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