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
Sunday, August 1, 2021
Saturday, July 31, 2021
31 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I woke in the middle of the night with the urge to pee and that old English euphemism rattling around in what’s left of my brain: Spend a penny. As in “I need to spend a penny.”
I wonder if the phrase is still current, now that its context has been long forgotten? We used to have those pay toilets—I hope they don’t have them any more!—where you had to put a penny in the slot to gain admittance. Pennies, of course, were not today’s little things, they were ridiculously huge pieces of hardware, and weighed at least a hundred times their monetary value. A “pocketful of change” would weigh your trousers down and jangle loudly when you walked. That’s when there were, sensibly, twelve pennies to the shilling (a much smaller coin) and twenty shillings to the pound. There wasn't even a pound coin.
Now they’ve gone and spoiled everything, of course.
With love, your son, Peter
I woke in the middle of the night with the urge to pee and that old English euphemism rattling around in what’s left of my brain: Spend a penny. As in “I need to spend a penny.”
I wonder if the phrase is still current, now that its context has been long forgotten? We used to have those pay toilets—I hope they don’t have them any more!—where you had to put a penny in the slot to gain admittance. Pennies, of course, were not today’s little things, they were ridiculously huge pieces of hardware, and weighed at least a hundred times their monetary value. A “pocketful of change” would weigh your trousers down and jangle loudly when you walked. That’s when there were, sensibly, twelve pennies to the shilling (a much smaller coin) and twenty shillings to the pound. There wasn't even a pound coin.
Now they’ve gone and spoiled everything, of course.
With love, your son, Peter
Friday, July 30, 2021
30 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
Is this not strange? My birthday comes up in a couple of days and here I am recalling what I know about that day. The actual day. The first one ever.
My mention of dance classes in my last entry reminds me that you were capable of remarkable and penetratig insights into the workings of the the human mind. I have written about this before in another context, but the story belongs, too, in these letters that I’m writing.
We attended dance classes every week in Bedford, Flora and I. It was something children of a certain class were frequently expected to do—more about social poise and posture, I suspect, than about dance, but there.
Which was fine, except that little Peter soon showed an aversion to the skipping rope, a simple prop that was used all the time in dance class. I began to howl whenever one was produced—a matter of some concern and perhaps a little bit of shame to my parents, and a distraction to everyone in the class.
What to do? Drawing on the knowledge of psychology you gained in your Cambridge days, you called me one day into your study for one of those serious father-son talks that surely shaped my life. On this occasion I found you sitting in the armchair by the fire with a skipping rope laid across your knees.
Reassuring me from my initial jolt of fear, you told me the story of my birth: how I was a blue baby, born with the umbilical caught around my neck; how I could have died at birth, but for the swift action of Mrs. Gates, the midwife, who seized a pair of scissors and cat through the cord in time to let me catch my first breath.
And crucially, as you were telling me this story, you took the skipping rope and placed it around my neck, tightening it gently from both ends until I felt the squeeze; and showed me there was nothing more to fear, that what had happened, happened long ago, and I was saved; that I had no need to cry any more when I saw a skipping rope in class.
I think back to this insight and, particularly, your action, and see that it was far in advance of its time. It was, as I say, remarkable, perhaps a little risky, except that you had the confidence that it was the right thing to do.
You were right, of course. I never cried at a skipping rope again. But I had reason to remember the story many, many years later, when asked in a group training session whether there could be some message from the moment of my birth that could be standing between me and my freedom as a writer; and if so, what that message might be. And I heard myself utter what seemed like the strangest of all words: I have no right to be here. And found myself laughing hysterically, crying, too… because I realized quite suddenly that those words were absolutely true.
So, Harry, father, wise man, thank you for the insight.
Ever your son, Peter
Is this not strange? My birthday comes up in a couple of days and here I am recalling what I know about that day. The actual day. The first one ever.
My mention of dance classes in my last entry reminds me that you were capable of remarkable and penetratig insights into the workings of the the human mind. I have written about this before in another context, but the story belongs, too, in these letters that I’m writing.
We attended dance classes every week in Bedford, Flora and I. It was something children of a certain class were frequently expected to do—more about social poise and posture, I suspect, than about dance, but there.
Which was fine, except that little Peter soon showed an aversion to the skipping rope, a simple prop that was used all the time in dance class. I began to howl whenever one was produced—a matter of some concern and perhaps a little bit of shame to my parents, and a distraction to everyone in the class.
What to do? Drawing on the knowledge of psychology you gained in your Cambridge days, you called me one day into your study for one of those serious father-son talks that surely shaped my life. On this occasion I found you sitting in the armchair by the fire with a skipping rope laid across your knees.
Reassuring me from my initial jolt of fear, you told me the story of my birth: how I was a blue baby, born with the umbilical caught around my neck; how I could have died at birth, but for the swift action of Mrs. Gates, the midwife, who seized a pair of scissors and cat through the cord in time to let me catch my first breath.
And crucially, as you were telling me this story, you took the skipping rope and placed it around my neck, tightening it gently from both ends until I felt the squeeze; and showed me there was nothing more to fear, that what had happened, happened long ago, and I was saved; that I had no need to cry any more when I saw a skipping rope in class.
I think back to this insight and, particularly, your action, and see that it was far in advance of its time. It was, as I say, remarkable, perhaps a little risky, except that you had the confidence that it was the right thing to do.
You were right, of course. I never cried at a skipping rope again. But I had reason to remember the story many, many years later, when asked in a group training session whether there could be some message from the moment of my birth that could be standing between me and my freedom as a writer; and if so, what that message might be. And I heard myself utter what seemed like the strangest of all words: I have no right to be here. And found myself laughing hysterically, crying, too… because I realized quite suddenly that those words were absolutely true.
So, Harry, father, wise man, thank you for the insight.
Ever your son, Peter
Thursday, July 29, 2021
29 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
I don’t know what made you decide to start the Rectory nursery school. Perhaps the local schools were suffering from lack of funds, or even closed during the war years. But you and Peggy got together with a handful of like-minded local parents and offered the Rectory drawing room as a classroom for a P.N.E.U. school. I remember that acronym.
Odd, isn’t it, the things that do get stuck in your mind? I still remember for example, eighty years later, the license plate number of your first car, the Austin 10 that brought us down from Newcastle to Aspley Guise before the war: it was GTN209. The TN, you always liked to remind us, were the letters particularly assigned to Newcastle-on-Tyne, TN being short for the river Tyne. You were always very proud of being a Geordie, a born Tyne-sider, and you’ll be pleased to know that I inherited that pride. I, too, still tell anyone who might be interested that I’m a Geordie, even though I haven’t seen the Tyne or visited the city in years. Well, decades.
Aside from Flora and myself, there were Charles and Caroline Allen, whose father was later knighted Sir Kenneth for his services to industry. (Many years later I appeared in white tie and tails, on the front cover of the high society magazine The Tatler with Caroline—a distinction of which Peggy was particularly proud!) There was Elizabeth Brown, whose father was an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, and Hillary (I forget her last name) who lived with her mother down behind The Bell. And there was Robert John, who for reasons unknown pushed me off a six-foot wall to the pavement below and left me nauseous and concussed. The doctor came, with you and Peggy anxiously hovering over me in the drawing room. Curious, because Robert John’s father was the Chief Inspector of the Woburn police, the nearest town of any size. Was he ever punished for his misdeed? I will never know.
There were surely other children at the school, whose names and faces have been lost to time.
Your contribution to the enterprise emerged from your woodshop, in the form of beautifully crafted wooden boxes, big enough to keep our pens and pencils, our colors and our exercise books, everything we needed for the school day; and which doubled as stools that we would sit on for our classes. Each one had the name of its owner painted in large letters on the side, so there could be no confusion as to which was who’s. They were beautifully painted, too, some blue, some yellow, and they could be conveniently stacked at the side of the room when more space was needed—say, for dance.
We had a series of teachers. I remember only one, the unforgettable Mrs. Smith, a tiny woman who wore tweedy clothes and was never seen without a hat, fastened to her hair with a hatpin to prevent it from flying off in the wind. What I remember best about Mrs. Smith is that she would take us on nature walks, rain or shine—in rain, with mackintoshes and Wellington boots—in the fields and woods around the house. She was, unfortunately, a kleptomaniac, as we soon discovered. People living at the Rectory began to notice things were missing, nothing of great significance to begin with—a piece of costume jewelry here, a bottle of bathroom scent or eau de cologne there. It was only when Grandfather’s gold watch disappeared that the hue and cry went up. A little detective work soon revealed the culprit: the innocent-seeming, otherwise innocuous Mrs. Smith.
You had to fire her, and I remember this caused you some distress. You understood quite well that this woman was not truly a thief, but suffered from a genuine illness, but there was no other option in a house full of guests. She had to go. Perhaps that was when Miss Thom, the WREN, was persuaded to step in. We all loved Miss Thom. In fact, I suspect I was more than a little in love with her.
Maybe you were, too?
More to come, Peter
I don’t know what made you decide to start the Rectory nursery school. Perhaps the local schools were suffering from lack of funds, or even closed during the war years. But you and Peggy got together with a handful of like-minded local parents and offered the Rectory drawing room as a classroom for a P.N.E.U. school. I remember that acronym.
Odd, isn’t it, the things that do get stuck in your mind? I still remember for example, eighty years later, the license plate number of your first car, the Austin 10 that brought us down from Newcastle to Aspley Guise before the war: it was GTN209. The TN, you always liked to remind us, were the letters particularly assigned to Newcastle-on-Tyne, TN being short for the river Tyne. You were always very proud of being a Geordie, a born Tyne-sider, and you’ll be pleased to know that I inherited that pride. I, too, still tell anyone who might be interested that I’m a Geordie, even though I haven’t seen the Tyne or visited the city in years. Well, decades.
Aside from Flora and myself, there were Charles and Caroline Allen, whose father was later knighted Sir Kenneth for his services to industry. (Many years later I appeared in white tie and tails, on the front cover of the high society magazine The Tatler with Caroline—a distinction of which Peggy was particularly proud!) There was Elizabeth Brown, whose father was an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, and Hillary (I forget her last name) who lived with her mother down behind The Bell. And there was Robert John, who for reasons unknown pushed me off a six-foot wall to the pavement below and left me nauseous and concussed. The doctor came, with you and Peggy anxiously hovering over me in the drawing room. Curious, because Robert John’s father was the Chief Inspector of the Woburn police, the nearest town of any size. Was he ever punished for his misdeed? I will never know.
There were surely other children at the school, whose names and faces have been lost to time.
Your contribution to the enterprise emerged from your woodshop, in the form of beautifully crafted wooden boxes, big enough to keep our pens and pencils, our colors and our exercise books, everything we needed for the school day; and which doubled as stools that we would sit on for our classes. Each one had the name of its owner painted in large letters on the side, so there could be no confusion as to which was who’s. They were beautifully painted, too, some blue, some yellow, and they could be conveniently stacked at the side of the room when more space was needed—say, for dance.
We had a series of teachers. I remember only one, the unforgettable Mrs. Smith, a tiny woman who wore tweedy clothes and was never seen without a hat, fastened to her hair with a hatpin to prevent it from flying off in the wind. What I remember best about Mrs. Smith is that she would take us on nature walks, rain or shine—in rain, with mackintoshes and Wellington boots—in the fields and woods around the house. She was, unfortunately, a kleptomaniac, as we soon discovered. People living at the Rectory began to notice things were missing, nothing of great significance to begin with—a piece of costume jewelry here, a bottle of bathroom scent or eau de cologne there. It was only when Grandfather’s gold watch disappeared that the hue and cry went up. A little detective work soon revealed the culprit: the innocent-seeming, otherwise innocuous Mrs. Smith.
You had to fire her, and I remember this caused you some distress. You understood quite well that this woman was not truly a thief, but suffered from a genuine illness, but there was no other option in a house full of guests. She had to go. Perhaps that was when Miss Thom, the WREN, was persuaded to step in. We all loved Miss Thom. In fact, I suspect I was more than a little in love with her.
Maybe you were, too?
More to come, Peter
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
28 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
We had the billetees, at the Rectory yes, but then there were the refugees—a different bunch entirely.
They arrived from London by the busload in the village square, by the horse trough. East Enders, Cockneys, bombed out of their homes. They had likely never left the city before, most of them, and here they were far from home in a country village with barely anything but the clothes they wore, mothers and dads and unruly children, all terrified by what they had experienced, the fire and fury they were fleeing. And their terror was palpable, infectious. Even as children, we could feel it.
From their buses they were distributed around the village, to anyone who had a place where they could sleep. You offered our coal cellar, and they were grateful for the shelter, any shelter.
It was dark down there. The only lighting was a single bulb suspended from the ceiling. It smelled of stored apples, cookers and eaters, Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins from the orchard, laid out in rows on newspaper, on the slats of wooden shelves. Potatoes, too. And the coal that came rattling down from chute from above, when it was delivered. No palace, it provided these people with a temporary refuge, on their way to some other, more permanent place for them to stay. One family, I know, the Turners, stayed on and made their home in Aspley Guise, forever grateful to you for your kindness.
In the night, the wail of the air raid sirens penetrated even the cellar door and the flight of wooden steps that led down to where they tried to sleep on the hard floor, and the too-familiar sound brought back their terror. It was you, Harry, who went down there and managed to calm them, while we children huddled amongst them for safety while the air raid warning lasted, waiting for the relief of the all-clear siren that marked the departure of the bombers over the horizon.
We thought you very brave. We were proud to have you as our father, a rock whenever the storm raged. We were glad to have your strong, grown-up presence, for protection, and learned to share you with whoever came to stay.
Remember all this, as I do? With love, Peter
We had the billetees, at the Rectory yes, but then there were the refugees—a different bunch entirely.
They arrived from London by the busload in the village square, by the horse trough. East Enders, Cockneys, bombed out of their homes. They had likely never left the city before, most of them, and here they were far from home in a country village with barely anything but the clothes they wore, mothers and dads and unruly children, all terrified by what they had experienced, the fire and fury they were fleeing. And their terror was palpable, infectious. Even as children, we could feel it.
From their buses they were distributed around the village, to anyone who had a place where they could sleep. You offered our coal cellar, and they were grateful for the shelter, any shelter.
It was dark down there. The only lighting was a single bulb suspended from the ceiling. It smelled of stored apples, cookers and eaters, Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins from the orchard, laid out in rows on newspaper, on the slats of wooden shelves. Potatoes, too. And the coal that came rattling down from chute from above, when it was delivered. No palace, it provided these people with a temporary refuge, on their way to some other, more permanent place for them to stay. One family, I know, the Turners, stayed on and made their home in Aspley Guise, forever grateful to you for your kindness.
In the night, the wail of the air raid sirens penetrated even the cellar door and the flight of wooden steps that led down to where they tried to sleep on the hard floor, and the too-familiar sound brought back their terror. It was you, Harry, who went down there and managed to calm them, while we children huddled amongst them for safety while the air raid warning lasted, waiting for the relief of the all-clear siren that marked the departure of the bombers over the horizon.
We thought you very brave. We were proud to have you as our father, a rock whenever the storm raged. We were glad to have your strong, grown-up presence, for protection, and learned to share you with whoever came to stay.
Remember all this, as I do? With love, Peter
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
27 JULY, 2021
Dear Harry,
The war years were memorable ones, no? You were exempt from military service for health reasons, and it’s my recollection that you were somewhat conscience-stricken for not being able to do your bit. Your brother Donald was an army officer—one of those who were stranded, and then rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk. Your Cambridge pal Alan, who married your sister Nancy, enlisted as an army chaplain. Even that path was closed to you.
In part to compensate for this inability to sign up for active duty, you and Peggy opened up the Rectory as living quarters for military people of all kinds. There were, of course, the Bletchley girls. But then, too, for a while, there was Edward, an officer in the Royal Navy, whose ship was sunk by German torpedos, and Miss Thomas, a WREN—the women’s branch of the navy—who I remember in her smart uniform with her smart round cap. At one point, for reasons I no longer recall, she took over as the teacher of our Rectory nursery school (which deserves a letter of its own).
Then there was Frank, with his bristly ginger mustache, the airman who was posted for a good long while at the RAF airfield down the hill at Cranfield. He was an artist, a painter, who returned to landscape painting when the war was over. His friend, Woody, was a portrait artist, whose full-length portrait of you in your dog-collar and cassock long graced the walls of our family homes. I wonder what became of it? Last time I knew it was in Flora’s home, before she died. I don’t know if she’d have remembered this, but she and I would ride our bikes down past the railway crossing and the bluebells woods to watch the Spitfires take off and land—I suppose it must have been for the Battle of Britain. They would land dangerously, sometimes, damaged by enemy fire or in flames. The airfield was probably too small and the runaway too short for bombers, because I don’t remember seeing them.
We did see them in the sky, though, and cheer the formations of British bombers setting out for Germany; and the remnants of German bombers, stragglers, mostly, making their way back to their point of origin after dumping their loads on London, some sixty miles to the south. From our upstairs windows, looking south, we could see the orange glow of the city burning. To the east, toward Bedford, across the valley with the tall smokestacks of its many brickworks, the bulbous bellies of dozens of barrage balloons were lit up by the roaming beams that emanated from the searchlights below, seeking out their prey—the silver glint of a German bomber—for the artillery batteries that sought to bring them down.
It was on nights such as this that—despite your wife’s alarm—you would leave the Rectory by the back door, careful not to transgress the blackout rules, and pace the perimeter of the house—as though that might somehow defend it from enemy attack. And the occasional jettison bomb did fall not far from our house, a quarter mile at most, as the bombers lightened their planes of any remaining load to speed their return across the North Sea to Germany.
Would you remember this? I don’t think you were with us when we went out on another adventure, to climb up on the wings and gaze in through the cockpit of a Messerschmidt 109 that crash-landed in the mud of a farmer’s field a half-mile from our house.
It must have been different for you, of course—not to mention for those millions whose lives were directly threatened and too often taken by this conflict—but my memories of those days, as a boy of five, six, seven, are more of adventure than of risk, more of curiosity than danger, more of a house full of good, loving and mutually supportive people than of enemies.
As I’m sure you’ll readily agree, Peggy deserves much of the credit for the relatively easy passage of the war years at the Rectory. She welcomed all, found beds for everyone, and saw to it that we all ate well. I can still see her at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, carefully cutting out coupons from her collection of ration books, piling them up to take with her to the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, or the grocery shop. There were even coupons for the sweet shop. With the help of a woman who came in from the village, she shopped and cooked for everyone. Somewhere amongst the family memorabilia there is still a letter to her from the King himself, thanking her for her very real service to the country—a tribute that she richly deserved.
But her first task, as we all knew, was to take care of her husband. You were more than fortunate to have such a woman by your side, supporting you through all your illnesses and periods of self-doubt and uncertainty. I don’t know what you would have done without her.
With tender memories of Peggy, then, your son, Peter
The war years were memorable ones, no? You were exempt from military service for health reasons, and it’s my recollection that you were somewhat conscience-stricken for not being able to do your bit. Your brother Donald was an army officer—one of those who were stranded, and then rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk. Your Cambridge pal Alan, who married your sister Nancy, enlisted as an army chaplain. Even that path was closed to you.
In part to compensate for this inability to sign up for active duty, you and Peggy opened up the Rectory as living quarters for military people of all kinds. There were, of course, the Bletchley girls. But then, too, for a while, there was Edward, an officer in the Royal Navy, whose ship was sunk by German torpedos, and Miss Thomas, a WREN—the women’s branch of the navy—who I remember in her smart uniform with her smart round cap. At one point, for reasons I no longer recall, she took over as the teacher of our Rectory nursery school (which deserves a letter of its own).
Then there was Frank, with his bristly ginger mustache, the airman who was posted for a good long while at the RAF airfield down the hill at Cranfield. He was an artist, a painter, who returned to landscape painting when the war was over. His friend, Woody, was a portrait artist, whose full-length portrait of you in your dog-collar and cassock long graced the walls of our family homes. I wonder what became of it? Last time I knew it was in Flora’s home, before she died. I don’t know if she’d have remembered this, but she and I would ride our bikes down past the railway crossing and the bluebells woods to watch the Spitfires take off and land—I suppose it must have been for the Battle of Britain. They would land dangerously, sometimes, damaged by enemy fire or in flames. The airfield was probably too small and the runaway too short for bombers, because I don’t remember seeing them.
We did see them in the sky, though, and cheer the formations of British bombers setting out for Germany; and the remnants of German bombers, stragglers, mostly, making their way back to their point of origin after dumping their loads on London, some sixty miles to the south. From our upstairs windows, looking south, we could see the orange glow of the city burning. To the east, toward Bedford, across the valley with the tall smokestacks of its many brickworks, the bulbous bellies of dozens of barrage balloons were lit up by the roaming beams that emanated from the searchlights below, seeking out their prey—the silver glint of a German bomber—for the artillery batteries that sought to bring them down.
It was on nights such as this that—despite your wife’s alarm—you would leave the Rectory by the back door, careful not to transgress the blackout rules, and pace the perimeter of the house—as though that might somehow defend it from enemy attack. And the occasional jettison bomb did fall not far from our house, a quarter mile at most, as the bombers lightened their planes of any remaining load to speed their return across the North Sea to Germany.
Would you remember this? I don’t think you were with us when we went out on another adventure, to climb up on the wings and gaze in through the cockpit of a Messerschmidt 109 that crash-landed in the mud of a farmer’s field a half-mile from our house.
It must have been different for you, of course—not to mention for those millions whose lives were directly threatened and too often taken by this conflict—but my memories of those days, as a boy of five, six, seven, are more of adventure than of risk, more of curiosity than danger, more of a house full of good, loving and mutually supportive people than of enemies.
As I’m sure you’ll readily agree, Peggy deserves much of the credit for the relatively easy passage of the war years at the Rectory. She welcomed all, found beds for everyone, and saw to it that we all ate well. I can still see her at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, carefully cutting out coupons from her collection of ration books, piling them up to take with her to the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, or the grocery shop. There were even coupons for the sweet shop. With the help of a woman who came in from the village, she shopped and cooked for everyone. Somewhere amongst the family memorabilia there is still a letter to her from the King himself, thanking her for her very real service to the country—a tribute that she richly deserved.
But her first task, as we all knew, was to take care of her husband. You were more than fortunate to have such a woman by your side, supporting you through all your illnesses and periods of self-doubt and uncertainty. I don’t know what you would have done without her.
With tender memories of Peggy, then, your son, Peter
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