28 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Back to school. There’s more you need to know about this.

What I learned, or thought to have learned about myself in the exclusive company of other boys was almost comically wrong. That’s what years at boarding school will do for you. Well, rather what it did for me. I’m not sure about you, but I think not. By the time I left school, with inexpressible relief and gratitude for that final release at the age of seventeen—it was just a couple of days before my eighteenth birthday—I was pretty much convinced that I would forever only have sex with boys and men. Yes, as you know, I had “fallen in love” with two girls outside of school, but they were impossible fantasies. My only actual experience was with people who had a penis, like myself.

I realize now—indeed, I realized immediately after leaving school—that there was nothing remotely “gay” about those early sexual experiments. It was a perfectly normal need to experiment with my bodily equipment, and for the better part of my life thus far the only humans readily available for my tentative explorations were other boys. With Nicole and Mary I was far too shy and insecure about my physical self to engage in even the most innocent of sexual play. But I could, and did, with boys. And at that time in my life I felt obliged to think of these games as “love” in order to explain and justify them to myself.

You could have known none of this, for sure, but I knew you would never have approved of my adventures. St. Swithun left little room for doubt that sex, particularly with your own kind, was the worst of all possible sins—the kind that, when you die, gets you sent straight off to hell to burn in the furnaces of eternal damnation. “Dirty” was the word that was generally used to describe anything to do with sex—as in “dirty jokes” and “don’t be dirty.” Still, Harry, you were not intolerant. There were gay men in our lives with whom you socially felt quite comfortable. Witness David, the flamboyantly gay American interior designer and his architect partner who lived across the lane from your St. Mary’s church in Braughing. This unabashedly gay couple—we knew no better than to call them “queer” or “homo” on those days—had refurbished an old cottage with the kind of elegance you find illustrated in the pages of contemporary architectural magazines. They entertained the somewhat bemused village gentry there with exotic cocktails and canapés.

You loved it! That was fine. You felt much more comfortable with this couple than you did with the flamboyantly heterosexual Barry. And despite my activity with boys at school, I think it’s true to say that I never felt the slightest curiosity or interest in these men’s sexual lives, still less did I feel inclined to join them. Well, there was the one occasion when David drove me in his huge convertible motor car to see another of the cottages they had worked on, where we went out back to take a pee in the garden and he turned around to swing an enormous dick toward me for my admiration. He also regaled me with surely fictional but to me startlingly specific stories of his exploits with exotic women in Paris night clubs after the war. But that was just in fun.

You might have had some concern about me a few years later, in Sharnbrook—I was now a late teenager—when you called me into your study for one of our serious conversations. As a courtesy to the Vicar, the local police inspector had informed you I had been seen on several occasions visiting a nearby house that was under surveillance and was subject to an imminent police raid. (Homosexuality was still a crime in England in the 1950s, punishable by prison sentences). I had been visiting people I considered to be friends without much thought that they might be gay, but simply charming, sophisticated people whom I respected and liked. We’d share a glass of wine, a few laughs, and the kind of intelligent conversation you’d not find in local pubs or the parties in the homes of more conventional village society. The inspector came with a friendly warning, that this might be a good moment for your son to stop knocking on that particular door—and, rather shamefully, I followed his advice. I never heard further about what might have happened to my friends. They may well have ended up in jail.

But as we’ll see, the doubts that tortured me about my sexual identity did not outlast my time at boarding school—not even by one minute.

How would the story of my early sexual experience have been different, I have often wondered, had you and Peggy sent me to a local state school, nearer to home, where boys and girls mixed naturally together? With the opportunity for emotional growth more suited to my natural proclivities, I like to believe it would have taken me far less time to reach anything like mature manhood. As it was, I remained an emotional adolescent well into my adult life. I was scarred with an emotional as well as a physical timidity. I had learned to contain myself, to hold back, to never quite let myself embrace life and love—and the people that I loved—as fully as I wished to.

As a postscript, Harry, you’ll be interested to know that most formerly all-boys’ boarding schools—including my own, Lancing—have been admitting girls for several years now. Some things have changed for the better since our day. When I last visited Lancing, with Ellie, years ago, I was delighted to find a gaggle of giggling teenage girls enlivening that same dormitory where I once scarcely knew enough to even dream of them.

And even—can you believe this, Harry?—even your old college in Cambridge, once the exclusive domain of young males like yourself in the 1920s and like me in the 1950s, even your old Cambridge college now welcomes women undergraduates! As I already mentioned earlier, your great-granddaughter, Georgia, is now enrolled there as a student in Linguistics. How proud you’d be!

As indeed am I, your son, her grandpa, Peter