdown, he telephoned and asked me to switch to a video call.
There was something he wanted to say face to face. Instantly I knew it was bad news. I fired up my iPad and there Alexander was on the screen, leaning against the worktop of his sunlit kitchen.
At 61 he looked as fit and successful as ever.
No way of telling you this easily, Q, he said lightly. Ive got cancer. He spent the rest of the call trying to make sure I was not upset.
The tumours spread. A specialist confirmed that the illness was terminal. Alexander died 12 months later.
So much for his jammy fortune. And yet that painful last year was in some ways his greatest achievement. At first he threw himself into a vortex of gym exercises and dietary discipline. The doctors told him he was the fittest cancer patient they had known. Not that it was going to make any difference.
Alexander refused to dabble in self-pity, even when the National Health Service did its worst. Examinations by Zoom are no substitute for proper care. The cancer had been spotted too late.
He was told he would die within a week unless an operation removed a blockage from his guts.
Youll need a Covid test first, said some jobsworth. How quickly could the test happen? Ten days. He pointed out that he did not have that long.
Hospital bureaucrats refused to bend their protocols until the local MP, Dame Andrea Leadsom, gave them a rocket. When people ask me to clap for the NHS
all I can think of is the administrative inertia my desperately ill brother encountered.
We drove to Northamptonshire to see him. No hugs. To comply with medical rules we had to keep a distance. We walked round his courtyard garden. The news is not encouraging, said Alexander, almost apologetic.
It must have been draining for him always to have to be the one holding things together.
As we drove away I saw him at his front door, waving goodbye. A damson tree was starting to blossom. I wondered if he would be dead by the time it fruited.
His resilience was remarkable. The damson did fruit and he was still with us. I sent him some strong Bendicks peppermints. They were the first thing he had been able to taste for months. Then Ludo arrived. His first grandchild. We have a photograph of him holding little Ludo. Alexanders hair was now grey and his face was bruised by exhaustion but he wore his jammy smile.
I stare at that photograph often. It is as if he has breasted the winners tape.
Things changed after that. His emails were still buoyant but the insistent determination faded. He no longer had anything to prove.
There is a phrase in Hebrew, ldor vdor, which Simeon would have known. It means from generation to generation and it expresses the belief that life continues in the way we observe our family traditions and our culture.
My brother was not a particularly religious man. I dont suppose he thought of the Nunc Dimittis when he held Ludo in his arms that day; but the echoes of Simeon whacked me in the solar plexus. That moment from our Childrens Bible had come full circle.
He threw a farewell party in his Northamptonshire courtyard. I drank too much rosé and burst into tears. Alexander took me to one side and told me to straighten my spine and cease this blubbing.
Death was a bore but it was only a fleeting phase and soon would be done. He was, if anything, curious about it. His final words to me that day were a soothing see you on the other side.
Back home I wrote him a letter – words are always easier on a page – and thanked him for being a wonderful brother. He rang me and started saying what the letter had meant to him.
After a few words his voice failed. The emotion had proved too much. He put down the telephone and that was the last I heard from him.
Kiplings If exhorts us to treat those impostors Triumph and Disaster just the same. Alexander did that. Like Simeon he understood that we are but links in a chain.
If you find yourself near a cathedral when evensong is about to start, drop in and listen to the Nunc Dimittis. Simeons song, like my big, brave, indomitable brother, has much to teach us.
NUNC! by Quentin Letts (Constable, £18.99) is published 3 April. © Quentin Letts 2025. To order a copy for £17.09 (offer valid to 12/04/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.