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