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