Dear Harry,
I woke in the middle of the night with the urge to pee and that old English euphemism rattling around in what’s left of my brain: Spend a penny. As in “I need to spend a penny.”
I wonder if the phrase is still current, now that its context has been long forgotten? We used to have those pay toilets—I hope they don’t have them any more!—where you had to put a penny in the slot to gain admittance. Pennies, of course, were not today’s little things, they were ridiculously huge pieces of hardware, and weighed at least a hundred times their monetary value. A “pocketful of change” would weigh your trousers down and jangle loudly when you walked. That’s when there were, sensibly, twelve pennies to the shilling (a much smaller coin) and twenty shillings to the pound. There wasn't even a pound coin.
Now they’ve gone and spoiled everything, of course.
With love, your son,
Peter
Saturday, July 31, 2021
Friday, July 30, 2021
30 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
Is this not strange? My birthday comes up in a couple of days and here I am recalling what I know about that day. The actual day. The first one ever.
My mention of dance classes in my last entry reminds me that you were capable of remarkable and penetratig insights into the workings of the the human mind. I have written about this before in another context, but the story belongs, too, in these letters that I’m writing.
We attended dance classes every week in Bedford, Flora and I. It was something children of a certain class were frequently expected to do—more about social poise and posture, I suspect, than about dance, but there.
Which was fine, except that little Peter soon showed an aversion to the skipping rope, a simple prop that was used all the time in dance class. I began to howl whenever one was produced—a matter of some concern and perhaps a little bit of shame to my parents, and a distraction to everyone in the class.
What to do? Drawing on the knowledge of psychology you gained in your Cambridge days, you called me one day into your study for one of those serious father-son talks that surely shaped my life. On this occasion I found you sitting in the armchair by the fire with a skipping rope laid across your knees.
Reassuring me from my initial jolt of fear, you told me the story of my birth: how I was a blue baby, born with the umbilical caught around my neck; how I could have died at birth, but for the swift action of Mrs. Gates, the midwife, who seized a pair of scissors and cat through the cord in time to let me catch my first breath.
And crucially, as you were telling me this story, you took the skipping rope and placed it around my neck, tightening it gently from both ends until I felt the squeeze; and showed me there was nothing more to fear, that what had happened, happened long ago, and I was saved; that I had no need to cry any more when I saw a skipping rope in class.
I think back to this insight and, particularly, your action, and see that it was far in advance of its time. It was, as I say, remarkable, perhaps a little risky, except that you had the confidence that it was the right thing to do.
You were right, of course. I never cried at a skipping rope again. But I had reason to remember the story many, many years later, when asked in a group training session whether there could be some message from the moment of my birth that could be standing between me and my freedom as a writer; and if so, what that message might be. And I heard myself utter what seemed like the strangest of all words: I have no right to be here. And found myself laughing hysterically, crying, too… because I realized quite suddenly that those words were absolutely true.
So, Harry, father, wise man, thank you for the insight.
Ever your son, Peter
Is this not strange? My birthday comes up in a couple of days and here I am recalling what I know about that day. The actual day. The first one ever.
My mention of dance classes in my last entry reminds me that you were capable of remarkable and penetratig insights into the workings of the the human mind. I have written about this before in another context, but the story belongs, too, in these letters that I’m writing.
We attended dance classes every week in Bedford, Flora and I. It was something children of a certain class were frequently expected to do—more about social poise and posture, I suspect, than about dance, but there.
Which was fine, except that little Peter soon showed an aversion to the skipping rope, a simple prop that was used all the time in dance class. I began to howl whenever one was produced—a matter of some concern and perhaps a little bit of shame to my parents, and a distraction to everyone in the class.
What to do? Drawing on the knowledge of psychology you gained in your Cambridge days, you called me one day into your study for one of those serious father-son talks that surely shaped my life. On this occasion I found you sitting in the armchair by the fire with a skipping rope laid across your knees.
Reassuring me from my initial jolt of fear, you told me the story of my birth: how I was a blue baby, born with the umbilical caught around my neck; how I could have died at birth, but for the swift action of Mrs. Gates, the midwife, who seized a pair of scissors and cat through the cord in time to let me catch my first breath.
And crucially, as you were telling me this story, you took the skipping rope and placed it around my neck, tightening it gently from both ends until I felt the squeeze; and showed me there was nothing more to fear, that what had happened, happened long ago, and I was saved; that I had no need to cry any more when I saw a skipping rope in class.
I think back to this insight and, particularly, your action, and see that it was far in advance of its time. It was, as I say, remarkable, perhaps a little risky, except that you had the confidence that it was the right thing to do.
You were right, of course. I never cried at a skipping rope again. But I had reason to remember the story many, many years later, when asked in a group training session whether there could be some message from the moment of my birth that could be standing between me and my freedom as a writer; and if so, what that message might be. And I heard myself utter what seemed like the strangest of all words: I have no right to be here. And found myself laughing hysterically, crying, too… because I realized quite suddenly that those words were absolutely true.
So, Harry, father, wise man, thank you for the insight.
Ever your son, Peter
Thursday, July 29, 2021
29 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I don’t know what made you decide to start the Rectory nursery school. Perhaps the local schools were suffering from lack of funds, or even closed during the war years. But you and Peggy got together with a handful of like-minded local parents and offered the Rectory drawing room as a classroom for a P.N.E.U. school. I remember that acronym.
Odd, isn’t it, the things that do get stuck in your mind? I still remember for example, eighty years later, the license plate number of your first car, the Austin 10 that brought us down from Newcastle to Aspley Guise before the war: it was GTN209. The TN, you always liked to remind us, were the letters particularly assigned to Newcastle-on-Tyne, TN being short for the river Tyne. You were always very proud of being a Geordie, a born Tyne-sider, and you’ll be pleased to know that I inherited that pride. I, too, still tell anyone who might be interested that I’m a Geordie, even though I haven’t seen the Tyne or visited the city in years. Well, decades.
Aside from Flora and myself, there were Charles and Caroline Allen, whose father was later knighted Sir Kenneth for his services to industry. (Many years later I appeared in white tie and tails, on the front cover of the high society magazine The Tatler with Caroline—a distinction of which Peggy was particularly proud!) There was Elizabeth Brown, whose father was an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, and Hillary (I forget her last name) who lived with her mother down behind The Bell. And there was Robert John, who for reasons unknown pushed me off a six-foot wall to the pavement below and left me nauseous and concussed. The doctor came, with you and Peggy anxiously hovering over me in the drawing room. Curious, because Robert John’s father was the Chief Inspector of the Woburn police, the nearest town of any size. Was he ever punished for his misdeed? I will never know.
There were surely other children at the school, whose names and faces have been lost to time.
Your contribution to the enterprise emerged from your woodshop, in the form of beautifully crafted wooden boxes, big enough to keep our pens and pencils, our colors and our exercise books, everything we needed for the school day; and which doubled as stools that we would sit on for our classes. Each one had the name of its owner painted in large letters on the side, so there could be no confusion as to which was who’s. They were beautifully painted, too, some blue, some yellow, and they could be conveniently stacked at the side of the room when more space was needed—say, for dance.
We had a series of teachers. I remember only one, the unforgettable Mrs. Smith, a tiny woman who wore tweedy clothes and was never seen without a hat, fastened to her hair with a hatpin to prevent it from flying off in the wind. What I remember best about Mrs. Smith is that she would take us on nature walks, rain or shine—in rain, with mackintoshes and Wellington boots—in the fields and woods around the house. She was, unfortunately, a kleptomaniac, as we soon discovered. People living at the Rectory began to notice things were missing, nothing of great significance to begin with—a piece of costume jewelry here, a bottle of bathroom scent or eau de cologne there. It was only when Grandfather’s gold watch disappeared that the hue and cry went up. A little detective work soon revealed the culprit: the innocent-seeming, otherwise innocuous Mrs. Smith.
You had to fire her, and I remember this caused you some distress. You understood quite well that this woman was not truly a thief, but suffered from a genuine illness, but there was no other option in a house full of guests. She had to go. Perhaps that was when Miss Thom, the WREN, was persuaded to step in. We all loved Miss Thom. In fact, I suspect I was more than a little in love with her.
Maybe you were, too?
More to come, Peter
I don’t know what made you decide to start the Rectory nursery school. Perhaps the local schools were suffering from lack of funds, or even closed during the war years. But you and Peggy got together with a handful of like-minded local parents and offered the Rectory drawing room as a classroom for a P.N.E.U. school. I remember that acronym.
Odd, isn’t it, the things that do get stuck in your mind? I still remember for example, eighty years later, the license plate number of your first car, the Austin 10 that brought us down from Newcastle to Aspley Guise before the war: it was GTN209. The TN, you always liked to remind us, were the letters particularly assigned to Newcastle-on-Tyne, TN being short for the river Tyne. You were always very proud of being a Geordie, a born Tyne-sider, and you’ll be pleased to know that I inherited that pride. I, too, still tell anyone who might be interested that I’m a Geordie, even though I haven’t seen the Tyne or visited the city in years. Well, decades.
Aside from Flora and myself, there were Charles and Caroline Allen, whose father was later knighted Sir Kenneth for his services to industry. (Many years later I appeared in white tie and tails, on the front cover of the high society magazine The Tatler with Caroline—a distinction of which Peggy was particularly proud!) There was Elizabeth Brown, whose father was an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, and Hillary (I forget her last name) who lived with her mother down behind The Bell. And there was Robert John, who for reasons unknown pushed me off a six-foot wall to the pavement below and left me nauseous and concussed. The doctor came, with you and Peggy anxiously hovering over me in the drawing room. Curious, because Robert John’s father was the Chief Inspector of the Woburn police, the nearest town of any size. Was he ever punished for his misdeed? I will never know.
There were surely other children at the school, whose names and faces have been lost to time.
Your contribution to the enterprise emerged from your woodshop, in the form of beautifully crafted wooden boxes, big enough to keep our pens and pencils, our colors and our exercise books, everything we needed for the school day; and which doubled as stools that we would sit on for our classes. Each one had the name of its owner painted in large letters on the side, so there could be no confusion as to which was who’s. They were beautifully painted, too, some blue, some yellow, and they could be conveniently stacked at the side of the room when more space was needed—say, for dance.
We had a series of teachers. I remember only one, the unforgettable Mrs. Smith, a tiny woman who wore tweedy clothes and was never seen without a hat, fastened to her hair with a hatpin to prevent it from flying off in the wind. What I remember best about Mrs. Smith is that she would take us on nature walks, rain or shine—in rain, with mackintoshes and Wellington boots—in the fields and woods around the house. She was, unfortunately, a kleptomaniac, as we soon discovered. People living at the Rectory began to notice things were missing, nothing of great significance to begin with—a piece of costume jewelry here, a bottle of bathroom scent or eau de cologne there. It was only when Grandfather’s gold watch disappeared that the hue and cry went up. A little detective work soon revealed the culprit: the innocent-seeming, otherwise innocuous Mrs. Smith.
You had to fire her, and I remember this caused you some distress. You understood quite well that this woman was not truly a thief, but suffered from a genuine illness, but there was no other option in a house full of guests. She had to go. Perhaps that was when Miss Thom, the WREN, was persuaded to step in. We all loved Miss Thom. In fact, I suspect I was more than a little in love with her.
Maybe you were, too?
More to come, Peter
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
28 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
We had the billetees, at the Rectory yes, but then there were the refugees—a different bunch entirely.
They arrived from London by the busload in the village square, by the horse trough. East Enders, Cockneys, bombed out of their homes. They had likely never left the city before, most of them, and here they were far from home in a country village with barely anything but the clothes they wore, mothers and dads and unruly children, all terrified by what they had experienced, the fire and fury they were fleeing. And their terror was palpable, infectious. Even as children, we could feel it.
From their buses they were distributed around the village, to anyone who had a place where they could sleep. You offered our coal cellar, and they were grateful for the shelter, any shelter.
It was dark down there. The only lighting was a single bulb suspended from the ceiling. It smelled of stored apples, cookers and eaters, Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins from the orchard, laid out in rows on newspaper, on the slats of wooden shelves. Potatoes, too. And the coal that came rattling down from chute from above, when it was delivered. No palace, it provided these people with a temporary refuge, on their way to some other, more permanent place for them to stay. One family, I know, the Turners, stayed on and made their home in Aspley Guise, forever grateful to you for your kindness.
In the night, the wail of the air raid sirens penetrated even the cellar door and the flight of wooden steps that led down to where they tried to sleep on the hard floor, and the too-familiar sound brought back their terror. It was you, Harry, who went down there and managed to calm them, while we children huddled amongst them for safety while the air raid warning lasted, waiting for the relief of the all-clear siren that marked the departure of the bombers over the horizon.
We thought you very brave. We were proud to have you as our father, a rock whenever the storm raged. We were glad to have your strong, grown-up presence, for protection, and learned to share you with whoever came to stay.
Remember all this, as I do? With love, Peter
We had the billetees, at the Rectory yes, but then there were the refugees—a different bunch entirely.
They arrived from London by the busload in the village square, by the horse trough. East Enders, Cockneys, bombed out of their homes. They had likely never left the city before, most of them, and here they were far from home in a country village with barely anything but the clothes they wore, mothers and dads and unruly children, all terrified by what they had experienced, the fire and fury they were fleeing. And their terror was palpable, infectious. Even as children, we could feel it.
From their buses they were distributed around the village, to anyone who had a place where they could sleep. You offered our coal cellar, and they were grateful for the shelter, any shelter.
It was dark down there. The only lighting was a single bulb suspended from the ceiling. It smelled of stored apples, cookers and eaters, Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins from the orchard, laid out in rows on newspaper, on the slats of wooden shelves. Potatoes, too. And the coal that came rattling down from chute from above, when it was delivered. No palace, it provided these people with a temporary refuge, on their way to some other, more permanent place for them to stay. One family, I know, the Turners, stayed on and made their home in Aspley Guise, forever grateful to you for your kindness.
In the night, the wail of the air raid sirens penetrated even the cellar door and the flight of wooden steps that led down to where they tried to sleep on the hard floor, and the too-familiar sound brought back their terror. It was you, Harry, who went down there and managed to calm them, while we children huddled amongst them for safety while the air raid warning lasted, waiting for the relief of the all-clear siren that marked the departure of the bombers over the horizon.
We thought you very brave. We were proud to have you as our father, a rock whenever the storm raged. We were glad to have your strong, grown-up presence, for protection, and learned to share you with whoever came to stay.
Remember all this, as I do? With love, Peter
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
27 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
The war years were memorable ones, no? You were exempt from military service for health reasons, and it’s my recollection that you were somewhat conscience-stricken for not being able to do your bit. Your brother Donald was an army officer—one of those who were stranded, and then rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk. Your Cambridge pal Alan, who married your sister Nancy, enlisted as an army chaplain. Even that path was closed to you.
In part to compensate for this inability to sign up for active duty, you and Peggy opened up the Rectory as living quarters for military people of all kinds. There were, of course, the Bletchley girls. But then, too, for a while, there was Edward, an officer in the Royal Navy, whose ship was sunk by German torpedos, and Miss Thomas, a WREN—the women’s branch of the navy—who I remember in her smart uniform with her smart round cap. At one point, for reasons I no longer recall, she took over as the teacher of our Rectory nursery school (which deserves a letter of its own).
Then there was Frank, with his bristly ginger mustache, the airman who was posted for a good long while at the RAF airfield down the hill at Cranfield. He was an artist, a painter, who returned to landscape painting when the war was over. His friend, Woody, was a portrait artist, whose full-length portrait of you in your dog-collar and cassock long graced the walls of our family homes. I wonder what became of it? Last time I knew it was in Flora’s home, before she died. I don’t know if she’d have remembered this, but she and I would ride our bikes down past the railway crossing and the bluebells woods to watch the Spitfires take off and land—I suppose it must have been for the Battle of Britain. They would land dangerously, sometimes, damaged by enemy fire or in flames. The airfield was probably too small and the runaway too short for bombers, because I don’t remember seeing them.
We did see them in the sky, though, and cheer the formations of British bombers setting out for Germany; and the remnants of German bombers, stragglers, mostly, making their way back to their point of origin after dumping their loads on London, some sixty miles to the south. From our upstairs windows, looking south, we could see the orange glow of the city burning. To the east, toward Bedford, across the valley with the tall smokestacks of its many brickworks, the bulbous bellies of dozens of barrage balloons were lit up by the roaming beams that emanated from the searchlights below, seeking out their prey—the silver glint of a German bomber—for the artillery batteries that sought to bring them down.
It was on nights such as this that—despite your wife’s alarm—you would leave the Rectory by the back door, careful not to transgress the blackout rules, and pace the perimeter of the house—as though that might somehow defend it from enemy attack. And the occasional jettison bomb did fall not far from our house, a quarter mile at most, as the bombers lightened their planes of any remaining load to speed their return across the North Sea to Germany.
Would you remember this? I don’t think you were with us when we went out on another adventure, to climb up on the wings and gaze in through the cockpit of a Messerschmidt 109 that crash-landed in the mud of a farmer’s field a half-mile from our house.
It must have been different for you, of course—not to mention for those millions whose lives were directly threatened and too often taken by this conflict—but my memories of those days, as a boy of five, six, seven, are more of adventure than of risk, more of curiosity than danger, more of a house full of good, loving and mutually supportive people than of enemies.
As I’m sure you’ll readily agree, Peggy deserves much of the credit for the relatively easy passage of the war years at the Rectory. She welcomed all, found beds for everyone, and saw to it that we all ate well. I can still see her at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, carefully cutting out coupons from her collection of ration books, piling them up to take with her to the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, or the grocery shop. There were even coupons for the sweet shop. With the help of a woman who came in from the village, she shopped and cooked for everyone. Somewhere amongst the family memorabilia there is still a letter to her from the King himself, thanking her for her very real service to the country—a tribute that she richly deserved.
But her first task, as we all knew, was to take care of her husband. You were more than fortunate to have such a woman by your side, supporting you through all your illnesses and periods of self-doubt and uncertainty. I don’t know what you would have done without her.
With tender memories of Peggy, then, your son, Peter
The war years were memorable ones, no? You were exempt from military service for health reasons, and it’s my recollection that you were somewhat conscience-stricken for not being able to do your bit. Your brother Donald was an army officer—one of those who were stranded, and then rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk. Your Cambridge pal Alan, who married your sister Nancy, enlisted as an army chaplain. Even that path was closed to you.
In part to compensate for this inability to sign up for active duty, you and Peggy opened up the Rectory as living quarters for military people of all kinds. There were, of course, the Bletchley girls. But then, too, for a while, there was Edward, an officer in the Royal Navy, whose ship was sunk by German torpedos, and Miss Thomas, a WREN—the women’s branch of the navy—who I remember in her smart uniform with her smart round cap. At one point, for reasons I no longer recall, she took over as the teacher of our Rectory nursery school (which deserves a letter of its own).
Then there was Frank, with his bristly ginger mustache, the airman who was posted for a good long while at the RAF airfield down the hill at Cranfield. He was an artist, a painter, who returned to landscape painting when the war was over. His friend, Woody, was a portrait artist, whose full-length portrait of you in your dog-collar and cassock long graced the walls of our family homes. I wonder what became of it? Last time I knew it was in Flora’s home, before she died. I don’t know if she’d have remembered this, but she and I would ride our bikes down past the railway crossing and the bluebells woods to watch the Spitfires take off and land—I suppose it must have been for the Battle of Britain. They would land dangerously, sometimes, damaged by enemy fire or in flames. The airfield was probably too small and the runaway too short for bombers, because I don’t remember seeing them.
We did see them in the sky, though, and cheer the formations of British bombers setting out for Germany; and the remnants of German bombers, stragglers, mostly, making their way back to their point of origin after dumping their loads on London, some sixty miles to the south. From our upstairs windows, looking south, we could see the orange glow of the city burning. To the east, toward Bedford, across the valley with the tall smokestacks of its many brickworks, the bulbous bellies of dozens of barrage balloons were lit up by the roaming beams that emanated from the searchlights below, seeking out their prey—the silver glint of a German bomber—for the artillery batteries that sought to bring them down.
It was on nights such as this that—despite your wife’s alarm—you would leave the Rectory by the back door, careful not to transgress the blackout rules, and pace the perimeter of the house—as though that might somehow defend it from enemy attack. And the occasional jettison bomb did fall not far from our house, a quarter mile at most, as the bombers lightened their planes of any remaining load to speed their return across the North Sea to Germany.
Would you remember this? I don’t think you were with us when we went out on another adventure, to climb up on the wings and gaze in through the cockpit of a Messerschmidt 109 that crash-landed in the mud of a farmer’s field a half-mile from our house.
It must have been different for you, of course—not to mention for those millions whose lives were directly threatened and too often taken by this conflict—but my memories of those days, as a boy of five, six, seven, are more of adventure than of risk, more of curiosity than danger, more of a house full of good, loving and mutually supportive people than of enemies.
As I’m sure you’ll readily agree, Peggy deserves much of the credit for the relatively easy passage of the war years at the Rectory. She welcomed all, found beds for everyone, and saw to it that we all ate well. I can still see her at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, carefully cutting out coupons from her collection of ration books, piling them up to take with her to the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, or the grocery shop. There were even coupons for the sweet shop. With the help of a woman who came in from the village, she shopped and cooked for everyone. Somewhere amongst the family memorabilia there is still a letter to her from the King himself, thanking her for her very real service to the country—a tribute that she richly deserved.
But her first task, as we all knew, was to take care of her husband. You were more than fortunate to have such a woman by your side, supporting you through all your illnesses and periods of self-doubt and uncertainty. I don’t know what you would have done without her.
With tender memories of Peggy, then, your son, Peter
Monday, July 26, 2021
26 JULY 2021
Note: this entry, like several others being posted now, is out of sequence. It should follow after the scene where Harry lost his temper and nearly beat me with his belt... You may have noticed that memories do not come reliably in chronological order!
Dear Harry,
You may have kept your word about never punishing me in that way again, but you must surely have known that corporal punishment was common practice at both the schools you sent me to. It must have been the practice at Shrewsbury, your own boarding school, in those early years of your life. Were you never subjected to this particular indignity? Perhaps—I can well imagine this—you were such a good citizen, always observant of the rules, that you never earned a caning.
The first time for me was when I was seven years old, at Windlesham, when the school was still evacuated north to the Lake District to be safe from the anticipated Nazi invasion. Because it was not designed as a school, our dormitory rooms were small in the mansion that the school had taken over. There were three or four of us in a bedroom, and we were caught talking during the afternoon nap time, when we were supposed to be silent. That time it was just three across the outstretched hand with a rubber strap.
The next time I don’t even remember what I’d done. This was after the post-war return to our Sussex school buildings. Whatever it was, the offense was obviously a serious one. I was summoned to Mr. Chris’s study, the headmaster, and had to stand outside his big oak door until I was told to enter. It was a big, serious room, looking out over the front lawn, wood-paneled floor to ceiling and furnished with heavy, leather-bound chairs and sofas. And redolent of the rich, sweet-smelling pipe tobacco that Mr. Chris smoked.
Once called inside, trembling with fear and anticipation, I was told to take my trousers down and bend forward over the arm of one of the leather chairs. You had to take your trousers down so you couldn’t even hope to use the blotting paper that was reputed to take the sting out of the blows. Then it was six of the best, right across my bare behind.
Did Mr. Chris get his kicks out of this, I have sometimes wondered? The spectacle of little boys’ bare buttocks exposed for him to lay his cane across? I don’t know. The very thought is perhaps an uncharitable one.
But there was certainly a pre-sexual excitement among us boys around the delivery of corporal punishment. We used to do it to each other late nights, in the dormitory, just for fun. Choose a boy to be punished—it was often me—and have him take his pajama bottoms down and stick his bare bum up in the air, which some other boy would slap fiercely with a slipper. A little precocious sado-masochism?
Then at Lancing, as a teenager, I was beaten twice. Again, bare ass—why did they insist on that? Tiger Halsey, our housemaster, used a leather strap. Was it smoking I was called in for? Then the head prefect caned me in a weirdly ceremonial event, myself bent over, holding my ankles, at the end of a gauntlet of his fellow prefects. I had been caught off-limits with another boy—I was hoping, I’ll admit, to get into his pants; more about this later—smoking and drinking in a billiards parlor.
I feel sure, Harry, that you never got up to such shenanigans. But I wonder if you’d have felt that I deserved it? That ritual punishment of this kind was an appropriate part of a sound education? I hope not. I hope it never happened to you. But to be honest there is some small place in the back of my mind where I nurse some anger that you allowed to happen to your son.
With love, though, as always,
Peter
Dear Harry,
You may have kept your word about never punishing me in that way again, but you must surely have known that corporal punishment was common practice at both the schools you sent me to. It must have been the practice at Shrewsbury, your own boarding school, in those early years of your life. Were you never subjected to this particular indignity? Perhaps—I can well imagine this—you were such a good citizen, always observant of the rules, that you never earned a caning.
The first time for me was when I was seven years old, at Windlesham, when the school was still evacuated north to the Lake District to be safe from the anticipated Nazi invasion. Because it was not designed as a school, our dormitory rooms were small in the mansion that the school had taken over. There were three or four of us in a bedroom, and we were caught talking during the afternoon nap time, when we were supposed to be silent. That time it was just three across the outstretched hand with a rubber strap.
The next time I don’t even remember what I’d done. This was after the post-war return to our Sussex school buildings. Whatever it was, the offense was obviously a serious one. I was summoned to Mr. Chris’s study, the headmaster, and had to stand outside his big oak door until I was told to enter. It was a big, serious room, looking out over the front lawn, wood-paneled floor to ceiling and furnished with heavy, leather-bound chairs and sofas. And redolent of the rich, sweet-smelling pipe tobacco that Mr. Chris smoked.
Once called inside, trembling with fear and anticipation, I was told to take my trousers down and bend forward over the arm of one of the leather chairs. You had to take your trousers down so you couldn’t even hope to use the blotting paper that was reputed to take the sting out of the blows. Then it was six of the best, right across my bare behind.
Did Mr. Chris get his kicks out of this, I have sometimes wondered? The spectacle of little boys’ bare buttocks exposed for him to lay his cane across? I don’t know. The very thought is perhaps an uncharitable one.
But there was certainly a pre-sexual excitement among us boys around the delivery of corporal punishment. We used to do it to each other late nights, in the dormitory, just for fun. Choose a boy to be punished—it was often me—and have him take his pajama bottoms down and stick his bare bum up in the air, which some other boy would slap fiercely with a slipper. A little precocious sado-masochism?
Then at Lancing, as a teenager, I was beaten twice. Again, bare ass—why did they insist on that? Tiger Halsey, our housemaster, used a leather strap. Was it smoking I was called in for? Then the head prefect caned me in a weirdly ceremonial event, myself bent over, holding my ankles, at the end of a gauntlet of his fellow prefects. I had been caught off-limits with another boy—I was hoping, I’ll admit, to get into his pants; more about this later—smoking and drinking in a billiards parlor.
I feel sure, Harry, that you never got up to such shenanigans. But I wonder if you’d have felt that I deserved it? That ritual punishment of this kind was an appropriate part of a sound education? I hope not. I hope it never happened to you. But to be honest there is some small place in the back of my mind where I nurse some anger that you allowed to happen to your son.
With love, though, as always,
Peter
Sunday, July 25, 2021
25 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
This is a hard one to write. I’ve been giving some further thought to this boarding school decision—which was, be honest now, Harry, not really my decision at all. I was seven years old, for God’s sake. How does that qualify me to make a decision as momentous as that?
Surely you knew. There’s a large gap in my knowledge of your early life, up to the death of your mother. Were you sent off to one of those “prep schools”—boarding schools for boys of elementary school age—as I was? Or did you stay home with your parents and siblings until you went to Shrewsbury, one of the great old English “public schools” up in Shropshire? Well, it would have been down for you, coming from Newcastle, but same difference. You rarely spoke of your time there, to my knowledge, but I well remember the school tie—diagonal stripes in gold, brown and dark blue—that you wore with great pride whenever you were not wearing your dog collar and cassock.
Perhaps your experience at an all-boys boarding school was different from mine? I believe you were already quite the sportsman; you rowed for your college eight at Cambridge, did you learn the sport at school? That pride in your school tie suggests that your time there was a memory you treasured, and in later life you certainly projected the self-assurance of a public school boy. Your socialist views were informed by a hugely privileged education.
But here’s what I’m interested to know—and know that I never will: did you experience none of the adolescent agonies that I did years later at Lancing College, my own public school? A sensitive lad, I always felt out of place. I was a total duffer at sports. I became a passably good cross-country runner only because running took less time than every other sport, and I could be done with it, in and out of the showers (I also suffered from intense body same) before the other boys. Then I could wander off to some private corner behind a building or a hedge, to exercise my right to rebel by jerking off in peace and smoking one of those forbidden cigarettes.
I like to think that in other respects I was a fairly normal teenager, emotionally volatile and needful of reassurance as I struggled to understand and come to terms with those strange sexual urges that demanded response and preoccupied my mind. Like—I assume—every normal teenager, I had crushes. I fell in love; and the only people around me with whom I could fall in love were other boys. As a younger boy, in my first years at Lancing, I fell in love with older boys; as a senior, I fell in love with juniors. That’s just how it was. All my early, fumbling sexual experiments and adventures were with them.
As a result of all this, by the time I was seventeen and past ready to leave school, I was pretty much convinced that this was ow it would be for the best of my life. Until you arrived to pick me up on that last day of school, prize day, and in the back seat of the car—remember?—was that lovely French girl, Jeanine, who’d come over to stay with us as an exchange student. I fell in love at first glance. Thanks to my public school years, however, I was pathetically immature, an emotional toddler. It took me many more years to grow up.
So had you no idea, when you sent me off to school, what boarding school had in store for me? Did you experience none of this yourself? Was everyone around you at Shrewsbury as immune to adolescent turmoil as perhaps you were yourself? I know that I’m not alone in the wounds from those days. Many years later I came across a whole organization dedicated to recovery from those wounds, Boarding School Survivors; and I learned to recognize the persistence of those wounds in social, political, military and industrial leaders, men of power and influence, inheritors of that old British Empire that crumbled into shambles after the war. They persist in positions of power even to this day; I look at the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, an Old Etonian as many of his predecessors have been, and judge that those childhood wounds are still capable of governing his behavior.
So that’s how it is, Harry, Father, Daddy, that’s what continues to perplex me as I look back to childhood. How could you not have known? What really persuaded you to put your son (your daughter, too; ask Flora!) through twelve years of… well, hell. I hope I’m past whining about this now, at the age of, next week, eighty-five, But yes, that’s simply how it was.
Your son, Peter
This is a hard one to write. I’ve been giving some further thought to this boarding school decision—which was, be honest now, Harry, not really my decision at all. I was seven years old, for God’s sake. How does that qualify me to make a decision as momentous as that?
Surely you knew. There’s a large gap in my knowledge of your early life, up to the death of your mother. Were you sent off to one of those “prep schools”—boarding schools for boys of elementary school age—as I was? Or did you stay home with your parents and siblings until you went to Shrewsbury, one of the great old English “public schools” up in Shropshire? Well, it would have been down for you, coming from Newcastle, but same difference. You rarely spoke of your time there, to my knowledge, but I well remember the school tie—diagonal stripes in gold, brown and dark blue—that you wore with great pride whenever you were not wearing your dog collar and cassock.
Perhaps your experience at an all-boys boarding school was different from mine? I believe you were already quite the sportsman; you rowed for your college eight at Cambridge, did you learn the sport at school? That pride in your school tie suggests that your time there was a memory you treasured, and in later life you certainly projected the self-assurance of a public school boy. Your socialist views were informed by a hugely privileged education.
But here’s what I’m interested to know—and know that I never will: did you experience none of the adolescent agonies that I did years later at Lancing College, my own public school? A sensitive lad, I always felt out of place. I was a total duffer at sports. I became a passably good cross-country runner only because running took less time than every other sport, and I could be done with it, in and out of the showers (I also suffered from intense body same) before the other boys. Then I could wander off to some private corner behind a building or a hedge, to exercise my right to rebel by jerking off in peace and smoking one of those forbidden cigarettes.
I like to think that in other respects I was a fairly normal teenager, emotionally volatile and needful of reassurance as I struggled to understand and come to terms with those strange sexual urges that demanded response and preoccupied my mind. Like—I assume—every normal teenager, I had crushes. I fell in love; and the only people around me with whom I could fall in love were other boys. As a younger boy, in my first years at Lancing, I fell in love with older boys; as a senior, I fell in love with juniors. That’s just how it was. All my early, fumbling sexual experiments and adventures were with them.
As a result of all this, by the time I was seventeen and past ready to leave school, I was pretty much convinced that this was ow it would be for the best of my life. Until you arrived to pick me up on that last day of school, prize day, and in the back seat of the car—remember?—was that lovely French girl, Jeanine, who’d come over to stay with us as an exchange student. I fell in love at first glance. Thanks to my public school years, however, I was pathetically immature, an emotional toddler. It took me many more years to grow up.
So had you no idea, when you sent me off to school, what boarding school had in store for me? Did you experience none of this yourself? Was everyone around you at Shrewsbury as immune to adolescent turmoil as perhaps you were yourself? I know that I’m not alone in the wounds from those days. Many years later I came across a whole organization dedicated to recovery from those wounds, Boarding School Survivors; and I learned to recognize the persistence of those wounds in social, political, military and industrial leaders, men of power and influence, inheritors of that old British Empire that crumbled into shambles after the war. They persist in positions of power even to this day; I look at the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, an Old Etonian as many of his predecessors have been, and judge that those childhood wounds are still capable of governing his behavior.
So that’s how it is, Harry, Father, Daddy, that’s what continues to perplex me as I look back to childhood. How could you not have known? What really persuaded you to put your son (your daughter, too; ask Flora!) through twelve years of… well, hell. I hope I’m past whining about this now, at the age of, next week, eighty-five, But yes, that’s simply how it was.
Your son, Peter
Friday, July 23, 2021
23 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
Back to our “story”! Is it time to talk about the Bletchley girls?
I have written about them often, because these extraordinarily smart young women were an important part of my childhood. Fiona, Vivian, and my mother’s sister Gay. Not long ago I found their names inscribed in the book at what is now the Bletchley Park visitor center. The place has become a famous tourist attraction, now that the contribution of the men and women who worked there during World War II is widely known through books, films, and television programs. Back then, and for many years thereafter, their success in utilizing the captured Enigma machine to break Nazi military codes was “very hush-hush”, and the girls who came to live in our house, an easy bike ride from Bletchley, were sworn to secrecy.
To me, a little boy, these women were mysterious, exotic, glamorous creatures. Their perfumed, powdered feminine presence loomed far above me, alluring in ways I was not yet able to understand. I remember, particularly, the sensual physical appeal of Fiona, a young woman whose body aroused in me what must have been, unrecognized, my very first sexual urges. She would have been no more that twenty-one, twenty-two, surely, full of fun and full of erotic energy.
For you, I suspect, Harry, a virile and physically-aware man in his mid-thirties, a man in need of adulation, she must have been… temptation in the flesh. My mother once told me, later in life, that there had been parlous moments in your relationship, and I have wondered if you ever succumbed to the carnal temptations you would preach about to others. Certainly, if anyone, this was the young woman whose attractions could have lured you into her all-too conveniently located bed.
But listen, Harry, there is an even darker side to your relationship with the Bletchley girls, one that I learned about to my dismay—and entirely by accident—years later, in researching the Bletchley story, when I happened upon a book called “The Hidden History of Bletchley Park: A Social and Organizational History”, by one C. Smith. I wonder if you ever knew about it? Ever read this passage:
Well, Harry, to say I was shocked to read this is a vast understatement. Shocked that the Bletchley girls (Smith reports four of them; I remember only three) were “getting a good deal disturbed” about you, that you were repeating what you knew to “everyone that comes into the house,” that you took such “unchristian delight in getting the girls into an awkward position”—all this was news to me. But I was perhaps especially shocked because the report seemed, well… so believable. So much in character. Smith continues:
So, Harry, I can’t imagine what it meant for a proud man like yourself to be “officially warned to keep your mouth shut.” Do you recall having received that “thorough frightening” from the security agency? How did they frighten you? With threats? Were you chastened by the experience? Were you any less chummy with the girls, more circumspect in what you broadcast from then on?
You always were something of a jokester and I’m sure you thought your intrusiveness with the Bletchley girls was a rather harmless piece of entertainment. That government security officials saw it as potential treachery is alarming. I wish I had learned about it in some way other than reading a history book written by some anonymous stranger.
As usual, too, I wish that I knew more.
Your ever questioning son, Peter
Back to our “story”! Is it time to talk about the Bletchley girls?
I have written about them often, because these extraordinarily smart young women were an important part of my childhood. Fiona, Vivian, and my mother’s sister Gay. Not long ago I found their names inscribed in the book at what is now the Bletchley Park visitor center. The place has become a famous tourist attraction, now that the contribution of the men and women who worked there during World War II is widely known through books, films, and television programs. Back then, and for many years thereafter, their success in utilizing the captured Enigma machine to break Nazi military codes was “very hush-hush”, and the girls who came to live in our house, an easy bike ride from Bletchley, were sworn to secrecy.
To me, a little boy, these women were mysterious, exotic, glamorous creatures. Their perfumed, powdered feminine presence loomed far above me, alluring in ways I was not yet able to understand. I remember, particularly, the sensual physical appeal of Fiona, a young woman whose body aroused in me what must have been, unrecognized, my very first sexual urges. She would have been no more that twenty-one, twenty-two, surely, full of fun and full of erotic energy.
For you, I suspect, Harry, a virile and physically-aware man in his mid-thirties, a man in need of adulation, she must have been… temptation in the flesh. My mother once told me, later in life, that there had been parlous moments in your relationship, and I have wondered if you ever succumbed to the carnal temptations you would preach about to others. Certainly, if anyone, this was the young woman whose attractions could have lured you into her all-too conveniently located bed.
But listen, Harry, there is an even darker side to your relationship with the Bletchley girls, one that I learned about to my dismay—and entirely by accident—years later, in researching the Bletchley story, when I happened upon a book called “The Hidden History of Bletchley Park: A Social and Organizational History”, by one C. Smith. I wonder if you ever knew about it? Ever read this passage:
while most residents appear to have been incurious, there were some locals, intrigued by the arrival of a military installation in their town, who attempted to discover what was going on. One such example was reported to CG&CS’s (Government Code and Cypher School) security staff, who recorded the incident in some detail:
“There is a parson in this neighborhood whose name is the Rev. Harry L. Clothier, The Rectory, Aspley Guise. We have had a number of people billeted there from time to time and as a host he is very kind. He has, however, apparently acquired a good deal of information about Bletchley Park, some of which gets rather close to the knuckle. The four girls who are billeted there now are getting a good deal disturbed about hm because he not only seems to try and catch them out with the idea of obtaining a little more information, but he repeats what he knows to everyone that comes to the house and seems to take a quite unchristian delight in getting the girls into an awkward position when introducing strangers.”
Well, Harry, to say I was shocked to read this is a vast understatement. Shocked that the Bletchley girls (Smith reports four of them; I remember only three) were “getting a good deal disturbed” about you, that you were repeating what you knew to “everyone that comes into the house,” that you took such “unchristian delight in getting the girls into an awkward position”—all this was news to me. But I was perhaps especially shocked because the report seemed, well… so believable. So much in character. Smith continues:
if the [security] agency was too heavy handed with offenders then that, in and of itself, would have been revealing. As a result, CG&CS appears to have taken a policy of trying to frighten offenders into silence as opposed to resorting to legal action. In the case of Reverend Clothier, it was decided that the best course of action was that he be ‘officially warned to keep his mouth shut.’ Rather ominously, the security official suggested that what the Reverend required was ‘a thorough frightening.’
So, Harry, I can’t imagine what it meant for a proud man like yourself to be “officially warned to keep your mouth shut.” Do you recall having received that “thorough frightening” from the security agency? How did they frighten you? With threats? Were you chastened by the experience? Were you any less chummy with the girls, more circumspect in what you broadcast from then on?
You always were something of a jokester and I’m sure you thought your intrusiveness with the Bletchley girls was a rather harmless piece of entertainment. That government security officials saw it as potential treachery is alarming. I wish I had learned about it in some way other than reading a history book written by some anonymous stranger.
As usual, too, I wish that I knew more.
Your ever questioning son, Peter
Thursday, July 22, 2021
22 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
(Another Freudian typo! I have corrected it, of course, but I first wrote “Fear Harry”! The F is next to the D on the qwerty keyboard, and I have never learned to type with any accuracy. So, yes, “Fear Harry!” So very true!)
As an aside in this quasi-narrative progression through the years, I want to pause to thank you properly and sincerely for the name you chose to give me: Peter. I am truly grateful for it, though I wonder if you ever knew how apt and meaningful it would prove to be. I have always loved the name, loved all of its associations, all my namesakes—Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, Peter the Great, Peter the Rock, Peter the Fisher of Men, and yes, even that slangy “peter” we men have slung between our legs! I love that I’m a Peter.
I have long known—and valued—the reason that you gave me the name: I was born on August 1st. In the Anglican calendar of saints of that time—has it since been changed? I have been unable to verify this anywhere online—this was the Feast of St. Peter’s Chains. Peter, of course, my namesake, Jesus’s disciple, was put in chains for the audacity of preaching the gospel in pagan Rome—and was released from those chains by the intervention of the Lord (or his angel?), who appeared in Peter’s jail cell to “burst them asunder.”
That same Peter was challenged by his long-dead Lord once again as he was fleeing Rome at the urging of his followers, who feared, justifiably, for his life. “Quo vadis, Domine?” he asked famously, in surprise and consternation: “Where are you going, Lord?” And when the Lord said he was returning to Rome to be crucified for a second time, Peter was shamed into turning around and high-tailing it back to Rome, where he was captured again, and himself crucified. He denied himself the honor of dying in the same manner as his Lord, however, and insisted instead on being crucified upside down, as memorably recorded in that great painting by Caravaggio.
I have written elsewhere about the moment of epiphany when I saw those chains the good Lord burst asunder—or what purported to be his chains—in a reliquary in the crypt chapel of the church of San Pietro ad Vincula in Rome. In that revelatory moment I recognized in them my own chains, the ones I had allowed to weigh my life down with shame and guilt and fear, the ones I now knew I finally needed to cast off. That’s when the meaning of my birth day came to me in a flash, and I understood with blazing clarity what my name meant, and why you had given it to me so many years before.
I went back home determined to find out how to change my life—and I’m proud to be able to tell you I succeeded (even though that change led me eventually to a very different spiritual path).
Such a complex character, then, that biblical Peter who became the first Bishop of Rome, the founder of the Roman Catholic church: the simple man whom Jesus met by the Sea of Galilee and chose to make his “fisher of men”; the one who cravenly denied his savior “before the cock crowed thrice”; the one who rediscovered his fortitude and courage and became the “rock” upon whom the Christian church was built. Did you know, Harry, when you gave me the name that I would “inherit” something of Peter’s cowardice and something of his strength, something of his fickle faithlessness and something of his solid, rock-like trustworthiness?
You certainly gave me a name to live up to. I don’t suppose my namesake will be waiting for me with his keys at heaven’s gate. I have surrendered that belief, if indeed I ever really had it. Was he waiting for you? I’ll be reminding you one day of how reluctant you were to leave this world. Was that because you, too, had doubts about that… well, let’s call it by its name: that myth?
Your doubt-ful son, Peter
(Another Freudian typo! I have corrected it, of course, but I first wrote “Fear Harry”! The F is next to the D on the qwerty keyboard, and I have never learned to type with any accuracy. So, yes, “Fear Harry!” So very true!)
As an aside in this quasi-narrative progression through the years, I want to pause to thank you properly and sincerely for the name you chose to give me: Peter. I am truly grateful for it, though I wonder if you ever knew how apt and meaningful it would prove to be. I have always loved the name, loved all of its associations, all my namesakes—Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, Peter the Great, Peter the Rock, Peter the Fisher of Men, and yes, even that slangy “peter” we men have slung between our legs! I love that I’m a Peter.
I have long known—and valued—the reason that you gave me the name: I was born on August 1st. In the Anglican calendar of saints of that time—has it since been changed? I have been unable to verify this anywhere online—this was the Feast of St. Peter’s Chains. Peter, of course, my namesake, Jesus’s disciple, was put in chains for the audacity of preaching the gospel in pagan Rome—and was released from those chains by the intervention of the Lord (or his angel?), who appeared in Peter’s jail cell to “burst them asunder.”
I have written elsewhere about the moment of epiphany when I saw those chains the good Lord burst asunder—or what purported to be his chains—in a reliquary in the crypt chapel of the church of San Pietro ad Vincula in Rome. In that revelatory moment I recognized in them my own chains, the ones I had allowed to weigh my life down with shame and guilt and fear, the ones I now knew I finally needed to cast off. That’s when the meaning of my birth day came to me in a flash, and I understood with blazing clarity what my name meant, and why you had given it to me so many years before.
I went back home determined to find out how to change my life—and I’m proud to be able to tell you I succeeded (even though that change led me eventually to a very different spiritual path).
Such a complex character, then, that biblical Peter who became the first Bishop of Rome, the founder of the Roman Catholic church: the simple man whom Jesus met by the Sea of Galilee and chose to make his “fisher of men”; the one who cravenly denied his savior “before the cock crowed thrice”; the one who rediscovered his fortitude and courage and became the “rock” upon whom the Christian church was built. Did you know, Harry, when you gave me the name that I would “inherit” something of Peter’s cowardice and something of his strength, something of his fickle faithlessness and something of his solid, rock-like trustworthiness?
You certainly gave me a name to live up to. I don’t suppose my namesake will be waiting for me with his keys at heaven’s gate. I have surrendered that belief, if indeed I ever really had it. Was he waiting for you? I’ll be reminding you one day of how reluctant you were to leave this world. Was that because you, too, had doubts about that… well, let’s call it by its name: that myth?
Your doubt-ful son, Peter
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
21 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
Ever the actor! I remember how you used to ham it up, on every possible occasion. You loved to be center stage, the object of everyone’s attention, everyone’s applause.
I sometimes think you became a priest because it gave you a stage to act on and an audience to give you the feedback that you craved. To give your voice the opportunity, every Sunday, to play with the sound of words and give them sonorous expression. To explore every subtlety of body language as you conveyed the depth of your emotional experience to your fellow human beings.
This morning I happened on the precise term for what you loved to be: the master of ceremonies. In church, yes. But also at home, where we always had a full house during the war: friends, family, billetees, the Bletchley girls… Over dinner, at social events in the drawing room, at garden parties outdoors… You loved to act the master of ceremonies.
In this, by the way, you were much like Ellie’s father, with whom you shared the honors at that seder dinner in Los Angeles when you visited, many years ago.
You got on well, the two of you, Anglican minister, Jewish paterfamilias, over that “Last Supper.” Sharing the stage…
Affectionately, Peter
Ever the actor! I remember how you used to ham it up, on every possible occasion. You loved to be center stage, the object of everyone’s attention, everyone’s applause.
I sometimes think you became a priest because it gave you a stage to act on and an audience to give you the feedback that you craved. To give your voice the opportunity, every Sunday, to play with the sound of words and give them sonorous expression. To explore every subtlety of body language as you conveyed the depth of your emotional experience to your fellow human beings.
This morning I happened on the precise term for what you loved to be: the master of ceremonies. In church, yes. But also at home, where we always had a full house during the war: friends, family, billetees, the Bletchley girls… Over dinner, at social events in the drawing room, at garden parties outdoors… You loved to act the master of ceremonies.
In this, by the way, you were much like Ellie’s father, with whom you shared the honors at that seder dinner in Los Angeles when you visited, many years ago.
You got on well, the two of you, Anglican minister, Jewish paterfamilias, over that “Last Supper.” Sharing the stage…
Affectionately, Peter
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
20 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I’m so glad you fell in love with that lovely girl from Swansea who would be my mother. The daughter of an Anglican minister (the Church of Wales, in his case, but the same difference), she told me once that she always swore she’d never marry a clergyman. Until she did.
I must have known at some point the circumstances of your meeting. I have it in my mind somewhere that it involved your Cambridge friend, Alan, the one who also took holy orders, married your sister, Nancy, and became a don at your old college, Caius, Gonville and Caius, which would later be my old college, and—this will swell your heart with pride, as it does mine—is now the college that has welcomed my granddaughter, your great-granddaughter, Georgia, into its hallowed halls. Alan stayed in Cambridge, went on to become a distinguished professor in an arcane field, the study of the biblical languages of Syriac and Aramaic.
You left. Went out into the world. And struggled. It was a time of great social turmoil, affecting the whole country. The year you graduated, the Trades Union Council summoned workers everywhere to militate—finally!—for better wages, better working conditions, and called for what became known as the General Strike of 1926. It lasted for nine days. A good socialist already—a young man of conscience—you stepped up in support of the workers. Drove a bus…
I suspect, though, that like myself you left university with no clue what to do with your life. Public (read “private”) school and Cambridge. A great education. You’d studied in what was at that time a whole new field of psychology. Your head was full of Freud and Jung. You’d done amateur theater at Cambridge, and had discovered your potential as an actor. I suspect, I’m sure, you wanted to do something meaningful with your life, something in service of something greater than yourself.
You met Peggy. You were so scared you went running off to a monastery! Thought of becoming a monk! Really! That’s the story, anyway.
How she managed to rescue you I no longer recall. As I say, I must have known how it happened at some point. If I did, I have forgotten now. But I’m glad you fell in love with her, and she with you. Glad she managed to overcome whatever fears you had. Glad you married and had Flora. Glad that, a year and a half later, you had me!
With love,
Peter
I’m so glad you fell in love with that lovely girl from Swansea who would be my mother. The daughter of an Anglican minister (the Church of Wales, in his case, but the same difference), she told me once that she always swore she’d never marry a clergyman. Until she did.
You left. Went out into the world. And struggled. It was a time of great social turmoil, affecting the whole country. The year you graduated, the Trades Union Council summoned workers everywhere to militate—finally!—for better wages, better working conditions, and called for what became known as the General Strike of 1926. It lasted for nine days. A good socialist already—a young man of conscience—you stepped up in support of the workers. Drove a bus…
I suspect, though, that like myself you left university with no clue what to do with your life. Public (read “private”) school and Cambridge. A great education. You’d studied in what was at that time a whole new field of psychology. Your head was full of Freud and Jung. You’d done amateur theater at Cambridge, and had discovered your potential as an actor. I suspect, I’m sure, you wanted to do something meaningful with your life, something in service of something greater than yourself.
You met Peggy. You were so scared you went running off to a monastery! Thought of becoming a monk! Really! That’s the story, anyway.
How she managed to rescue you I no longer recall. As I say, I must have known how it happened at some point. If I did, I have forgotten now. But I’m glad you fell in love with her, and she with you. Glad she managed to overcome whatever fears you had. Glad you married and had Flora. Glad that, a year and a half later, you had me!
With love,
Peter
Sunday, July 18, 2021
18 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
One of the lasting images I have is of you standing at the altar, your back to everything and everyone but God, arms raised in reverence, face raised and catching light from the great stained glass window.
It was a point of pride for you to be a “high” churchman. You delighted in the robes, the rituals of the church, the solemnity of its ceremonies. You loved the candles, the decorative accoutrements, the flowers in their tall vases standing near the altar. You would have used incense if your more conservative parishioners had not objected that it “smacked of Rome.” Roman Catholicism (you insisted on the difference between Roman and Anglo-Catholicism) was still deeply suspect in the English countryside, with its burden of centuries of prejudice and fear. I guess since that dreadful Henry ruled the land and outlawed Papism!
You celebrated two communion services every Sunday: a simple, no-frills half-hour Holy Communion early in the morning for the more conservative faithful; and at ten o’clock your favorite Parish Mass (yes! You insisted on the Catholic word Mass) with all the bells and whistles. This was the communion service for families, for the rest of us, and it included lots of hymns and chanted versions of the Introit, the Confession, the Kyrie, the Gloria.
The Parish Mass included, too, your weekly sermon from the pulpit. How hard you worked at them! For days we children had to tiptoe around your study, always sacrosanct, while you prepared those sermons, writing them down in blue ink on special pads with your Parker fountain pen, in a scrawl that was always unintelligible to anyone but yourself. You put heart and soul and mind into every word—so much so that I came to believe, along with my mother, I’m sure, that they contributed enormously to the pain that devoured so much of your life.
We’ll talk about that later. Meantime, the Parish Mass was the main course of your Sunday feast of services. If Holy Communion was the hors d’oeuvres, the dessert, at the end of the day, was Vespers, the Evening Service, with its psalms and solemn ending as the day turned into night. No robes, for Vespers. Just the black cassock and the narrow white clerical “dog” collar, betokening your high church allegiance. The deeper your collar, as I recall, the more Protestant your faith.
I wonder if you ever thought what it might mean to a very small boy, not old enough yet to even be an altar boy, sitting with his mother and sister in the Rector’s pew, a few rows from the front, looking up through the chancel to where you stood, arms raised, as I remember you, your presence haloed by the glow of multicolored light from the stained glass window? What it meant to a small boy to look up to the pulpit and watch his father preach the word to an attentive congregation, or read from the Bible at that great eagle lectern? How small it could seem? How insignificant? How much in awe a little boy could be? How unreachable you seemed?
And then of course there were those times when I was just bored and wriggly, when Mr. Brown, the Verger, would notice my discomfort and come forward quietly, seriously, to take me by the hand and lead me back to the great church porch, and from there, down the cold stone steps to the crypt below. Once there, he’d crank open the heavy iron door to the furnace, where the fuel burned hot and red, and have me help him stoke the flames with new shovelfuls of coal.
Respectfully, Peter
One of the lasting images I have is of you standing at the altar, your back to everything and everyone but God, arms raised in reverence, face raised and catching light from the great stained glass window.
It was a point of pride for you to be a “high” churchman. You delighted in the robes, the rituals of the church, the solemnity of its ceremonies. You loved the candles, the decorative accoutrements, the flowers in their tall vases standing near the altar. You would have used incense if your more conservative parishioners had not objected that it “smacked of Rome.” Roman Catholicism (you insisted on the difference between Roman and Anglo-Catholicism) was still deeply suspect in the English countryside, with its burden of centuries of prejudice and fear. I guess since that dreadful Henry ruled the land and outlawed Papism!
You celebrated two communion services every Sunday: a simple, no-frills half-hour Holy Communion early in the morning for the more conservative faithful; and at ten o’clock your favorite Parish Mass (yes! You insisted on the Catholic word Mass) with all the bells and whistles. This was the communion service for families, for the rest of us, and it included lots of hymns and chanted versions of the Introit, the Confession, the Kyrie, the Gloria.
The Parish Mass included, too, your weekly sermon from the pulpit. How hard you worked at them! For days we children had to tiptoe around your study, always sacrosanct, while you prepared those sermons, writing them down in blue ink on special pads with your Parker fountain pen, in a scrawl that was always unintelligible to anyone but yourself. You put heart and soul and mind into every word—so much so that I came to believe, along with my mother, I’m sure, that they contributed enormously to the pain that devoured so much of your life.
We’ll talk about that later. Meantime, the Parish Mass was the main course of your Sunday feast of services. If Holy Communion was the hors d’oeuvres, the dessert, at the end of the day, was Vespers, the Evening Service, with its psalms and solemn ending as the day turned into night. No robes, for Vespers. Just the black cassock and the narrow white clerical “dog” collar, betokening your high church allegiance. The deeper your collar, as I recall, the more Protestant your faith.
I wonder if you ever thought what it might mean to a very small boy, not old enough yet to even be an altar boy, sitting with his mother and sister in the Rector’s pew, a few rows from the front, looking up through the chancel to where you stood, arms raised, as I remember you, your presence haloed by the glow of multicolored light from the stained glass window? What it meant to a small boy to look up to the pulpit and watch his father preach the word to an attentive congregation, or read from the Bible at that great eagle lectern? How small it could seem? How insignificant? How much in awe a little boy could be? How unreachable you seemed?
And then of course there were those times when I was just bored and wriggly, when Mr. Brown, the Verger, would notice my discomfort and come forward quietly, seriously, to take me by the hand and lead me back to the great church porch, and from there, down the cold stone steps to the crypt below. Once there, he’d crank open the heavy iron door to the furnace, where the fuel burned hot and red, and have me help him stoke the flames with new shovelfuls of coal.
Respectfully, Peter
Saturday, July 17, 2021
17 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I have a vivid memory of the big, comfy slip-on shoes you wore, protruding from beneath the hem of your black cassock. I remember the sheen of their soft black leather, the wrinkles left on their surface by constant wear. They used to gather dust on the path that led down past the chicken run and that great pine tree from the Rectory to the church. You had to shine them up again with a duster before the service. They had a big silver buckle, like a pirate’s shoe…
I do remember them.
Your son,
Peter
Friday, July 16, 2021
16 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
There were less good memories, too, from our years at Aspley Guise. (We were there, I suppose, from the time I was two or three years old and through the war years until perhaps the end of the forties, when we moved---not very far—to Braughing. From Bedfordshire to Hertfordshire, a matter, surely, of no more than fifty miles…)
But this was in Aspley.
You may not remember it as clearly as I do. I would have been four years old, or so. Maybe younger. Maybe terrible twos. Or threes. But I had done something bad. I had pulled Flora’s hair, perhaps, or taken one of her toys. The kind of bad thing a little boy does to his older sister, just to be mean. Or because she was being mean to me.
The resulting screams of pain or rage must have brought you running up the stairs to the nursery, where you identified me as the culprit. Reverting to some old masculine idea of punishment, you unstrapped the narrow black belt from where it cinched your cassock and shouted at me in a fury.
I ran.
Terrified, I ran from the nursery, out across the landing and down the corridor that led past the upstairs bathroom to the guest rooms, with you in hot pursuit, shouting, the leather belt raised and poised to strike. Alerted by the uproar, my mother must have run upstairs herself and was now making our stampede a threesome.
Reaching the dead end of the corridor, by the linen closet, I made a quick turn into the main guest bedroom, with its two twin beds. I remember the color of the counterpanes, one yellow and orange, on dark and light green.
But here I was trapped against the nearest of the beds. You towered over me in your flowing cassock, a giant black crow, your belt up behind your shoulder, ready for the first smarting blow.
Then my mother intervened. “No, Harry, no! Please no!”
And you came to the sudden realization of what it was you were about to do. Your arm dropped, and with it, the belt. The rage subsided into something different—a sense of guilt? An understanding of the misuse of your power over the powerless?
I managed to relax a little as I watched you do the same. You fumbled with your belt as you fastened it back around your waist. Then you said, “You’re right. I’m sorry, Peter. I should not have been so angry. And I promise—promise—that I’ll never, ever try to hit you again.”
And you never did.
I think you left my mother to take care of restoring peace and order in the family and returned downstairs to resume the work I’d interrupted in your study.
So that was that. I could have used a hug.
With love. Your son,
Peter
Thursday, July 15, 2021
15 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
The typo I caught in my last letter (“sin” for “son”!) reminds me of a couple of gaffes we both laughed out loud about, when I was still a boy.
Can I remind you?
The first must have happened when I was about 12 years old—old enough to know something of your history and clever enough to be able to appreciate the subtleties involved. You had been reading from the Bible—perhaps the text was the Epistle of the day—in the chancel of St. Botolph’s church in Aspley Guise, where you were Rector, standing behind the imposing golden lectern that carried the weight of that enormous book on the spread wings of a flying eagle.
The lofty tenor of your sonorous voice, so much loved by your congregation, still echoes in my mind as I recall this particular occasion, when the actor you had once wanted to be popped up from ancient history and turned to the congregation, instead of the altar, and bowed to them, your “audience”, more in appreciation for their imagined applause for your performance than in solemn reverence for the gospel.
Do you remember this?
Sitting in the Rector’s row beside my mother and my sister, I somehow caught your eye in one of those moments of I-know and I-know-you-know that degenerated, on my part, into barley contained giggles and, on yours, into a quick turn back to face the altar to conceal the realization on your face that you had been caught by your son in an act of vanity that would have been recognized by no one unfamiliar with the quandary of your choice, as a young man, between the theater and the ministry.
The second occasion was also at St. Botolph’s, this time in the vestry. I had just served as altar boy for the early communion service and was divesting my cassock and surplice while you replaced your robes on their hangers and sat down at the oak table in the middle of the room to perform the ritual act of signing the registry of services. Unscrewing the cap of your fountain pen, you noted down the date as required in the appropriate column and next to it, in the adjacent, wider column, the nature of the service—Holy Communion. Then you set out as usual to sign your name in the last column… and wrote, with a flourish, instead of Harry L. Clothier, Holy L. Clothier.
So, you see? I remember these things, the smallest things. I remember them, perhaps, because more than anything they tell me who you are; and because I remember nothing more strangely intimate than all the time we spent together in the chancel--or the vestry--of St. Botolph’s church in Aspley Guise, where you were Rector.
Good memories, then.
Your son,
Peter
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
14 JULY, 2021 (Le quatorze juillet!)
Dear Harry,
Here’s what I want: for you to tell me who you are.
Think of this as a way for me to sift through the clues you gave me. I imagine that you were telling me who you are in every deed, every action, every word, every glance you cast in my direction. It was just that I didn’t know enough to hear what it was you were trying to tell me. And I suppose it’s true that you didn’t even know yourself what it was you were trying to tell me.
So I have to go back over it, as best I can, every tiny detail, in the attempt to recapture what I failed to capture at the time.
I wrote an essay about this once: “Tell Me Who You Are.” The essay was an attempt to convey what it was that I was looking for, when I wrote professionally about art and artists. And that was the best I could come up with. Tell me who you are.
I have come to think this way about all creative work, including my own as a writer.
I see art—and writing—as a way to share the experience of being a human being in the world, among other human beings, and a way to learn from others how to be more fully human.
It’s not “telling” in the usual sense of that word—though it can be that, exactly.
The kind of telling I’m talking about is the telling that happens casually, as though by accident, in a simple, unthought gesture, a movement of the body, a word, or words, put out into the world without particular intention.
So I hope this explains a little what I’m trying to do. There’s no particular order, no chronology, no progression, just a growing understanding, and expanding consciousness, if you will, about the mystery of my father.
Your son,
Peter
PS I signed this off at first with a typo: “Your sin” instead of “Your son”! I thought you’d get a laugh out of that!
Monday, July 12, 2021
12 JULY, 2021
My dear Harry,
Yes, your pain. I promised more.
This happened many, many years later. Even after you died.
I’ve had a pain myself for years and years. I remember going to a doctor about it when I was still teaching at the University of Southern California, back in the early 1970s. Perhaps 1972, 1973? Around then.
The pain is a sharp one, intermittent, but nasty when it happens. It occurs on the left side, toward the center, right beneath the lowest ribs. I can almost feel it when I push my fingers in and up, relieving it a bit. I’ve sought medical advice on numerous occasions, but I have never received a convincing diagnosis, let alone a cure. It still bothers me sometimes today, though I have to say with less frequency than it used to. If I focus my attention, I can feel it there at almost any moment, but most of the time it just goes unnoticed.
Well, here’s the story. I don’t actually recall what took me to Ed Cohen’s home clinic in the first place, but what Ed offered was a very deep tissue massage—something like a rolfing. He was good at it, had good strong hands and knew how and where to use them to effect. I had recently learned the benefits of what I could call trance work, for want of a better word—suspending normal brain activity in order to go deep inside and activate the unconscious mind. Knowing your fascination with the reaches of the human mind, I’m sure this is something you would appreciate, even though I suspect it was not something you practiced or experienced—but Ed’s work provided an ideal space for this to happen. You would have relished the chance to spend time on his massage table.
So there I was, on that table, this one time, having told Ed about that recurring pain beneath my ribs. He worked the spot intensely—and, yes, painfully!—even as his voice invited me to experience the pain to the fullest and allow it to speak to me, until finally I heard the words in my own voice, arising spontaneously, clearly, though without my formulating them in any conscious way: “This is not my pain,” I said. “It’s not your pain.” I heard Ed’s voice, followed by a silence. Then: “Whose pain is it, then?” he asked.
“My father’s pain,” I said, with utter clarity. “This is my father’s pain.”
Odd, no? It made an immediate, intuitive sense to me that I had been carrying your pain for all those years. That your pain had been such an intense experience to me, as a child, that it had somehow imprinted itself in some dark recess of the mind; and had worked, from there, to reinvent itself in my body.
Was this a cure? For a while I imagined that it might be, and for a while it seemed it was. But after that while the pain began to recur in all its familiarity, and it still prods at me from time to time, reminding me that it has never really gone away. It’s back now, with me, as I write. I have taken it to other medical professionals since that experience with Ed. I have had examinations, x-rays, scans, but none of them has resulted in a diagnosis. There is no apparent cause, no medical problem doctors can identify. It remains a mystery.
I still think of it as “my father’s pain”—your pain. If that’s what it is, the wound is very deep, impossible to root out. I think it will be with me until the day I die.
But I think you’ll agree with me and with my diagnosis—which would probably be yours, even all that time ago. And yet still… it is odd. No? So much for today, then.
With love, Peter
Yes, your pain. I promised more.
This happened many, many years later. Even after you died.
I’ve had a pain myself for years and years. I remember going to a doctor about it when I was still teaching at the University of Southern California, back in the early 1970s. Perhaps 1972, 1973? Around then.
The pain is a sharp one, intermittent, but nasty when it happens. It occurs on the left side, toward the center, right beneath the lowest ribs. I can almost feel it when I push my fingers in and up, relieving it a bit. I’ve sought medical advice on numerous occasions, but I have never received a convincing diagnosis, let alone a cure. It still bothers me sometimes today, though I have to say with less frequency than it used to. If I focus my attention, I can feel it there at almost any moment, but most of the time it just goes unnoticed.
Well, here’s the story. I don’t actually recall what took me to Ed Cohen’s home clinic in the first place, but what Ed offered was a very deep tissue massage—something like a rolfing. He was good at it, had good strong hands and knew how and where to use them to effect. I had recently learned the benefits of what I could call trance work, for want of a better word—suspending normal brain activity in order to go deep inside and activate the unconscious mind. Knowing your fascination with the reaches of the human mind, I’m sure this is something you would appreciate, even though I suspect it was not something you practiced or experienced—but Ed’s work provided an ideal space for this to happen. You would have relished the chance to spend time on his massage table.
So there I was, on that table, this one time, having told Ed about that recurring pain beneath my ribs. He worked the spot intensely—and, yes, painfully!—even as his voice invited me to experience the pain to the fullest and allow it to speak to me, until finally I heard the words in my own voice, arising spontaneously, clearly, though without my formulating them in any conscious way: “This is not my pain,” I said. “It’s not your pain.” I heard Ed’s voice, followed by a silence. Then: “Whose pain is it, then?” he asked.
“My father’s pain,” I said, with utter clarity. “This is my father’s pain.”
Odd, no? It made an immediate, intuitive sense to me that I had been carrying your pain for all those years. That your pain had been such an intense experience to me, as a child, that it had somehow imprinted itself in some dark recess of the mind; and had worked, from there, to reinvent itself in my body.
Was this a cure? For a while I imagined that it might be, and for a while it seemed it was. But after that while the pain began to recur in all its familiarity, and it still prods at me from time to time, reminding me that it has never really gone away. It’s back now, with me, as I write. I have taken it to other medical professionals since that experience with Ed. I have had examinations, x-rays, scans, but none of them has resulted in a diagnosis. There is no apparent cause, no medical problem doctors can identify. It remains a mystery.
I still think of it as “my father’s pain”—your pain. If that’s what it is, the wound is very deep, impossible to root out. I think it will be with me until the day I die.
But I think you’ll agree with me and with my diagnosis—which would probably be yours, even all that time ago. And yet still… it is odd. No? So much for today, then.
With love, Peter
Sunday, July 11, 2021
11 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
We were talking about your ulcers…
It’s a painful story, one that colored most of my young years and significantly influenced the course of my life.
It seems to me that you had persistent health problems throughout your life.
It was for reasons of health, and on doctors’ recommendations, that the family originally moved from the heavily polluted environment of Newcastle, where I was born, to the healthier air further south, in the Midlands. Your first Parish there was Aspley Guise, in Bedfordshire, not far from the county seat of Bedford. Except for the first year-and-a-half of my life, we lived there for all of my pre-teen years. By the end of your life, you were suffering mostly from the pulmonary problems that were caused by your lifelong addiction to cigarettes.
But in Aspley Guise it was the stomach pain that plagued you.
We lived with it constantly, as a family. We children, Flora and I, always knew to tiptoe around the pain, to do nothing that might upset you and make it worse. Our mother was forever on the alert.
You were always thin, skinny, emaciated almost, but you ate well. You ate heartily, even. Were you aware that cigarettes certainly contributed to the acids that churned inside your belly? Even in those days, as I recall, they were called, though jokingly, “coffin nails” by the men on the front lines who smoked them. But even if you knew this, or suspected it, you evidently chose to remain, as we say today, in denial, and made no serious effort to quit. (It was only at the end of your life, in your eighties, living with my ailing mother in that small cottage in Wales, that you finally quit. My mother, your beloved Peggy, was suffering from severe bronchial problems and the doctor told you in no uncertain terms that the polluted air was killing her. So you quit. Cold turkey. Overnight. And never smoked another cigarette.)
You did try everything else, from diets, to pills, even psychotherapy—where you failed, notably as I wrote earlier, to practice what you preached. You even went once on a long trip to Switzerland, where you’d heard of a doctor who performed miracles with people suffering from your kind of stomach problems. His name was Dr. Jeanneret. You took time away from your parish—and your family!—to make the pilgrimage to his consulting office and returned with boxes of enormous pills called—yes, I remember to this day—called “poudres de coq” (literally, “cock powders”; the feathered kind, I hasten to add, for propriety’s sake). I remember distinctly, too, the image on the outside of the box, the outline of a huge hammer knocking a wedge into a human head; the text read “Enfoncez-vous ça dans la tête”—shove that into your skull. To the best of my recollection, even these monstrous pills had no effect.
Seriously, though, I have often wondered whether it was not your pain the contributed to the decision to send me off to boarding school at such an early age. I have often said that I was six, but I think I was more likely seven years old. We had a serious family talk and I was given the “choice” (I put that in quotes because it did not feel like one to me): I could either go to the nearest elementary school with all the local children (read, unhappily, those of a lower social class than ours); or, though at great financial sacrifice on my parents’ part, I could go off to a “prep school”—a boarding school for younger boys—where I would have a wonderful education more suited, though unspoken, to a young man of better class).
I “chose” the latter. As I told you later in life—you expressed dismay at my ingratitude—I was never happy at the boys’ boarding schools to which you sent me. Did you send me there, I have often wondered, for the great educational opportunity I was to be afforded there? Or was it rather—yes, I have entertained this rather ungracious thought—to spare yourself, because of the pain you were suffering, from the added burden of having small children around the house? (Flora, if I remember right, was spared for another couple of years; but she, too, went off to boarding school at a very early age—and she, too, was a long time in recovery from the experience…)
Well, as they say, Harry, water under the bridge. I need to add a few words about your pain, and will do so in a follow-up to this current letter.
With love and deep, sincere forgiveness, Peter
Friday, July 9, 2021
10 July, 2021
Dear Harry,
You are all gone now, you and Peggy long ago, and not far apart.
Flora, too. You did not live to mourn her death. Which is just as well, because we all knew that she was the proverbial “apple of your eye”—ever since she was a little girl. I was more on the other side, my mother’s boy. Once she grew up you and Flora had a problematic, sometimes painful relationship. No one could hurt you as she did. Nor you, her. I know because she told me.
Still, that’s how it often is, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons.
And now, for a growing number of years, I’m the sole survivor of the four of us.
I do miss you, now you're gone. I miss you all…
Your son,
Peter
9 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
Yes! Hands! How could I have missed this?
You were a great believer in the “laying on of hands”—that hands had the capacity to heal disorders of all kinds, imply by being laid by the practitioner on the head of the person suffering, along with a prayer for recovery.
You were yourself a healer, saw that as a part of your function as a minister of the gospel. The practice derives, surely, from the New Testament, with its numerous examples of Christ healing the sick.
You believed in miracles.
You believed, certainly, in non-traditional forms of healing, witness the story of the warts on my left hand. I was perhaps seven or eight years old. The first one, and eventually the largest, appeared on the heel of my thumb. Then others started growing up the thumb, in descending order of size, towards the tip. Eventually there were, as I recall, about twelve or thirteen of them.
So you took me to a wart charmer.
He was the local blacksmith. The man had already managed to charm away a wart that was growing on the head of Hank, our border collie (we’ll need to talk about him more, one day). My father drove me over to the smithy and we found him in a scorched leather apron, busy at the bellows and the furnace, a red hot horseshoe grasped in his long tongs. You gave him a shilling, and he paused for long enough to look at my thumb and run his finger over the hard little knots of growth.
“How many are there?” he asked. (Do you remember this?) I told him there were twelve. “Well, then,” he said, “I expect they’ll be gone in a couple of weeks.”
They weren’t. They were still there.
And you, always one to get your money’s worth, took me back to the smithy to complain. The blacksmith was puzzled, too. “How many, did you say?” I recounted. There were thirteen, not twelve. Perhaps one had been hiding under the skin. “Ah, well,” he said. “That’s better. Now they’ll be gone. You’ll see.”
And two weeks later, they were gone.
As miracles go, this was a minor one. The cures that you performed for your parishioners were long-termed, and much less dramatic. They involved not just the hands—though these were always somehow instrumental—but your deep and always growing understanding of human nature, backed up by what you had learned from Dr. Freud. You were fond of the term “psychosomatic,” and used it as an explanation for every ailment we had as children. You even had associative meanings for each finger and each toe. An injury to the thumb, I remember, implied some conflict with a person in authority…
And so on.
You did help people with their ailments, physical and psychological, that I know. The exception, if the distant echo of a memory serves me well, was a strange young woman named Winnie, who was extraordinarily deft with her fingers and made marvelous little dioramas for myself and Flora, with elfin figures fashioned out of tissue paper. You befriended her, became her spiritual guide, but were unable to save her from the disease that left her thinner and thinner, more and more emaciated, until she simply passed away. I don’t know whether there was a name for the disease back then, or if you knew it. Today we call it anorexia.
And, Harry, there is this to be said: for all your empathy for those who suffered from illness or disease, for all your desire and ability to heal the sick, you were never able to turn those skills and address them to your own debility, the stomach pains from which you suffered so terribly throughout my childhood years. That old adage, “physician, heal thyself” could not have been more appropriate. To my knowledge—and it could surely be deficient—you never saw that inner turmoil in the terms you applied so readily to others.
And yet, as I see it now—I only came to understand this much later—it seems so clear that the physical turmoil in you belly, the “ulcer,” reflected your struggle with God, with faith, and the conflict between your intellectual doubt and the religious certainty your profession required you to preach and practice for those who placed their trust in you…
More on this later. Enough for this one day.
With love, Peter
Thursday, July 8, 2021
8 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
It is a bit irreverent, I know, to ask this, and impertinent. But speaking of hands, I wonder if they were strong, and firm, and tender, when they touched my mother in the act of love? For all their skill, I do not, myself, remember them as loving hands. Not for me. I hope they were, for her. I hope you treasured the touch of that smooth, warm skin I still recall beneath the flimsy, silken transparency of her nightgown--should I even be saying this?--when I was allowed, as a very little boy, in bed beside her in the morning?
And while we’re on the subject of hands, I recall your having said once, à propos of I know not what—because this still surprises me; why would you tell me such a thing?—that you were never interested in masturbation. So did you really never touch yourself? Experience the subtle pleasures of what your generation, judgmentally, called “self-abuse”?
As a boy I recall being warned against this sinful, sinfully appealing act—but indulging in it, sinfully, anyway. Often. You might say obsessively. On every possible occasion.
You might say—I say—it’s natural.
As a grandfather, I watch my grandson scarcely able to keep his hands away from that delightful toy. As a man in a circle of men, in later life, I would watch as almost every hand was raised when the question came up: how many of you men jerk off? (I apologize for the crude language, Harry, Father, Padre, but these are the words we use…)
So here’s my question: were you being really honest when you made that claim? And why did you feel the need to make it? Could it be that this was out of a sense of guilt? Come on, now, Harry, did your hand really never stray between the black folds of your cassock—perhaps even at lonely moments in the vestry—or through the gap in your pajamas and seek out that irresistible source of masculine delight? Were your fingers really never curious enough to explore its size, its heft, the sense of urgency it generates? Did you really never pump away, as most men do, in the effort to reach that moment of quiet, solitary ecstasy?
But as I say, it’s an impertinent question of a father from his son, so let’s leave it unasked. Or at least unanswered.
With respect, your son,
Peter
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
7 JULY, 2021
Good morning, Harry!
I woke in the middle of the night last night thinking about your hands.
They were fine hands, strong, supple, skillful, and they were prominent in so many of the daily actions of your life.
I think of your hands in the Rectory dining room, where you took such pride in your carving skills, reducing a beef or pork roast to precise, thin slices (this was wartime, there was meat rationing!) to be passed around the always crowded table; or separating the wings, legs, thighs of a bird—chicken, goose, or duck, or turkey at Christmas time—and slicing the breast on either side with the same precision for an admiring audience of house guests.
I think of your right hand raised to bless the food at grace time.
I think of your hands in the workshop where you practiced the carpentry skills you learned, at your father’s insistence, as a pattern-maker’s apprentice as a young man. Those hands could turns plain lengths of wood, like magic, into the toys you made for your children every Christmas: an actual train that was big enough for me to actually ride, an airfield, complete with windsock and a fleet of Hurricanes and Spitfires, a walk-in doll’s house for Flora and, when she was older, a kidney-shaped dressing table she could actually use. I used to watch in wonder as your hands created—not these things, because they were made in secret; the workshop was strictly off limits in the days before Christmas—but many other objects of household utility.
In your later years you discovered the lathe, and used the wood from a hewn walnut tree to create bowls, vases, candlesticks. Your hands became the hands not merely of a great craftsman, but an artist.
I think of your hands on the gear shift and the steering wheels of your cars. Your favorite of all times, I think, was the long, sleep, elegant Armstrong Siddley coupé with “pre-selection” gearshift—an early forerunner of today’s automatic. You were an expert driver, proud of that expertise. (When you taught me to drive, remember—I was seventeen years old—you were critical of my own hands for grasping the wheel too tightly in the ten-to, ten-past position you insisted on.)
I think your hands, perhaps most vividly, lastingly, and with such profound clarity, in church. I see them in the vestry as you robe ready for the service, or disrobe afterwards; at the altar (I was an altar boy) as I passed you the bread and wine for consecration, as you turned to the congregation as they etched a blessing with the sign of the cross, as you offered communicants, in turn, the paten with white wafers and the silver chalice at the altar rail. My mother would bring us, Flora and myself, to the communion rail and your would pause along your way to give us, instead or the eucharist, your blessing. Still today I feel your hands on my head and hear the murmured words above me.
I remembered those moments many years later, when you were on your deathbed, and was moved to ask for your blessing—even though I had long since abandoned belief in your religion. I bowed my head at your bedside and took your hand in mine to bring it to rest on the top of my head, only to realize that by this time you had forgotten the words. But I received your blessing anyway, without them.
With loving memories from your son,
Peter
Tuesday, July 6, 2021
6 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
Did you feel it too? Did you regret it? That we were never close? Not really. Would you, as I do, have wished it otherwise?
This thought occurred to me as I wrote earlier about the early loss of your mother and your grieving, rather “proper” father. I suppose that left you with no one to model closeness. Perhaps it was just the ethos of the English upper middle classes of your generation, a hangover from Victorian days with their strict adherence to propriety.
I well remember that first time I brought Ellie over to visit, that Christmas—would this have been 1970? 1970? You made a point of saying, often, and telling your friends at the pub, how much it meant to you that I gave you a big hug—the first I could ever remember!—when we got off the train at Carmarthen station.
I did not learn this from you but from Ellie’s father, Michael, who first surprised me with the big hug I soon came to expect every time we got together. A matter of course.
We used to shake hands, you and I, grown man and boy, father and son! Hard to believe it now, so many years later, but we shook hands even to say goodbye when you took me to the station and saw me onto the train that would take me off to school. We shook hands, hello, when I got back…
Well, I promise I’d give you a big hug now, too, if that were possible. Maybe even a kiss on the cheek! How that would surprise you!
Your son, Peter
Monday, July 5, 2021
5 JULY, LOS ANGELES
Dear Harry,
Today when I took Jake the dog out at seven o’clock for his pee and poop walk, the air was still heavy with lingering smoke from last night’s July Fourth extravaganza, and the smell of spent gunpowder was still pervasive in the misty light of the early morning. And even at this hour, long after the celebration, the pop and fizz and boom of the occasional stray firework could still be heard.
In the England of my childhood, as you’ll well recall, fireworks meant Guy Fawkes Day. Remember, remember, the fifth of November, of gunpowder, treason and plot… went that old piece of doggerel. It meant the parading of the Guy Fawkes effigy and the lighting of the bonfire where he’d be burned each year in a new ritual at the stake. Amidst the sparks and smoke from the fire, the fireworks were the crowning moment for the cheering crowds.
Sadly, this was not a celebration that we shared, you and I. In November, of course, from the age of seven, I was away at school. I wonder if you missed me on those nights of revelry?
These thoughts occurred to me as I looked out over Hollywood last night, so far in time and space from the fireworks of my youth. And with you gone already, these many years. And I found myself reflecting, not for the first time, how strange it seemed to have ended up so far from where I started.
July Fourth is the day when we Americans—yes, I am one now!—celebrate their independence from the country where you and I grew up. Is it my imagination that this year’s celebration had an anxious, almost desperate feel to it? The rumble of exploding fireworks started earlier, I thought, than usual, and continued longer—even, as I noted, until this morning. It seemed also more chaotic. While neighboring trees obscured our view to the south, where most of the action seemed to be taking place, the distant flashes and occasional nearby bursts of brilliant, multicolored lights were ubiquitous, ceaseless, relentless. It was as though the city were bent on asserting the freedom of Americans, come what may—and despite the current dire political threats on the very freedom that was being celebrated.
Well, Harry, as I suggested, that’s likely all in my own head. The truth is—I can share this with you, my own father, no?—I no longer feel at home in my adoptive country. I long for the social proprieties, the civility, the intimacy, perhaps—even during the war years—the safety of that English country village, the one where you were Rector and I, a small boy, was the Rector’s son.
Affectionately, Peter
Today when I took Jake the dog out at seven o’clock for his pee and poop walk, the air was still heavy with lingering smoke from last night’s July Fourth extravaganza, and the smell of spent gunpowder was still pervasive in the misty light of the early morning. And even at this hour, long after the celebration, the pop and fizz and boom of the occasional stray firework could still be heard.
In the England of my childhood, as you’ll well recall, fireworks meant Guy Fawkes Day. Remember, remember, the fifth of November, of gunpowder, treason and plot… went that old piece of doggerel. It meant the parading of the Guy Fawkes effigy and the lighting of the bonfire where he’d be burned each year in a new ritual at the stake. Amidst the sparks and smoke from the fire, the fireworks were the crowning moment for the cheering crowds.
Sadly, this was not a celebration that we shared, you and I. In November, of course, from the age of seven, I was away at school. I wonder if you missed me on those nights of revelry?
These thoughts occurred to me as I looked out over Hollywood last night, so far in time and space from the fireworks of my youth. And with you gone already, these many years. And I found myself reflecting, not for the first time, how strange it seemed to have ended up so far from where I started.
July Fourth is the day when we Americans—yes, I am one now!—celebrate their independence from the country where you and I grew up. Is it my imagination that this year’s celebration had an anxious, almost desperate feel to it? The rumble of exploding fireworks started earlier, I thought, than usual, and continued longer—even, as I noted, until this morning. It seemed also more chaotic. While neighboring trees obscured our view to the south, where most of the action seemed to be taking place, the distant flashes and occasional nearby bursts of brilliant, multicolored lights were ubiquitous, ceaseless, relentless. It was as though the city were bent on asserting the freedom of Americans, come what may—and despite the current dire political threats on the very freedom that was being celebrated.
Well, Harry, as I suggested, that’s likely all in my own head. The truth is—I can share this with you, my own father, no?—I no longer feel at home in my adoptive country. I long for the social proprieties, the civility, the intimacy, perhaps—even during the war years—the safety of that English country village, the one where you were Rector and I, a small boy, was the Rector’s son.
Affectionately, Peter
Sunday, July 4, 2021
4 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
The truth is, you were a mystery to me. An enigma.
Who were you? Where did you come from?
I knew this much: your father, my grandfather, was a prominent electrical engineer in the early days of electricity. Amongst his other achievements he invented something called oil immersion switchgear, allowing manufacturers to safely harness high voltage power for industrial purposes. A handful or studio portraits and less formal snapshots in the great tome my mother called the “family album” show a thoughtful, elegant gentleman with a generous, neatly-trimmed mustache and dark, twinkling eyes. His benign humor is evident in the soft gleam of those eyes and the gentle curve of his lips.
Your mother, my real grandmother and your father’s first wife, died when you were only 14 years old. We never spoke about this, but I’m convinced that it must have left a deep wound in your heart. I did come to understand—did my own mother tell me this?—that your father’s grief left you in some way responsible, along with your older sister Nancy, for the care of your two younger brothers, Donald and Neil.
The grandmother I knew, Granny Murcott, became a part of the family when your father remarried after a respectable period of mourning.
Then your father died, of a heart attack I believe, on a business trip to New Zealand, when I was a year-and-a-half old. The way I calculate it—my mother was 30 years older to the day than I, and you were a year older than she—you would have been 32 or 33 years old. Which is still a young age to lose your father. (I was nearly 60 when you died…)
Though she lived on for a while in the village where we lived, I believe you were never really close with your stepmother, Granny Murcott, who died when I was about 5 years old.
From what I know from others about the loss of parents at an early age, then, I conclude that this history must have affected you in ways I never knew because you never talked about it, at least not with your children. Perhaps you thought it inappropriate.
Still, thinking back on it today, I would have liked to know. It would surely help me to unwrap the enigma to which your silence left me heir.
I think I might have been able to love you more.
Affectionately, in retrospect, your son,
Peter
Saturday, July 3, 2021
2 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I think perhaps it also has to do with love. If memory serves me well, this was a word that was not much used in our family. Well, never, really. “My father never told me that he loved me.” I heard this complaint from many wounded, maladjusted men in my later years and have to say that for a long time I judged them to be a bit of a whine. Alright, a major whine.
But I’ve come to understand that those words are in fact important.
We may have thought it needless to say them, that it sufficed among our family members to take the fact for granted. We all loved each other, didn’t we? You and “Mummy” and my sister Flora and myself? We may have surrendered to old English inhibitions and conventional embarrassment, in the belief that matters of the heart were of little importance and were not worth talking about.
But did we? Did we love each other? Did you love me? Did I love you? These are questions to which I long to know the answer.
Your son,
Peter
Friday, July 2, 2021
1 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I have decided to call you by your first name, even though I’ll admit it still feels strange to me. I would never have presumed to do so while you were still alive. But now that I myself am approaching the age you were when you left this world, I’d like to think I have earned that right and hope to be forgiven if you disagree.
I have decided to call you by your first name, even though I’ll admit it still feels strange to me. I would never have presumed to do so while you were still alive. But now that I myself am approaching the age you were when you left this world, I’d like to think I have earned that right and hope to be forgiven if you disagree.
For most of my early life of course I called you Daddy. We did not abbreviate it to “Dad” when I was growing up, as is commonly the case over here in America. It was always Daddy. My mother, an inveterate hoarder of all family memorabilia, saved some of the letters I had to write to you from school (I say “had to” because they used to sit us down every Sunday morning and require us to fulfill this filial obligation) and all those letters start out, in big, uneven, childish letters, with the words “Dear Mummy and Daddy.” Most of them, from my younger years, continue with stock phrases like “I am well. How are you?”
I think I was uncomfortable with “Daddy” even as a teenager, but certainly by the time I was a young adult, a university student, I was embarrassed by the childish sound of it. Still, it was a while before I managed to make the transition to the more formal—well, too formal—“Father”, which I always found easier to write than to use in person. I also wanted to distinguish myself from the many people, especially among your high church friends and congregants, who would address you as “Father” because that was your profession. I have a distant memory, too, that you liked “Padre” from at least one military officer, in the war years…
But now it’s Harry, and it will be Harry from here on. That puts us on a more equal footing, and at my age I think I’ve earned the right. Perhaps it’s something that I need. I have been feeling the desire for reconnection, or rather a connection that we never quite had. It distresses me to feel that I never knew you, my own father, and I’m hoping now—so late in life!—to get to know you better by picking through old clues that in my self-absorption, as a child and a young man, I never bothered to register or recognize—clues that might have helped me know you for the man you were.
So let's consider this the start.
With fond regards from your son,
Peter
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