30 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Back to Barry. Your nemesis. Braughing. Your son is now sixteen, seventeen, back in his last year at school in a turmoil of anger, self-doubt and confusion. There were two things that kept me sane that last year and, at times, brought me back from the edge of despair. I’ll return to Barry later, because he was one of them. The other was the school term, that wonderful, blessed, liberating third of the year that I was lucky enough to spend as an exchange student at a state school in Rendsburg, a small town situated halfway along the Kiel canal in Schleswig-Holstein, in the very north of Germany. My exchange partner was Manfred Eckhardt, and the Eckhardts were the most wonderful of surrogate parents. For the first time in my life I rejoiced in the experience of going home every day after school to spend the evening with my “family”, of sleeping comfortably in my own bed, in my own room, and going off to school again the next day.

What bliss, Harry! You can hardly imagine what bliss that was!

It was the winter term, though, and by God it was cold in Schleswig-Holstein. Many days I walked with deep snow on the ground to get to school in the early morning, head down against a mercilessly biting wind, wrapped up in a heavy winter coat—there were no down parkas that I know of in those days—and thick woolen gloves and mufflers. It was the first time in my life that I had experienced the kind of cold that cuts straight through to the bone and leaves the body frigid.

The compensation was to arrive at the Hochschule and make the transition through the big front doors from bitter cold into wonderful, all-embracing warmth and the rich smell of hundreds of human bodies regaining body heat. And then to find myself sitting in the classroom, elbow-to-elbow with teenagers of both sexes! The difference from everything I knew about school from the age of seven could not have been more stark, nor more appealing. I fell in love (again!) from a distance (again!) with a girl named Annaliese, blond, and to my eyes totally captivating—and untouchable. Among the strange things my mind brings back with amazing clarity across the years is a moment in our classroom where Annaliese is batting at a bee that has found its way into class and hovers insistently around her head. And as she does so, she cries out—I transcribe phonetically as best I can— not “ay-nie”, “eine Biene”, which would have been correct, but “eernie”, “eenie beenie”, a whimsical, rhyming mispronunciation that even so many years later I recall as utterly charming. And obviously memorable.

And, Harry, there is this: while I was happily fantasizing about being in love with Annaliese, I was actually in love with someone completely different. Stupid, no? But how could I have known? She was an older woman, I could not have imagined such a thing. Her name was Iris. She came from Cardiff so she was Welsh, a fellow “Auslander” also in Germany on an exchange but in her case as a teacher. We often used to walk to and from school together, since she was staying not far from the Eckhardts, and when I had the car accident that ended my stay in Germany, she was the constant visitor at my bedside. She was kind, understanding, caring, always ready to listen and offer the kind of warmth and sympathy I had missed throughout my school years. In short, she was everything my deeply confused and adolescent self so badly needed at time. I wish I’d been sufficiently aware to realize then how much she meant to me—and I perhaps to her—a fellow stranger in a strange land… Did she ever understand this as I came to understand it later, when I found to my surprise how much I sorely missed her?

Anyway, that accident. Remember? You must have been out of your minds with worry, you and Peggy, when someone called to let you know. I could easily have died.

I had a friend at school, or maybe it was the friend of a friend, a year or two older than myself, who’d been able to borrow his father’s DKW for a jaunt to a neighboring town and invited me and a couple of other friends along for the ride. (DKW, by the way, in case you didn’t know, is today’s Audi, with the same linked circles in its company logo. The acronym DKW (Deustche Kraftwagen) translated into a schoolboy joke: Das Krankenhaus Wartet, “the hospital awaits”—which proved in my case to be uncomfortably true. We drank beer, had a jolly time, and it was dark already by the time we got started on the return trip to Rendsburg. The road was icy. We were probably traveling too fast. A set of oncoming headlights dazzled our driver, who baked too hard and took us into a long, dizzying skid. It came to an emphatic, screeching stop when the car slammed head-on into a farm tractor parked at the side of the road.

We ended up in the ditch. I don’t know how long I was unconscious but when I came to there was blood was streaming down across my cheek. I could hear people screaming, “Bist Du OK? Bist Du OK?” Are you okay? I thought I was. The worst thing, it seemed to me, was that there was blood dripping down onto the cover of my copy of “Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems” that I happened to be holding in my lap. They managed to free me from the wreck and prevented me from trying desperately, irrationally to remove my overcoat, despite the freezing cold. That, too, I noticed now, was getting stained with blood. The next thing I remember was being in piled into a stranger’s car, still in a daze, and driven back to Rendsburg.

The Eckhardts were beside themselves. They took me straight to the nearest hospital where the doctor stitched up two deep cuts, one above the eye, one leading back across my skull. He reported a fracture, a splintering of the skull that was apparently not serious enough in his opinion to keep me in the hospital overnight. Besides, the Eckhardts were anxious to get me back home—a mistake perhaps, but a kind intention. In retrospect, back home in England, the doctor thought I should have received more treatment for concussion than the few days I spent in bed. But at least I had constant, loving care from the good Frau Eckhardt—and those daily bedside visits from Iris that I shall not forget. Like so many good people from those days, I wish I were able to let her know today how much she meant to me. I’d love to be able to travel back in time and tell her.

Enough for one day, Harry. To be continued in my next.

With love, Peter

29 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry, I’m amazed. Here in Southern California as I sit wondering what I might have to say to you this morning, I find myself looking out through our windows into a slow, inexorable drizzle, a spectacle unheard of in August in this part of the world. Glistening on the big green leaves of ivy that hang over our fence, these raindrops have me thinking of the England of my youth…

A pleasant interlude!

With love, Peter

28 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Back to school. There’s more you need to know about this.

What I learned, or thought to have learned about myself in the exclusive company of other boys was almost comically wrong. That’s what years at boarding school will do for you. Well, rather what it did for me. I’m not sure about you, but I think not. By the time I left school, with inexpressible relief and gratitude for that final release at the age of seventeen—it was just a couple of days before my eighteenth birthday—I was pretty much convinced that I would forever only have sex with boys and men. Yes, as you know, I had “fallen in love” with two girls outside of school, but they were impossible fantasies. My only actual experience was with people who had a penis, like myself.

I realize now—indeed, I realized immediately after leaving school—that there was nothing remotely “gay” about those early sexual experiments. It was a perfectly normal need to experiment with my bodily equipment, and for the better part of my life thus far the only humans readily available for my tentative explorations were other boys. With Nicole and Mary I was far too shy and insecure about my physical self to engage in even the most innocent of sexual play. But I could, and did, with boys. And at that time in my life I felt obliged to think of these games as “love” in order to explain and justify them to myself.

You could have known none of this, for sure, but I knew you would never have approved of my adventures. St. Swithun left little room for doubt that sex, particularly with your own kind, was the worst of all possible sins—the kind that, when you die, gets you sent straight off to hell to burn in the furnaces of eternal damnation. “Dirty” was the word that was generally used to describe anything to do with sex—as in “dirty jokes” and “don’t be dirty.” Still, Harry, you were not intolerant. There were gay men in our lives with whom you socially felt quite comfortable. Witness David, the flamboyantly gay American interior designer and his architect partner who lived across the lane from your St. Mary’s church in Braughing. This unabashedly gay couple—we knew no better than to call them “queer” or “homo” on those days—had refurbished an old cottage with the kind of elegance you find illustrated in the pages of contemporary architectural magazines. They entertained the somewhat bemused village gentry there with exotic cocktails and canapés.

You loved it! That was fine. You felt much more comfortable with this couple than you did with the flamboyantly heterosexual Barry. And despite my activity with boys at school, I think it’s true to say that I never felt the slightest curiosity or interest in these men’s sexual lives, still less did I feel inclined to join them. Well, there was the one occasion when David drove me in his huge convertible motor car to see another of the cottages they had worked on, where we went out back to take a pee in the garden and he turned around to swing an enormous dick toward me for my admiration. He also regaled me with surely fictional but to me startlingly specific stories of his exploits with exotic women in Paris night clubs after the war. But that was just in fun.

You might have had some concern about me a few years later, in Sharnbrook—I was now a late teenager—when you called me into your study for one of our serious conversations. As a courtesy to the Vicar, the local police inspector had informed you I had been seen on several occasions visiting a nearby house that was under surveillance and was subject to an imminent police raid. (Homosexuality was still a crime in England in the 1950s, punishable by prison sentences). I had been visiting people I considered to be friends without much thought that they might be gay, but simply charming, sophisticated people whom I respected and liked. We’d share a glass of wine, a few laughs, and the kind of intelligent conversation you’d not find in local pubs or the parties in the homes of more conventional village society. The inspector came with a friendly warning, that this might be a good moment for your son to stop knocking on that particular door—and, rather shamefully, I followed his advice. I never heard further about what might have happened to my friends. They may well have ended up in jail.

But as we’ll see, the doubts that tortured me about my sexual identity did not outlast my time at boarding school—not even by one minute.

How would the story of my early sexual experience have been different, I have often wondered, had you and Peggy sent me to a local state school, nearer to home, where boys and girls mixed naturally together? With the opportunity for emotional growth more suited to my natural proclivities, I like to believe it would have taken me far less time to reach anything like mature manhood. As it was, I remained an emotional adolescent well into my adult life. I was scarred with an emotional as well as a physical timidity. I had learned to contain myself, to hold back, to never quite let myself embrace life and love—and the people that I loved—as fully as I wished to.

As a postscript, Harry, you’ll be interested to know that most formerly all-boys’ boarding schools—including my own, Lancing—have been admitting girls for several years now. Some things have changed for the better since our day. When I last visited Lancing, with Ellie, years ago, I was delighted to find a gaggle of giggling teenage girls enlivening that same dormitory where I once scarcely knew enough to even dream of them.

And even—can you believe this, Harry?—even your old college in Cambridge, once the exclusive domain of young males like yourself in the 1920s and like me in the 1950s, even your old Cambridge college now welcomes women undergraduates! As I already mentioned earlier, your great-granddaughter, Georgia, is now enrolled there as a student in Linguistics. How proud you’d be!

As indeed am I, your son, her grandpa, Peter

27 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Let’s see, where were we? Braughing, no? Did you know that this was where I fell in love—with a girl!—for a second time. After Nicole.

It was quite innocent. For sex, in adolescence, there were only boys, the ones at school, but that was different. I’m sure you never knew about that. But you did know about Mary—that was her name—because Peggy was in something of a panic about it; she was convinced I was going to run off and get married—at the age of fourteen!—and that needless worry brought out the snob in her. Mary, as you’ll recall, was the daughter of the local garage owner and her best friend, Brian’s parents ran the post office next door. Not a suitable match for the Vicar’s son! (Yes, you were the Rector of Aspley Guise, but now you were the Vicar of Braughing. I never knew the difference, if there was one).

But if I’m to tell you about Mary, I’ll need to start with your nemesis, Barry Evans. Yes, the artist. I think that Barry somehow represented everything you most longed for and most feared within yourself. He personified the wild side, the Harry within that longed to come out and play, but the one the Vicar had to keep contained. Barry rejected anything that smacked of social convention. He lusted unashamedly after women and had no qualms about sleeping with them if he could; he was blatantly unfaithful to his wife, another Mary. He borrowed money from you—I mentioned this before—and did not return it. He was a man to whom histrionics came naturally, unrestrained by the propriety to which you were bound by nurture more than nature.

It was your love of theater that brought the two of you together, head-to-head. One of the most memorable events I can recall from our Braughing days was your production of the Dickens story, “A Christmas Carol”, in the village hall, right across from the church at the bottom of the hill. Did you regret having chosen to cast Barry in the role of Scrooge? He certainly reveled in it. Even more than the acting, I suspect, he relished the opportunity to get a rise out of the Vicar. No one could outclass you as a natural born ham like Barry Evans. He was a brilliant, over-the-top Scrooge, a totally undisciplined actor, happily improvising lines and outlandish gestures—like puffing out the white powder that we used to age his hair to get a laugh out of the audience.

He was also scandalously, loudly irreligious.

So there was Barry. Mary, meantime—my Mary, not his, not Barry’s wife—was cast as one of the street urchins. You could not include me in the play myself—I was away at school during the early rehearsals—but brought me in as an assistant make-up artist to help backstage with the production. One of my daily jobs before the curtain went up was to smear Mary’s legs with sooty make-up, to evoke the dirt of the Victorian London streets. I was by this time, as I say, fourteen years old, and I found the task quite thrillingly erotic. I could hardly wait for each night’s performance. Small wonder that I fell in love.

It happened that Barry also loved to play the Pandar. He and Mary—his Mary—had begun hosting weekly soirées for young people like myself (and my Mary, of course, and her friend Brian). It was an evening of cheese and cheap red wine from Spain, poetry (Dylan Thomas!), stories, modern art (Picasso! Braque!) and music (Poulenc, Satie, Stravinsky!) beside a roaring fire in the hearth, with Barry and Mary’s young children running amok amongst the guests. It was an ideal circumstance in which to fan the flames of love.

Still, it took a while before I found the nerve to ask Mary to go out with me. In Braughing, “going out” meant taking walks along the lanes and out into the countryside. The nearest cinema was many miles away and we were too young for pubs. I was intensely shy. Perhaps she was, too. I could only fantasize about things I would never have known how to do, and still less dare. Did we ever even kiss, along those shady country lanes? Perhaps. I do remember the tantalizing thrill of holding hands. How daring that seemed to me. And our friend Barry was positively itching to get us into bed together and would have gladly found us one, had we been ready for it.

But of course we weren’t. We were innocent village kids. Barry efforts notwithstanding, Peggy need not have worried.

I no longer recall how things ended between me and Mary, but it’s clear they did not end either as my mother feared, nor as the lecherous Barry would have wished. The most obvious answer is that I just went back to school. Once there, I do remember mooning about for her for a while and gloomily engraving her initials, MM, on my desk in Latin class, where they mingled with the inscription of a century’s worth of other, equally lovelorn tributes. For all I know, those initials could still be there.

Do you remember her, Harry? I think of her warmly to this day. The second actual girl I ever loved. Too bad I was so shy! Too bad you had to send me back to school so soon after that Christmas.

With a pinch of nostalgia then, today, your son, Peter

26 AUGUST, 2021

Oh, Harry!

I do you such a grave injustice, making you out to be some kind of ogre to your son. Just yesterday I recovered from its storage box a cache of those thin blue air mail forms, letters written to me over the years by both yourself and Peggy. I have not read them all—there are dozens of them—but they are filled with such love, such compassion, such concern.

In one of those letters, written at the time when both Flora and myself were having trouble in our relationships, you wrote these words (you write so well, I quote the short passage verbatim:

I am convinced (between you & me) that a lot of the trouble is relationship adjustment (horrid phrase). The old 7 year itch. 7 to 12 yrs seems to me the biggest test of a marriage. If you can ”make it” over that period, not just accepting, but winning through, then you achieve a wonderful fulfillment in each other. It’s never easy-going.

Well, Harry, what you say is true. You would be proud of me and Ellie, who have sailed past your 12 year point many times over. But then you continue in the next paragraph, with words that touch my heart: “My heart ached for you, reading your last letter, and all our thoughts will be often with you at Christmas.” I’m not sure what I wrote to cause your heartache, but mine ached when I read how you continued:

As I am aware of both you and Flora now, I do often reflect on my own failings as a father. How much have I passed on to you my lack of self-confidence, apart from much self-centredness & I suppose irritation and frustration. This doesn’t depress me now, but it does sadden me. You both have many creative gifts and yes, somehow, you both appear to have a tendency to destroy your own happiness, even perhaps your own success.

And you signed yourself “Your ever affectionate, Father.”

Thank you for those words, Harry. Thank you for the insight and the compassion. Thank you for the affection. I have made too little of it in these letters, and for that I ask forgiveness.

Your ever affectionate son, Peter

25 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

There is one other, painful thing we have shared in common: cluster headaches.

Though Peggy mentioned migraines in her letters, I would not known you suffered from these excruciating episodes until Flora told me about them some time after your death. It was after I had been diagnosed with this horrible affliction—those blinding spasms that arrive in a series, peculiarly, at the exact same time each day and engulf the whole of one side of the head, eyes, teeth and jaws, in excruciating pain. As I imagine you well know—did you experience them in the same way?—they are so regular you can almost set your watch by them. They are usually of a fixed duration—mine, at the time I suffered from them most, were mercifully brief, a half hour to an hour, at most—but incredibly intense; they say that clusters are worse by far than any migraine. And they leave behind them, every day, a shadow that hangs around inside your head for much longer than the pain itself.

I wonder how you dealt with them? For me, the only relief I could find—and it was minimal—was rocking. I’d climb out of bed, if it came at night, and hold my head tight between my hands and rock back and forth for as long as I could stand it. I do know there was no medication that could touch it, though Peggy once mentioned something that you took whose effects were almost as dire as the headaches themselves. Perhaps they have since discovered a more effective drug.

And then finally, after a few days, a couple of weeks, the series would come to an end as inexplicably as it started, and the headaches would be gone for months at a time.

This memory was evoked by the strange recurrence, as I started these letters, of a series of blessedly mild and slightly different physical sensations that share much in common with those clusters. The pain is almost an exact replica, a brilliant, sparkling aura on the entire left side of the head, but thankfully far less intense; and instead of coming at the same time each day, they seem to arrive, oddly, almost exactly one hour later each day than the day before.

I have been unable to determine whether there’s a genetic trail that leads to these events. Neither one of my sons, your grandsons, has mentioned them to me—but they are now still only in their fifties, and I believe that clusters tend to occur in later years. Mine came and went away again when I was in my sixties. Until now. I’m not sure about yours, and Flora is not around to ask about them any more.

Anyway, thought I’d mention this, now that you are finally beyond pain…

With love, Peter

24 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

We both realize, of course, that all my efforts to rescue you from the past and come to know you, perhaps even love you in a way I never could before, are just as much an effort to come to terms with myself—and perhaps acknowledge the love you had for me…

In what ways am I like you? What would you recognize of yourself in your son? These are questions of interest to me because at one time I wanted so much to be not like you.

I have my mother’s eyes, blue, not brown like yours. Flora had your eyes. She was also, like you, skinny. I have a tendency, as I age, to put on weight. Remember that “spare tire” around the belly that Peggy accumulated in her later years? I have that, too. You never did. At the age I have now reached, your hair was sparse; combed flat on your head, and barely concealed your scalp. Mine, though long since turned to grey, is still quite long and thick. Oh, and I still have most of the teeth that I was born with. I was scared years ago into the habit of nightly flossing by my fearsome Chinese American dentist; my mouth had begun to show the ravages of poor dentistry—worse, in Britain, during the war, for sure—and the cavalier neglect of my youth. Most of yours had been replaced long since by the dentures you took out and left in a glass on the bathroom shelf each night.

Is my voice a little like yours? Perhaps. Sixty years this side of the Atlantic have worn the edges off the public school-Oxbridge manner of speech that I grew up with, but even today my fellow Americans immediately hear the remnant of a British accent. Because they seem to love my voice so much, I think I might inherit some of the mellifluous quality of your baritone—though I incline more to tenor.

I have none of your skill with hands. When it comes to anything handy I’m a hopeless klutz—a term you’d likely not have heard of but you’ll know what I mean. Put a hammer in my hand and I’ll no doubt end up breaking something. With luck, it won’t be my finger. The kind of things you took care of with ease—the home repairs, basic electrical and plumbing—are the things I need a handyman to help me out with.

I inherited your love of mysteries, thrillers, suspense books of all kinds. I even wrote a couple of them myself, back in the 1980s. Did you ever read them? I can’t remember anything you might have said about them—but then, I can’t be sure I gave them to you to read. I took the skill you had with words and turned myself into a wordsmith.

There are other, more fundamental things that lead me to believe we have more in common than might appear at a cursory glance. When I sit for my daily half-hour’s morning meditation, for example, I often see you sitting in your wing-back chair, silent, prayer book in hand, completing the “office” that was your unfailing commitment even in the years following your retirement. I came to my personal need to delve into the realm of the spirit only much later in my life.

I inherited your social conscience, your socialism, your left-wing political views, your commitment to social justice. I watched as you became more conservative toward the end of your life—you were not a Thatcherite, I hope!—but by the time you came to the broader perspective of advancing years, the England of your youth was barely recognizable. Such is my impression, anyway, from where I sit half a world away after half a century’s exile. By this time, social programs like the National Health and National Insurance had long been institutionalized in Britain, and the Labour Party had become less about the welfare of the working classes, it seemed to me, than the advancement of the nouveau middle class. There was Tony Blair, halfway Tory. Mass immigration, too, from India, Pakistan, the West Indies, Africa and the Middle East had changed the racial demographic of old England and introduced racial tensions little known in the early years of the twentieth century. And with the construction of the Chunnel between Dover and Calais, the age-old insularity of the British was no longer assured by the island’s physical isolation from the European Continent. Clinging to the treasured pound sterling while other European countries adapted to the euro, the Brits at least had to yield to the metric system in their currency. No more twenty shillings to the pound and twelve pence to the shilling.

An inveterate traveler and explorer of the Continent in the caravan you towed everywhere behind you on your summer trips, you would have been horrified by Brexit and the xenophobia it betokened. You prided yourself on being tolerant, open to historical and demographic change, curious about the customs of our neighboring countries, especially their food and wine. You welcomed people from throughout the world into your home—Monu from India, Graeme from South Africa, that Japanese Anglican minister whose name I have forgotten, the black African bishop, handsome in his purple bishop’s cassock—and relished cultural differences, intellectual conversations with your guests. More gregarious than I myself have ever been, you embraced humanity and the joys of human interchange. While I suspect there must have been an introverted part of you, there was always that actor, too, the extrovert. Sometimes, admit it, the shameless show-off.

Your Christian faith… I’d love to have talked to you about this some time because, while I long since abandoned that faith (I never dared to tell you face-to-face for fear of hurting you; how dumb was that?) Yet I share with you the belief that there is something more to life than the physical body and the material world it lives in. I had not yet discovered Buddhism by the time of your death. For much of my life, indeed, I would have scoffed at it, as at all religious belief. I wish I’d that opportunity, though,, because we would surely have had something to talk about. And not only the human ethic of Buddhism, the dedication to principles of behavior I deem admirable, essential, really, to a well-lived life; but also to its spiritual dimension—for lack of a better word—a belief in values that transcend even death.

Oh yes, I would have loved that conversation! And I am sure you would have, too. Your Christianity was not of the exclusive kind; you were informed about other faiths and eager to find common ground between them. In your last years you became deeply involved in new ways of thinking about the Christian faith and made several pilgrimages to the ecumenical community at Taizé, in France. I remember the spirited exchange between you and Ellie’s father, Mike, at the seder you attended when you and Peggy came to visit us in Los Angeles, exploring the similarities and differences between Christian and Jewish faiths, between Passover and the Last Supper. Was that not an occasion to be remembered and celebrated! I know Mike relished it, and recalled it often. That you were unable to pursue that friendship was a matter, only, of the geographical distance that lay between you. Such a shame!

And now that I think of it, there is one other thing we share: you were a tease. I am a tease. Just ask my grandson, your great-grandson, little Luka—who is a bit of a tease himself!

Signing off with a smile for now, your son, Peter