by Stephen Fry
Back inside again, on the wall next to the sally, was the predictable bell panel, which would have told servants from a previous era into which room to scuttle, bow and bob for instructions. Instead of the pulled-by-wire shaking bells so familiar from today’s country house films or television series, ours – being an in-its-day modern Victorian house – took the form of a wooden framed box. Each room’s name was printed beneath a red star in a white circle which oscillated when an electric bell was pressed. It was said that my parents’ house was one of the first in its part of Norfolk to be thoroughly ‘on the electric’. I am sure the circuitry was never upgraded from the time of its building in the 1880s until my mother and father finally sold the place nearly a century and a half later. The ceramic fuse boxes, the solid bakelite and brass three- or two-pin plugs were at least eighty years old when I was a boy in the 1960s and I was always astonished by the eye-achingly dazzling white three-pin plugs I saw in friends’ houses, just as I was astonished by, and more than passingly envious of, the wall-to-wall carpeting, colour televisions and warm radiators that my friends took for granted. Not to mention their easy access to cinemas, shops and coffee bars. Such ordinary, modern households as theirs may not have had trained plum and pear trees stapled to the gable-ends of their outbuildings, nor could they boast built-in hand-carved linenfold cupboards that a contemporary antiquarian would orgasm over, but they were, to my restless rusticated brain, as exciting as my life and household were dull.
We move along, as an estate agent would say, from the pantries and cellar door, past the bell panel and rope and encounter an always closed studded baize door which leads through to the house proper. There, hallways, dining room, drawing room, great front stairs and my father’s study could be found. Forbidden territory. Next to the baize door were the back stairs, which led to our domain.
On the third floor of the house my brother and I each occupied a huge bedroom, leaving the others (one of which was already divided into two rooms) for furniture overspill, spare rooms and attic space. These unfeasibly proportioned rooms, a little William Morris wallpaper still showing through in one of them, had originally been designed as dormitories for servants. Whitwell Elwin, the architect who built the house, had made the mistake earlier, when building his own Victorian rectory in the same village, of providing small individual rooms for his staff. It seems that in these narrow rooms they had suffered acutely from homesickness and loneliness and thus, given a second chance at domestic architecture, Elwin had created in our house enormous servant chambers in which the maids and footmen (in their ruthlessly segregated dorms, naturally) could chatter and console each other through the night.
Elwin’s finest work of architecture was neither the rectory nor our house, but the village church. Booton church is worth travelling miles to see. ‘The cathedral of the villages’ it has been called. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the great master registrar of Britain’s architecture, who visited every county and chronicled any building of worth in the United Kingdom, gave this chapter of my book its subheading when he described St Michael the Archangel’s in Booton as ‘very naughty, but built in the right spirit’. I remember quoting this observation of Pevsner’s to John Betjeman when he came down to the church with a camera crew and some of his Victorian Society friends during one of my school holidays or rustication (temporary punishment suspension) periods. I had been given the exciting job of escorting this distinguished party around, the self-appointed local expert, and telling them about the Bath stone, the knapped flint, the crocketed pinnacles, chamfering and idiomatic Gothic influences and any other such pretentious guff as my mind (stuffed as it then was with prized Banister Fletcher jargonese) could come up with: ‘note the influence of the Cluniac revival’ – that sort of gobshite, as if they didn’t know all that without the cocky pipings of a twelve-year-old who behaved as if he was the Professor of Architecture at the Courtauld. The great Poet Laureate (or were those years still ahead of him?) was very friendly and patient about all this, but it was only years later that I learned that Betjeman and Pevsner were not on the most cordial of terms, despite each of them so valuing, and indeed so raising the value of, architecture in Britain; perhaps therefore my quoting of Sir Nikolaus had been injudicious. I spent the rest of the day, I remember, as a guest of the Victorian Society’s formidably knowledgeable and likeable Hermione Hobhouse, diving in on unsuspecting Pugin and Gilbert Scott mini-masterpieces around the county.
Whitwell Elwin may have created an astonishing church, but his major interest (outside, one presumes, his fifty-one-year ministry at Booton) was his editorship of the Quarterly Review, his querulous correspondence with fellow Victorian greats like Darwin and Gladstone and his somewhat ‘inappropriate’ relationships with a series of young girls, the most prominent of whom was his ‘blessed girl’, Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, a viceroy’s daughter who later went on to marry the truly great architect Edwin Lutyens, best known for his creation of colonial New Delhi and his collaborations with the horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll. Lutyens also designed Booton Manor, an ‘averagely fine’ example of his work. After building Booton church and its rectory (envious of Lutyens’ superior talent as well as jealous of his snaffling the beloved Emily, one supposes), Whitwell Elwin built our house as a thank you to the spinster sisters who had bankrolled his magnificent ecclesiastical folly.
Just to drive home to you how preposterously old-fashioned a dwelling ours was, I should tell you that the lavatories were the boxed-in kind with a high up cistern. Instead of the later decorated china ‘pull me’ chain, there had originally been a handle next to the bowl which you pulled up to flush. The wash basin in the lavatory’s ante-room didn’t have a plughole. You pulled on a sprung tap to fill it, washed and rinsed your hands, tipped up a lip in the basin which also served as the overflow slit, and the bowl pivoted to empty its water underneath before swinging back to its original position. You probably can’t picture it, and I am dissatisfied with my ability to convey its workings succinctly and clearly. Never mind. Similarly, the bathtub upstairs, with its great lion’s claw feet, had a long cylindrical ceramic pole that you twisted and let down to seal the plug hole. It was also one of the few bathrooms I have ever known to possess a fireplace.
My brother and I were only ever allowed to have a fire lit in our bedrooms if we were ill. I cannot overstate the pleasure of waking on a dark winter’s morning and seeing the embers still glowing in the grate. Otherwise in winter, one relied for warmth on a mountain of eiderdowns and blankets or the company in bed of a cat or two. I had never even heard of a duvet or quilt.
I once found a thin Dimplex electric radiator in an attic and brought it into my room. When my father discovered I had kept it, dialled up to maximum heat for three days in a row (the breath steaming from my mouth and nostrils was nonetheless visible), he made me sit down and work out, given the price of kilowatt hours, how much my profligacy had cost him. This was an arithmetical problem, of course, wildly beyond my competence. The radiator disappeared, and my fear of mathematics grew that much greater.
Outside, the gardeners provided what the grocer, butcher, bread man and fish man could not supply with their weekly van visits. Apples, pears and potatoes were stored in outhouses over the winter; jams, pickles and chutneys were prepared in the autumn by the cook, Mrs Riseborough. Lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, scarlet runner beans, broad beans, peas, marrows, asparagus in raised beds, figs, damsons, plums, cherries, greengages, strawberries, rhubarb, raspberry and blackcurrant canes and the whole rich bounty of the garden supplied us all. Milk was delivered daily in wax cartons which, when dried, we used as kindling for the fireplaces; a local farm provided eggs and dark-yellow butter patted with carved wooden paddles and wrapped in greaseproof paper. I had never heard of or been into a supermarket before I was … I can’t even guess what age. If we needed brambles for one of Mrs Riseborough’s blackberry and apple pies, I would take my baby sister Jo in her pushchair along a bridle path and pick the fruit by hand. The Octo
ber mixing of the Christmas puddings and the pouring of the apple jelly … I am sure that plenty of people still do this every year – more than ever before perhaps, thanks to all the Take-offs of the Bake-offs and Cake-offs that now take up most of our television schedules. Cream of tartar and crystallized angelica have never had it so good. Men and women the length of the land still grow vegetables, apples, pears and soft fruits too; I am not, I hope, over-misting my own childhood idyll. Not that for me it was anything close to idyllic, much as it might and ought to appear to have been from this great distance in time and manners.
A grass tennis court and even a badminton lawn were at our disposal; for whatever reason we didn’t use them much, only when American cousins visited.
Behind the stable-block was a cottage and separate garden, where a couple who worked for my father lived, and next to that a paddock filled with noisy geese. I used to brave these hissingly aggressive birds to get to a walnut tree around which they honked and flapped as if it were a sacred temple being vandalized by heathens. Despite growing up in the country, I have never been fully at ease with wild animals.
In the garden’s overgrown old pigsty and hidden in a hedged area filled with broken sundials and choked ponds my sister Jo and I found, tamed and finally domesticated feral cats and kittens which had been let loose from the almost incredibly eccentric rector of the village church, who didn’t, of course, as a high religionist, believe that animals possessed souls, and so they could therefore happily be thrown away like so much litter. Horses we did not have, for over the way my father had converted the monumentally solid stable block into a laboratory. He was a kind of designer, physicist and electronics engineer, impossible exactly to categorize. The stable mangers were filled with tools, the stalls with lathes, mills and other machinery; the vast upper rooms where the grooms might have slept housed oscilloscopes, ammeters and circuitry of the most curious and impenetrable kind. After ten or twenty years of his work there, the smell of solder, Swarfega and freon finally overcame decades of dung, straw and saddle soap.
Reepham, the nearest village to have proper shops and pubs, was over three miles away, and the inhabitants thought of my father, on the very rare occasions they caught sight of him, as the Mad Inventor. If for some reason he had to go in for a supply of tobacco – my mother having succumbed perhaps to a rare bout of influenza – he would stand in the post office, forlornly holding out money in the palm of his hand like a foreign tourist, allowing the correct amount to be picked out. I think he frightened the villagers a little and that Wordsworth’s real world of ‘getting and spending’ frightened him too.
Nothing like as much as he frightened me, however. In my mind he was a compound of Mr Murdstone and Sherlock Holmes, with an element of The Famous Five’s Uncle Quentin thrown in. Certainly he had the sinister saturnine features and snarling intolerance of children that marked out the latter and the almost inhuman brilliance and pipe-smoking gauntness of the great detective. It was Holmes himself who observed that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains and, awestruck and often filled with rage and hatred against him as I was, there was never a time that I didn’t think my father an authentic genius. I still do. Between the ages of seven and nineteen, however, I am not sure I was ever able to look him in the eye, or to hear his disgruntled snorts and growls and sighs, without wanting to wet myself or to fly from him in tears of humiliation and misery. Now in his eighties, he is building, from scratch, to his own design, a 3D printer. I know him enough to be absolutely certain that when he has finished it will be more reliable and more elegantly designed than any other that currently exists on the market.
My mother was and remains the warmest and kindest person you could know. Her first love and duty, however, was, and will always be, to my father. And vice versa. Which is as it should be. Their marriage always seemed to me to be so ideal that I often wonder if it completely spoiled my chances of achieving a relationship anything like as perfect. Which must be nonsense, since my brother and sister are both blissfully married. We will come to the squashier bogs, the more mephitically foul marshes of my useless and repulsive private life later in this book if you have the patience. Meanwhile, it is still catch-up time.
One marvellous favour J. K. Rowling has done all English writers of a certain generation is to clarify this business of being sent off to school. No Hogwarts Express for the seven-year-old Stephen, of course, no Butter Beers or magical chocolate frogs, but all in all a really very similar affair otherwise. Boaters at the school end of the train were crammed on the heads or waved airily by impossibly mature-looking twelve-year-olds; we new boys braced like mules and clutched on to our mothers as the prospect of months of separation in the company of these frightening-looking seniors approached. ‘They’ll think I look stupid.’ ‘They’ll think I look weedy.’ ‘They’ll think I look common.’ All kinds of immature waves of inadequacy rolled over me. I am not even sure that I knew what ‘common’ meant. It was two years later, reading Nancy Mitford’s indispensable Noblesse Oblige, that I discovered it turned out to be a word only ever used by ‘common’ people in the first place, which is rather a lowering thought.
Before Paddington station was finally cleaned, rejigged and renovated ten or so years ago, complete with the statue of its famous and noble bear, I could never go near the place without my bowels turning to water.
Everybody else new you ever meet, and this continues throughout life, is stronger than you are, knows the system better and sees right through to the back of your brain and finds what they see there to be wholly inadequate. Everyone you encounter carries, as it were, a huge club behind their back, while all you hold behind yours is a weedy cotton-bud. I think I may have written this before, or possibly stolen it from someone else: it is, in any case, hardly a fresh observation, and I should be very surprised if it does not strike home with you. The rest of the world was at That Lesson, the one we missed because of a toothache or diarrhoea, the one where they – the rest of the school – were told how the world works and how to comport themselves with confidence and ease. We all missed it and have felt insecure ever since. Other people know some secret thing, and no other people know more than children who are just a few years older than you are.
To go to a prep school 200 miles away at the age of seven seems, like the fish-cart, the 1880s servants’ bells or the cook receiving vegetables from cap-doffing gardeners, madly silly, English, grand and old-fashioned.
You should know, then, before I go any further, that, contrary to the implication of all that has gone before, we were poor. Not dirt poor, not peasant poor obviously, just poor compared to all the kinds of people who sent their sons to the same kinds of schools, poor compared to the kinds of people my parents had to dinner parties. Yes, dinner parties where the men wore black tie and the women ‘withdrew’ from the dining room to the drawing room after the cheese to allow the men time for strong talk, cigars and port. My mother confided in me her probably accurate opinion that this old and now defunct ritual (defunct even in Royal Palaces I am able to tell you – more of that later too) was in fact a way of allowing women to go to bathrooms together without drawing to the attention of their men that the sweet creatures possessed such things as bladders which needed voiding just as much as any man’s or horse’s did.
We were poor in that my mother drove an ancient Austin A35 with flicky-uppy indicators and my father an Austin 1800 from the heyday of British motoring incompetence (after he had driven an old Rover 90 into desuetude). We never went on holidays, and every time my mother and I went into a shoe or clothing shop throughout my childhood and adolescence I remember squirming and writhing with embarrassment as she complained (very loudly to my ears) that such and such a pair of shoes were ‘shatteringly expensive’ and that she ‘couldn’t possibly afford’ those trousers. I did grow very fast, of course, and she had a small budget from which to buy anything. The school fees themselves (somehow we found ourselves, my brother and I, going to two not wildly grand
private schools that were nonetheless just about the most expensive of any in England) were paid for, I am certain, by my mother’s father, the beloved Jewish immigrant who died when I was about ten and whom I wish, greatly wish, I had known better. But I grew up with a quite illusory – ‘entitled’, as we would now say – sense of aggrieved deprivation. To confess this is deeply embarrassing; how could I possibly feel deprived? Just how cheap must I have been to think a country house with servants and grand rooms was horrible and that a modern house with colour televisions, gas ovens, freezer-cabinets, carpets and central heating was a lost dream of luxury?
There we are, then. Off to a prep school in Gloucestershire, far from Norfolk, but beautiful too in its own way. I wrote in The Fry Chronicles about my insatiable appetite for sweets. I devoted pagefuls of panegyrics to the tuck shop and provided pagefuls too of self-reproach for the thieving and sly manipulations that my addiction to all things sugary led me to. I suppose they themselves derived from this sense of being hard done by, wherever the hell that came from. Maybe sugar stood in for a parental love or the domestic prosperity that I felt deprived of. Perhaps I was born with one of those narcissistic fantasy minds. The kind that believes they are really the abandoned son of a duke, or that a solicitor’s letter will one day arrive informing them of an unknown cousin’s fabulous will, of which they are to be sole benefactor. The crown courts are daily full of such sad people. I happen to be that rare thing – rarer than a straight man in a Hollister T-shirt – a fantasist whose fantasies came true, it would seem. A lot of celeb haters would say that most celebs are narcissists. It could be that they are right. Counterintuitively, self-hatred is one of the leading symptoms of clinical narcissism. Only by telling yourself and the world how much you hate yourself can you receive the reliable shower of praise and admiration in response that you feel you deserve … or so at least the theory runs.