Dear Harry,
This is a bleak and solemn day in American history. Had you survived a few years longer than you did, it would have been late afternoon, early evening in Wales when it began to happen. News time. I’m sure you would have been watching; you always did. You would perhaps have missed the first terrible event, as I did, here in Los Angeles. But your news sources would have switched to New York in time for you to watch in horror as that second jet airliner, filled with passengers, slammed into the second of the two World Trade Center towers at the southern end of Manhattan. And the third, into the Pentagon in Washington, DC; and the fourth, crashing into an open field in Pennsylvania.
I’m sure the hijackers of those planes were praising their god as they met their fate, along with the nearly three thousand innocent human beings whose lives they took with them that day. Among them was the brilliant young son of one or our oldest, closest friends.
You would have been appalled as I was, Harry, as was every other sane person on the planet, that fanatical belief in any god could have inspired men to commit such a hateful, devastating act. It seems sometimes that religion, unhappily, paradoxically, has engendered as much evil in the world across the centuries as the good it claims to foster.
Unhappily, too, there was nothing but vengeance on the mind of the American President, the American Congress, the American people. I have to say that it was on my mind too. It became the national obsession to kill—to kill the man deemed responsible, to kill his followers, and to kill all those who helped them.
Twenty years have passed since that terrible day. Twenty years of killing, of misguided warfare, leaving many thousands of our own as well as many thousands of our purported enemies dead. We have finally come to a recognition of the futility of the effort and abandoned it. Our achievement, after twenty years of slaughter? Ironically, we have left the chief intended target of our wrath, the Afghan Taliban, even stronger than the day we first attacked them.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, your God, Harry. We would have left done better to leave it to him. My own religious inspiration is the Buddha. He would, I’m sure, have counseled otherwise.
In grief, today, your son,
Peter
Saturday, September 11, 2021
Sunday, September 5, 2021
4 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
It’s Saturday. I’m looking forward to sitting out on our balcony this afternoon and lighting up my weekly La Gloria cigar.
It’s a treat that I allow myself. You’ll be pleased to hear that I finally managed to give up smoking cigarettes in my fiftieth year—a few decades sooner than yourself. I had been trying for years. Had tried everything, from patches to nicotine chewing gum to hypnosis. Nothing worked. Until I decided to take a positive approach. I stopped telling myself, No, shouldn’t, mustn’t, can’t and so on, and tried giving myself permission to light up but choosing, instead, the benefits that came with not smoking: the ability to climb a flight of stairs without panting for breath, for example, and having clothes that didn’t stink of stale tobacco. The list was long. It didn’t hurt, too, that Sarah, from her earliest years, kept nagging me insistently to stop.
Like you, I was addicted. But I managed to quit. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 1986.
A while ago, however, I gave myself permission to enjoy the occasional hit of nicotine with a cigar. Just for the pleasure of it. I don’t believe I ever saw you smoking one of these. The cigarettes you smoked were mostly those you rolled yourself. I say “rolled,” but you had all kinds of ways of making them, all kinds of little intricate machines. I think the making was as much a part of the fun for you as lighting up and smoking, but you were happy to kid yourself that the shredded tobacco you used was less harmful to the health than store-bought cigarettes. Still, I’m sure they did you no good. I’m glad you had the good sense it took—and the love!—to quit the nasty habit when you understood that it was harming Peggy.
Knowing of my addiction, I ration myself to one a week—though sometimes, I’ll admit, I manage to sneak in a second one if no one else is counting. No smoking in the house, of course, these days, but the weather here in Southern California is rarely a deterrent. I slip out onto the balcony or the patio behind the cottage and enjoy my smoke as I complete a New York Times Sunday crossword. (That was never one of your addictions, was it? In that we differ…)
Am I addicted? Maybe. Bust a little. Is that like being a little bit pregnant? Maybe. But I figure, well, at this stage of my life it won’t kill me.
See you out on the balcony, then, Peter
It’s Saturday. I’m looking forward to sitting out on our balcony this afternoon and lighting up my weekly La Gloria cigar.
It’s a treat that I allow myself. You’ll be pleased to hear that I finally managed to give up smoking cigarettes in my fiftieth year—a few decades sooner than yourself. I had been trying for years. Had tried everything, from patches to nicotine chewing gum to hypnosis. Nothing worked. Until I decided to take a positive approach. I stopped telling myself, No, shouldn’t, mustn’t, can’t and so on, and tried giving myself permission to light up but choosing, instead, the benefits that came with not smoking: the ability to climb a flight of stairs without panting for breath, for example, and having clothes that didn’t stink of stale tobacco. The list was long. It didn’t hurt, too, that Sarah, from her earliest years, kept nagging me insistently to stop.
Like you, I was addicted. But I managed to quit. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 1986.
A while ago, however, I gave myself permission to enjoy the occasional hit of nicotine with a cigar. Just for the pleasure of it. I don’t believe I ever saw you smoking one of these. The cigarettes you smoked were mostly those you rolled yourself. I say “rolled,” but you had all kinds of ways of making them, all kinds of little intricate machines. I think the making was as much a part of the fun for you as lighting up and smoking, but you were happy to kid yourself that the shredded tobacco you used was less harmful to the health than store-bought cigarettes. Still, I’m sure they did you no good. I’m glad you had the good sense it took—and the love!—to quit the nasty habit when you understood that it was harming Peggy.
Knowing of my addiction, I ration myself to one a week—though sometimes, I’ll admit, I manage to sneak in a second one if no one else is counting. No smoking in the house, of course, these days, but the weather here in Southern California is rarely a deterrent. I slip out onto the balcony or the patio behind the cottage and enjoy my smoke as I complete a New York Times Sunday crossword. (That was never one of your addictions, was it? In that we differ…)
Am I addicted? Maybe. Bust a little. Is that like being a little bit pregnant? Maybe. But I figure, well, at this stage of my life it won’t kill me.
See you out on the balcony, then, Peter
Saturday, September 4, 2021
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
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
Friday, September 3, 2021
3 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Timidity! This is the quality I wish I had not learned at school. Oh, I was pretty smart, Harry, after all that education! I was articulate, well-spoken, and I had learned to present myself with a certain natural—though some might think affected—English public schoolboy charm. I knew Latin! I could speak both French and German fluently. My head was filled with an awful lot of stuff. What I didn’t know was how to be a man.
There I was in Paris, Harry! Just a couple of months later, in the fall. The city was glorious, glowing. I was free, for the first time in my life! Free from school and all its rules and regulations. Free from you and Peggy! I was in love, and I was pretty sure that Jeannine loved me too.
And what did I do about it, Harry? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I could hardly summon the nerve to kiss the girl I loved. Oh, we held hands a lot. We strolled along the boulevards as lovers are supposed to do. Lingered around the book stalls on the banks of the Seine. Talked books, because Jeannine had recently passed her baccalaureate and was ten times smarter than me. We went to the Louvre—and this was in the days long, long before the glass pyramid, before the whole world was lining up with cell phone to take selfies with the Mona Lisa. The galleries could still echo with the lonely visitor’s footsteps.
I was in lover’s heaven, Harry, and could barely bring myself to touch the girl I so much wanted to make love to. I had only the vaguest idea about what it was I wanted, and still less the guts to make it known, or ask her if that was what she wanted, too.
What a klutz, Harry (again that word you probably never heard)!
Your son, Peter
Timidity! This is the quality I wish I had not learned at school. Oh, I was pretty smart, Harry, after all that education! I was articulate, well-spoken, and I had learned to present myself with a certain natural—though some might think affected—English public schoolboy charm. I knew Latin! I could speak both French and German fluently. My head was filled with an awful lot of stuff. What I didn’t know was how to be a man.
There I was in Paris, Harry! Just a couple of months later, in the fall. The city was glorious, glowing. I was free, for the first time in my life! Free from school and all its rules and regulations. Free from you and Peggy! I was in love, and I was pretty sure that Jeannine loved me too.
And what did I do about it, Harry? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I could hardly summon the nerve to kiss the girl I loved. Oh, we held hands a lot. We strolled along the boulevards as lovers are supposed to do. Lingered around the book stalls on the banks of the Seine. Talked books, because Jeannine had recently passed her baccalaureate and was ten times smarter than me. We went to the Louvre—and this was in the days long, long before the glass pyramid, before the whole world was lining up with cell phone to take selfies with the Mona Lisa. The galleries could still echo with the lonely visitor’s footsteps.
I was in lover’s heaven, Harry, and could barely bring myself to touch the girl I so much wanted to make love to. I had only the vaguest idea about what it was I wanted, and still less the guts to make it known, or ask her if that was what she wanted, too.
What a klutz, Harry (again that word you probably never heard)!
Your son, Peter
Thursday, September 2, 2021
2 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Do I need to remind you of that other remarkable event on my last day at boarding school?
You brought salvation with you on that day when you and Peggy came to pick me up. You brought Jeannine. I found her sitting there beside me, when I opened up the door to the back seat of your car and climbed in. You had written me to expect another exchange student from France but I had entirely forgotten that she had already arrived to stay with us. And there she was, beautiful in her white shirt and tartan skirt, mysterious, infinitely tantalizing, French, feminine, and smiling what I came to know as her private, impenetrable feline smile.
Of course I fell in love again at once.
Says your son, who always fell in love too easily but never managed to love well,
Peter
Do I need to remind you of that other remarkable event on my last day at boarding school?
You brought salvation with you on that day when you and Peggy came to pick me up. You brought Jeannine. I found her sitting there beside me, when I opened up the door to the back seat of your car and climbed in. You had written me to expect another exchange student from France but I had entirely forgotten that she had already arrived to stay with us. And there she was, beautiful in her white shirt and tartan skirt, mysterious, infinitely tantalizing, French, feminine, and smiling what I came to know as her private, impenetrable feline smile.
Of course I fell in love again at once.
Says your son, who always fell in love too easily but never managed to love well,
Peter
1 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
I can tell you now—as I would not have done back then: it would have cost you sleep at night—about the second thing that eased my bumpy passage through that last year of school. This was the reliable weekly flow of florid, uninhibitedly exuberant letters from the man whose influence on me you had come to fret about more than anything: Barry Evans.
I looked forward eagerly, almost desperately to their arrival. Our letters, when we received them, were distributed at the end of breakfast in the dining hall, and Barry’s were instantly recognizable from his impeccably stylish art school italics. I have lost those letters and I no longer recall the details of their content, but I do know they were filled with the kind of leering, tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendo that typified our conversations when I visited him at home. In the letters I sent him in return, I am also sure that I mentioned none of the truth about my sexual life at school; Barry was all about girls, the women he lusted after with insatiable appetite and those he fantasized. He was impatient for me to be finally out of school and into the real world, where he’d be able to supervise the loss of my virginity.
You can see that your son was in a deep and tormenting conflict, Harry. The fears provoked by actual experience led me to conclude that I would never dare to touch a girl. And yet there was some not yet fully-awakened part of me, the part that was easily seduced by Barry and his letters, that longed desperately to be initiated into the terrifying mysteries of the opposite sex.
It was not only in this that I was timid. I had learned too well to tame the wild creature who lurked beguilingly within my soul. It was not for nothing that Barry took to signing off each letter, “Your Wicked Uncle.” His presence in my life was certainly a greater influence on me than was yours. I longed to be the rebel that he was. And yet… I had been taught from my earliest days to be the Good Boy, the Boy Scout, honest and loyal, truthful, obedient in all things, and obliging. I had learned this code of honor from you, Harry, and from the schools you sent me to. Impossible for the good boy to allow the Barry part of me to emerge from that deep place where I’d learned to hide, repress, deny him.
Oh, I did make every effort to prove myself the rebel in that last year at school. Aside from Barry, I had a “friend”—I put him in quotation marks because I wished so much to be his friend; for his part, he did not need my friendship. He collected bebop records—Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie—and played them loudly in the corridor of little studies we were allotted as seniors. He drank black coffee. He was remarkable for the extreme pallor of his face and his short, dark, curly hair. He wore his trousers ultra-tapered in the Teddy Boy fashion of the day. He openly, defiantly flouted the school rules, and got away with it. He smoked. He drank. He swore.
His name was Chris. I ran a search for him online as I was writing this and found that he had died at the age of 69 in Tanzania, still a jazz afficionado and immersed in African culture.
In my study across the corridor from his at Lancing, I longed to be as bold, as arrogant, as rebellious as Chris—the only boy at school I ever called by his first name. I played the artist, covered my study walls with two huge, clumsy murals, one a free-hand abstraction, the other an enlargement of one of those late blue cut-out figures by Matisse. I had my trousers tapered, but never managed to achieve the look that Chris did. I visited the barbershop in nearby Brighton and got myself a Perry Como haircut.
Perry Como!
None of it worked. I never got to be the bad boy Barry had in mind. The Good Boy prevailed, and I succeeded mostly in looking, I suppose, in the long view, more than a little bit ridiculous.
Still the Good Boy, then, Harry, to this very day.
Your son, Peter
I can tell you now—as I would not have done back then: it would have cost you sleep at night—about the second thing that eased my bumpy passage through that last year of school. This was the reliable weekly flow of florid, uninhibitedly exuberant letters from the man whose influence on me you had come to fret about more than anything: Barry Evans.
I looked forward eagerly, almost desperately to their arrival. Our letters, when we received them, were distributed at the end of breakfast in the dining hall, and Barry’s were instantly recognizable from his impeccably stylish art school italics. I have lost those letters and I no longer recall the details of their content, but I do know they were filled with the kind of leering, tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendo that typified our conversations when I visited him at home. In the letters I sent him in return, I am also sure that I mentioned none of the truth about my sexual life at school; Barry was all about girls, the women he lusted after with insatiable appetite and those he fantasized. He was impatient for me to be finally out of school and into the real world, where he’d be able to supervise the loss of my virginity.
You can see that your son was in a deep and tormenting conflict, Harry. The fears provoked by actual experience led me to conclude that I would never dare to touch a girl. And yet there was some not yet fully-awakened part of me, the part that was easily seduced by Barry and his letters, that longed desperately to be initiated into the terrifying mysteries of the opposite sex.
It was not only in this that I was timid. I had learned too well to tame the wild creature who lurked beguilingly within my soul. It was not for nothing that Barry took to signing off each letter, “Your Wicked Uncle.” His presence in my life was certainly a greater influence on me than was yours. I longed to be the rebel that he was. And yet… I had been taught from my earliest days to be the Good Boy, the Boy Scout, honest and loyal, truthful, obedient in all things, and obliging. I had learned this code of honor from you, Harry, and from the schools you sent me to. Impossible for the good boy to allow the Barry part of me to emerge from that deep place where I’d learned to hide, repress, deny him.
Oh, I did make every effort to prove myself the rebel in that last year at school. Aside from Barry, I had a “friend”—I put him in quotation marks because I wished so much to be his friend; for his part, he did not need my friendship. He collected bebop records—Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie—and played them loudly in the corridor of little studies we were allotted as seniors. He drank black coffee. He was remarkable for the extreme pallor of his face and his short, dark, curly hair. He wore his trousers ultra-tapered in the Teddy Boy fashion of the day. He openly, defiantly flouted the school rules, and got away with it. He smoked. He drank. He swore.
His name was Chris. I ran a search for him online as I was writing this and found that he had died at the age of 69 in Tanzania, still a jazz afficionado and immersed in African culture.
In my study across the corridor from his at Lancing, I longed to be as bold, as arrogant, as rebellious as Chris—the only boy at school I ever called by his first name. I played the artist, covered my study walls with two huge, clumsy murals, one a free-hand abstraction, the other an enlargement of one of those late blue cut-out figures by Matisse. I had my trousers tapered, but never managed to achieve the look that Chris did. I visited the barbershop in nearby Brighton and got myself a Perry Como haircut.
Perry Como!
None of it worked. I never got to be the bad boy Barry had in mind. The Good Boy prevailed, and I succeeded mostly in looking, I suppose, in the long view, more than a little bit ridiculous.
Still the Good Boy, then, Harry, to this very day.
Your son, Peter
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
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
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
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I am back at the beginning with blogs and Blogger. It has been a long march. I started out in 2004 when the second Bush was re-elected. To m...
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The word came to me with sudden and rather unwelcome clarity after two sleepless hours this morning early. Burdened. I'm feeling burdene...
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Dear Harry, It's a good day to celebrate your skill, your artistry. I wish I knew the whereabouts of that early picture of you in your b...
