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
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