Two Letters, One War.

29 September 1937

Mother

I am settled here now at the training camp and kept very busy learning all aspects of aeroplane engineering and maintenance. I’m told that I can also be trained as a pilot eventually if I keep my nose clean, so that’s what I’ll be trying to do. When the war comes there’ll be a need for more pilots.

I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much of each other for a while now, and perhaps that is for the best. You and I have had our battles and I'm not sure we're very good for each other. You have Uncle Norman to look after you now, and as you well know he doesn’t think the best of me. You asked me to try and be get along with him and I promise you I tried. But there was no pleasing him. 

I just want you to know that not everyone who joins the RAF is a queer. And not everyone who likes to reads book is a snob. Not everyone is such a fan of Mister Mussolini either. And when the dodgems break down, as they always do, it’ll be Norman who’ll have to try and fix them, instead of relying on me.

I write all this to warn you about kind of man you are hitching yourself to. When this war comes  - and it is definitely coming - we're all going to have to decide who's side we're on. God knows what the world will look like when it's all done.

Take care of yourself.

Peter

==

13 May 1946

Mother

You must know I went to see Mr Butlin last month, and he said I could be useful to him. He’s expanding the fairground and has plans to open an airfield, so he can fly more holidaymakers in. He said he’s going to need people who know about planes, and he considered me to be one of the family. I had high hopes of gaining a position.

Instead, I received a visit from Uncle Norman this weekend. He suggested I would be better off pursuing a career in London and implied strongly that I wasn’t welcome to come to Skegness. He said I wasn’t cut out to be a yellowbelly, and then added ‘well, not of that kind anyway’ which is a slight he must have been practising for several years!

There is only one way Norman could have known that I’d been to see Mr Butlin, and that would be through you. Am I to presume that you thought it necessary to put me off?

Don’t worry – I wasn’t intending to try and rekindle any kind of relationship with you and Norman. Far from it. I have always known that Norman is a bully – he never could stand that I knew more about how to run the rides than he did. And you know very well that he was on the side of Mussolini and Moseley back in the day. If he could have found a black shirt to buy in Skegness he would have done. And don’t get me started on the number of times he turned away Jews and gypsies looking for work. And now he’s turning away people like me.

He wants to say I’m a coward for never trying to escape Stalag One. He wants to believe that men who joined the RAF before conscription came along were almost certainly queer. He thinks I’m too high and mighty with my book-reading and my posh accent. He probably thinks, like you, that any kind of intelligence and learning ends up making a boy unhappy – although it was you – wasn’t it? – who wanted me to go away and be educated and make my way up the social ladder. You sent me a way and then got surprised when I became distant and remote  - became, as Norman would have it, ‘snooty’.

Well, Mr Butlin seemed to think I was OK, and it seemed to me there was an opportunity there for me – your son! – to set myself up with a decent job and possibly some kind of long time career in the business. My thought was always to get myself some lodgings in the area and not trouble you at all with the idea of resting with you in any way, or being a drain on your time. But it seems Norman – and you – couldn’t even live with that. How petty.

As it happens, I have got an opportunity to work at a sports car garage just outside London with an army pal of mine – who you can let Norman know is very probably a homosexual. There are also a lot of film studios out that way that need people who know about electrics and cars and trucks and planes. My friend Donald – another kriegie and not a queer by the way – says there’s going to be lots of motion pictures made about the war now.

So really I had no need to go to Mr Butlin except to think it might be better for me in the long run to get into a business that I knew, and which definitely gave me prospects.

But that has gone now. Thanks to you and Norman. I shall take his advice and stay in London. And you can rest easy that I won’t be troubling you in the future. You and I have never been able to rub along in a nice way, a loving way, have we? And given what I’ve been through these last few years I’ve promised myself that I won’t stay long in any environment that is hurtful  - for me or for others.

So, mother, you can tell Norman he has got his wish. This is the end for me. I’m not saying I won’t help you out if you need it as you get older, when Norman has passed on into hell, as he inevitably will, sooner rather than later. That’s what a good son does – looks after his mother.

What does a good mother do?

Peter