7 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

I need to talk about Flora again, while we’re still in Aspley Guise. Now that she has been gone, these several years, and you for many more, I feel it can be told. It was, for her, an early wound. How do I know about this? Did you tell me? Or did she? I did know the story, even at a young age, young enough not to fully understand.

She could have been twelve years old at the time, and came back in tears one day from a walk on the heath, up behind the Rectory, beyond the end of the path where we used to pick blackberries and past the sandpit—a quarry cut deep into the hillside. We took tin trays there from the kitchen, for the scary thrill of sliding on them down its steep, slippery slopes, top to bottom. We took glass vials, at times, filling them with layers of different colored sands, red and green, yellow, orange, black, and corking them up securely to bring back home as gifts.

Further, past the sandpit, was a wild area of heath with waist high gorse bushes, deep green with seasonal bright yellow blossoms, small but plentiful. It was here that Flora came upon a stranger with his fly unbuttoned, cock in hand—though she had no idea what that strange thing might be—scaring her as it squirted “white stuff,” so she said, all over the ground in front of her.

Did she just happen upon this man by chance, his work already in progress? Or did he see this pretty little girl and choose the moment to undo his fly? Was he one of those men what get their kicks this way?

I do not know the answer to those questions, and I suspect you did not, either. But you had the task of comforting your daughter and calming her down with some kind of explanation as to what this man was doing.

No easy task. As we well know, you resorted frequently to Drs. Freud or Jung to guide you in such situations, so perhaps these luminaries helped. And you were surely well aware of the potentially long-lasting emotional repercussions of trauma such as this. I wonder to what extent the episode may have affected your later efforts to “understand” your daughter and her problems—and offer her sometimes unasked-for advice about her relationship with men.

You may or may not know this, Harry, but she—your daughter, Flora—found something dark and disturbing about your attempted interventions in this aspect of her life.

So, asking you in advance to forgive the honesty about an obviously disturbing subject, I remain, as always,

Flora's loving brother, Peter