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