8 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Before we leave Aspley Guise, let’s take a moment to revisit The Bell. This was the pub at one corner of the (actually triangular) village “square”, with the Post Office on one side of the triangle, Aspley House on opposite side, and the butcher’s, the grocer’s and the greengrocer’s on the third. Somewhere too—I think sandwiched in between the butcher’s and the grocer’s—was a tiny newsagent where you bought the shredded Golden Virginia tobacco for your home-rolled cigarettes and, once in a while, on a splurge, a pack of Players or Senior Service. Oh, and in the middle of the square, let’s not forget, was the bus shelter and the horse trough.

But The Bell. You often used to stop there for a drink or two, mostly before lunch. In a way, I think you did your business there, or some of it, because as in every English village worth its name the pub was the center of all social life. All the local news was readily available here, so any news you wanted to put out into the community could be spread rapidly from this point out. It was here, too, that you could expect to meet many of your parishioners, particularly the male ones, and particularly those who might need a timely reminder that it was time to show their faces back in church on Sunday morning.

And the pub was an important place for you to maintain your credentials as a man of the people, one who could be trusted to understand their problems, a man with his feet on the ground with everyone else, a man you could share a beer with, or a game of darts. Not some hoity-toity snob who thought himself a cut above because he wore the cloth. Here everyone could call you Harry and know you’d have a laugh if they shared a joke at your expense.

So that was The Bell, in Aspley Guise. In Braughing there was The Brown Bear, where you were given the goose eggs that turned into Susan and Sarah. In Sharnbrook, The Swan with Two Nicks; in Aberporth, where you retired, The Ship. These were your haunts—mostly, as I say, in the middle of the day but sometimes also before supper in the evening. Your usual was Guinness.

I don’t think I ever saw you visibly intoxicated but you were actually, fess up, a bit of a boozer, no? Aside from your lunchtime Guinness, there would likely be another one before dinner, carefully poured to produce exactly the right layer of foam at the head. Then the ritual glass of sherry and, with dinner, a glass or two of “plonk”—your wine of choice, the cheapest you could find, though you did enjoy a glass of the finer stuff if someone else was treating. And even after all that alcohol consumption, you would usually find it necessary to complete the evening with a snifter of brandy or one of those tiny glasses of liqueur—Grand Marnier, Cointreau, Benedictine… Your absolute favorite was Chartreuse, with a preference for the more expensive, finer-tasting green over the yellow.

Anyway, yes, The Bell. Even when we were little children you would take us there when you finished your morning rounds, stopping by at the homes of those of your parishioners who required for any reason—sickness, social, or psychological distress—a visit from the clergy. Children were not allowed in pubs under any circumstance in those days, so you would leave us in the car by the back door and come out with a glass of lemonade and a package of Smith’s Potato Crisps for each of us. Inside the package with the crisps was a twist of azure blue paper containing just a pinch of salt, enough to season those delicious crisps to taste.

See? These are the things I recall most clearly, those shining moments that seem to me now as intimate as any that we shared. These little things are the ones that stick in the mind, and these are the memories that I treasure most.

Nostalgically, then, your son, Peter

7 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

I need to talk about Flora again, while we’re still in Aspley Guise. Now that she has been gone, these several years, and you for many more, I feel it can be told. It was, for her, an early wound. How do I know about this? Did you tell me? Or did she? I did know the story, even at a young age, young enough not to fully understand.

She could have been twelve years old at the time, and came back in tears one day from a walk on the heath, up behind the Rectory, beyond the end of the path where we used to pick blackberries and past the sandpit—a quarry cut deep into the hillside. We took tin trays there from the kitchen, for the scary thrill of sliding on them down its steep, slippery slopes, top to bottom. We took glass vials, at times, filling them with layers of different colored sands, red and green, yellow, orange, black, and corking them up securely to bring back home as gifts.

Further, past the sandpit, was a wild area of heath with waist high gorse bushes, deep green with seasonal bright yellow blossoms, small but plentiful. It was here that Flora came upon a stranger with his fly unbuttoned, cock in hand—though she had no idea what that strange thing might be—scaring her as it squirted “white stuff,” so she said, all over the ground in front of her.

Did she just happen upon this man by chance, his work already in progress? Or did he see this pretty little girl and choose the moment to undo his fly? Was he one of those men what get their kicks this way?

I do not know the answer to those questions, and I suspect you did not, either. But you had the task of comforting your daughter and calming her down with some kind of explanation as to what this man was doing.

No easy task. As we well know, you resorted frequently to Drs. Freud or Jung to guide you in such situations, so perhaps these luminaries helped. And you were surely well aware of the potentially long-lasting emotional repercussions of trauma such as this. I wonder to what extent the episode may have affected your later efforts to “understand” your daughter and her problems—and offer her sometimes unasked-for advice about her relationship with men.

You may or may not know this, Harry, but she—your daughter, Flora—found something dark and disturbing about your attempted interventions in this aspect of her life.

So, asking you in advance to forgive the honesty about an obviously disturbing subject, I remain, as always,

Flora's loving brother, Peter

6 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Hank was your dog. He was devoted to you. A north-of-Englander, like yourself, he was a border collie. Handsome, always eager, with soft brown eyes and remarkable intelligence, he came with the family when we left Newcastle in 1938 and headed south to your new incumbency in Aspley Guise, because your doctor—doctors?—recommended the move.

I remember the feel of his think black coat, highlighted with white. See? Like you, black and white, cassock and dog collar! The first “memory” I have of Hank—a “memory” because it’s only a photograph—is of him sitting on the lawn in Holywell, your first parish, before Newcastle, where Flora was born. Hank is pretending to be lazing in the sun but I know that he’s awake and fully attentive, because that’s his job, to watch over the little baby in the pram beside him.

Border collies need to have a job, don’t they? You taught me that. It’s in their nature. They’re herders. Up north, in the mountains of Northumberland, the shepherds send them off with a whistle into the hills to gather the widely scattered flocks and bring them back down the mountainside to be sheared. When we got to Aspley Guise, Hank had a new job. He’d be sent off, through the village streets, all the way up to Granny Murcott’s house, a mile away, by the woods, where she would attach a little package of sweets (candies, that is) for him to bring back to her grandchildren.

His other job was to look after us when we were little, to see that we never strayed too far from his watchful gaze.

Flora and I were away at school when Hank died. Of old age. You told us he was gone in the car, on the way home from picking us up at the train station. You must have been totally devastated by his death, but you put a good face on it. A father was not allowed to show grief to his children.

Did we cry in the car? I don’t remember. I suspect that even by that young age—I would have been, what? Seven? Eight?—we had learned to keep our feelings to ourselves. But I remember the terrible sense of loss, of emptiness, as you drove us home. I remember how, to relieve the gloom, you told us you had a surprise for us when we got home.

The surprise was Benjy, an adorable little Cocker Spaniel puppy, who jumped all over us, as excited to meet us as we to discover that we had a brand new pet.

We loved Benjy, of course. And Siân (Welsh for Jane, the “gift of God”) the snappy Pembrokeshire Corgi who was Benjy’s successor after he died. But we all knew, secretly, that not one of these two could never, ever live up to Hank. Because Hank was the gentlest, kindest, smartest dog we ever had. Well, that ever lived. I know you loved him, though you'd never admit to loving a dog! And I know that he loved you. He was the family’s dog, yes, of course. But there was never any doubt about whose dog he really was.

I see him walking obediently to heel, ears perked, tail held high, beside the flapping black folds of your cassock. Your faithful dog.

Good memories, then, today. Your son, Peter

5 AUGUST, 2021

Good morning again, Harry!

We did have fun, though, didn’t we, with the Bletchley girls? They were especially kind to us children. Adoring, even.

There was that time at Christmas. It was a tradition in our family—one that was surely originally your idea—to celebrate the arrival of Father Christmas (Santa Claus, over here) with great fun and games, rather than make it a furtive, middle of the night affair whose only trace was the stuffed stocking left to be discovered in the morning. No, for us, Father Christmas came with fanfare and much clanging of cowbells loud “ho-ho-hos” reverberating through the upstairs of the house. One time he was a giant, arriving on stilts—not your skill, Harry, but one of your guests; another time it was an alternating pair of bristly mustachio’ed twins from the RAF base at Cranfield down the hill (“I know what you think, you think I’m Frank. Well I’m not, I’m Douggie!”)

And then there was the time that Father Christmas arrived with great hue and cry, driving a sleigh—an ancient perambulator (baby carriage, here) rescued from the attic and hauled along the top corridor by two harnessed “reindeer”, Vivian and Fiona wearing fur coats, on their knees. I suspect it might have taken a good few gin and tonics to induce their cooperation, but there they were, good sports, the whole party laughing wildly.

Fiona starred, too, in another Rectory extravaganza inspired by your old love of theater. I don’t recall the occasion—but perhaps you would? The title of the play was “Murder in the Rectory.” Did you write the script? I’m guessing so. You did love your mysteries: Agatha Christia, Ngaoi Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham. You devoured them endlessly, there was always one on your bedside table. And your play was obviously inspired by them.

You staged it in the drawing room—the large, formal room with great windows looking out to the rhododendron bushes that marked the boundaries of the garden, the room where tea was served on special occasions with finger sandwiches and biscuits (okay, cookies here) and cake set out on the best art deco Burlington china. For the occasion, you rigged a curtain across one end of the room and arranged chairs for your audience at the other. Of the play, I remember only the heart-chilling scream of Fiona as the murder victim and the slash of bright red lipstick across her cheek where the “blood” poured out. I was terrified, clutching at my mother’s hand for reassurance.

I believe that you, Harry, were the murderer. If memory serves…

And here's my dark suspicion: that you lusted heartily after her, the seductive Fiona, as I did, just a child, and unable yet to understand my lust.

Lost in these memories, Peter  

4 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

I’m trying to recall when I was first aware of Jews as a people somehow “different” from us Christians. Did I know, for example, that Ernst, our Kindertransport guest, was Jewish? Did you ever make us aware of that—you must of course have known—and did it matter to you? There were no Jews in our little English country village. Indeed, I had scarcely any history with Jews until I married Ellie, when I was already in my thirties!

What did I even know, back then, and what did you tell me about the Holocaust? I was eight years old at the time the camps were liberated, and you may have considered me too young to know about, let alone understand such horrors. I suspect that you’d have wanted to protect me from the terrible, heart-rending truth about the depravities of our fellow man. I believe that I learned about it only later from my history lessons.

And yet… and yet… When Flora and I were still quite little, our mother, Peggy, used to read us bedtime stories from a book called “All Saints at Six O’Clock.” One of the stories she read was that of “Little Saint Hugh,” a boy who lived in the dark back streets in the town of Lincoln (I always had the impression that it was an Eastern European ghetto, but no, this was in my own country, England, in the Middle Ages) and was supposedly sacrificed by Jews in what I now know to be the infamous “blood libel” myth that continues, even today, to be propagated amongst the more rabid anti-Semites of the world.

It was a truly beastly story, yet Peggy calmly included it without judgment or explanation with all the other saints’ stories that she read us, apparently unashamed to share its disgraceful slander with her children. Did she believe this calumny against the Jews? Surely not! I prefer to think that her anti-Semitism was not malicious—I still fail to see a shred of malice in her—but rather pure, unquestioned ignorance, reflecting more on benighted, ancient, shameful Christian lore than on her character.

Still—I need to say this, Harry—there was a grievously intuitive and unexamined part of Peggy’s otherwise kind, generous personality (witness her welcoming of all and sundry into her home in the war years and her caring mothering of them all!) that bespoke prejudice, and not only of Jews but of people of other heritages and skin colors. She was, she herself would readily admit, a snob, whose class-consciousness was sometimes an embarrassment.

It pains me to say that Ellie was conscious of Peggy’s—let me avoid the term anti-Semitism, which mischaracterizes her—but of her hesitation in embracing those whose culture she neither knew nor understood. There was, Ellie tells me of their first encounter at the railway station in Carmarthen where you came to pick us up, and in the car on the drive home, a kind of subtle recoil, a kind of drawing back that she, Ellie, felt quite keenly—and I do not doubt her feeling. But I do believe that Peggy always made the effort to overcome her prejudices, when she was aware of them, and that she was at heart a generous, kind and loving person.

Is any of this new to you? I imagine not. You lived together and loved each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health” for more than sixty years.

Fond memories, then, of both of you, Peter

3 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

I did not know this at the time, nor would I have understood, I think, but I later learned that an important member of our household in those war years came over to England via the now well-known Kindertransport—the trains that left Germany and Austria between 1938 and 1940 filled with children, mostly Jewish, who were sent off by desperate parents so that they, at least, might find shelter from the impending Nazi storm.

Ernst must have been about twelve or thirteen years old when he arrived in England—older than us by a few years. He seemed to Flora and myself a strange boy who lived up to his name: earnest. A part of that strangeness was the marked accent with which he struggled, initially, with the English language. He kept a good part of that accent until his recent death, more than seventy years later, in his adopted city of Chicago. Reunited with his parents in the United States after the war, he had lived with them for many years in Omaha, Nebraska, where I can only imagine how hard it would have been for this family of Viennese Jewish refugees to adapt to a city deep in the American Midwest.

For several years after the war we would receive regular care packages from the Schnabls. They were more than welcome at a time when food was still scarce in post-war England and ration books still required for grocery shopping. Amongst the many gifts in those exotic packages from America, there were two that stand out forever in my memory: huge cans of salty, memorably delicious ham… and jars of peanut butter. The latter was something hitherto unknown in England, at least by us, a treat that Peggy packed into my tuck box to take to school with me, where it made me the envy of my school mates.

Until the day he died, already in his nineties, Ernst remained whole-heartedly devoted to you, Harry, and to Peggy. And to Flora and myself. He did not, he told me much later, have a good relationship with his own father, and I suspect that you became a kind of substitute. For a while, indeed, he was a part of our family, never quite a brother to Flora and myself, but always in our midst. He went to school in Bedford, where he received a good start in his education. And in transatlantic correspondence and occasional visits, he remained in close touch with you throughout his life.

Importantly, with your guidance—though surely without your insistence?—he found in Christianity a refuge from the confusion of his own cultural roots. He remained deeply appreciative of your mentorship. A devout Christian in his adult life, he married a church organist and was devastated, in later years, by her loss. He was, though, a stubborn traditionalist, resistant to change—perhaps a consequence of the disruption in his early life. He was outraged, for example, when his daughter Emily, brought up by himself in the Episcopal tradition, decided to take Holy Orders—given his disapproval of women priests. Happily, they were reconciled in due course.

I was in touch with Ernst several times by telephone and US mail—not email!—in the years before his death. He was a gentle soul, loyal to a fault, and his gratitude to you personally and to our family was touching. This was one person, among many I’m sure, whose life you helped to change with your own special wisdom and compassion.

With respectful thoughts, then, your son, Peter  

1 AUGUST, 2021

Sunday, August 1sT, 2021

Dear Harry,

My birthday. Peggy’s birthday. There can’t be many of us, mother and son, who share a birthday. You used to joke that I was her 30th birthday present. Were she alive today she would be one hundred and fifteen years old. Which makes me eighty-five. To borrow the title of one of Ellie's father's novels, I didn't know I would live so long.

I miss Peggy, miss the birthdays that we spent together. She was the best cake-maker in the universe, whether for birthday, Christmas or Easter. Weddings. Dark, rich fruitcakes, quite delicious. And they kept for, what? Weeks? Months? And cherry sponge cakes, light and equally delicious. But they didn't last so long. No one could resist them.

Anyway, here we are. The Feast of St. Peter’s Chains. I already thanked you in an earlier letter for my name, and what it means to me. But it never hurts to be thanked again.

People call me Peter, never Pete. The only one who ever called me Pete was… Peggy!

Sending good thoughts, then. We are back down at our Laguna Beach cottage, not Glenview, but paid for mostly by the proceeds from the sale of Glenview. We have no plans, other than to have a few friends over for dinner. Ellie has not yet told me who they are, not what time they are coming. It’s a surprise.

With love, Peter