Letters Home

In all the years I was at school in England I wrote to my parents weekly. I never spoke to them on the telephone - it was impossibly expensive - and I am only aware of one occasion when my parents sent a telegram, or 'cable' as they called it, and that was not to me but to the Glengorse headmaster when I sent my first letter home to the wrong address.

At Glengorse all the boys were sat down in silence each Sunday morning in the house room to write to our parents. They were checked by the master on duty and corrected or, if necessary, rewritten. This is one of the few surviving letters from that time, written in October 1955 when I was ten. My parents were on their way to England with Richard on leave, but would leave him at Glengorse for the spring term.

We were told never to write anything that might worry our parents. Had we done so, the letter would have been torn up. So the contents are utterly bland.

Although there was no requirement to do so, I continued to write home once a week from Bradfield. This air letter is fairly typical. It continues for half a page on the other side. While there was much more in these letters they continued to be determinedly positive, despite the fact that they weren't checked by anyone.

The letter is dated 19th July 1959 at the end of my first year at the school, the last letter before I flew back to Mombasa for the summer holidays. During that year I had experienced and witnessed some horrific bullying. It was institutional, all-pervasive, sometimes sadistic. Some boys suffered particularly badly - fortunately, I wasn't one - and all one could do was to give these unfortumates what support was possible. None of this ever appeared in a letter.

The habit of writing to my parents continued through my university days and well into my twenties, when Gill and I were abroad. Almost all these letters are in the old Arab chest.