16 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

A postscript to the Philippe story. The year after the exchange with Flora that brought him to England for the summer and her (miserably!) to France with his parents, it was my turn to go. It was my first time there. Philippe and his father, Monsieur, came to pick me up at the airport, and I was hugely impressed, on arriving at their house in Maisons-Lafitte, just north of Paris, by his father’s genial ease with what, in our home, would surely have been an awkward embarrassment. They had just acquired a new kitten who was taking what was apparently its first poop in the front yard when we arrived, and Monsieur was delighted. “Eh, chérie,” he called up to his wife. “Viens voir la merde du chat.” Come see the cat’s shit. I knew I was in exactly the right place, a place where freedom for convention and English inhibitions reigned.

I was disappointed by one thing, though, that first night in France. I had been looking forward, secretly, excitedly in fact, to the opportunity to further pursue my sexual education with the expert guidance of Philippe. I had gained some experience in the intervening months and was expecting to be able to play more advanced games this time around. But Philippe showed not the slightest interest—not even a memory of what had been, for me, a momentous encounter the previous year. He had his own room, I had mine. He seemed even older, even more aloof. No more touching, no more stories. I felt quite bereft.

But—Harry, you’ll be relieved to know this—I did fall in love that summer in France. For the first time. With a girl.

Her name was Nicole. She was a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, golden brown-haired and irresistible thirteen year-old. She wore orange jeans and white blouses open at the neck. She had a beguiling smile that infatuated me when I first saw her. Her brother was Philippe’s best friend, Jean-Claude. I used to tag along with Philippe and Jean-Claude, whose favorite occupation now was making bombs and exploding them on a vacant lot, and always felt like the third wheel on a bicycle. But then Jean-Claude’s father called on his son to help out with the annual harvesting of the crop of green plums in their backyard and ready them for distillation into his home-brewed plum brandy.

Imagine, Harry, this deeply shy, deeply self-conscious and infatuated teenage boy and the amorous urgency he felt in standing close to the girl he so impossibly desired—I would not have known how to approach her, even if the occasion ever arose—fingers touching fingers as they stuff ripe plums into the dark bung-hole of the barrel in which they were to be left for many days to ferment.

As you can tell, Harry, the memory is still as fresh, as intensely, and as unrequitedly sexual as it was back then.

Your son, still in love, with tongue hanging out,

Peter