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