Dear Harry,
Among the many hurtful, harmful things Marie and I inflicted on ourselves and, worse, on others over the years, I can claim to have done at least one decent thing by her. It started with a late night telephone call I picked up at my Mercier Road flat.
It was Marie’s roommate. She needed me.
I’m pleased to be able to tell you that I had not the slightest hesitation. Within minutes I was in the Anglia, driving over to the small house she shared with the friend who—as I have said—did not like me much. Perhaps she was right about me. Absent romantic or other social interest, she saw through the surface of my charm to the less admirable character who lay beneath. But this evening she was kinder than her usual self when she came to the front door and let me in. “She’s in her room,” she said.
I found Marie in tears. She’d had a call from her mother a short while ago: her father was dead, killed in an instant in a car crash caused by a drunk driving American from the local air force base. Quite aside from naturally being distraught, she felt helpless. She had no further details and there was nothing further she could do that night. She planned to take the first train home in the morning—she lived in a small village near Oxford—and in the meantime she needed me to stay with her.
Of course. I had never stayed overnight in her home before. She had only a single bed in her small, neatly furnished room, and we lay down together and stayed there all night long, my arms around her while she tried to sleep.
It was a long night. Marie cried through most of it, and I felt strangely privileged to be there, holding her, lying together for the first time without a thought of sex.
I thought of you, Harry. I thought about fathers, and the pain of final, irremediable separation that is death. I was twenty-two years old. I had never been bothered, I’m sure, by the thought that you or Peggy might die. It was in a way beyond my comprehension. And here was Marie, in bed with me, a living body, and her father was gone. I was not to know that it would be nearly a half-century before you were to die.
In the morning we woke early. I drove her to the train station and we waved goodbye.
Sadly, your son,
Pete
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
29 September, 2021
Dear Harry,
Is Marie still with us, in some corner of our poor, exploited planet? I don’t see why not. She was just four or five years my senior, and these days many people live well into their nineties, more and more into their hundreds. If she is still alive—as I hope, if she is also well and hearty—this intermittently appearing inamorata of my youthful days will be a very old lady now! I hope she still remembers me with the same fondness and gratitude that I remember her, because I share equally in the blame for the havoc she eventually brought into my life.
Did I ever bring her home with me to Sharnbrook? I seem to remember that I did. Maybe more than once. I wonder what you could have thought of her? She was not outwardly the kind of girl who normally attracted me—not beautiful or even pretty in any conventional way. Her least prepossessing feature, if I can take the rather invidious liberty of a purely objective, aesthetic assessment, was her ankles. They were the ankles of a natural-born country girl, strong and solid, compared with the shapely, elegant ankles of the city girl who is brought up walking in high heels on the even paving stones of sidewalks and never in the mud.
Yet she projected a powerful sexual energy. And I must qualify that: her energy was not only sexual. I saw it as a kind of joyful lust for all the pleasures life could bring and damn the consequences. We survived—miraculously—a disastrous, rain-soaked camping trip in Germany that first summer, and continued to see each other in London in the fall, each teaching at a different school in the south-western area of the city.
I am not proud of the young man I was at that time, Harry. I discovered in short order that teaching was not the poet’s sinecure I had envisioned. The short hours were lengthened interminably by such things as teacher conferences, sports supervision and… my God, the homework! Hours upon hours of squinting through smudged, illegible exercise books, in which I was obliged not only to correct the countless grammatical or punctuation errors, but also to add comments, commendations, questions, the exasperated “See me!” The long holidays I had so naively anticipated turned out to be much-needed periods of restoration to a measure of health and sanity. Weekends, an all-too-brief and welcome respite. Worse, my teenage charges were quick to spot my deficiency as a disciplinarian—and to take advantage.
Marie loved teaching. I’m afraid to say I grew to loathe it. Meantime, inexcusably, I began to treat her with cavalier entitlement. I was happy to exercise seigneurial rights to disport myself with other women, but I blithely assumed unquestioning fidelity on her part, and instant availability at my whim. If I had nothing more interesting going on, it was time to call Marie. And in truth she always was available. Until she wasn’t.
It was one Saturday evening. I called her at the last moment, in full confidence that she would of course come running at my behest… and found that she had other plans. She had been invited to a party. She would probably be home late but perhaps we could find time to see each other the next day, Sunday.
It was been a while since my jealousy last showed its ugly face, but it hit me with a vengeance when I called her late that evening from our flat (mobile phones were no more than a germ of implausible speculation in the minds of science fiction writers, along with the barely conceivable video phone that Facetime has become today!) and she didn’t answer. Where was she? I had visions of her cavorting with some tweedy young man with cavalry twill trousers and a striped college tie.
I suffered through a sleepless night disturbed by endless speculations, and called her at home as early as I decently could on Sunday morning. There was still no answer. Impossible! Could she, would she have spent the night in another man’s bed—a man who might be, God forbid, wealthier, smarter, more charming than myself and endowed—God! No!—with a bigger, more appealing cock? The image of her allowing another man’s penis up inside her whipped me into a rage that I could barely control. I called again, and again the ring went unanswered. And again… I called Barry, to ask if he had heard from her. He was surprised, and sounded infuriatingly amused by my anxiety. I drove over to the small suburban house she shared with a roommate who, I had always been quite sure, distrusted me. She seemed delighted to see me so upset. No, Marie had not been home the night before.
My hours that Sunday morning were spent in an ever-increasing state of despair and rage. I was convinced by now she had betrayed me, that she had (joyfully!) allowed another man to penetrate the body that was rightfully mine. And then finally, in this deranged state of confusion and, well, yes, truthfully self-pity, the phone rang. It was Barry.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Come on over.”
Which I did. I ran.
Barry greeted me at the door with one of his wicked grins and waved me in, and led me up the stairs to the empty living room… Then, with a dramatic gesture, he flung wide the door to his bedroom, his and Mary’s, and there, behind the door, giggling, was Marie.
The initial flood of relief at seeing her was tempered immediately by a flood of questions that I did not dare to put to her aloud: where had she been? Where had she spent the night? With whom? I dreaded the answers to the questions that I feared to ask, and instead pretended to believe the story she came up with. But I didn’t. At heart, I knew that she was lying.
Worse, a new suspicion began to seep like poison into a distrustful corner of my mind: what was she doing here at Barry’s? They seemed to be having a lot of fun at my expense. In conspiracy. How long had she been here? Where was Mary? The bed, I could see behind her, was a tangle of sheets and blankets. It looked appallingly like my own bed after a night of sex. Had she…? Had she slept with Barry…? I could not put it past him.
As for Marie… my jealously swamped any other feelings. Sent trust flying. After all, I realized, I had treated her so badly, could I blame her if she’d seized the opportunity to take revenge?
Enough for this one letter, Harry. I’m exhausted. I’ll need to continue this story in my next.
Your son, Peter
Is Marie still with us, in some corner of our poor, exploited planet? I don’t see why not. She was just four or five years my senior, and these days many people live well into their nineties, more and more into their hundreds. If she is still alive—as I hope, if she is also well and hearty—this intermittently appearing inamorata of my youthful days will be a very old lady now! I hope she still remembers me with the same fondness and gratitude that I remember her, because I share equally in the blame for the havoc she eventually brought into my life.
Did I ever bring her home with me to Sharnbrook? I seem to remember that I did. Maybe more than once. I wonder what you could have thought of her? She was not outwardly the kind of girl who normally attracted me—not beautiful or even pretty in any conventional way. Her least prepossessing feature, if I can take the rather invidious liberty of a purely objective, aesthetic assessment, was her ankles. They were the ankles of a natural-born country girl, strong and solid, compared with the shapely, elegant ankles of the city girl who is brought up walking in high heels on the even paving stones of sidewalks and never in the mud.
Yet she projected a powerful sexual energy. And I must qualify that: her energy was not only sexual. I saw it as a kind of joyful lust for all the pleasures life could bring and damn the consequences. We survived—miraculously—a disastrous, rain-soaked camping trip in Germany that first summer, and continued to see each other in London in the fall, each teaching at a different school in the south-western area of the city.
I am not proud of the young man I was at that time, Harry. I discovered in short order that teaching was not the poet’s sinecure I had envisioned. The short hours were lengthened interminably by such things as teacher conferences, sports supervision and… my God, the homework! Hours upon hours of squinting through smudged, illegible exercise books, in which I was obliged not only to correct the countless grammatical or punctuation errors, but also to add comments, commendations, questions, the exasperated “See me!” The long holidays I had so naively anticipated turned out to be much-needed periods of restoration to a measure of health and sanity. Weekends, an all-too-brief and welcome respite. Worse, my teenage charges were quick to spot my deficiency as a disciplinarian—and to take advantage.
Marie loved teaching. I’m afraid to say I grew to loathe it. Meantime, inexcusably, I began to treat her with cavalier entitlement. I was happy to exercise seigneurial rights to disport myself with other women, but I blithely assumed unquestioning fidelity on her part, and instant availability at my whim. If I had nothing more interesting going on, it was time to call Marie. And in truth she always was available. Until she wasn’t.
It was one Saturday evening. I called her at the last moment, in full confidence that she would of course come running at my behest… and found that she had other plans. She had been invited to a party. She would probably be home late but perhaps we could find time to see each other the next day, Sunday.
It was been a while since my jealousy last showed its ugly face, but it hit me with a vengeance when I called her late that evening from our flat (mobile phones were no more than a germ of implausible speculation in the minds of science fiction writers, along with the barely conceivable video phone that Facetime has become today!) and she didn’t answer. Where was she? I had visions of her cavorting with some tweedy young man with cavalry twill trousers and a striped college tie.
I suffered through a sleepless night disturbed by endless speculations, and called her at home as early as I decently could on Sunday morning. There was still no answer. Impossible! Could she, would she have spent the night in another man’s bed—a man who might be, God forbid, wealthier, smarter, more charming than myself and endowed—God! No!—with a bigger, more appealing cock? The image of her allowing another man’s penis up inside her whipped me into a rage that I could barely control. I called again, and again the ring went unanswered. And again… I called Barry, to ask if he had heard from her. He was surprised, and sounded infuriatingly amused by my anxiety. I drove over to the small suburban house she shared with a roommate who, I had always been quite sure, distrusted me. She seemed delighted to see me so upset. No, Marie had not been home the night before.
My hours that Sunday morning were spent in an ever-increasing state of despair and rage. I was convinced by now she had betrayed me, that she had (joyfully!) allowed another man to penetrate the body that was rightfully mine. And then finally, in this deranged state of confusion and, well, yes, truthfully self-pity, the phone rang. It was Barry.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Come on over.”
Which I did. I ran.
Barry greeted me at the door with one of his wicked grins and waved me in, and led me up the stairs to the empty living room… Then, with a dramatic gesture, he flung wide the door to his bedroom, his and Mary’s, and there, behind the door, giggling, was Marie.
The initial flood of relief at seeing her was tempered immediately by a flood of questions that I did not dare to put to her aloud: where had she been? Where had she spent the night? With whom? I dreaded the answers to the questions that I feared to ask, and instead pretended to believe the story she came up with. But I didn’t. At heart, I knew that she was lying.
Worse, a new suspicion began to seep like poison into a distrustful corner of my mind: what was she doing here at Barry’s? They seemed to be having a lot of fun at my expense. In conspiracy. How long had she been here? Where was Mary? The bed, I could see behind her, was a tangle of sheets and blankets. It looked appallingly like my own bed after a night of sex. Had she…? Had she slept with Barry…? I could not put it past him.
As for Marie… my jealously swamped any other feelings. Sent trust flying. After all, I realized, I had treated her so badly, could I blame her if she’d seized the opportunity to take revenge?
Enough for this one letter, Harry. I’m exhausted. I’ll need to continue this story in my next.
Your son, Peter
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
28 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Did I ever show the proper appreciation for the car you bought me, or helped me buy? I forget whether, or how, I participated in the purchase.
It was my first car, a little Ford Anglia. Its color was best described as dun, not an attractive color by any means, but the price was right at the used car dealership in Bedford where we bought it, even if the color would not have been my choice. After a thorough examination—you knew more about these things than I—you determined that both the bodywork and the engine were sound; and I liked what was a rather sleek, quasi-American design for a little English car.
So we bought it. Perhaps you even got a better deal on account of your clerical collar—a perk you mentioned once in one of your letters. We are now in the late fifties and in those days the clergy were treated with consideration and respect. Such things still counted.
I was immensely proud of my little Anglia. I brought it up to London and parked it proudly on the street outside our house. Admittedly, it was no match for Hugh’s elegant black monster—was it a vintage Bentley? A Daimler? A Jag?—but unlike his fine antique machines, mine actually worked. I did not have to tinker under the hood, which was how my friend Hugh spent a great deal of his time. Instead of having to walk over to the tube station and take the train, I could now drive up to the top of Putney Hill and cut across the common towards Wimbledon. Arriving at the school I could drive into the teachers’ parking lot and park my Anglia with pride alongside the odd assortment of my colleagues’ cars. I could feel, well… almost like an adult. A man in control, and not only of his means of transportation but his life.
Which was quite obviously just another illusion, Harry, as you’ll understand by now. But thank you anyway, for this generosity and the trust it represented. And my apologies for proving, in the coming days, that the trust you’d shown in me was unhappily misplaced.
Regretfully, Peter
Did I ever show the proper appreciation for the car you bought me, or helped me buy? I forget whether, or how, I participated in the purchase.
It was my first car, a little Ford Anglia. Its color was best described as dun, not an attractive color by any means, but the price was right at the used car dealership in Bedford where we bought it, even if the color would not have been my choice. After a thorough examination—you knew more about these things than I—you determined that both the bodywork and the engine were sound; and I liked what was a rather sleek, quasi-American design for a little English car.
So we bought it. Perhaps you even got a better deal on account of your clerical collar—a perk you mentioned once in one of your letters. We are now in the late fifties and in those days the clergy were treated with consideration and respect. Such things still counted.
I was immensely proud of my little Anglia. I brought it up to London and parked it proudly on the street outside our house. Admittedly, it was no match for Hugh’s elegant black monster—was it a vintage Bentley? A Daimler? A Jag?—but unlike his fine antique machines, mine actually worked. I did not have to tinker under the hood, which was how my friend Hugh spent a great deal of his time. Instead of having to walk over to the tube station and take the train, I could now drive up to the top of Putney Hill and cut across the common towards Wimbledon. Arriving at the school I could drive into the teachers’ parking lot and park my Anglia with pride alongside the odd assortment of my colleagues’ cars. I could feel, well… almost like an adult. A man in control, and not only of his means of transportation but his life.
Which was quite obviously just another illusion, Harry, as you’ll understand by now. But thank you anyway, for this generosity and the trust it represented. And my apologies for proving, in the coming days, that the trust you’d shown in me was unhappily misplaced.
Regretfully, Peter
Monday, September 27, 2021
27 SEPTEMBER, 2012
Dear Harry,
You must have been troubled to learn that Barry Evans moved to London around the same time I did. You were convinced he was a “bad influence.” You were right about the influence—and probably right, too, about the “bad.” He was an important friend and ally, and I could always talk to him about what was happening in my life in a way that I could never talk to you. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Barry and Mary had found a place to live in Putney, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a Bohemian artist and his brood. They rented the floor above what once had been the stables of a grand old Victorian relic on Rayners Road, with a wide back gate leading into a cobblestone courtyard whose walls were overgrown with ivy. The flat itself was long and narrow, with the kitchen at one end, a big, comfortable living room and, off at an angle, bedrooms for the parents and the children. Below, the stables were converted to a spacious studio where Barry worked when he was not out on a job. He and his partner, William Kempster, had by then established a national reputation as muralists and illustrators, and work, by this time, was readily available.
Was it pure coincidence? I have forgotten how it came about, but after accepting a job as a French and German teacher at Rutlish School in Wimbledon, a little further to the south and west from Putney, I heard of a group of former Caius men renting one half of another large, now subdivided home on Mercier Road, also in Putney, quite literally around the corner from Barry and Mary’s place. Conveniently, the nearby East Putney tube station was a mere two stops from Wimbledon on the District Line.
You knew some, but not all of the men who became my flat-mates; Hugh, for example—Hugh deVere Welchman, in full—the stockbroker in training who wore a business suit and a bowler hat to work every day, and carried a rolled umbrella. He loved old things, especially cars and furniture. Among his most treasured possessions was an elegant Sheraton sideboard which he kept assiduously polished. His whole room was elegant, an exception in the hodge-podge of other quirky personal “styles.” Frank Brennan, the Irishman, painted the walls of his space in dreadful alternating telephone black and telephone box red; Dick Booth, a big, secretive rugger player type whose job remained a guarded secret—his frequent visits to the USSR persuaded the rest of us that he was a spy with MI-6—maintained a room of almost studied anonymity; Frank—later Graham—Rooth shared the top floor with me, his room a spare attic, his bed a mattress on the floor. He had a mysterious and to me inexplicable flirtation with Scientology, at that time a virtually unknown sect in the UK.
My own attic room was the smallest in the house. I had the expert help of Mary in choosing colors for the multiple, mostly sloping walls; and Barry painted a Picasso-esque mural on a rectangular space above the non-functioning fireplace. The room had space only for a desk and a single bed, occupied most often by my lonely self, but on occasion—as frequently as possible—also host to any young woman I could persuade to join me there. My most frequent overnight company was Marie… but more about her shortly.
Barry continued to play the always eager Pandar to my appetites. It was at a party at is house that I met Violet, for instance, a small, pretty, indefatigably vivacious woman. She was married. I didn’t care. She seemed not to care. We were both more than a little tipsy, and Barry spurred us on. Violet’s husband was in the RAF, and she was in town for a weekend of freedom—a freedom, she made clear, that she planned to use to gratify needs that went unaddressed at home. I took her home with me to my little attic room. As Barry commented the next day when he came over to visit after she had left, we left it looking like a tornado had blown through. I’ll spare you the details.
You would be disappointed in me, Harry, and not only because of Violet. I spent my evenings and nights in this kind of debauchery as often as I could, but not nearly as often as I would have liked. I too often nursed a hangover on the way to work. A walk to East Putney station through the London mist—sometimes, in those days, a heavy blanket of smog—was of help to clear the head, as was the walk from Wimbledon Station to the school. I would arrive in good enough shape, by a hair, to check in at the teacher’s staff room for a cup of strong tea before heading off to class.
Who was I? The truth is, I had no idea. Was I the civilized, well-bred, well-spoken, socially acceptable young man, public school and Cambridge, straight-arrow, dutiful and honest to a fault? The young man you would have wanted me to be, perhaps even imagined that I was? Was I the hard-drinking, libertine, flamboyant Bohemian poet, careless of rules and social conventions, the one that Barry Evans flattered me to believe myself to be? Was I the carefree, polyamorous Romeo, seducer of women, ace lover that I’d like to have believed myself—but secretly feared I was not, and could never be? Or was I the quiet, introverted, peace- and nature-loving, rather lazy country boy who dreamed of pleasant, day-long idleness with a straw between his teeth and long, dreamless nights?
I was all of these, Harry, and none of them. Above all, I was like many young men in their very early twenties, unsure who I was, what it was I wanted, and whither I was going in my life.
Were you aware, I wonder, of this inner conflict? I tried to hide it when I was at home with a confident exterior, an easy social charm at village events, and outwardly—for the most part—gentlemanly behavior? Would it have helped if we’d been able to talk about these things? Had I not felt obliged to hide them from you, tin order to protect both you and myself from guilt, embarrassment, accountability?
The only thing I know for sure is this: that I will never know.
But we can talk now, can’t we?
Your son, Peter
You must have been troubled to learn that Barry Evans moved to London around the same time I did. You were convinced he was a “bad influence.” You were right about the influence—and probably right, too, about the “bad.” He was an important friend and ally, and I could always talk to him about what was happening in my life in a way that I could never talk to you. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Barry and Mary had found a place to live in Putney, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a Bohemian artist and his brood. They rented the floor above what once had been the stables of a grand old Victorian relic on Rayners Road, with a wide back gate leading into a cobblestone courtyard whose walls were overgrown with ivy. The flat itself was long and narrow, with the kitchen at one end, a big, comfortable living room and, off at an angle, bedrooms for the parents and the children. Below, the stables were converted to a spacious studio where Barry worked when he was not out on a job. He and his partner, William Kempster, had by then established a national reputation as muralists and illustrators, and work, by this time, was readily available.
Was it pure coincidence? I have forgotten how it came about, but after accepting a job as a French and German teacher at Rutlish School in Wimbledon, a little further to the south and west from Putney, I heard of a group of former Caius men renting one half of another large, now subdivided home on Mercier Road, also in Putney, quite literally around the corner from Barry and Mary’s place. Conveniently, the nearby East Putney tube station was a mere two stops from Wimbledon on the District Line.
You knew some, but not all of the men who became my flat-mates; Hugh, for example—Hugh deVere Welchman, in full—the stockbroker in training who wore a business suit and a bowler hat to work every day, and carried a rolled umbrella. He loved old things, especially cars and furniture. Among his most treasured possessions was an elegant Sheraton sideboard which he kept assiduously polished. His whole room was elegant, an exception in the hodge-podge of other quirky personal “styles.” Frank Brennan, the Irishman, painted the walls of his space in dreadful alternating telephone black and telephone box red; Dick Booth, a big, secretive rugger player type whose job remained a guarded secret—his frequent visits to the USSR persuaded the rest of us that he was a spy with MI-6—maintained a room of almost studied anonymity; Frank—later Graham—Rooth shared the top floor with me, his room a spare attic, his bed a mattress on the floor. He had a mysterious and to me inexplicable flirtation with Scientology, at that time a virtually unknown sect in the UK.
My own attic room was the smallest in the house. I had the expert help of Mary in choosing colors for the multiple, mostly sloping walls; and Barry painted a Picasso-esque mural on a rectangular space above the non-functioning fireplace. The room had space only for a desk and a single bed, occupied most often by my lonely self, but on occasion—as frequently as possible—also host to any young woman I could persuade to join me there. My most frequent overnight company was Marie… but more about her shortly.
Barry continued to play the always eager Pandar to my appetites. It was at a party at is house that I met Violet, for instance, a small, pretty, indefatigably vivacious woman. She was married. I didn’t care. She seemed not to care. We were both more than a little tipsy, and Barry spurred us on. Violet’s husband was in the RAF, and she was in town for a weekend of freedom—a freedom, she made clear, that she planned to use to gratify needs that went unaddressed at home. I took her home with me to my little attic room. As Barry commented the next day when he came over to visit after she had left, we left it looking like a tornado had blown through. I’ll spare you the details.
You would be disappointed in me, Harry, and not only because of Violet. I spent my evenings and nights in this kind of debauchery as often as I could, but not nearly as often as I would have liked. I too often nursed a hangover on the way to work. A walk to East Putney station through the London mist—sometimes, in those days, a heavy blanket of smog—was of help to clear the head, as was the walk from Wimbledon Station to the school. I would arrive in good enough shape, by a hair, to check in at the teacher’s staff room for a cup of strong tea before heading off to class.
Who was I? The truth is, I had no idea. Was I the civilized, well-bred, well-spoken, socially acceptable young man, public school and Cambridge, straight-arrow, dutiful and honest to a fault? The young man you would have wanted me to be, perhaps even imagined that I was? Was I the hard-drinking, libertine, flamboyant Bohemian poet, careless of rules and social conventions, the one that Barry Evans flattered me to believe myself to be? Was I the carefree, polyamorous Romeo, seducer of women, ace lover that I’d like to have believed myself—but secretly feared I was not, and could never be? Or was I the quiet, introverted, peace- and nature-loving, rather lazy country boy who dreamed of pleasant, day-long idleness with a straw between his teeth and long, dreamless nights?
I was all of these, Harry, and none of them. Above all, I was like many young men in their very early twenties, unsure who I was, what it was I wanted, and whither I was going in my life.
Were you aware, I wonder, of this inner conflict? I tried to hide it when I was at home with a confident exterior, an easy social charm at village events, and outwardly—for the most part—gentlemanly behavior? Would it have helped if we’d been able to talk about these things? Had I not felt obliged to hide them from you, tin order to protect both you and myself from guilt, embarrassment, accountability?
The only thing I know for sure is this: that I will never know.
But we can talk now, can’t we?
Your son, Peter
Saturday, September 25, 2021
25 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
The slap that brought my relationship with "Melanie" to a bitter, shameful end had a surprising and equally shameful sequel. On my way back to my room, still shaking with righteous rage, I ran into Marie. And in an instant, my all-consuming love for Melanie evaporated into a new wave of hunger. I greeted this woman whose name I did not yet know and with whom I had never before exchanged a single word, and almost dragged her up the stairs to my room where, Harry, yes, I fucked her.
No other word for it. It’s a word I never liked and I’m sure not one you never used. But yes, I fucked her.
And, to be honest, she fucked me right back. But let me explain.
Marie was not one of us, not a graduate student, but you could tell at once that she was different from the other two-year teacher-training students. For one thing, she was clearly older than the students she habitually sat with in the dining hall where I first laid concupiscent eyes on her. In fact, she was a couple of years older than myself. She stood out not only for that reason, though, but especially for the joyful energy she projected, her constant merriment, and not least for the brilliant shimmer of her golden hair.
As I mentioned earlier, we graduate students kept for the most part to ourselves. In the dining hall, we ate together, a small group of friends. But for months now, at mealtime, my eyes had been drawn back time and again to the vision of that blond hair, that seductive, bubbling energy, that joyful smile.
Afterwards, impulsively, still bathed in the afterglow of those hot, erotic moments, I asked Marie if she’d like to join me on a camping trip I had already planned in Germany that summer; and to my astonishment, she immediately agreed. That trip is a whole story unto itself, Harry. Enough to say here that for months, and as it turned out, years after that first encounter, we sinned away hungrily together, on and off, until our hunger for each other’s body proved to have consequences we could never, at that moment, have foreseen.
Mea culpa, Harry. Mea maxima culpa.
Your wicked son, Peter
The slap that brought my relationship with "Melanie" to a bitter, shameful end had a surprising and equally shameful sequel. On my way back to my room, still shaking with righteous rage, I ran into Marie. And in an instant, my all-consuming love for Melanie evaporated into a new wave of hunger. I greeted this woman whose name I did not yet know and with whom I had never before exchanged a single word, and almost dragged her up the stairs to my room where, Harry, yes, I fucked her.
No other word for it. It’s a word I never liked and I’m sure not one you never used. But yes, I fucked her.
And, to be honest, she fucked me right back. But let me explain.
Marie was not one of us, not a graduate student, but you could tell at once that she was different from the other two-year teacher-training students. For one thing, she was clearly older than the students she habitually sat with in the dining hall where I first laid concupiscent eyes on her. In fact, she was a couple of years older than myself. She stood out not only for that reason, though, but especially for the joyful energy she projected, her constant merriment, and not least for the brilliant shimmer of her golden hair.
As I mentioned earlier, we graduate students kept for the most part to ourselves. In the dining hall, we ate together, a small group of friends. But for months now, at mealtime, my eyes had been drawn back time and again to the vision of that blond hair, that seductive, bubbling energy, that joyful smile.
Afterwards, impulsively, still bathed in the afterglow of those hot, erotic moments, I asked Marie if she’d like to join me on a camping trip I had already planned in Germany that summer; and to my astonishment, she immediately agreed. That trip is a whole story unto itself, Harry. Enough to say here that for months, and as it turned out, years after that first encounter, we sinned away hungrily together, on and off, until our hunger for each other’s body proved to have consequences we could never, at that moment, have foreseen.
Mea culpa, Harry. Mea maxima culpa.
Your wicked son, Peter
Friday, September 24, 2021
24 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
London, then. Though not many more geographical miles distant from your Sharnbrook parish, it seemed somehow further removed than Cambridge. Oh yes, I did come home quite often at the weekends, though I’m sure less frequently than from Cambridge. And when at home, I dutifully followed the rules. I went to church on Sunday mornings. Took communion, at my mother’s side. I did this, knowingly, to please you, keeping up the pretense that I was somehow still a good practicing Christian, as I thought you wanted, when in fact I had long since given up the practice. At Caius, despite the Dean’s friendly interest in my welfare—the Dean’s job, of course, at Cambridge, was not the purely administrative position I filled over here in my last years in academia; he was more like the collage chaplain—I barely ever showed my face in chapel.
Even on my visits to you at the Vicarage I had begun to feel more distant. In London, far from home I felt untethered, relieved of obligation and responsibility, free to go my own misguided way. I enrolled at a teacher’s training college at the end of the King’s Road in Chelsea, where I joined a small cadre of graduate students, half a dozen of us, rather snobby in our attitude toward the hoi-polloi of students working for two-year teaching credentials. I had a tiny room on the top floor, just big enough for a creaky bed and a desk and chair. It was here, in this dreary little room, that I finally—finally!—found the courage to do what I had dismally failed to do years before, in my much more spacious and welcoming rooms at Caius: I made love to "Melanie" (not her real name), my still unforgotten love from Cambridge days.
I’ve no doubt that it will tickle you, Harry—as it humbled me—to learn that many years later, when we two reconnected (electronically: another story!) as old people, old friends across the ocean—I discovered that "Melanie", the great obsession of my young life, the person I had always thought of as my first true love, had not the slightest memory of it ever happening! But as I remember it, and with the frank admission that some kind of mental wish fulfillment invented the whole thing, we had both chosen to come up to London after graduation, and it was here I managed to get back in touch. We arranged to meet. Perhaps we had dinner. I invited her to come up to see my undistinguished college room and… voilà! This time I had no hesitation, no more reticence. As I remember it. She does not.
Everything I learned growing up about the sanctity of sex had long since flown out the window. There was still in England in the 1950s the hypocritical pretense of a social and moral prohibition on sex before marriage. In reality, such reticence had surely been discarded many years before. What about those flappers, Harry, in your young day, the Roaring Twenties, when you yourself were in your twenties? Were those girls all innocent until they married? I don’t believe it. If I know anything, it’s that young people were already bedding each other merrily in those days, Victorian-era moralism be damned. That period in the sexual history of humankind was the exception, surely, rather than the rule.
I bring this up to confess to something you perhaps already knew: once initiated into the joys of sex, I had absolutely no compunction about hopping into bed with whomsoever I could persuade to join me. I suspect that Flora was a little more circumspect about such things than I, but I’m sure that she, too, had what were referred to, in genteel circles, as “affairs.” Yet none of this was mentioned or acknowledged in our family. Amongst the four of us, when we were together, it was as though we, the young members of the family, never swerved from the proprieties of our good Christian morality.
It did not end well with "Melanie". It was not long before she began to cool on our relationship. It was perhaps in part the distance—we lived at opposite ends of town—but also because I became overbearingly possessive. I demanded her exclusive devotion. I discovered my jealousy for the first time, but not the last in those youthful days, that “green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” And it was truly monstrous, hot and wild, so uncontrollable that it could spiral in an instant from anger into a violence that I never suspected in me. I slapped two women in my life, Harry, and one of them was Melanie. I’m happy that this, too, is something she has blotted from her memory. The other one was Ellie.
Of all the misbegotten myths that have survived into the twenty-first century one of the worst is that of men’s domination over women. Too often, even today, we men behave like those (apparently slandered!) Neanderthals, dragging our women into our cave and demanding total fealty. Anything less and we react in fury, provoked by what we perceive as an intolerable insult to our manhood.
Mea culpa, Harry. Mea culpa.
Your son, Peter
London, then. Though not many more geographical miles distant from your Sharnbrook parish, it seemed somehow further removed than Cambridge. Oh yes, I did come home quite often at the weekends, though I’m sure less frequently than from Cambridge. And when at home, I dutifully followed the rules. I went to church on Sunday mornings. Took communion, at my mother’s side. I did this, knowingly, to please you, keeping up the pretense that I was somehow still a good practicing Christian, as I thought you wanted, when in fact I had long since given up the practice. At Caius, despite the Dean’s friendly interest in my welfare—the Dean’s job, of course, at Cambridge, was not the purely administrative position I filled over here in my last years in academia; he was more like the collage chaplain—I barely ever showed my face in chapel.
Even on my visits to you at the Vicarage I had begun to feel more distant. In London, far from home I felt untethered, relieved of obligation and responsibility, free to go my own misguided way. I enrolled at a teacher’s training college at the end of the King’s Road in Chelsea, where I joined a small cadre of graduate students, half a dozen of us, rather snobby in our attitude toward the hoi-polloi of students working for two-year teaching credentials. I had a tiny room on the top floor, just big enough for a creaky bed and a desk and chair. It was here, in this dreary little room, that I finally—finally!—found the courage to do what I had dismally failed to do years before, in my much more spacious and welcoming rooms at Caius: I made love to "Melanie" (not her real name), my still unforgotten love from Cambridge days.
I’ve no doubt that it will tickle you, Harry—as it humbled me—to learn that many years later, when we two reconnected (electronically: another story!) as old people, old friends across the ocean—I discovered that "Melanie", the great obsession of my young life, the person I had always thought of as my first true love, had not the slightest memory of it ever happening! But as I remember it, and with the frank admission that some kind of mental wish fulfillment invented the whole thing, we had both chosen to come up to London after graduation, and it was here I managed to get back in touch. We arranged to meet. Perhaps we had dinner. I invited her to come up to see my undistinguished college room and… voilà! This time I had no hesitation, no more reticence. As I remember it. She does not.
Everything I learned growing up about the sanctity of sex had long since flown out the window. There was still in England in the 1950s the hypocritical pretense of a social and moral prohibition on sex before marriage. In reality, such reticence had surely been discarded many years before. What about those flappers, Harry, in your young day, the Roaring Twenties, when you yourself were in your twenties? Were those girls all innocent until they married? I don’t believe it. If I know anything, it’s that young people were already bedding each other merrily in those days, Victorian-era moralism be damned. That period in the sexual history of humankind was the exception, surely, rather than the rule.
I bring this up to confess to something you perhaps already knew: once initiated into the joys of sex, I had absolutely no compunction about hopping into bed with whomsoever I could persuade to join me. I suspect that Flora was a little more circumspect about such things than I, but I’m sure that she, too, had what were referred to, in genteel circles, as “affairs.” Yet none of this was mentioned or acknowledged in our family. Amongst the four of us, when we were together, it was as though we, the young members of the family, never swerved from the proprieties of our good Christian morality.
It did not end well with "Melanie". It was not long before she began to cool on our relationship. It was perhaps in part the distance—we lived at opposite ends of town—but also because I became overbearingly possessive. I demanded her exclusive devotion. I discovered my jealousy for the first time, but not the last in those youthful days, that “green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” And it was truly monstrous, hot and wild, so uncontrollable that it could spiral in an instant from anger into a violence that I never suspected in me. I slapped two women in my life, Harry, and one of them was Melanie. I’m happy that this, too, is something she has blotted from her memory. The other one was Ellie.
Of all the misbegotten myths that have survived into the twenty-first century one of the worst is that of men’s domination over women. Too often, even today, we men behave like those (apparently slandered!) Neanderthals, dragging our women into our cave and demanding total fealty. Anything less and we react in fury, provoked by what we perceive as an intolerable insult to our manhood.
Mea culpa, Harry. Mea culpa.
Your son, Peter
Saturday, September 18, 2021
18 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
I realize, belatedly as usual, that it’s time to acknowledge what has become obvious even to your stubbornly obtuse son! Time to give up the original conceit that these letters are about me trying to get to know you. The truth is the opposite, it’s about wanting you to get to know me. The “tell me who you are” turns out to be reversed. But you probably understood that from the start.
From the time I left Cambridge and strode out—with a quite few stumbles yet to come—onto the world’s greater stage, I had very little contact with you, other than what I have lately discovered to be a remarkably extensive correspondence. The actual time we spent together was quite brief. Even in the previous years, my being away at boarding school for the better part of the year meant that I’d had less contact with you than most boys do with their fathers. After Cambridge, though, I spent only two years more in England, in the big city, and then left England for good. For the rest of your life, I returned only for short visits. I moved first to Germany for two years, then to Canada for another two before arriving here in the United States, I spent four years in Iowa City at the Writers’ Workshop, then moved out to California in 1968. I have lived here ever since. In short, the progression of the years put an ever further geographical distance between the two of us.
It was not long after I left England that you retired—I think in part for reasons of poor health. There were recurrent headaches, bronchial problems, a sometimes severe depression. The remainder of your days, and Peggy’s, were spent at Glenview, that little cottage by the Cardigan Bay in Aberporth, where Peggy’s parents lived, too, until their death. You set up your woodshop in what had been the garage and worked for many years at your lathe, a minister-turned-craftsman, while Peggy took care of the cottage and the cooking. You had your pub within walking distance, and when walking became difficult you took to a nicely decorated wooden cane to help you up the hill. With that, and your French beret, you became a familiar sight in the village, something of a local institution on your daily trips up to The Ship in the middle of the day.
We’ll talk more about our visits there, and the grandchildren’s, in due course. In the meantime, it’s good to have arrived at a greater clarity about my purpose. You have become, curiously, perhaps perversely, your own son’s confessor!
With love, Peter
I realize, belatedly as usual, that it’s time to acknowledge what has become obvious even to your stubbornly obtuse son! Time to give up the original conceit that these letters are about me trying to get to know you. The truth is the opposite, it’s about wanting you to get to know me. The “tell me who you are” turns out to be reversed. But you probably understood that from the start.
From the time I left Cambridge and strode out—with a quite few stumbles yet to come—onto the world’s greater stage, I had very little contact with you, other than what I have lately discovered to be a remarkably extensive correspondence. The actual time we spent together was quite brief. Even in the previous years, my being away at boarding school for the better part of the year meant that I’d had less contact with you than most boys do with their fathers. After Cambridge, though, I spent only two years more in England, in the big city, and then left England for good. For the rest of your life, I returned only for short visits. I moved first to Germany for two years, then to Canada for another two before arriving here in the United States, I spent four years in Iowa City at the Writers’ Workshop, then moved out to California in 1968. I have lived here ever since. In short, the progression of the years put an ever further geographical distance between the two of us.
It was not long after I left England that you retired—I think in part for reasons of poor health. There were recurrent headaches, bronchial problems, a sometimes severe depression. The remainder of your days, and Peggy’s, were spent at Glenview, that little cottage by the Cardigan Bay in Aberporth, where Peggy’s parents lived, too, until their death. You set up your woodshop in what had been the garage and worked for many years at your lathe, a minister-turned-craftsman, while Peggy took care of the cottage and the cooking. You had your pub within walking distance, and when walking became difficult you took to a nicely decorated wooden cane to help you up the hill. With that, and your French beret, you became a familiar sight in the village, something of a local institution on your daily trips up to The Ship in the middle of the day.
We’ll talk more about our visits there, and the grandchildren’s, in due course. In the meantime, it’s good to have arrived at a greater clarity about my purpose. You have become, curiously, perhaps perversely, your own son’s confessor!
With love, Peter
Friday, September 17, 2021
17 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
At the end of my three years at Cambridge I was headed out into the real world without the first idea what to do with the rest of my life. Just like you, Harry. I know that much. You had your degree in psychology. You would have made an excellent psychotherapist—a familiar path these days but not an obvious one in the 1920s when you graduated. Back then the career paths in that field would have been either psychiatrist, with a medical degree, or psychoanalyst, with a couch. I can understand that neither one would have appealed. Alternatively… you had been involved in amateur theatrics at Cambridge, and you were tempted by the dream of a career in acting. I believe I mentioned earlier that Peggy told me this. But I suspect your father played a part in your rejecting this path, whether consciously or unconsciously: a practical man, a scientist, an inventor, a businessman, he would never have approved.
And then there was the ministry, the path you chose.
As for me, I was a poet. I had been writing poetry since the age of twelve, and it was at that age, Peggy told me, that I announced my intention to become a writer. I had been writing poems in my student days at Cambridge—pretty maudlin stuff, I could well imagine. Still, it could hardly escape my attention, as I reached that time to leave the sheltered world of academia behind and set out into the real world where a “job” was needed, and the livable income that went along with it, that poets are not known to make a lot of money. That they are, in fact, lucky if they make anything at all.
There was, too, another factor that had to be considered: National Service. I had deftly managed to postpone the requirement by heading off to university, but now the obligation loomed once more. I had this somewhat romantic poet’s notion of joining the RAF to become a pilot, where I could leave the mundane earth behind me and drift ecstatically among the clouds in the cockpit of my Spitfire. I even showed up for the aptitude test, which put an ignominious end to that aspiration. It proved me to be singularly lacking in spatial perception—a quality obviously essential to a pilot. (It also helps to explain that deficiency in sports I mentioned earlier, that I was never able to locate a ball in space).
What, then? Did we consult together about this? Did we have a serious family discussion about my future prospects? If we did, I don’t remember it. But there was another option into which I more or less stumbled without clear intention—one that would, to coin a phrase, conveniently kill two birds with one stone. I learned that teachers employed in the state school system were spared the necessity of National Service in the military, and that I could earn myself a further deferment by enrolling in a year at a teacher’s training college.
A teacher’s life? It would be ideal, I easily convinced myself. Not much work, really. Short days, long holidays. I would have plenty of time to spend on my poetry!
From what Olympian heights did I condescend to look down upon a world awaiting nothing better than the flowering of my genius!
How wrong I was.
Your ever self-deluding son, Peter
At the end of my three years at Cambridge I was headed out into the real world without the first idea what to do with the rest of my life. Just like you, Harry. I know that much. You had your degree in psychology. You would have made an excellent psychotherapist—a familiar path these days but not an obvious one in the 1920s when you graduated. Back then the career paths in that field would have been either psychiatrist, with a medical degree, or psychoanalyst, with a couch. I can understand that neither one would have appealed. Alternatively… you had been involved in amateur theatrics at Cambridge, and you were tempted by the dream of a career in acting. I believe I mentioned earlier that Peggy told me this. But I suspect your father played a part in your rejecting this path, whether consciously or unconsciously: a practical man, a scientist, an inventor, a businessman, he would never have approved.
And then there was the ministry, the path you chose.
As for me, I was a poet. I had been writing poetry since the age of twelve, and it was at that age, Peggy told me, that I announced my intention to become a writer. I had been writing poems in my student days at Cambridge—pretty maudlin stuff, I could well imagine. Still, it could hardly escape my attention, as I reached that time to leave the sheltered world of academia behind and set out into the real world where a “job” was needed, and the livable income that went along with it, that poets are not known to make a lot of money. That they are, in fact, lucky if they make anything at all.
There was, too, another factor that had to be considered: National Service. I had deftly managed to postpone the requirement by heading off to university, but now the obligation loomed once more. I had this somewhat romantic poet’s notion of joining the RAF to become a pilot, where I could leave the mundane earth behind me and drift ecstatically among the clouds in the cockpit of my Spitfire. I even showed up for the aptitude test, which put an ignominious end to that aspiration. It proved me to be singularly lacking in spatial perception—a quality obviously essential to a pilot. (It also helps to explain that deficiency in sports I mentioned earlier, that I was never able to locate a ball in space).
What, then? Did we consult together about this? Did we have a serious family discussion about my future prospects? If we did, I don’t remember it. But there was another option into which I more or less stumbled without clear intention—one that would, to coin a phrase, conveniently kill two birds with one stone. I learned that teachers employed in the state school system were spared the necessity of National Service in the military, and that I could earn myself a further deferment by enrolling in a year at a teacher’s training college.
A teacher’s life? It would be ideal, I easily convinced myself. Not much work, really. Short days, long holidays. I would have plenty of time to spend on my poetry!
From what Olympian heights did I condescend to look down upon a world awaiting nothing better than the flowering of my genius!
How wrong I was.
Your ever self-deluding son, Peter
Thursday, September 16, 2021
16 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Phew! We can happy to have finally passed that milepost.
Considering how kind she had been to me—and how kind she would continue to be, so long as I knew her—I was as shamefully cavalier in the way I treated Debbie as I had been with Jeannine. We did continue to go out together, sometimes for dinner at one of those inexpensive Indian restaurants where you could get a delicious, spicy, satisfying meal for no more than half-a-crown. I don’t know what that would be in today’s money, maybe something like a couple of dollars.
Or we’d go to the flicks. Perhaps it was with Debbie that I saw “East of Eden”, the first time I saw James Dean, and the first movie that he made. After which, before he died in a car crash in his Porsche at a remote California crossroads, there were “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant,” the one about the Texas oil man in which the (for many, eternally) young actor aged, none too successfully, into a nasty, rich old drunk. I mention James Dean because like so many other young men at the time and at that age, I identified so keenly with both the actor and his roles; with the easy, boyish surface charm that covered a hornet’s nest of insecurities and anger; with the lost, mumbling man-boy, so anxious to please the father for whom he was never good enough and earn the love of the mother he could never reach.
I was James Dean. Well, a self-conscious, reedy English public schoolboy version of the same.
How many of us James Deans were out there on the streets with our nervous tics, mumbling away and grinning quick, angst-filled grins, and brushing nervously at our hair? We were, as they say, legion.
You of all people, Harry, with your love of Freud, would doubtless spot the Oedipus lurking in our psyches. But then I can be sure you never saw any of those films I loved so much. You were never a serious movie-goer, as I recall, and in any case their whole ethos would have been “too American” for you and Peggy.
For what it’s worth, my favorite line from a James Dean movie is this one: “Well then there now…”
Riddle me that, you wise old man.
Your son, Peter
Phew! We can happy to have finally passed that milepost.
Considering how kind she had been to me—and how kind she would continue to be, so long as I knew her—I was as shamefully cavalier in the way I treated Debbie as I had been with Jeannine. We did continue to go out together, sometimes for dinner at one of those inexpensive Indian restaurants where you could get a delicious, spicy, satisfying meal for no more than half-a-crown. I don’t know what that would be in today’s money, maybe something like a couple of dollars.
Or we’d go to the flicks. Perhaps it was with Debbie that I saw “East of Eden”, the first time I saw James Dean, and the first movie that he made. After which, before he died in a car crash in his Porsche at a remote California crossroads, there were “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant,” the one about the Texas oil man in which the (for many, eternally) young actor aged, none too successfully, into a nasty, rich old drunk. I mention James Dean because like so many other young men at the time and at that age, I identified so keenly with both the actor and his roles; with the easy, boyish surface charm that covered a hornet’s nest of insecurities and anger; with the lost, mumbling man-boy, so anxious to please the father for whom he was never good enough and earn the love of the mother he could never reach.
I was James Dean. Well, a self-conscious, reedy English public schoolboy version of the same.
How many of us James Deans were out there on the streets with our nervous tics, mumbling away and grinning quick, angst-filled grins, and brushing nervously at our hair? We were, as they say, legion.
You of all people, Harry, with your love of Freud, would doubtless spot the Oedipus lurking in our psyches. But then I can be sure you never saw any of those films I loved so much. You were never a serious movie-goer, as I recall, and in any case their whole ethos would have been “too American” for you and Peggy.
For what it’s worth, my favorite line from a James Dean movie is this one: “Well then there now…”
Riddle me that, you wise old man.
Your son, Peter
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
15 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
It took a patient, sweet, kind-hearted, and easily exploited girl—the girlfriend of a friend’s girlfriend, to ease my awkward and self-doubting self out of my virginity. I was 19, nearly 20! From what I hear, that would seem laughably retarded to today’s young people, who apparently “hook up” with random others with barely a second thought. I wish you were around to tell me about your first time! I imagine things were still more restrictive in your day. I could quite imagine, if you shared that reticence I’ve been describing, that you were still inexperienced when you married Peggy. (Okay, I’ll admit this might seem tasteless and intrusive, but frankly I’m long since done with being timid. I’m long since done with being the good boy you brought up!) Was the wedding night the first time for both of you? Were you as clumsy as I was?
You likely would not remember my friend Paul from Venezuela, though I’m pretty sure you met him. Dark hair? Wavy? He was one of those friends I’d bring home with me because he had no family to go home to in England in the shorter holidays. A year behind me at Caius, he was far ahead in the kind of experience I lacked—and sorely needed. His pretty, cheerfully promiscuous girlfriend at the time was Mickey, and on more than one occasion he prevailed on me to help free up the flat she shared with her friend Debbie, to allow him to enjoy an afternoon of undisturbed libidinous pleasure with his inamorata.
So I took Debbie out—to the cinema, perhaps—and we became friends ourselves. Sort of. I’m ashamed to say I may have considered myself a cut above this good person. May have? No, I did. Paul and I were university students, after all, and the girls were town girls, with jobs in local stores. (I’m aware, of course, that attitudes of this kind do not speak well of the privileged young man I was). There came a time, however, when Paul—and Mickey too, I suspect—decided it was time for their friend Peter to grow up and they conspired to invite me over for a cup of tea one afternoon, and shortly afterwards announced they had evening plans, leaving me and Debbie free run of the flat. It was pretty obvious to both of us what was expected.
We sat on Debbie’s bed. I took courage in both hands and began a fumbling exploration of her body. She seemed perfectly willing to allow it, unhitching her bra beneath her blouse and allowing me, too, to kiss her as I fumbled further. Breasts. Had I ever touched a woman’s breasts before? Jeannine’s? Would I have dared? The result of this delight was predictable in my nether regions, Harry, and Debbie’s fingers proved skillful in further stimulating the arousal. Then, with much awkward wriggling and repositioning of bodies, she guided my fingers into the mysterious triangle of silken hair between her thighs and opened herself to a breathless adventure into that unknown territory.
By now a tangle of body parts and half-discarded clothes, we fell back on the bed and Debbie squirmed out of her panties, dumping them over the side of the bed as she spread her legs for me to lie between and slip myself into that now moist and beckoning interior. And I lost it. My recently rampant cock went suddenly limp as a wave of self-doubt and lack of confidence surged up and disempowered me, along with a flood of shame. There she was, this patient, lovely girl, all ready and willing, eager, even, for me to enter into her most private sanctum… and I couldn’t do it.
“Sorry,” I said. “Oh, my God, I’m sorry.”
And Debbie said, “It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “It happens all the time.”
Which was kind of her, but it did nothing to relieve the intensity my embarrassment and shame. What mattered was that it had happened not to other men but to me. Incredibly. I had been so hot with desire, oozing, literally, with the urgency of that long imagined, long craved moment and then… nothing.
Well, Harry, as an old man now myself I can readily imagine that the same thing does happen to a great number of young men on their first attempt. I wonder even, since we’re being totally honest here, if it might have happened to you? I wonder, too—I know, sorry, this is totally inappropriate—if Peggy was your first time? And what had you done with all the sexual urges you must presumably have felt before, since puberty, as I had done?
Might as well say it here. I only ever saw your penis once, by accident. You were standing naked in the caravan and I burst in unexpectedly. I was probably no more than eight or nine years old and I was shocked by the size of it, the dangle, the thicket of hair. The startling image froze inside my mind and haunted me, even though you covered yourself quickly with a towel. So it was no more than a glimpse. But it is strange, isn’t it, that I remember this image so clearly even today?
Anyway, to get back to my story: I’m happy to report that the disaster with Debbie was quickly followed by recovery and triumph. Debbie's kindly ministrations proved exactly what was needed to regenerate what I’d lost, and she managed to guide me gently into that place I had so lusted after for so long. Virility restored, I buried myself joyfully inside that tunnel of love and ploughed away like a real man till I was done. Which was probably much too soon for Debbie—I’m sure I had as yet no idea that a woman, too, could have an orgasm. But I was relieved and grateful beyond words, as you can imagine, to have finally endowed her with my unwanted virginity. The door—if you’ll forgive the rather crude image—was open. It would never close again.
Your son, Peter
It took a patient, sweet, kind-hearted, and easily exploited girl—the girlfriend of a friend’s girlfriend, to ease my awkward and self-doubting self out of my virginity. I was 19, nearly 20! From what I hear, that would seem laughably retarded to today’s young people, who apparently “hook up” with random others with barely a second thought. I wish you were around to tell me about your first time! I imagine things were still more restrictive in your day. I could quite imagine, if you shared that reticence I’ve been describing, that you were still inexperienced when you married Peggy. (Okay, I’ll admit this might seem tasteless and intrusive, but frankly I’m long since done with being timid. I’m long since done with being the good boy you brought up!) Was the wedding night the first time for both of you? Were you as clumsy as I was?
You likely would not remember my friend Paul from Venezuela, though I’m pretty sure you met him. Dark hair? Wavy? He was one of those friends I’d bring home with me because he had no family to go home to in England in the shorter holidays. A year behind me at Caius, he was far ahead in the kind of experience I lacked—and sorely needed. His pretty, cheerfully promiscuous girlfriend at the time was Mickey, and on more than one occasion he prevailed on me to help free up the flat she shared with her friend Debbie, to allow him to enjoy an afternoon of undisturbed libidinous pleasure with his inamorata.
So I took Debbie out—to the cinema, perhaps—and we became friends ourselves. Sort of. I’m ashamed to say I may have considered myself a cut above this good person. May have? No, I did. Paul and I were university students, after all, and the girls were town girls, with jobs in local stores. (I’m aware, of course, that attitudes of this kind do not speak well of the privileged young man I was). There came a time, however, when Paul—and Mickey too, I suspect—decided it was time for their friend Peter to grow up and they conspired to invite me over for a cup of tea one afternoon, and shortly afterwards announced they had evening plans, leaving me and Debbie free run of the flat. It was pretty obvious to both of us what was expected.
We sat on Debbie’s bed. I took courage in both hands and began a fumbling exploration of her body. She seemed perfectly willing to allow it, unhitching her bra beneath her blouse and allowing me, too, to kiss her as I fumbled further. Breasts. Had I ever touched a woman’s breasts before? Jeannine’s? Would I have dared? The result of this delight was predictable in my nether regions, Harry, and Debbie’s fingers proved skillful in further stimulating the arousal. Then, with much awkward wriggling and repositioning of bodies, she guided my fingers into the mysterious triangle of silken hair between her thighs and opened herself to a breathless adventure into that unknown territory.
By now a tangle of body parts and half-discarded clothes, we fell back on the bed and Debbie squirmed out of her panties, dumping them over the side of the bed as she spread her legs for me to lie between and slip myself into that now moist and beckoning interior. And I lost it. My recently rampant cock went suddenly limp as a wave of self-doubt and lack of confidence surged up and disempowered me, along with a flood of shame. There she was, this patient, lovely girl, all ready and willing, eager, even, for me to enter into her most private sanctum… and I couldn’t do it.
“Sorry,” I said. “Oh, my God, I’m sorry.”
And Debbie said, “It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “It happens all the time.”
Which was kind of her, but it did nothing to relieve the intensity my embarrassment and shame. What mattered was that it had happened not to other men but to me. Incredibly. I had been so hot with desire, oozing, literally, with the urgency of that long imagined, long craved moment and then… nothing.
Well, Harry, as an old man now myself I can readily imagine that the same thing does happen to a great number of young men on their first attempt. I wonder even, since we’re being totally honest here, if it might have happened to you? I wonder, too—I know, sorry, this is totally inappropriate—if Peggy was your first time? And what had you done with all the sexual urges you must presumably have felt before, since puberty, as I had done?
Might as well say it here. I only ever saw your penis once, by accident. You were standing naked in the caravan and I burst in unexpectedly. I was probably no more than eight or nine years old and I was shocked by the size of it, the dangle, the thicket of hair. The startling image froze inside my mind and haunted me, even though you covered yourself quickly with a towel. So it was no more than a glimpse. But it is strange, isn’t it, that I remember this image so clearly even today?
Anyway, to get back to my story: I’m happy to report that the disaster with Debbie was quickly followed by recovery and triumph. Debbie's kindly ministrations proved exactly what was needed to regenerate what I’d lost, and she managed to guide me gently into that place I had so lusted after for so long. Virility restored, I buried myself joyfully inside that tunnel of love and ploughed away like a real man till I was done. Which was probably much too soon for Debbie—I’m sure I had as yet no idea that a woman, too, could have an orgasm. But I was relieved and grateful beyond words, as you can imagine, to have finally endowed her with my unwanted virginity. The door—if you’ll forgive the rather crude image—was open. It would never close again.
Your son, Peter
Saturday, September 11, 2021
11 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
This is a bleak and solemn day in American history. Had you survived a few years longer than you did, it would have been late afternoon, early evening in Wales when it began to happen. News time. I’m sure you would have been watching; you always did. You would perhaps have missed the first terrible event, as I did, here in Los Angeles. But your news sources would have switched to New York in time for you to watch in horror as that second jet airliner, filled with passengers, slammed into the second of the two World Trade Center towers at the southern end of Manhattan. And the third, into the Pentagon in Washington, DC; and the fourth, crashing into an open field in Pennsylvania.
I’m sure the hijackers of those planes were praising their god as they met their fate, along with the nearly three thousand innocent human beings whose lives they took with them that day. Among them was the brilliant young son of one or our oldest, closest friends.
You would have been appalled as I was, Harry, as was every other sane person on the planet, that fanatical belief in any god could have inspired men to commit such a hateful, devastating act. It seems sometimes that religion, unhappily, paradoxically, has engendered as much evil in the world across the centuries as the good it claims to foster.
Unhappily, too, there was nothing but vengeance on the mind of the American President, the American Congress, the American people. I have to say that it was on my mind too. It became the national obsession to kill—to kill the man deemed responsible, to kill his followers, and to kill all those who helped them.
Twenty years have passed since that terrible day. Twenty years of killing, of misguided warfare, leaving many thousands of our own as well as many thousands of our purported enemies dead. We have finally come to a recognition of the futility of the effort and abandoned it. Our achievement, after twenty years of slaughter? Ironically, we have left the chief intended target of our wrath, the Afghan Taliban, even stronger than the day we first attacked them.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, your God, Harry. We would have left done better to leave it to him. My own religious inspiration is the Buddha. He would, I’m sure, have counseled otherwise.
In grief, today, your son,
Peter
This is a bleak and solemn day in American history. Had you survived a few years longer than you did, it would have been late afternoon, early evening in Wales when it began to happen. News time. I’m sure you would have been watching; you always did. You would perhaps have missed the first terrible event, as I did, here in Los Angeles. But your news sources would have switched to New York in time for you to watch in horror as that second jet airliner, filled with passengers, slammed into the second of the two World Trade Center towers at the southern end of Manhattan. And the third, into the Pentagon in Washington, DC; and the fourth, crashing into an open field in Pennsylvania.
I’m sure the hijackers of those planes were praising their god as they met their fate, along with the nearly three thousand innocent human beings whose lives they took with them that day. Among them was the brilliant young son of one or our oldest, closest friends.
You would have been appalled as I was, Harry, as was every other sane person on the planet, that fanatical belief in any god could have inspired men to commit such a hateful, devastating act. It seems sometimes that religion, unhappily, paradoxically, has engendered as much evil in the world across the centuries as the good it claims to foster.
Unhappily, too, there was nothing but vengeance on the mind of the American President, the American Congress, the American people. I have to say that it was on my mind too. It became the national obsession to kill—to kill the man deemed responsible, to kill his followers, and to kill all those who helped them.
Twenty years have passed since that terrible day. Twenty years of killing, of misguided warfare, leaving many thousands of our own as well as many thousands of our purported enemies dead. We have finally come to a recognition of the futility of the effort and abandoned it. Our achievement, after twenty years of slaughter? Ironically, we have left the chief intended target of our wrath, the Afghan Taliban, even stronger than the day we first attacked them.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, your God, Harry. We would have left done better to leave it to him. My own religious inspiration is the Buddha. He would, I’m sure, have counseled otherwise.
In grief, today, your son,
Peter
Sunday, September 5, 2021
4 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
It’s Saturday. I’m looking forward to sitting out on our balcony this afternoon and lighting up my weekly La Gloria cigar.
It’s a treat that I allow myself. You’ll be pleased to hear that I finally managed to give up smoking cigarettes in my fiftieth year—a few decades sooner than yourself. I had been trying for years. Had tried everything, from patches to nicotine chewing gum to hypnosis. Nothing worked. Until I decided to take a positive approach. I stopped telling myself, No, shouldn’t, mustn’t, can’t and so on, and tried giving myself permission to light up but choosing, instead, the benefits that came with not smoking: the ability to climb a flight of stairs without panting for breath, for example, and having clothes that didn’t stink of stale tobacco. The list was long. It didn’t hurt, too, that Sarah, from her earliest years, kept nagging me insistently to stop.
Like you, I was addicted. But I managed to quit. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 1986.
A while ago, however, I gave myself permission to enjoy the occasional hit of nicotine with a cigar. Just for the pleasure of it. I don’t believe I ever saw you smoking one of these. The cigarettes you smoked were mostly those you rolled yourself. I say “rolled,” but you had all kinds of ways of making them, all kinds of little intricate machines. I think the making was as much a part of the fun for you as lighting up and smoking, but you were happy to kid yourself that the shredded tobacco you used was less harmful to the health than store-bought cigarettes. Still, I’m sure they did you no good. I’m glad you had the good sense it took—and the love!—to quit the nasty habit when you understood that it was harming Peggy.
Knowing of my addiction, I ration myself to one a week—though sometimes, I’ll admit, I manage to sneak in a second one if no one else is counting. No smoking in the house, of course, these days, but the weather here in Southern California is rarely a deterrent. I slip out onto the balcony or the patio behind the cottage and enjoy my smoke as I complete a New York Times Sunday crossword. (That was never one of your addictions, was it? In that we differ…)
Am I addicted? Maybe. Bust a little. Is that like being a little bit pregnant? Maybe. But I figure, well, at this stage of my life it won’t kill me.
See you out on the balcony, then, Peter
It’s Saturday. I’m looking forward to sitting out on our balcony this afternoon and lighting up my weekly La Gloria cigar.
It’s a treat that I allow myself. You’ll be pleased to hear that I finally managed to give up smoking cigarettes in my fiftieth year—a few decades sooner than yourself. I had been trying for years. Had tried everything, from patches to nicotine chewing gum to hypnosis. Nothing worked. Until I decided to take a positive approach. I stopped telling myself, No, shouldn’t, mustn’t, can’t and so on, and tried giving myself permission to light up but choosing, instead, the benefits that came with not smoking: the ability to climb a flight of stairs without panting for breath, for example, and having clothes that didn’t stink of stale tobacco. The list was long. It didn’t hurt, too, that Sarah, from her earliest years, kept nagging me insistently to stop.
Like you, I was addicted. But I managed to quit. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 1986.
A while ago, however, I gave myself permission to enjoy the occasional hit of nicotine with a cigar. Just for the pleasure of it. I don’t believe I ever saw you smoking one of these. The cigarettes you smoked were mostly those you rolled yourself. I say “rolled,” but you had all kinds of ways of making them, all kinds of little intricate machines. I think the making was as much a part of the fun for you as lighting up and smoking, but you were happy to kid yourself that the shredded tobacco you used was less harmful to the health than store-bought cigarettes. Still, I’m sure they did you no good. I’m glad you had the good sense it took—and the love!—to quit the nasty habit when you understood that it was harming Peggy.
Knowing of my addiction, I ration myself to one a week—though sometimes, I’ll admit, I manage to sneak in a second one if no one else is counting. No smoking in the house, of course, these days, but the weather here in Southern California is rarely a deterrent. I slip out onto the balcony or the patio behind the cottage and enjoy my smoke as I complete a New York Times Sunday crossword. (That was never one of your addictions, was it? In that we differ…)
Am I addicted? Maybe. Bust a little. Is that like being a little bit pregnant? Maybe. But I figure, well, at this stage of my life it won’t kill me.
See you out on the balcony, then, Peter
Saturday, September 4, 2021
4 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
I hate to say this, but that timidty still paralyzed me when I went up to university.
You met Susan, because I brought her home to the Vicarage on at least one occasions. Susan was the Girton girl I fell in love with the first time I sat down behind her in a French Romantic Poetry lecture class. (Ever the opportunist, I ditched Jeannine unceremoniously. Having written her a pile of yearning love letters, I wrote her one last time with at least a pretense of regret for the geographical impossibility of our everlasting love. Susan was, well, closer to hand). I eventually overcame my timidity enough to ask her out. We became friends, but it took a long time for me to find the nerve to invite her up to my college rooms for tea and I think I was taken by surprise when she accepted. This was my moment, I promised myself. I could declare my love, kiss her, maybe even… I scarcely dared to think.
When the day came, I was beyond nervous. For hours before, my heart was already beating wildly with anticipation. I arranged with my roommate, Jerry, to be out for the afternoon. Unlike myself, Jerry was a sportsman, a rugby football player, and I had to hide his smelly wet socks and ,jock strap from where he’d left them out to dry in our communal sitting room. The jock strap particularly, with its in-you-face evocation of the male appendages, would have been acutely embarrassing. I bought chocolate-coated McVities to accompany the tea. Added a shilling to the meter to ensure the gas fire would hold out.
She arrived! I “sported the oak”—closed the outer door to indicate the need for privacy. Made tea. Served the McVities on the best plate from our rudimentary kitchen. We made small talk.
Once the tea was done, there was nothing for it but to make my move. I took the seat beside her on the sofa, in front of the gas fire. Put a tentative arm around her, drew her closer, and noticed with growing panic that she did not resist. Seemed even to welcome it. Snuggled in. And raised her face to mine…
If only the magnitude of my desire could be translated into the confidence and courage it required to respond to her readiness for a bit of smooch. She was so close, so feminine, so utterly desirable. So… well, so available. Not in a bad sense, she was just plainly eager for a kiss. For more than a kiss. Was I wrong in thinking that she actually mouthed the words, Come on?
And yet there I was, behaving like the English public schoolboy that I was, so lacking in self-confidence about my ability to perform that I was paralyzed into inaction. I loved this girl. I wanted her more badly, more immediately, more urgently than anything ever in my life. But I couldn’t do it, couldn’t even kiss her. I did not know how. I was not man enough, no match for the woman in her, the woman she had already grown to be—while I was still a boy.
Not man enough. I remember, Harry, when you challenged me with those words, years later. “Are you man enough for her?” you asked me, many years later, when my marriage was falling apart.
I was not. But that’s for another letter. Suffice it for now to remember, with some pain, some sadness, and not a little shame how emotionally stunted I was as I embarked upon my life as an adult. It is perhaps too easily self-exculpatory to blame my immaturity on those protected years at school. But it’s my suspicion that I was not too much unlike you, at that time in your life. Did you share that paralyzing physical, emotional and, yes, sexual timidity? Was your libido as fierce as mine, and your fear as deadening?
The result of this conflict about my manhood was, for me, an inner rage—a toxic rage that I refused steadfastly to recognize, let alone express.
More of this still to be revealed, I fear. Meantime I am, as always, your son,
Peter
I hate to say this, but that timidty still paralyzed me when I went up to university.
You met Susan, because I brought her home to the Vicarage on at least one occasions. Susan was the Girton girl I fell in love with the first time I sat down behind her in a French Romantic Poetry lecture class. (Ever the opportunist, I ditched Jeannine unceremoniously. Having written her a pile of yearning love letters, I wrote her one last time with at least a pretense of regret for the geographical impossibility of our everlasting love. Susan was, well, closer to hand). I eventually overcame my timidity enough to ask her out. We became friends, but it took a long time for me to find the nerve to invite her up to my college rooms for tea and I think I was taken by surprise when she accepted. This was my moment, I promised myself. I could declare my love, kiss her, maybe even… I scarcely dared to think.
When the day came, I was beyond nervous. For hours before, my heart was already beating wildly with anticipation. I arranged with my roommate, Jerry, to be out for the afternoon. Unlike myself, Jerry was a sportsman, a rugby football player, and I had to hide his smelly wet socks and ,jock strap from where he’d left them out to dry in our communal sitting room. The jock strap particularly, with its in-you-face evocation of the male appendages, would have been acutely embarrassing. I bought chocolate-coated McVities to accompany the tea. Added a shilling to the meter to ensure the gas fire would hold out.
She arrived! I “sported the oak”—closed the outer door to indicate the need for privacy. Made tea. Served the McVities on the best plate from our rudimentary kitchen. We made small talk.
Once the tea was done, there was nothing for it but to make my move. I took the seat beside her on the sofa, in front of the gas fire. Put a tentative arm around her, drew her closer, and noticed with growing panic that she did not resist. Seemed even to welcome it. Snuggled in. And raised her face to mine…
If only the magnitude of my desire could be translated into the confidence and courage it required to respond to her readiness for a bit of smooch. She was so close, so feminine, so utterly desirable. So… well, so available. Not in a bad sense, she was just plainly eager for a kiss. For more than a kiss. Was I wrong in thinking that she actually mouthed the words, Come on?
And yet there I was, behaving like the English public schoolboy that I was, so lacking in self-confidence about my ability to perform that I was paralyzed into inaction. I loved this girl. I wanted her more badly, more immediately, more urgently than anything ever in my life. But I couldn’t do it, couldn’t even kiss her. I did not know how. I was not man enough, no match for the woman in her, the woman she had already grown to be—while I was still a boy.
Not man enough. I remember, Harry, when you challenged me with those words, years later. “Are you man enough for her?” you asked me, many years later, when my marriage was falling apart.
I was not. But that’s for another letter. Suffice it for now to remember, with some pain, some sadness, and not a little shame how emotionally stunted I was as I embarked upon my life as an adult. It is perhaps too easily self-exculpatory to blame my immaturity on those protected years at school. But it’s my suspicion that I was not too much unlike you, at that time in your life. Did you share that paralyzing physical, emotional and, yes, sexual timidity? Was your libido as fierce as mine, and your fear as deadening?
The result of this conflict about my manhood was, for me, an inner rage—a toxic rage that I refused steadfastly to recognize, let alone express.
More of this still to be revealed, I fear. Meantime I am, as always, your son,
Peter
Friday, September 3, 2021
3 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Timidity! This is the quality I wish I had not learned at school. Oh, I was pretty smart, Harry, after all that education! I was articulate, well-spoken, and I had learned to present myself with a certain natural—though some might think affected—English public schoolboy charm. I knew Latin! I could speak both French and German fluently. My head was filled with an awful lot of stuff. What I didn’t know was how to be a man.
There I was in Paris, Harry! Just a couple of months later, in the fall. The city was glorious, glowing. I was free, for the first time in my life! Free from school and all its rules and regulations. Free from you and Peggy! I was in love, and I was pretty sure that Jeannine loved me too.
And what did I do about it, Harry? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I could hardly summon the nerve to kiss the girl I loved. Oh, we held hands a lot. We strolled along the boulevards as lovers are supposed to do. Lingered around the book stalls on the banks of the Seine. Talked books, because Jeannine had recently passed her baccalaureate and was ten times smarter than me. We went to the Louvre—and this was in the days long, long before the glass pyramid, before the whole world was lining up with cell phone to take selfies with the Mona Lisa. The galleries could still echo with the lonely visitor’s footsteps.
I was in lover’s heaven, Harry, and could barely bring myself to touch the girl I so much wanted to make love to. I had only the vaguest idea about what it was I wanted, and still less the guts to make it known, or ask her if that was what she wanted, too.
What a klutz, Harry (again that word you probably never heard)!
Your son, Peter
Timidity! This is the quality I wish I had not learned at school. Oh, I was pretty smart, Harry, after all that education! I was articulate, well-spoken, and I had learned to present myself with a certain natural—though some might think affected—English public schoolboy charm. I knew Latin! I could speak both French and German fluently. My head was filled with an awful lot of stuff. What I didn’t know was how to be a man.
There I was in Paris, Harry! Just a couple of months later, in the fall. The city was glorious, glowing. I was free, for the first time in my life! Free from school and all its rules and regulations. Free from you and Peggy! I was in love, and I was pretty sure that Jeannine loved me too.
And what did I do about it, Harry? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I could hardly summon the nerve to kiss the girl I loved. Oh, we held hands a lot. We strolled along the boulevards as lovers are supposed to do. Lingered around the book stalls on the banks of the Seine. Talked books, because Jeannine had recently passed her baccalaureate and was ten times smarter than me. We went to the Louvre—and this was in the days long, long before the glass pyramid, before the whole world was lining up with cell phone to take selfies with the Mona Lisa. The galleries could still echo with the lonely visitor’s footsteps.
I was in lover’s heaven, Harry, and could barely bring myself to touch the girl I so much wanted to make love to. I had only the vaguest idea about what it was I wanted, and still less the guts to make it known, or ask her if that was what she wanted, too.
What a klutz, Harry (again that word you probably never heard)!
Your son, Peter
Thursday, September 2, 2021
2 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Do I need to remind you of that other remarkable event on my last day at boarding school?
You brought salvation with you on that day when you and Peggy came to pick me up. You brought Jeannine. I found her sitting there beside me, when I opened up the door to the back seat of your car and climbed in. You had written me to expect another exchange student from France but I had entirely forgotten that she had already arrived to stay with us. And there she was, beautiful in her white shirt and tartan skirt, mysterious, infinitely tantalizing, French, feminine, and smiling what I came to know as her private, impenetrable feline smile.
Of course I fell in love again at once.
Says your son, who always fell in love too easily but never managed to love well,
Peter
Do I need to remind you of that other remarkable event on my last day at boarding school?
You brought salvation with you on that day when you and Peggy came to pick me up. You brought Jeannine. I found her sitting there beside me, when I opened up the door to the back seat of your car and climbed in. You had written me to expect another exchange student from France but I had entirely forgotten that she had already arrived to stay with us. And there she was, beautiful in her white shirt and tartan skirt, mysterious, infinitely tantalizing, French, feminine, and smiling what I came to know as her private, impenetrable feline smile.
Of course I fell in love again at once.
Says your son, who always fell in love too easily but never managed to love well,
Peter
1 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
I can tell you now—as I would not have done back then: it would have cost you sleep at night—about the second thing that eased my bumpy passage through that last year of school. This was the reliable weekly flow of florid, uninhibitedly exuberant letters from the man whose influence on me you had come to fret about more than anything: Barry Evans.
I looked forward eagerly, almost desperately to their arrival. Our letters, when we received them, were distributed at the end of breakfast in the dining hall, and Barry’s were instantly recognizable from his impeccably stylish art school italics. I have lost those letters and I no longer recall the details of their content, but I do know they were filled with the kind of leering, tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendo that typified our conversations when I visited him at home. In the letters I sent him in return, I am also sure that I mentioned none of the truth about my sexual life at school; Barry was all about girls, the women he lusted after with insatiable appetite and those he fantasized. He was impatient for me to be finally out of school and into the real world, where he’d be able to supervise the loss of my virginity.
You can see that your son was in a deep and tormenting conflict, Harry. The fears provoked by actual experience led me to conclude that I would never dare to touch a girl. And yet there was some not yet fully-awakened part of me, the part that was easily seduced by Barry and his letters, that longed desperately to be initiated into the terrifying mysteries of the opposite sex.
It was not only in this that I was timid. I had learned too well to tame the wild creature who lurked beguilingly within my soul. It was not for nothing that Barry took to signing off each letter, “Your Wicked Uncle.” His presence in my life was certainly a greater influence on me than was yours. I longed to be the rebel that he was. And yet… I had been taught from my earliest days to be the Good Boy, the Boy Scout, honest and loyal, truthful, obedient in all things, and obliging. I had learned this code of honor from you, Harry, and from the schools you sent me to. Impossible for the good boy to allow the Barry part of me to emerge from that deep place where I’d learned to hide, repress, deny him.
Oh, I did make every effort to prove myself the rebel in that last year at school. Aside from Barry, I had a “friend”—I put him in quotation marks because I wished so much to be his friend; for his part, he did not need my friendship. He collected bebop records—Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie—and played them loudly in the corridor of little studies we were allotted as seniors. He drank black coffee. He was remarkable for the extreme pallor of his face and his short, dark, curly hair. He wore his trousers ultra-tapered in the Teddy Boy fashion of the day. He openly, defiantly flouted the school rules, and got away with it. He smoked. He drank. He swore.
His name was Chris. I ran a search for him online as I was writing this and found that he had died at the age of 69 in Tanzania, still a jazz afficionado and immersed in African culture.
In my study across the corridor from his at Lancing, I longed to be as bold, as arrogant, as rebellious as Chris—the only boy at school I ever called by his first name. I played the artist, covered my study walls with two huge, clumsy murals, one a free-hand abstraction, the other an enlargement of one of those late blue cut-out figures by Matisse. I had my trousers tapered, but never managed to achieve the look that Chris did. I visited the barbershop in nearby Brighton and got myself a Perry Como haircut.
Perry Como!
None of it worked. I never got to be the bad boy Barry had in mind. The Good Boy prevailed, and I succeeded mostly in looking, I suppose, in the long view, more than a little bit ridiculous.
Still the Good Boy, then, Harry, to this very day.
Your son, Peter
I can tell you now—as I would not have done back then: it would have cost you sleep at night—about the second thing that eased my bumpy passage through that last year of school. This was the reliable weekly flow of florid, uninhibitedly exuberant letters from the man whose influence on me you had come to fret about more than anything: Barry Evans.
I looked forward eagerly, almost desperately to their arrival. Our letters, when we received them, were distributed at the end of breakfast in the dining hall, and Barry’s were instantly recognizable from his impeccably stylish art school italics. I have lost those letters and I no longer recall the details of their content, but I do know they were filled with the kind of leering, tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendo that typified our conversations when I visited him at home. In the letters I sent him in return, I am also sure that I mentioned none of the truth about my sexual life at school; Barry was all about girls, the women he lusted after with insatiable appetite and those he fantasized. He was impatient for me to be finally out of school and into the real world, where he’d be able to supervise the loss of my virginity.
You can see that your son was in a deep and tormenting conflict, Harry. The fears provoked by actual experience led me to conclude that I would never dare to touch a girl. And yet there was some not yet fully-awakened part of me, the part that was easily seduced by Barry and his letters, that longed desperately to be initiated into the terrifying mysteries of the opposite sex.
It was not only in this that I was timid. I had learned too well to tame the wild creature who lurked beguilingly within my soul. It was not for nothing that Barry took to signing off each letter, “Your Wicked Uncle.” His presence in my life was certainly a greater influence on me than was yours. I longed to be the rebel that he was. And yet… I had been taught from my earliest days to be the Good Boy, the Boy Scout, honest and loyal, truthful, obedient in all things, and obliging. I had learned this code of honor from you, Harry, and from the schools you sent me to. Impossible for the good boy to allow the Barry part of me to emerge from that deep place where I’d learned to hide, repress, deny him.
Oh, I did make every effort to prove myself the rebel in that last year at school. Aside from Barry, I had a “friend”—I put him in quotation marks because I wished so much to be his friend; for his part, he did not need my friendship. He collected bebop records—Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie—and played them loudly in the corridor of little studies we were allotted as seniors. He drank black coffee. He was remarkable for the extreme pallor of his face and his short, dark, curly hair. He wore his trousers ultra-tapered in the Teddy Boy fashion of the day. He openly, defiantly flouted the school rules, and got away with it. He smoked. He drank. He swore.
His name was Chris. I ran a search for him online as I was writing this and found that he had died at the age of 69 in Tanzania, still a jazz afficionado and immersed in African culture.
In my study across the corridor from his at Lancing, I longed to be as bold, as arrogant, as rebellious as Chris—the only boy at school I ever called by his first name. I played the artist, covered my study walls with two huge, clumsy murals, one a free-hand abstraction, the other an enlargement of one of those late blue cut-out figures by Matisse. I had my trousers tapered, but never managed to achieve the look that Chris did. I visited the barbershop in nearby Brighton and got myself a Perry Como haircut.
Perry Como!
None of it worked. I never got to be the bad boy Barry had in mind. The Good Boy prevailed, and I succeeded mostly in looking, I suppose, in the long view, more than a little bit ridiculous.
Still the Good Boy, then, Harry, to this very day.
Your son, Peter
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
31 AUGUST, 2021
Dear Harry,
What could you have felt about this, you and Peggy, when your son came home looking pretty odd with half a head of hair (they shaved the other half) and two rows of as yet unhealed stitches? Were you worried? I know that Ellie and I would have thrown a fit, had it been our daughter Sarah. But for you not so much, it seems, that you weren’t ready to pack me off for my last term at boarding school.
Grin and bear it? That was always your philosophy. Grin and bear it.
Back at Lancing, though, I began to suffer from persistent headaches. It may be, I’ll admit, that I exaggerated them for the attention that they brought me; I was quite happy to be sent off to “the san”—short for the sanitarium, the school’s little hospital. Located up behind all the other buildings and halfway along the path that led out onto the Sussex Downs, it was the domain of a woman I remember only as Sister, a woman who covered her sweet and caring nature with a stiff nurse’s uniform and the pretense of strict adherence to professionalism.
Lucky for me, I was Sister’s only patient at the time, and she spared no effort in looking after me. She gave me a soothing magic pill to help me fall sleep at night; even today I recall that swift, dizzying descent into oblivion. Best of all, she allowed me at least one daily cigarette. I was already addicted by this time; I had started back in France with Philippe and Jean-Claude, at the age of fourteen, smoking those black, throat-ripping Gauloises Bleues, and had pursued the prohibited addiction furtively behind the bushes throughout my time at Lancing. In Germany I had been smoking Roth-Händlers, as black as those Gauloises, with no objection from the Eckhardts. Now, with Sister, we would meet conspirationally in her little office and share unashamedly in the dark pleasures of nicotine addiction. (Damn! There it is! Another thing we shared!)
What would I have done without Sister and the refuge of the sanitarium in that last term at school?
What else did I do? I worked on my final exams, the “A” levels. I labored over an essay about Heinrich Heine that easily won me the school prize in German Literature. This was the cause of one final insult awaiting me at the end of my years at Lancing: a summons to the Headmaster’s study to be subjected to a scathing reprimand for the book I had been allowed to choose freely for my prize, a handsome hardcover edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I don’t doubt that I intended it as cocky middle finger to the school, its religion, its rules and regulations, and mostly its repression of my rebellious self. How could I claim to be shocked when he, the Headmaster, one Mr. Dancy, red-faced with anger, forbade me to put “that filth” on the prize table, presided over by his Lordship the Bishop himself and in the presence of the entire school board!
And you were there, Harry! Did you know, when you came to pick me up that one last time, what was happening behind the carefully orchestrated pomp of Prize Day?
Perhaps not. I surely never told you.
Your wayward son, Peter
What could you have felt about this, you and Peggy, when your son came home looking pretty odd with half a head of hair (they shaved the other half) and two rows of as yet unhealed stitches? Were you worried? I know that Ellie and I would have thrown a fit, had it been our daughter Sarah. But for you not so much, it seems, that you weren’t ready to pack me off for my last term at boarding school.
Grin and bear it? That was always your philosophy. Grin and bear it.
Back at Lancing, though, I began to suffer from persistent headaches. It may be, I’ll admit, that I exaggerated them for the attention that they brought me; I was quite happy to be sent off to “the san”—short for the sanitarium, the school’s little hospital. Located up behind all the other buildings and halfway along the path that led out onto the Sussex Downs, it was the domain of a woman I remember only as Sister, a woman who covered her sweet and caring nature with a stiff nurse’s uniform and the pretense of strict adherence to professionalism.
Lucky for me, I was Sister’s only patient at the time, and she spared no effort in looking after me. She gave me a soothing magic pill to help me fall sleep at night; even today I recall that swift, dizzying descent into oblivion. Best of all, she allowed me at least one daily cigarette. I was already addicted by this time; I had started back in France with Philippe and Jean-Claude, at the age of fourteen, smoking those black, throat-ripping Gauloises Bleues, and had pursued the prohibited addiction furtively behind the bushes throughout my time at Lancing. In Germany I had been smoking Roth-Händlers, as black as those Gauloises, with no objection from the Eckhardts. Now, with Sister, we would meet conspirationally in her little office and share unashamedly in the dark pleasures of nicotine addiction. (Damn! There it is! Another thing we shared!)
What would I have done without Sister and the refuge of the sanitarium in that last term at school?
What else did I do? I worked on my final exams, the “A” levels. I labored over an essay about Heinrich Heine that easily won me the school prize in German Literature. This was the cause of one final insult awaiting me at the end of my years at Lancing: a summons to the Headmaster’s study to be subjected to a scathing reprimand for the book I had been allowed to choose freely for my prize, a handsome hardcover edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I don’t doubt that I intended it as cocky middle finger to the school, its religion, its rules and regulations, and mostly its repression of my rebellious self. How could I claim to be shocked when he, the Headmaster, one Mr. Dancy, red-faced with anger, forbade me to put “that filth” on the prize table, presided over by his Lordship the Bishop himself and in the presence of the entire school board!
And you were there, Harry! Did you know, when you came to pick me up that one last time, what was happening behind the carefully orchestrated pomp of Prize Day?
Perhaps not. I surely never told you.
Your wayward son, Peter
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