11 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Let’s change the subject. Talk about something else that was close to your heart but impossible for us to talk about: sex.

You liked to think of yourself as open-minded, frank, unembarrassed, you loved to engage in sexual innuendo, flirt with Bletchley girls at the Rectory… but all I really learned from you about sex was the blush of the English schoolboy.

I would have been, what? Twelve? Thirteen? When I was summoned to your study at the Vicarage in Braughing. It was a tiny room, off the front hall, hardly big enough for your blond oak desk and matching chair and, as I recall, one comfortable leather easy chair.

On this occasion, when you called me in, you had a chalkboard set up on an easel. It was time to explain to your son the mysteries of sex, and if you were embarrassed, it was not half as much as I was.

Obviously, with the chalkboard, you wanted to make your lesson as objective as possible. All science and medicine. No mess or joy. You drew the outlines of the operative parts, male and female, with a piece of white chalk and explained how they could be merged in an act designed (by the good Lord, surely!) to create children. You explained about eggs and fertilization, about incubation and birth. You did your best to say what you thought needed to be said.

I did my own best to listen patiently and attentively, as I knew I should. But in actual fact—I tell you this now, so many years later, and after you are long gone from this world!—your explanations were superfluous, at least in theory: by what agency I no longer recall, I had a copy of Gray’s Anatomy in my bedroom and had explored its pages—and illustrations—on more than one occasion for this same information, trying to put it all together with the mysterious physiological effect that manifested in a region of my body I knew I was supposed to refrain from touching.

On multiple occasions, too, I had proved to myself that the required restraint was more than even a good boy could reasonably practice. The temptation was too great, the mysterious pleasure too hard to resist. But I was not yet well enough developed to take things further than the exploratory touch.

No matter how well intended, I’m afraid to say that your explanations did no more than add to my confusion. But there was soon another incident that I knew must somehow be related to all this, but was unable to fit in to the confusing picture. You heard about it later, didn’t you, not from me but from another source? But that deserves a letter all its own and I’ll write more tomorrow.

Meantime, Harry, I do know that you struggled with this. I can’t imagine how much harder it must have been for you to have this talk with Flora. But perhaps you left that task to Peggy? I’m curious, but must acknowledge this is something I will never know.

Your son, Peter