14 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

I have a confession to make. I’m not sure at what age exactly I stopped enjoying your favorite summertime activity, but by my teenage years I’m pretty sure I hated it. Well, hate is perhaps too strong a word, but I was no longer sharing your enjoyment of the nomadic life.

I’m talking about the caravan. In the years immediately following the war (when petrol once again became more readily available) our caravan trips consumed most of the family time away from school during the summer holidays. As a little boy, I’m sure I went along with it unquestioningly. It was what we did. As I grew older I began to hate (that word again!) the hours spent in the back seat of your car with Flora; the daily search in the Caravan Club handbook for the next site where we could pull in and “put the legs down”; the arguments over the best routes between you and Peggy in the front seat; and the perfection you insisted on in leveling the caravan by cranking each of the four corner legs to your exacting requirements. I hated the Elsan tent (was that invented by you? Your brother Donald?) a tall, narrow tent with squatting room for one on the portable loo, held in place by a brace at one corner of the caravan. I was lazy. I wanted to spend my summer lounging around, escaping all the rules and impositions of school life. I was reaching an age where boys begin to sense the possibilities of freedom, and the last thing I needed was more constraints.

The one thing I did like was my little pup tent. It was easy enough to put up, a short way from the caravan, and it was my little private space. It was meant for one, but it could sleep two people at a push, and it was here I was initiated into the arcane knowledge of that thing between my legs whose purpose you had attempted to explain to me and which Mr. Ellis had inexplicably attempted to devour. Aside from its mundane application in the loo, however, (or, when camping, behind the nearest hedge) its more interesting behaviors continued to mystify me.

Remember Philippe? The French boy who came over to stay that summer when Flora first went to stay with his parents in France? We took him caravanning with us, remember? and every time we passed a Citroën on the road he would point and shout, delightedly, “Ah, ze car of my fazza!” That seemed to be the sum of his interest in the lovely English countryside.

Philippe was Flora’s age—a year and a half older than me; so, fourteen going on fifteen—and compared to myself he was physically strong, muscular, well-developed. He wore a tiny bathing suit and liked to show off his muscles. And he shared my pup tent…

We each had a sleeping bag and slept side by side, and one evening, shortly after bedtime, I could sense that something other than sleep was going on. Philippe, when he spoke, seemed a little breathless, husky: “’ave you done eet yet?” he asked.

Done what? I had no idea what his question meant.

“You know,” he said—but I didn’t—“done eet, veez a girl?”

Of course I hadn’t, and he realized at once that I was totally ignorant. Time to educate me. He reached over and slid his hand down in my sleeping bag to perform a manual investigation of my penis, hard already, but still quite small and skinny. “Ah,” he said sympathetically. “’ees still too small, you see? ’ere,” he added, with some pride: “feel zees.”

He took my hand and led it down inside his sleeping bag. I was amazed, first by the contact of my fingers with the mat of wiry hairs—I told you, didn’t I, that he was well-developed? I had only a soft down, as yet—and still more when he wrapped my fingers around his erection. It was not long, but fat, hard, and throbbing. Philippe was quite clearly very enamored of it. He said, “You see, one day ‘ee will grow big, like zees.”

So that was settled. He took care of his own need right there in the pup tent as he continued on to tell me the (perhaps fictional?) story of how he had already lost his virginity—“you poot eet up inside ‘er”, he explained—having been seduced by an older woman, the mother of a friend, and how he planned to resume their intimacy once he got back to France.

So, Harry, the caravanning holiday that year served an unexpected and for me revelatory purpose. What Philippe had to show me was soon, as I matured just a little further, to open the door to a pleasure that accompanied me through adolescence and beyond—the pleasure that you claimed to have denied yourself. The pleasure you disparagingly called “self-abuse.”

Your sinful son, Peter