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