8 OCTOBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

You’ll know by now how easily I lost my heart, and how much harm I left in my wake as a result. It would sadly take me many years yet to grow up and come to the understanding that love was something other than the satisfaction of my needs.

There followed many wonderful days and evenings in the new life I was creating for myself. Living in Winden, I was able to spend the better part of the day at my typewriter. I was gaining confidence, feeling more accomplished as a writer. Early evening I would take the bus into Düren, arriving at the Berlitz School in time to meet up with my new colleague for a cup of tea or coffee before classes started. I had not yet summoned the nerve to make my feelings known, nor was I sure of them myself. While I was aware of a familiar, powerfully physical attraction to this petite young woman with green eyes, dark hair, and a sharp and lively mind, I was content for once to take the time needed for us to get to know one another before trying to rush her off to bed. For her part, Liz was perhaps rightly wary of a man who was yet to earn her trust.

Still, we did build a friendship. After class, most often, we would go out to a nearby Taverne for beer and a bite to eat, Brat- or Knackwurst with Sauerkraut, or one of those breaded cutlets that German chefs do so well. I would sometimes order a big bowl of steamed mussels—a specialty at our favorite late-night haunt—until the memorable time when I must have swallowed down a bad one… I was so horribly sick, I scarcely made it home that night; so sick that I have never dared to eat another mussel in more than sixty years.

We had friends in common. There were Willi and Helle, two aspiring young businessmen with each a pretty girlfriend and a brand new car; and Dieter, a slightly older man, forty-ish, old enough to have been a member of the Hitler Jugend. The ravages of war were still a vivid memory in Düren, at the eastern rim of what had been the Battle of the Bulge; there were many people for whom the night of November 16, 1944 was still a recent nightmare, when waves of Allied bombers swarmed in the skies above to unleash a murderous storm of fire and high explosive on the city. Of the 22,000 human beings who once lived there, three thousand died that night, most of them trapped in cellars beneath the burning buildings, where they’d taken shelter.

We became close friends, Liz and I, as well as colleagues. We stood out as the only two young English people, foreigners amongst the natives. There was a mutual respect as well as a tenderness. It took me a good long while, as I recall, to tell her awkwardly that I loved her and soon to ask her if she would consider marrying me. Until that moment we had still done little more than kiss goodnight, but she said, Yes. It was kind and brave of her to agree to take me on, because I was not much of a prospective husband, with only a part-time evening job and vague hopes of eventually gaining recognition as a writer. I was impractical, penniless and—though I may have managed successfully to hide it—emotionally not much past my adolescence. As I look back on it, I wish that I could have been—your phrase, Harry!—more man for her woman. I was not.

She took me on anyway. Now many years later I continue to thank her for the immeasurable gift of love. It saddens me to acknowledge that I was unable to prove myself worthy of the trust that went along with it.

More of that later, Harry.

For now, your son, Peter