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