Dear Harry,
I know you believed in what the church called “the sanctity of marriage.” I’m assuming that you observed the principle yourself. You belonged to a generation where divorce was still an unconscionable alternative, where it was spoken of amongst respectable people only in hushed whispers, not only a sign of a failure of character but also a family disgrace.
What a bitter, deeply distressing experience for you and Peggy, then, to know that the marriages of both your children ended in divorce.
There are matters too delicate and too hurtful still, after many years, to write about without due compassion and respect, so I want to keep this, insofar as possible, between you and me. I blame no one, and take full responsibility for own my part in these events, no matter how long ago they occurred.
You’ll remember that you came across to Germany, with Peggy of course, to officiate at the church ceremony where Liz and I were married. Flora and her new husband John were there too, as was my old Cambridge friend Hugh Welchman, my best man. It was a moment of mutual commitment, hope, and love. We spent what was, for me—I hope it was, too, for Liz—a wonderful week on honeymoon in Amsterdam. Returning to Düren, we settled into a downtown apartment for the first months of our life together.
Were we ready for the responsibilities or married life and, soon enough, of bringing children into the world? I wasn’t. For now, and for too many years to come, I allowed myself to drift along with little foresight and less planning. We were still in Düren when I first began to realize the need to get a real job and settle down into adult life (as though such a thing were possible for me, Harry!) and, impractically hopeful as ever, I wrote off in response to a three-week old announcement in the “wanted” column of one of the leftist New Statesman weeklies that Peggy used to forward me from England. A private grammar school in Nova Scotia, Canada, was looking for someone to teach English. They were offering a salary of five thousand dollars, wealth I had never dreamed of!
I applied at once. The response came in short order: unsurprisingly the advertised post had been filled already. But the school was now also looking for a French and German teacher. Was I interested?
I telegraphed my assent.
This is how I came to cross the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, Harry, putting an even greater distance between you and me.
We settled in Halifax, Liz and I. And Nova Scotia was good to us. As anyone who has traveled there will tell you, it is a truly lovely province with its wild, rocky coastline and scores of inland lakes where, in winter, I could enjoy the novel spectacle of car races on ice. It was cold, yes—colder by far than anything we’d ever known in Europe. There was real weather, blizzards in winter, hurricanes in the summer, a blaze of color as the seasons changed in the fall. We had a tiny basement apartment with a black and white TV set where we watched ice hockey every Saturday evening. We had a gray cat named Plato. We bought a brand new car—the first I’d ever owned, a tiny powder blue Mini Minor. Liz was seriously pregnant but I insisted foolishly on taking us out for a spin on our new car’s first day, despite weather forecasts predicting the imminent arrival of a hurricane. What did I care about hurricanes? They were only a word to me… (I learned only later that this was Ginny, a Category 2 storm, one of the most destructive to ever hit the Nova Scotia coast). Before we knew it we were in unfamiliar territory, lost in the rocky wilderness on a side road where the tarmac abruptly ended, giving way to a rough dirt surface, and the storm was hurtling all around us. I drove on. What else could I do? I was terrified, yes, by this time, but we were committed. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the road descended to sea level and we found ourselves driving alongside the ocean, dark and angry, with massive waves crashing down across the road. A wrecked cargo ship tilted at an angle on the rocks, not far distant.
We survived. My reckless insistence had exposed not only myself but my wife and our soon-to-be-born child to grievous danger. What saved us I will never know. Your God? More likely it was the little Mini’s front wheel drive, gripping the mud and pulling us valiantly through. When we finally reached the highway back to Halifax, I stopped to check on the car and opened up the hood. The entire engine of my beautiful brand new Mini was coated in a layer of thick, red, salty mud.
Hubris? I learned, at least, to pay attention to storm warnings in the future.
And then to our great joy our first son, Matthew was born.
All of which was fine, except that I had apparently forgotten the lesson learned at Rutlish: I was not cut out to be a teacher, particularly not at a secondary school for boys. It was a lesson I re-learned rather quickly at the Halifax Grammar School. It would be ungracious to complain too loudly. I was fortunate to have a good job. To be earning what seemed to us in those days a fine salary. And the school was a progressive one, with a well-qualified staff of committed colleagues and interesting, socially active parents—all good, compatible, caring people with whom Liz and I would socialize at evening events and on weekends at the shoreline where crabs and lobsters were thrown liberally into pots of boiling water and gobbled down with gusto on warm summer beaches.
We moved. We had no room for a baby in our tiny basement flat, so we found what I recall as a rather bleak modern apartment with an extra bedroom and a shared laundry room that came in handy with the diapers. We had a portable stereo with a collection of classical records that we loved, and French Canadian folks songs. (Ah, si mon moine voulait danser, A la claire fontaine… I remember them). We discovered the lovely, haunting voice of Joan Baez… I think, no, I’m quite sure that we were happy, just the three of us.
And yet, and yet… There was still that poet in me, “yearning to be free”; the one who kept nudging me to write and making me feel empty and unaccomplished when I didn’t. In fact I was writing poems at the time. I had belatedly discovered the work of e.e.cummings and my poems were heavily influenced by his whimsical play with language. Meanwhile, more and more, the hours I spent in the classroom reminded me that teaching was not a passion but a requisite, money-earning chore.
It was at the end of the first school year in Nova Scotia that the son of one of my colleagues arrived with his wife to spend the summer with his parents. We hit it off well. He was a poet, a well-known poet, a successful poet even—a concept I had previously never entertained. In my ignorance, I had not heard of him before; I had been writing poems in my own little backwater, uninformed of the greater world of my contemporaries. What I saw in Mark Strand, a tall, powerful man, confident in himself both as a writer and a man, was everything I longed to be and clearly was not yet. He was kind enough to read my poems, assuring me that he found them to be intelligent, interesting; they showed promise. Nova Scotia was no place for me, he said; I should be at the Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he had a teaching job.
A poetry workshop! Here was a new concept, Harry! Iowa! Who would have ever dreamed?
Sadly, Mark died before his time, a short while ago. I owe him a debt of gratitude. He recommended me to Paul Engle, the poet, founder and at that time still the man who ran the Writers’ Workshop, and the rest followed with relative ease. I was offered a grant, and a teaching assistant’s job in the French Department which provided me with an adequate income for the family, and a place in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature. I was given an on-campus office of my own and low-cost graduate student housing in a Quonset hut just a short walk from the campus… It was everything I could have asked for.
I was thrilled with this unexpected change in my prospects that had fallen from the heavens into my lap. School-teaching was forever behind me, vistas of life as a genuine writer opened up. There were, I soon discovered, more poets per square block in Iowa City than I could have imagined possible. And the Ph.D, my new Comp. Lit. professors assured me, would be a breeze for someone with my language skills and a degree in languages and literature from Cambridge University.
I hope you were proud of your new son, Harry, when all this began to happen. Or did you, in your wisdom, already intuit disaster looming in the years to come? I’d love to have known.
Your all too often deluded son,
Peter
Saturday, October 9, 2021
Friday, October 8, 2021
8 OCTOBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
You’ll know by now how easily I lost my heart, and how much harm I left in my wake as a result. It would sadly take me many years yet to grow up and come to the understanding that love was something other than the satisfaction of my needs.
There followed many wonderful days and evenings in the new life I was creating for myself. Living in Winden, I was able to spend the better part of the day at my typewriter. I was gaining confidence, feeling more accomplished as a writer. Early evening I would take the bus into Düren, arriving at the Berlitz School in time to meet up with my new colleague for a cup of tea or coffee before classes started. I had not yet summoned the nerve to make my feelings known, nor was I sure of them myself. While I was aware of a familiar, powerfully physical attraction to this petite young woman with green eyes, dark hair, and a sharp and lively mind, I was content for once to take the time needed for us to get to know one another before trying to rush her off to bed. For her part, Liz was perhaps rightly wary of a man who was yet to earn her trust.
Still, we did build a friendship. After class, most often, we would go out to a nearby Taverne for beer and a bite to eat, Brat- or Knackwurst with Sauerkraut, or one of those breaded cutlets that German chefs do so well. I would sometimes order a big bowl of steamed mussels—a specialty at our favorite late-night haunt—until the memorable time when I must have swallowed down a bad one… I was so horribly sick, I scarcely made it home that night; so sick that I have never dared to eat another mussel in more than sixty years.
We had friends in common. There were Willi and Helle, two aspiring young businessmen with each a pretty girlfriend and a brand new car; and Dieter, a slightly older man, forty-ish, old enough to have been a member of the Hitler Jugend. The ravages of war were still a vivid memory in Düren, at the eastern rim of what had been the Battle of the Bulge; there were many people for whom the night of November 16, 1944 was still a recent nightmare, when waves of Allied bombers swarmed in the skies above to unleash a murderous storm of fire and high explosive on the city. Of the 22,000 human beings who once lived there, three thousand died that night, most of them trapped in cellars beneath the burning buildings, where they’d taken shelter.
We became close friends, Liz and I, as well as colleagues. We stood out as the only two young English people, foreigners amongst the natives. There was a mutual respect as well as a tenderness. It took me a good long while, as I recall, to tell her awkwardly that I loved her and soon to ask her if she would consider marrying me. Until that moment we had still done little more than kiss goodnight, but she said, Yes. It was kind and brave of her to agree to take me on, because I was not much of a prospective husband, with only a part-time evening job and vague hopes of eventually gaining recognition as a writer. I was impractical, penniless and—though I may have managed successfully to hide it—emotionally not much past my adolescence. As I look back on it, I wish that I could have been—your phrase, Harry!—more man for her woman. I was not.
She took me on anyway. Now many years later I continue to thank her for the immeasurable gift of love. It saddens me to acknowledge that I was unable to prove myself worthy of the trust that went along with it.
More of that later, Harry.
For now, your son, Peter
You’ll know by now how easily I lost my heart, and how much harm I left in my wake as a result. It would sadly take me many years yet to grow up and come to the understanding that love was something other than the satisfaction of my needs.
There followed many wonderful days and evenings in the new life I was creating for myself. Living in Winden, I was able to spend the better part of the day at my typewriter. I was gaining confidence, feeling more accomplished as a writer. Early evening I would take the bus into Düren, arriving at the Berlitz School in time to meet up with my new colleague for a cup of tea or coffee before classes started. I had not yet summoned the nerve to make my feelings known, nor was I sure of them myself. While I was aware of a familiar, powerfully physical attraction to this petite young woman with green eyes, dark hair, and a sharp and lively mind, I was content for once to take the time needed for us to get to know one another before trying to rush her off to bed. For her part, Liz was perhaps rightly wary of a man who was yet to earn her trust.
Still, we did build a friendship. After class, most often, we would go out to a nearby Taverne for beer and a bite to eat, Brat- or Knackwurst with Sauerkraut, or one of those breaded cutlets that German chefs do so well. I would sometimes order a big bowl of steamed mussels—a specialty at our favorite late-night haunt—until the memorable time when I must have swallowed down a bad one… I was so horribly sick, I scarcely made it home that night; so sick that I have never dared to eat another mussel in more than sixty years.
We had friends in common. There were Willi and Helle, two aspiring young businessmen with each a pretty girlfriend and a brand new car; and Dieter, a slightly older man, forty-ish, old enough to have been a member of the Hitler Jugend. The ravages of war were still a vivid memory in Düren, at the eastern rim of what had been the Battle of the Bulge; there were many people for whom the night of November 16, 1944 was still a recent nightmare, when waves of Allied bombers swarmed in the skies above to unleash a murderous storm of fire and high explosive on the city. Of the 22,000 human beings who once lived there, three thousand died that night, most of them trapped in cellars beneath the burning buildings, where they’d taken shelter.
We became close friends, Liz and I, as well as colleagues. We stood out as the only two young English people, foreigners amongst the natives. There was a mutual respect as well as a tenderness. It took me a good long while, as I recall, to tell her awkwardly that I loved her and soon to ask her if she would consider marrying me. Until that moment we had still done little more than kiss goodnight, but she said, Yes. It was kind and brave of her to agree to take me on, because I was not much of a prospective husband, with only a part-time evening job and vague hopes of eventually gaining recognition as a writer. I was impractical, penniless and—though I may have managed successfully to hide it—emotionally not much past my adolescence. As I look back on it, I wish that I could have been—your phrase, Harry!—more man for her woman. I was not.
She took me on anyway. Now many years later I continue to thank her for the immeasurable gift of love. It saddens me to acknowledge that I was unable to prove myself worthy of the trust that went along with it.
More of that later, Harry.
For now, your son, Peter
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
6 OCTOBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
After that moment of terrible suspicion, finding Marie with Barry at his flat on Rayners Road I never thought of him in the same way again. The long friendship in which I had shared with him the most intimate of secrets of my life, the darkest of my dreams, the most erotic of my desires was now tainted with an edge of distrust from which it never fully recovered.
With Marie, when we resumed our now tenuous relationship after her father’s death, the tables were turned. I became ever more possessive. The more I felt her slipping away from me, the more desperate was my need to keep clinging on. And then one day she told me she was leaving. She had accepted the offer of a job at one of the British military schools in then still-occupied Germany. Devastated, I realized belatedly that I could not conceive of life without her, and it took me only a month or two before I devised a way to follow her. Do you remember how I walked away from my good job in Wimbledon in the middle of the school year, Harry? How I sold that Ford Anglia you had helped me buy and reneged on my share of the lease in the house on Mercier Road? The pretext I offered to anyone who asked was that I needed to test my talents as a writer. I may have convinced even myself that this was true. The part-time evening job I had taken, teaching English to adult students at a language school in Düren, would allow me the time to write all day and every day, I told myself. Besides, I thought, it would be a huge relief to exchange my teenage tormentors at Rutlish for reasonable, grown-up people who signed up for classes because they actually wanted to learn.
I suspect that you and Peggy never knew the real reason for my sudden flight. You may not have been aware that Düren was a mere fifty miles from the military base where Marie was now employed. I could not imagine otherwise than that she would be delighted, impatient as I was to be back (in bed!) together. To my chagrin and surprise, it seemed she wasn’t. Through weeks of increasingly desperate telephone calls there was nothing from the other end of the line but excuses, prevarications, protestations and delays. Eventually I managed to prevail on her to drive down. I couldn’t wait to get her into bed, and made urgent love to her in the single room I had rented—the best I could afford on a part-time teacher’s pittance. As I strove mightily, repeatedly, to satisfy my need, I’m sure I failed to notice that her part in our love-making had turned from desire to tolerance.
Or rather, to be truthful, it was my choice not to notice this; denial was more acceptable to my anguished mind than was acknowledgment.
After that first weekend the length of time between her visits stretched out interminably. She bought herself a steel blue Renault Dauphine, an all too popular model at the time. Every time I saw one on the streets, my heart leapt with anticipation, followed at once by frustration, despair, and jealous rage. I was obsessed with thoughts of her submitting to the bestial attentions of all-too-charming British officers at her army base. On the increasingly rare occasions of her visits, I began to feel more like a supplicant than a lover. Then on one final weekend she told me she was pregnant. And the baby wasn’t mine.
Oh, Harry, believe me, your son had never felt so miserable. There he was, stuck in a tiny room looking out on a bland and frigid street somewhere in Germany, in mid-winter, pounding away on his portable Royal typewriter (a parting gift from Peggy) and churning out dreadful poems that no one would ever read. I had nothing but an immersion heater to make tea or coffee, and an electric hotplate to warm up a bowl of soup or make a melted cheese sandwich on a slice of thick German rye bread topped with a slab of Emmentaler.
I had fallen so far into despair, I could no longer imagine a way up or out.
And then there was Winden. I found a new place to live in a small village at the edge of the Eifel Forest with an endless view out over a long green valley to the edge of the trees, an easy bus ride from my job Düren. Reinvigorated by the springtime sun, I abandoned poetry and started on the novel that was guaranteed to bring me fame and fortune. Frau Hennes, a widow, was my landlady. Her husband was one of those tens of thousands of German soldiers who never returned from the Russian gulags after the war, and she treated me like the son she never had. I loved the meals she cooked, Sauerbraten, Rindfleisch, delicious “Eintopf” stews…
At work there was greater responsibility and better salary when I was made Director as the school expanded to serve more students with more classes and different languages.
And before long there was the arrival of my first new colleague. I fell in love.
Your ever-peripatetic son, Peter
After that moment of terrible suspicion, finding Marie with Barry at his flat on Rayners Road I never thought of him in the same way again. The long friendship in which I had shared with him the most intimate of secrets of my life, the darkest of my dreams, the most erotic of my desires was now tainted with an edge of distrust from which it never fully recovered.
With Marie, when we resumed our now tenuous relationship after her father’s death, the tables were turned. I became ever more possessive. The more I felt her slipping away from me, the more desperate was my need to keep clinging on. And then one day she told me she was leaving. She had accepted the offer of a job at one of the British military schools in then still-occupied Germany. Devastated, I realized belatedly that I could not conceive of life without her, and it took me only a month or two before I devised a way to follow her. Do you remember how I walked away from my good job in Wimbledon in the middle of the school year, Harry? How I sold that Ford Anglia you had helped me buy and reneged on my share of the lease in the house on Mercier Road? The pretext I offered to anyone who asked was that I needed to test my talents as a writer. I may have convinced even myself that this was true. The part-time evening job I had taken, teaching English to adult students at a language school in Düren, would allow me the time to write all day and every day, I told myself. Besides, I thought, it would be a huge relief to exchange my teenage tormentors at Rutlish for reasonable, grown-up people who signed up for classes because they actually wanted to learn.
I suspect that you and Peggy never knew the real reason for my sudden flight. You may not have been aware that Düren was a mere fifty miles from the military base where Marie was now employed. I could not imagine otherwise than that she would be delighted, impatient as I was to be back (in bed!) together. To my chagrin and surprise, it seemed she wasn’t. Through weeks of increasingly desperate telephone calls there was nothing from the other end of the line but excuses, prevarications, protestations and delays. Eventually I managed to prevail on her to drive down. I couldn’t wait to get her into bed, and made urgent love to her in the single room I had rented—the best I could afford on a part-time teacher’s pittance. As I strove mightily, repeatedly, to satisfy my need, I’m sure I failed to notice that her part in our love-making had turned from desire to tolerance.
Or rather, to be truthful, it was my choice not to notice this; denial was more acceptable to my anguished mind than was acknowledgment.
After that first weekend the length of time between her visits stretched out interminably. She bought herself a steel blue Renault Dauphine, an all too popular model at the time. Every time I saw one on the streets, my heart leapt with anticipation, followed at once by frustration, despair, and jealous rage. I was obsessed with thoughts of her submitting to the bestial attentions of all-too-charming British officers at her army base. On the increasingly rare occasions of her visits, I began to feel more like a supplicant than a lover. Then on one final weekend she told me she was pregnant. And the baby wasn’t mine.
Oh, Harry, believe me, your son had never felt so miserable. There he was, stuck in a tiny room looking out on a bland and frigid street somewhere in Germany, in mid-winter, pounding away on his portable Royal typewriter (a parting gift from Peggy) and churning out dreadful poems that no one would ever read. I had nothing but an immersion heater to make tea or coffee, and an electric hotplate to warm up a bowl of soup or make a melted cheese sandwich on a slice of thick German rye bread topped with a slab of Emmentaler.
I had fallen so far into despair, I could no longer imagine a way up or out.
And then there was Winden. I found a new place to live in a small village at the edge of the Eifel Forest with an endless view out over a long green valley to the edge of the trees, an easy bus ride from my job Düren. Reinvigorated by the springtime sun, I abandoned poetry and started on the novel that was guaranteed to bring me fame and fortune. Frau Hennes, a widow, was my landlady. Her husband was one of those tens of thousands of German soldiers who never returned from the Russian gulags after the war, and she treated me like the son she never had. I loved the meals she cooked, Sauerbraten, Rindfleisch, delicious “Eintopf” stews…
At work there was greater responsibility and better salary when I was made Director as the school expanded to serve more students with more classes and different languages.
And before long there was the arrival of my first new colleague. I fell in love.
Your ever-peripatetic son, Peter
Thursday, September 30, 2021
30 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Among the many hurtful, harmful things Marie and I inflicted on ourselves and, worse, on others over the years, I can claim to have done at least one decent thing by her. It started with a late night telephone call I picked up at my Mercier Road flat. It was Marie’s roommate. She needed me.
I’m pleased to be able to tell you that I had not the slightest hesitation. Within minutes I was in the Anglia, driving over to the small house she shared with the friend who—as I have said—did not like me much. Perhaps she was right about me. Absent romantic or other social interest, she saw through the surface of my charm to the less admirable character who lay beneath. But this evening she was kinder than her usual self when she came to the front door and let me in. “She’s in her room,” she said.
I found Marie in tears. She’d had a call from her mother a short while ago: her father was dead, killed in an instant in a car crash caused by a drunk driving American from the local air force base. Quite aside from naturally being distraught, she felt helpless. She had no further details and there was nothing further she could do that night. She planned to take the first train home in the morning—she lived in a small village near Oxford—and in the meantime she needed me to stay with her.
Of course. I had never stayed overnight in her home before. She had only a single bed in her small, neatly furnished room, and we lay down together and stayed there all night long, my arms around her while she tried to sleep.
It was a long night. Marie cried through most of it, and I felt strangely privileged to be there, holding her, lying together for the first time without a thought of sex.
I thought of you, Harry. I thought about fathers, and the pain of final, irremediable separation that is death. I was twenty-two years old. I had never been bothered, I’m sure, by the thought that you or Peggy might die. It was in a way beyond my comprehension. And here was Marie, in bed with me, a living body, and her father was gone. I was not to know that it would be nearly a half-century before you were to die.
In the morning we woke early. I drove her to the train station and we waved goodbye.
Sadly, your son, Pete
Among the many hurtful, harmful things Marie and I inflicted on ourselves and, worse, on others over the years, I can claim to have done at least one decent thing by her. It started with a late night telephone call I picked up at my Mercier Road flat. It was Marie’s roommate. She needed me.
I’m pleased to be able to tell you that I had not the slightest hesitation. Within minutes I was in the Anglia, driving over to the small house she shared with the friend who—as I have said—did not like me much. Perhaps she was right about me. Absent romantic or other social interest, she saw through the surface of my charm to the less admirable character who lay beneath. But this evening she was kinder than her usual self when she came to the front door and let me in. “She’s in her room,” she said.
I found Marie in tears. She’d had a call from her mother a short while ago: her father was dead, killed in an instant in a car crash caused by a drunk driving American from the local air force base. Quite aside from naturally being distraught, she felt helpless. She had no further details and there was nothing further she could do that night. She planned to take the first train home in the morning—she lived in a small village near Oxford—and in the meantime she needed me to stay with her.
Of course. I had never stayed overnight in her home before. She had only a single bed in her small, neatly furnished room, and we lay down together and stayed there all night long, my arms around her while she tried to sleep.
It was a long night. Marie cried through most of it, and I felt strangely privileged to be there, holding her, lying together for the first time without a thought of sex.
I thought of you, Harry. I thought about fathers, and the pain of final, irremediable separation that is death. I was twenty-two years old. I had never been bothered, I’m sure, by the thought that you or Peggy might die. It was in a way beyond my comprehension. And here was Marie, in bed with me, a living body, and her father was gone. I was not to know that it would be nearly a half-century before you were to die.
In the morning we woke early. I drove her to the train station and we waved goodbye.
Sadly, your son, Pete
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
29 September, 2021
Dear Harry,
Is Marie still with us, in some corner of our poor, exploited planet? I don’t see why not. She was just four or five years my senior, and these days many people live well into their nineties, more and more into their hundreds. If she is still alive—as I hope, if she is also well and hearty—this intermittently appearing inamorata of my youthful days will be a very old lady now! I hope she still remembers me with the same fondness and gratitude that I remember her, because I share equally in the blame for the havoc she eventually brought into my life.
Did I ever bring her home with me to Sharnbrook? I seem to remember that I did. Maybe more than once. I wonder what you could have thought of her? She was not outwardly the kind of girl who normally attracted me—not beautiful or even pretty in any conventional way. Her least prepossessing feature, if I can take the rather invidious liberty of a purely objective, aesthetic assessment, was her ankles. They were the ankles of a natural-born country girl, strong and solid, compared with the shapely, elegant ankles of the city girl who is brought up walking in high heels on the even paving stones of sidewalks and never in the mud.
Yet she projected a powerful sexual energy. And I must qualify that: her energy was not only sexual. I saw it as a kind of joyful lust for all the pleasures life could bring and damn the consequences. We survived—miraculously—a disastrous, rain-soaked camping trip in Germany that first summer, and continued to see each other in London in the fall, each teaching at a different school in the south-western area of the city.
I am not proud of the young man I was at that time, Harry. I discovered in short order that teaching was not the poet’s sinecure I had envisioned. The short hours were lengthened interminably by such things as teacher conferences, sports supervision and… my God, the homework! Hours upon hours of squinting through smudged, illegible exercise books, in which I was obliged not only to correct the countless grammatical or punctuation errors, but also to add comments, commendations, questions, the exasperated “See me!” The long holidays I had so naively anticipated turned out to be much-needed periods of restoration to a measure of health and sanity. Weekends, an all-too-brief and welcome respite. Worse, my teenage charges were quick to spot my deficiency as a disciplinarian—and to take advantage.
Marie loved teaching. I’m afraid to say I grew to loathe it. Meantime, inexcusably, I began to treat her with cavalier entitlement. I was happy to exercise seigneurial rights to disport myself with other women, but I blithely assumed unquestioning fidelity on her part, and instant availability at my whim. If I had nothing more interesting going on, it was time to call Marie. And in truth she always was available. Until she wasn’t.
It was one Saturday evening. I called her at the last moment, in full confidence that she would of course come running at my behest… and found that she had other plans. She had been invited to a party. She would probably be home late but perhaps we could find time to see each other the next day, Sunday.
It was been a while since my jealousy last showed its ugly face, but it hit me with a vengeance when I called her late that evening from our flat (mobile phones were no more than a germ of implausible speculation in the minds of science fiction writers, along with the barely conceivable video phone that Facetime has become today!) and she didn’t answer. Where was she? I had visions of her cavorting with some tweedy young man with cavalry twill trousers and a striped college tie.
I suffered through a sleepless night disturbed by endless speculations, and called her at home as early as I decently could on Sunday morning. There was still no answer. Impossible! Could she, would she have spent the night in another man’s bed—a man who might be, God forbid, wealthier, smarter, more charming than myself and endowed—God! No!—with a bigger, more appealing cock? The image of her allowing another man’s penis up inside her whipped me into a rage that I could barely control. I called again, and again the ring went unanswered. And again… I called Barry, to ask if he had heard from her. He was surprised, and sounded infuriatingly amused by my anxiety. I drove over to the small suburban house she shared with a roommate who, I had always been quite sure, distrusted me. She seemed delighted to see me so upset. No, Marie had not been home the night before.
My hours that Sunday morning were spent in an ever-increasing state of despair and rage. I was convinced by now she had betrayed me, that she had (joyfully!) allowed another man to penetrate the body that was rightfully mine. And then finally, in this deranged state of confusion and, well, yes, truthfully self-pity, the phone rang. It was Barry.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Come on over.”
Which I did. I ran.
Barry greeted me at the door with one of his wicked grins and waved me in, and led me up the stairs to the empty living room… Then, with a dramatic gesture, he flung wide the door to his bedroom, his and Mary’s, and there, behind the door, giggling, was Marie.
The initial flood of relief at seeing her was tempered immediately by a flood of questions that I did not dare to put to her aloud: where had she been? Where had she spent the night? With whom? I dreaded the answers to the questions that I feared to ask, and instead pretended to believe the story she came up with. But I didn’t. At heart, I knew that she was lying.
Worse, a new suspicion began to seep like poison into a distrustful corner of my mind: what was she doing here at Barry’s? They seemed to be having a lot of fun at my expense. In conspiracy. How long had she been here? Where was Mary? The bed, I could see behind her, was a tangle of sheets and blankets. It looked appallingly like my own bed after a night of sex. Had she…? Had she slept with Barry…? I could not put it past him.
As for Marie… my jealously swamped any other feelings. Sent trust flying. After all, I realized, I had treated her so badly, could I blame her if she’d seized the opportunity to take revenge?
Enough for this one letter, Harry. I’m exhausted. I’ll need to continue this story in my next.
Your son, Peter
Is Marie still with us, in some corner of our poor, exploited planet? I don’t see why not. She was just four or five years my senior, and these days many people live well into their nineties, more and more into their hundreds. If she is still alive—as I hope, if she is also well and hearty—this intermittently appearing inamorata of my youthful days will be a very old lady now! I hope she still remembers me with the same fondness and gratitude that I remember her, because I share equally in the blame for the havoc she eventually brought into my life.
Did I ever bring her home with me to Sharnbrook? I seem to remember that I did. Maybe more than once. I wonder what you could have thought of her? She was not outwardly the kind of girl who normally attracted me—not beautiful or even pretty in any conventional way. Her least prepossessing feature, if I can take the rather invidious liberty of a purely objective, aesthetic assessment, was her ankles. They were the ankles of a natural-born country girl, strong and solid, compared with the shapely, elegant ankles of the city girl who is brought up walking in high heels on the even paving stones of sidewalks and never in the mud.
Yet she projected a powerful sexual energy. And I must qualify that: her energy was not only sexual. I saw it as a kind of joyful lust for all the pleasures life could bring and damn the consequences. We survived—miraculously—a disastrous, rain-soaked camping trip in Germany that first summer, and continued to see each other in London in the fall, each teaching at a different school in the south-western area of the city.
I am not proud of the young man I was at that time, Harry. I discovered in short order that teaching was not the poet’s sinecure I had envisioned. The short hours were lengthened interminably by such things as teacher conferences, sports supervision and… my God, the homework! Hours upon hours of squinting through smudged, illegible exercise books, in which I was obliged not only to correct the countless grammatical or punctuation errors, but also to add comments, commendations, questions, the exasperated “See me!” The long holidays I had so naively anticipated turned out to be much-needed periods of restoration to a measure of health and sanity. Weekends, an all-too-brief and welcome respite. Worse, my teenage charges were quick to spot my deficiency as a disciplinarian—and to take advantage.
Marie loved teaching. I’m afraid to say I grew to loathe it. Meantime, inexcusably, I began to treat her with cavalier entitlement. I was happy to exercise seigneurial rights to disport myself with other women, but I blithely assumed unquestioning fidelity on her part, and instant availability at my whim. If I had nothing more interesting going on, it was time to call Marie. And in truth she always was available. Until she wasn’t.
It was one Saturday evening. I called her at the last moment, in full confidence that she would of course come running at my behest… and found that she had other plans. She had been invited to a party. She would probably be home late but perhaps we could find time to see each other the next day, Sunday.
It was been a while since my jealousy last showed its ugly face, but it hit me with a vengeance when I called her late that evening from our flat (mobile phones were no more than a germ of implausible speculation in the minds of science fiction writers, along with the barely conceivable video phone that Facetime has become today!) and she didn’t answer. Where was she? I had visions of her cavorting with some tweedy young man with cavalry twill trousers and a striped college tie.
I suffered through a sleepless night disturbed by endless speculations, and called her at home as early as I decently could on Sunday morning. There was still no answer. Impossible! Could she, would she have spent the night in another man’s bed—a man who might be, God forbid, wealthier, smarter, more charming than myself and endowed—God! No!—with a bigger, more appealing cock? The image of her allowing another man’s penis up inside her whipped me into a rage that I could barely control. I called again, and again the ring went unanswered. And again… I called Barry, to ask if he had heard from her. He was surprised, and sounded infuriatingly amused by my anxiety. I drove over to the small suburban house she shared with a roommate who, I had always been quite sure, distrusted me. She seemed delighted to see me so upset. No, Marie had not been home the night before.
My hours that Sunday morning were spent in an ever-increasing state of despair and rage. I was convinced by now she had betrayed me, that she had (joyfully!) allowed another man to penetrate the body that was rightfully mine. And then finally, in this deranged state of confusion and, well, yes, truthfully self-pity, the phone rang. It was Barry.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Come on over.”
Which I did. I ran.
Barry greeted me at the door with one of his wicked grins and waved me in, and led me up the stairs to the empty living room… Then, with a dramatic gesture, he flung wide the door to his bedroom, his and Mary’s, and there, behind the door, giggling, was Marie.
The initial flood of relief at seeing her was tempered immediately by a flood of questions that I did not dare to put to her aloud: where had she been? Where had she spent the night? With whom? I dreaded the answers to the questions that I feared to ask, and instead pretended to believe the story she came up with. But I didn’t. At heart, I knew that she was lying.
Worse, a new suspicion began to seep like poison into a distrustful corner of my mind: what was she doing here at Barry’s? They seemed to be having a lot of fun at my expense. In conspiracy. How long had she been here? Where was Mary? The bed, I could see behind her, was a tangle of sheets and blankets. It looked appallingly like my own bed after a night of sex. Had she…? Had she slept with Barry…? I could not put it past him.
As for Marie… my jealously swamped any other feelings. Sent trust flying. After all, I realized, I had treated her so badly, could I blame her if she’d seized the opportunity to take revenge?
Enough for this one letter, Harry. I’m exhausted. I’ll need to continue this story in my next.
Your son, Peter
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
28 SEPTEMBER, 2021
Dear Harry,
Did I ever show the proper appreciation for the car you bought me, or helped me buy? I forget whether, or how, I participated in the purchase.
It was my first car, a little Ford Anglia. Its color was best described as dun, not an attractive color by any means, but the price was right at the used car dealership in Bedford where we bought it, even if the color would not have been my choice. After a thorough examination—you knew more about these things than I—you determined that both the bodywork and the engine were sound; and I liked what was a rather sleek, quasi-American design for a little English car.
So we bought it. Perhaps you even got a better deal on account of your clerical collar—a perk you mentioned once in one of your letters. We are now in the late fifties and in those days the clergy were treated with consideration and respect. Such things still counted.
I was immensely proud of my little Anglia. I brought it up to London and parked it proudly on the street outside our house. Admittedly, it was no match for Hugh’s elegant black monster—was it a vintage Bentley? A Daimler? A Jag?—but unlike his fine antique machines, mine actually worked. I did not have to tinker under the hood, which was how my friend Hugh spent a great deal of his time. Instead of having to walk over to the tube station and take the train, I could now drive up to the top of Putney Hill and cut across the common towards Wimbledon. Arriving at the school I could drive into the teachers’ parking lot and park my Anglia with pride alongside the odd assortment of my colleagues’ cars. I could feel, well… almost like an adult. A man in control, and not only of his means of transportation but his life.
Which was quite obviously just another illusion, Harry, as you’ll understand by now. But thank you anyway, for this generosity and the trust it represented. And my apologies for proving, in the coming days, that the trust you’d shown in me was unhappily misplaced.
Regretfully, Peter
Did I ever show the proper appreciation for the car you bought me, or helped me buy? I forget whether, or how, I participated in the purchase.
It was my first car, a little Ford Anglia. Its color was best described as dun, not an attractive color by any means, but the price was right at the used car dealership in Bedford where we bought it, even if the color would not have been my choice. After a thorough examination—you knew more about these things than I—you determined that both the bodywork and the engine were sound; and I liked what was a rather sleek, quasi-American design for a little English car.
So we bought it. Perhaps you even got a better deal on account of your clerical collar—a perk you mentioned once in one of your letters. We are now in the late fifties and in those days the clergy were treated with consideration and respect. Such things still counted.
I was immensely proud of my little Anglia. I brought it up to London and parked it proudly on the street outside our house. Admittedly, it was no match for Hugh’s elegant black monster—was it a vintage Bentley? A Daimler? A Jag?—but unlike his fine antique machines, mine actually worked. I did not have to tinker under the hood, which was how my friend Hugh spent a great deal of his time. Instead of having to walk over to the tube station and take the train, I could now drive up to the top of Putney Hill and cut across the common towards Wimbledon. Arriving at the school I could drive into the teachers’ parking lot and park my Anglia with pride alongside the odd assortment of my colleagues’ cars. I could feel, well… almost like an adult. A man in control, and not only of his means of transportation but his life.
Which was quite obviously just another illusion, Harry, as you’ll understand by now. But thank you anyway, for this generosity and the trust it represented. And my apologies for proving, in the coming days, that the trust you’d shown in me was unhappily misplaced.
Regretfully, Peter
Monday, September 27, 2021
27 SEPTEMBER, 2012
Dear Harry,
You must have been troubled to learn that Barry Evans moved to London around the same time I did. You were convinced he was a “bad influence.” You were right about the influence—and probably right, too, about the “bad.” He was an important friend and ally, and I could always talk to him about what was happening in my life in a way that I could never talk to you. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Barry and Mary had found a place to live in Putney, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a Bohemian artist and his brood. They rented the floor above what once had been the stables of a grand old Victorian relic on Rayners Road, with a wide back gate leading into a cobblestone courtyard whose walls were overgrown with ivy. The flat itself was long and narrow, with the kitchen at one end, a big, comfortable living room and, off at an angle, bedrooms for the parents and the children. Below, the stables were converted to a spacious studio where Barry worked when he was not out on a job. He and his partner, William Kempster, had by then established a national reputation as muralists and illustrators, and work, by this time, was readily available.
Was it pure coincidence? I have forgotten how it came about, but after accepting a job as a French and German teacher at Rutlish School in Wimbledon, a little further to the south and west from Putney, I heard of a group of former Caius men renting one half of another large, now subdivided home on Mercier Road, also in Putney, quite literally around the corner from Barry and Mary’s place. Conveniently, the nearby East Putney tube station was a mere two stops from Wimbledon on the District Line.
You knew some, but not all of the men who became my flat-mates; Hugh, for example—Hugh deVere Welchman, in full—the stockbroker in training who wore a business suit and a bowler hat to work every day, and carried a rolled umbrella. He loved old things, especially cars and furniture. Among his most treasured possessions was an elegant Sheraton sideboard which he kept assiduously polished. His whole room was elegant, an exception in the hodge-podge of other quirky personal “styles.” Frank Brennan, the Irishman, painted the walls of his space in dreadful alternating telephone black and telephone box red; Dick Booth, a big, secretive rugger player type whose job remained a guarded secret—his frequent visits to the USSR persuaded the rest of us that he was a spy with MI-6—maintained a room of almost studied anonymity; Frank—later Graham—Rooth shared the top floor with me, his room a spare attic, his bed a mattress on the floor. He had a mysterious and to me inexplicable flirtation with Scientology, at that time a virtually unknown sect in the UK.
My own attic room was the smallest in the house. I had the expert help of Mary in choosing colors for the multiple, mostly sloping walls; and Barry painted a Picasso-esque mural on a rectangular space above the non-functioning fireplace. The room had space only for a desk and a single bed, occupied most often by my lonely self, but on occasion—as frequently as possible—also host to any young woman I could persuade to join me there. My most frequent overnight company was Marie… but more about her shortly.
Barry continued to play the always eager Pandar to my appetites. It was at a party at is house that I met Violet, for instance, a small, pretty, indefatigably vivacious woman. She was married. I didn’t care. She seemed not to care. We were both more than a little tipsy, and Barry spurred us on. Violet’s husband was in the RAF, and she was in town for a weekend of freedom—a freedom, she made clear, that she planned to use to gratify needs that went unaddressed at home. I took her home with me to my little attic room. As Barry commented the next day when he came over to visit after she had left, we left it looking like a tornado had blown through. I’ll spare you the details.
You would be disappointed in me, Harry, and not only because of Violet. I spent my evenings and nights in this kind of debauchery as often as I could, but not nearly as often as I would have liked. I too often nursed a hangover on the way to work. A walk to East Putney station through the London mist—sometimes, in those days, a heavy blanket of smog—was of help to clear the head, as was the walk from Wimbledon Station to the school. I would arrive in good enough shape, by a hair, to check in at the teacher’s staff room for a cup of strong tea before heading off to class.
Who was I? The truth is, I had no idea. Was I the civilized, well-bred, well-spoken, socially acceptable young man, public school and Cambridge, straight-arrow, dutiful and honest to a fault? The young man you would have wanted me to be, perhaps even imagined that I was? Was I the hard-drinking, libertine, flamboyant Bohemian poet, careless of rules and social conventions, the one that Barry Evans flattered me to believe myself to be? Was I the carefree, polyamorous Romeo, seducer of women, ace lover that I’d like to have believed myself—but secretly feared I was not, and could never be? Or was I the quiet, introverted, peace- and nature-loving, rather lazy country boy who dreamed of pleasant, day-long idleness with a straw between his teeth and long, dreamless nights?
I was all of these, Harry, and none of them. Above all, I was like many young men in their very early twenties, unsure who I was, what it was I wanted, and whither I was going in my life.
Were you aware, I wonder, of this inner conflict? I tried to hide it when I was at home with a confident exterior, an easy social charm at village events, and outwardly—for the most part—gentlemanly behavior? Would it have helped if we’d been able to talk about these things? Had I not felt obliged to hide them from you, tin order to protect both you and myself from guilt, embarrassment, accountability?
The only thing I know for sure is this: that I will never know.
But we can talk now, can’t we?
Your son, Peter
You must have been troubled to learn that Barry Evans moved to London around the same time I did. You were convinced he was a “bad influence.” You were right about the influence—and probably right, too, about the “bad.” He was an important friend and ally, and I could always talk to him about what was happening in my life in a way that I could never talk to you. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Barry and Mary had found a place to live in Putney, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a Bohemian artist and his brood. They rented the floor above what once had been the stables of a grand old Victorian relic on Rayners Road, with a wide back gate leading into a cobblestone courtyard whose walls were overgrown with ivy. The flat itself was long and narrow, with the kitchen at one end, a big, comfortable living room and, off at an angle, bedrooms for the parents and the children. Below, the stables were converted to a spacious studio where Barry worked when he was not out on a job. He and his partner, William Kempster, had by then established a national reputation as muralists and illustrators, and work, by this time, was readily available.
Was it pure coincidence? I have forgotten how it came about, but after accepting a job as a French and German teacher at Rutlish School in Wimbledon, a little further to the south and west from Putney, I heard of a group of former Caius men renting one half of another large, now subdivided home on Mercier Road, also in Putney, quite literally around the corner from Barry and Mary’s place. Conveniently, the nearby East Putney tube station was a mere two stops from Wimbledon on the District Line.
You knew some, but not all of the men who became my flat-mates; Hugh, for example—Hugh deVere Welchman, in full—the stockbroker in training who wore a business suit and a bowler hat to work every day, and carried a rolled umbrella. He loved old things, especially cars and furniture. Among his most treasured possessions was an elegant Sheraton sideboard which he kept assiduously polished. His whole room was elegant, an exception in the hodge-podge of other quirky personal “styles.” Frank Brennan, the Irishman, painted the walls of his space in dreadful alternating telephone black and telephone box red; Dick Booth, a big, secretive rugger player type whose job remained a guarded secret—his frequent visits to the USSR persuaded the rest of us that he was a spy with MI-6—maintained a room of almost studied anonymity; Frank—later Graham—Rooth shared the top floor with me, his room a spare attic, his bed a mattress on the floor. He had a mysterious and to me inexplicable flirtation with Scientology, at that time a virtually unknown sect in the UK.
My own attic room was the smallest in the house. I had the expert help of Mary in choosing colors for the multiple, mostly sloping walls; and Barry painted a Picasso-esque mural on a rectangular space above the non-functioning fireplace. The room had space only for a desk and a single bed, occupied most often by my lonely self, but on occasion—as frequently as possible—also host to any young woman I could persuade to join me there. My most frequent overnight company was Marie… but more about her shortly.
Barry continued to play the always eager Pandar to my appetites. It was at a party at is house that I met Violet, for instance, a small, pretty, indefatigably vivacious woman. She was married. I didn’t care. She seemed not to care. We were both more than a little tipsy, and Barry spurred us on. Violet’s husband was in the RAF, and she was in town for a weekend of freedom—a freedom, she made clear, that she planned to use to gratify needs that went unaddressed at home. I took her home with me to my little attic room. As Barry commented the next day when he came over to visit after she had left, we left it looking like a tornado had blown through. I’ll spare you the details.
You would be disappointed in me, Harry, and not only because of Violet. I spent my evenings and nights in this kind of debauchery as often as I could, but not nearly as often as I would have liked. I too often nursed a hangover on the way to work. A walk to East Putney station through the London mist—sometimes, in those days, a heavy blanket of smog—was of help to clear the head, as was the walk from Wimbledon Station to the school. I would arrive in good enough shape, by a hair, to check in at the teacher’s staff room for a cup of strong tea before heading off to class.
Who was I? The truth is, I had no idea. Was I the civilized, well-bred, well-spoken, socially acceptable young man, public school and Cambridge, straight-arrow, dutiful and honest to a fault? The young man you would have wanted me to be, perhaps even imagined that I was? Was I the hard-drinking, libertine, flamboyant Bohemian poet, careless of rules and social conventions, the one that Barry Evans flattered me to believe myself to be? Was I the carefree, polyamorous Romeo, seducer of women, ace lover that I’d like to have believed myself—but secretly feared I was not, and could never be? Or was I the quiet, introverted, peace- and nature-loving, rather lazy country boy who dreamed of pleasant, day-long idleness with a straw between his teeth and long, dreamless nights?
I was all of these, Harry, and none of them. Above all, I was like many young men in their very early twenties, unsure who I was, what it was I wanted, and whither I was going in my life.
Were you aware, I wonder, of this inner conflict? I tried to hide it when I was at home with a confident exterior, an easy social charm at village events, and outwardly—for the most part—gentlemanly behavior? Would it have helped if we’d been able to talk about these things? Had I not felt obliged to hide them from you, tin order to protect both you and myself from guilt, embarrassment, accountability?
The only thing I know for sure is this: that I will never know.
But we can talk now, can’t we?
Your son, Peter
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