27 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Let’s see, where were we? Braughing, no? Did you know that this was where I fell in love—with a girl!—for a second time. After Nicole.

It was quite innocent. For sex, in adolescence, there were only boys, the ones at school, but that was different. I’m sure you never knew about that. But you did know about Mary—that was her name—because Peggy was in something of a panic about it; she was convinced I was going to run off and get married—at the age of fourteen!—and that needless worry brought out the snob in her. Mary, as you’ll recall, was the daughter of the local garage owner and her best friend, Brian’s parents ran the post office next door. Not a suitable match for the Vicar’s son! (Yes, you were the Rector of Aspley Guise, but now you were the Vicar of Braughing. I never knew the difference, if there was one).

But if I’m to tell you about Mary, I’ll need to start with your nemesis, Barry Evans. Yes, the artist. I think that Barry somehow represented everything you most longed for and most feared within yourself. He personified the wild side, the Harry within that longed to come out and play, but the one the Vicar had to keep contained. Barry rejected anything that smacked of social convention. He lusted unashamedly after women and had no qualms about sleeping with them if he could; he was blatantly unfaithful to his wife, another Mary. He borrowed money from you—I mentioned this before—and did not return it. He was a man to whom histrionics came naturally, unrestrained by the propriety to which you were bound by nurture more than nature.

It was your love of theater that brought the two of you together, head-to-head. One of the most memorable events I can recall from our Braughing days was your production of the Dickens story, “A Christmas Carol”, in the village hall, right across from the church at the bottom of the hill. Did you regret having chosen to cast Barry in the role of Scrooge? He certainly reveled in it. Even more than the acting, I suspect, he relished the opportunity to get a rise out of the Vicar. No one could outclass you as a natural born ham like Barry Evans. He was a brilliant, over-the-top Scrooge, a totally undisciplined actor, happily improvising lines and outlandish gestures—like puffing out the white powder that we used to age his hair to get a laugh out of the audience.

He was also scandalously, loudly irreligious.

So there was Barry. Mary, meantime—my Mary, not his, not Barry’s wife—was cast as one of the street urchins. You could not include me in the play myself—I was away at school during the early rehearsals—but brought me in as an assistant make-up artist to help backstage with the production. One of my daily jobs before the curtain went up was to smear Mary’s legs with sooty make-up, to evoke the dirt of the Victorian London streets. I was by this time, as I say, fourteen years old, and I found the task quite thrillingly erotic. I could hardly wait for each night’s performance. Small wonder that I fell in love.

It happened that Barry also loved to play the Pandar. He and Mary—his Mary—had begun hosting weekly soirées for young people like myself (and my Mary, of course, and her friend Brian). It was an evening of cheese and cheap red wine from Spain, poetry (Dylan Thomas!), stories, modern art (Picasso! Braque!) and music (Poulenc, Satie, Stravinsky!) beside a roaring fire in the hearth, with Barry and Mary’s young children running amok amongst the guests. It was an ideal circumstance in which to fan the flames of love.

Still, it took a while before I found the nerve to ask Mary to go out with me. In Braughing, “going out” meant taking walks along the lanes and out into the countryside. The nearest cinema was many miles away and we were too young for pubs. I was intensely shy. Perhaps she was, too. I could only fantasize about things I would never have known how to do, and still less dare. Did we ever even kiss, along those shady country lanes? Perhaps. I do remember the tantalizing thrill of holding hands. How daring that seemed to me. And our friend Barry was positively itching to get us into bed together and would have gladly found us one, had we been ready for it.

But of course we weren’t. We were innocent village kids. Barry efforts notwithstanding, Peggy need not have worried.

I no longer recall how things ended between me and Mary, but it’s clear they did not end either as my mother feared, nor as the lecherous Barry would have wished. The most obvious answer is that I just went back to school. Once there, I do remember mooning about for her for a while and gloomily engraving her initials, MM, on my desk in Latin class, where they mingled with the inscription of a century’s worth of other, equally lovelorn tributes. For all I know, those initials could still be there.

Do you remember her, Harry? I think of her warmly to this day. The second actual girl I ever loved. Too bad I was so shy! Too bad you had to send me back to school so soon after that Christmas.

With a pinch of nostalgia then, today, your son, Peter