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