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