21 AUGUST, 2021

FAIR WARNING, FRIENDS: THIS ONE IS RAW,

Dear Harry,

You’d have no way of knowing this, but there were some seriously awful things that happened to me during my teenage years at school.

Did you know, for example, that your son was gang-raped? In public? Maybe not technically, but that’s how it felt.

The facts, Harry: a big bruiser of a boy named “Bunter” Scott, fifteen years old, just one year ahead of me at school, came back after one of our holidays boasting that he’d had sex with a girl. Of course none of the other boys believed him, so he set out after lights-out in the dormitory one night to demonstrate his prowess. Whom should he choose to be his partner in this demonstration? They settled on me. It was a matter of common consent. And despite my protests they gathered around my bed with flashlights in their hands, laughing and cheering him on as he climbed in, pulled down his pajama bottoms and forced himself between my legs, plunging away with abandon to the delight of his spectators.

Having proved his point, he took time to acknowledge the admiration that was now his due, tucked himself back in his pajamas, and returned to his own bed. I was left shamed and humiliated, obviously, but also with that desperate sense of loneliness, of being irremediably other than the rest of them, the ones in the know, the ones who belonged.

No one, to my knowledge, ever mentioned the incident again. I would not have dared to tell you about it at the time. The repercussion was mine alone to live with.

In all the anger and the shame, I still managed to blame myself. Why had I let this happen to me?

We are smarter as a society about these things today. We know to dismiss self-blame as inappropriate. We have learned to encourage victims of such acts of molestation or sexual assault not to accept responsibility for it themselves but to hold the aggressor accountable for his act. But I knew no better at the time, and this was a question that I asked myself repeatedly. There was no one else to ask. And of course I had no answer.

I don’t wish to punish you, Harry, for those twelve years at school. But that’s no reason for not taking the opportunity to absolve myself.

Those words from the confessional come back to me: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” False words. St. Swithun be damned, there was no sin in this on my part. Nor in my harmless pursuit of lonely pleasure. Sin? Along with so many other aspects of the religion you embraced, I reject the very notion of it.

But maybe you can forgive me that!

Your son, Peter