by Stephen Fry
I survived prep school – just. Stout’s Hill School, now a holiday resort, was a marvellous mid-eighteenth-century Strawberry Hill Gothic Revival rococo (if you can have such a mixture) castellated fantasy, complete with catacombs and crenellations, a butler (Mr Dealey) and entirely strange characters, such as a Mr Sawdon, whose hands shook uncontrollably and whom we imitated without mercy.
It was only in my last year that one of the masters told me that Sawdon had been a brilliant youth, an authentic war hero, his mind shattered by shell shock in the trenches of Flanders, an experience from which he had never recovered. If I think now of the ho-ho number of times I would creep behind him, imitating his flicking, quivering hands, his slack jaw, his drivelling mutters, his drooling and his weaving, dipping gait, him all unaware, the boys in front watching me over his shoulder and squealing with laughter … if I think of that now I want to stick a pen through my throat in shame. What made it all the worse was the memory I have that his face would light up whenever he saw laughter. He believed, I suppose, that he was looking at affection and pleasure, and some distant image stirred in him of a happy life of laughter and friendship before the bone-splintering, mind-ravaging war that destroyed everything he had been. Just about 99 per cent of the times that he saw a smiling face, he wasn’t looking at the smiles of friends, he was peering unawares at the mocking grins of young fiends who thought him weird and retarded and worthy of nothing but contempt. All the time I was there he was deliberately tormented, impersonated and cruelly teased almost daily. It is no use my apologizing now. He would be 120 were he still alive, I expect, but I weep as I write this. Weep at my own callous, ignorant and ostentatious viciousness, and weep for the hundreds and thousands of Sawdons who didn’t even have the shelter of a school folded in the soft green wolds of Gloucestershire to give them a home.
Mr Sawdon was, I think, somehow related by marriage to the founder and headmaster of the school, Robert Angus. Angus had three daughters, each of whom was more or less nutty about horses, especially Jane, the youngest. Our star alumnus had been Mark Phillips, already in training for the Mexico Olympics as an equestrian and later to marry Princess Anne. Riding at Stout’s Hill was not an ‘extra’ like bassoon lessons or fencing, but part of the everyday curriculum. One would descend from a double Latin class to the stables for an equally serious (and to me much duller) lesson in the arcana of equestrianism. I can still recite the pommels, martingales, snaffles, pelhams, gags, Kimblewick and Liverpool bits (even something called a Chifney anti-rearing bit, if I recall correctly), girth-straps and curry-combs whose every detail and proper use we had to master before we were ever allowed so much as to mount a pony. The smell of saddle soap and dubbin, rarely encountered by me these days, is as intense and evocative as the smell of creosote, cloves or candyfloss. I think of myself – despite an assumption amongst some that I am intellectual, rationalist and almost coldly logical – as an emotional, sensual being, led far more by the heart and other organs than by the brain. Smell, as we all know, evokes the past more immediately than any of the other four senses. Where the aroma of saddle soap takes me, your grandmother’s lily-of-the-valley hand lotion or the sweat-and-mud reek of the school changing rooms might take you.
In 2009 I swore, not in the sense of using foul language (although I had muttered plenty of that off-camera), that the day I was nearly thrown by a skittering Tennessee walking horse would be the last time anyone would ever, ever see me on top of a horse until my dying day. This incident had taken place while filming a documentary series in which I visited each state of the American union.
The humiliation of arranging the title sequence of Blackadder Goes Forth had already more or less determined me never to sit atop an equine again. We had shot the sequence down at the Royal Anglian Regiment’s HQ in Colchester, and the idea was I, as the blithering General Melchett, would bestride my mount and take salute while the band led by Captain Blackadder and attended by poor old Private Baldrick, along with Hugh Laurie’s nobly asinine Lieutenant George and Tim McInnerny’s twitchy Captain Darling, marched past, eyes right, to the stirring march ‘The British Grenadiers’, which then morphed into Howard Goodall’s Blackadder theme tune. For practice I got my foot into the stirrup of the colonel’s mount, whose name I think was – and this should have warned me – Thunderbolt, swung into the saddle and walked experimentally forwards, clucking and tchitching in a way that would have built up confidence and amiability in a tyrannosaurus who had just heard bad news from his bank. I had walked about the whole parade ground feeling more or less confident, cooing Thunderbolt’s name, stroking his muzzle, softly patting his flanks and giving him the news that he was safe and that I loved him.
Thunderbolt and I now stood peacefully awaiting the moment. Cameras, action and … cue music. The moment the first blare of the trumpet sounded Thunderbolt reared, neighed like a banshee, pawed the air and galloped around the parade ground as if stung by a gadfly. None of this was helped by Hugh all but falling to the ground heaving with such uncontrollable laughter that he could scarcely breathe. I was eight and a half feet at least from solid concrete, holding on for dear life, and my friend thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen in his life. Men.
So you may well imagine that twenty years later in the Southern states of America the prospect of heaving my carcass on a Tennessee walking horse was causing me a little perturbation. It was Georgia we were investigating at this stage of our documentary series on the fifty states, and we were the guests of a very kind family who lived in a plantation house that didn’t seem to have changed since the days of Scarlett O’Hara. It was clear that my discomfort in the presence of horses transmitted itself.
‘Now don’t you go worrying about her,’ my amiable hostess had reassured me with a delicious high-class Southern drawl. ‘There never was born a horse so docile …’ that last word pronounced, of course, in the American way, as if to rhyme with ‘fossil’ or that turdine melodic songbird, the throstle. Yes, isn’t turdine a splendid word? Anyway, back to that docile animal.
‘That’s all very well,’ I remember gasping, as I tried to heave my bulk on to its back, ‘but horses and I never get on, which is why I never get on horses. They know that I don’t like them and they always panic.’ Even at my initial gentle, reasonable, unhurried, clucking, apple-offering, muzzle-nuzzling approach the beast’s ears had instantly drawn back, the flanks had pricked and twitched, and the hooves had stamped as if it had detected Satan in me.
‘Not this one, hun …’ came the complacent, murmured reply.
Five minutes later, just in time for the camera to catch my humiliation, the ‘walking horse’ freaked out at the horror of having me astride it or possibly (like every fucking horse ever fucking born) became utterly spooked by the astounding existence of such wholly unexpected and terrifying phenomena as wind, trees, sky, a bird gliding in the distance, a chicken, a hedge, a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly – you name it – and galloped off, bursting through the corral fence, while I screamed and juddered in the saddle, incompetently trying to operate the brakes.
‘Well, I declare she’s never done that in her life …’
You would think a prep school laid out in idyllic countryside, with a lake, woods, spinneys and rolling parkland, and where the riding of biddable and patient ponies was compulsory, might have prepared me for at least normal human competence on horseback. The school achieved this for me no more than it prepared me for normal human competence at life. Just as I can’t and never could ride horses, I can’t and never could live. At least, I have never felt I could.
So (this is still for the new subscribers, I should warn) I survived six years of prep school and moved at the age of thirteen to Uppingham, an old-fashioned public school set in the glorious county of Rutland. It was here that, to contradict Philip Larkin, love fell on me like an enormous No. Most of my life since has been a response to that. Fortunately, however, there had been books.
I will leap backwards
a little to Booton and myself at an earlier age just to explain the effect that books had had on me by the time I arrived at Big School. I relish all things digital, but if I had been born twenty-five years later I dread to think of how little I would know about the written word.
I am not so foolish as to join myself with those heralds of doom who claim that the internet and social networking will inevitably spell the death of literacy, literature, focus, concentration span or ‘real’ human interaction. When moving-type printing was invented it was damned as a technology that would rot the mind. No longer would a scholar have to know everything, they could just ‘look it up’. When the novel arrived it was damned as destructive, escapist, shallow and detrimental to morals. The same howls of protest were screeched at popular theatre, music hall, cinema, then television, video-gaming and now social networking. Human teenagers in particular are tougher than their elders will ever believe. The bullying, abuse and trolling is, of course, horrific, but believe me, a teenager has a better life of it now than he or she ever did a hundred years ago, when physical punishment, cruel sadistic beatings and sexual abuse went unquestioned in schools and in the home.
As it was, my father, who was from the radio (or wireless as it was then called) generation, thought televisions were perhaps permissible for showing events like Churchill’s funeral, moon-landings or serious news stories, but otherwise our little black-and-white set at home was relegated to the corner of the kitchen, its aerial being just a wire poked in the rear antenna socket and Blu-Tacked to the wall. My mother pasted a cutout newspaper cartoon on the television’s side: a housewife is explaining to her friend, ‘Oh, we had one of the very first colour sets, but the colours have faded now.’
Insomnia, especially on hot nights, was one of the chief miseries of my childhood and youth. The only answer therefore was to read, which in itself presented an absurd problem. If I opened the windows to cool the room it would soon fill with huge moths, May-bugs, June-bugs and all kinds of simply terrifying arthropods peculiar to Norfolk which, like crazed winged lobsters, would carom and careen straight to my bedside lamp and flicker, bang and buzz about inside the shade. I happen to be horribly afraid of moths – an utterly irrational fear, I am quite aware, but agonizingly real.
Somehow I managed, despite these abhorred fluttering distractions, to get through hundreds of books a year. My parents had many of their own, most of which I had soon consumed more than once. I further supplemented my reading matter at first from a large grey mobile library which arrived every other Thursday at the corner of two lanes not far from the house. I am not sure such services still operate; it seems doubtful – councils these days seem disobliged so much as to resurface a road, educate a child or empty a dustbin.
One Sunday afternoon, aged twelve, while my father was safely at work in the stable block ‘over the way’, I watched on the little television Anthony Asquith’s film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. I vividly recall sitting on an uncushioned wooden kitchen chair, face flushed, mouth half-open, simply astonished at what I was watching and, most especially, hearing. I had had simply no idea that language could do this. That it could dance and trip and tickle, cavort, swirl, beguile and seduce, that its rhythms, subclauses, repetitions, clausulae and colours could excite quite as much as music.
When Algernon says to Cecily, ‘I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?’ I wriggled and giggled and repeated the phrase to myself in disbelieving bliss. Enough times to commit it to memory there and then. I would repeat it solemnly to the (faintly bewildered) Mrs Riseborough.
‘Oh, you do go on with your nonsense. How that drives Nanny crazy.’
By this time Mrs Riseborough had been promoted to the role of nanny to my sister, something she considered a great advancement (although she still cooked, ironed and performed innumerable other jobs around the house), and thenceforth would much rather be called Nanny Riseborough than Mrs Riseborough. Her Christian name, Dolly, was used only by her immediate family, although her husband Tom, who had after all given her the name, preferred to call her in Janeite, Dickensian fashion ‘Mrs Riseborough’. She died only last year, aged almost a hundred. I had visited her a few times over the years but deeply regret missing her funeral. I am not sure that such combinations of independence, strength and unquestioning service still exist. Her son Peter came to own a very successful and popular Norfolk gastropub called The Ratcatchers. Rather than sitting at a table and enjoying a little sip or a well-earned bowl of soup, his mother would insist on washing up in the kitchen behind the bar, right through into her nineties.
That day years before, my repeatedly telling her that I hoped I would not offend her if I stated quite frankly and openly that she seemed to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection might have flustered her a little, but she was used to my behaviour, which was at times so frantic, fanciful and foolish that it would today quite certainly be diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Wilde’s phrase, and many others from the film – ‘Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational’ – took hold of me completely. In an age before video recording, the best I could do was imagine myself inside the world of this extraordinary motion picture, which turned out, my mother told me (after of course patiently enduring the matter of her too being the visible personification of absolute perfection), to have been based on a play, a copy of which she was sorry to say was not in the house.
The following Thursday I stood then, the only customer (lender? user? what was the word then?), fretfully at the corner of the lanes, waiting for the battleship-grey mobile library to hove into view. The driver lurched the van, of the kind that I think used to be called a pantechnicon, to a halt, came round to open the door and lower the steps and tousled my hair and patted my bum as I ascended (as adults were quite rightly allowed to do in those days without being hauled up before the courts and having their houses set fire to). The librarian, a becardiganed, multi-beaded old dear, was also apt to ruffle my hair. She often told me that I read so many books I would soon grow into one. For a child to read books, especially in the summer, was looked on as very peculiar and, of course, unhealthy, something I had always been used to being considered on account of my loathing of all forms of organized games and sports.
‘Have you,’ I asked her breathlessly, ‘ever heard of a play called The Importance of Being Earnest?’
‘Why yes, my love, that’s just up there, I think.’
It was far from the largest drama section you have ever seen in a library. A smattering of Shaw, Priestley and Shakespeare, but also – marvellously – the collected comedies of Oscar Wilde. She stamped the book out with that splendid springing, spanking sound that will never be heard on these shores again. It had last been lent, the previous stamp showed me, in 1959. I thanked her, dismounted in a bound, flew up the lane, round the rear of the house, up the back stairs and into my bedroom.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest. I read them all again and again and again until a fortnight later, when I found myself once more restlessly pacing the corner of the two lanes.
‘Have you anything else by Oscar Wilde?’
‘Well, now, I aren’t rightly sure …’ she lifted her reading glasses from the delicately linked silver chain that hung round her neck, pushed them to her nose and came around the desk to inspect the shelves as if for the first time. ‘Ah, now, there you go.’
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. This was more, so much more than I could possibly have hoped for. Once again I flung myself on my bed and started to read. Some of the dialogues written in the Socratic style in essays like ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist’ confused me a little, and parts of ‘The Soul of Man Under Sociali
sm’ were quite beyond me. The poems I frankly disliked, save for ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, which seemed an odd subject for such a glamorous and flowing lord of language to have chosen. The stories for children made me weep, as they do to this day, and The Picture of Dorian Gray touched a part of me that I couldn’t quite define but disturbed and excited me very deeply indeed. ‘De Profundis’, too, I found beautiful, but puzzling. I wasn’t sure what the allusions to ‘prison’ and ‘shame’ and ‘scandal’ and so on were supposed to mean. Indeed, I assumed the letter to be a work of fiction that held some allegorical meaning beyond my reach.
I kept this collection for four weeks, and the cosily obliging librarian waived the late return penalty of sixpence when I at last brought it back to the mobile library. I asked if she had anything else by this Oscar Wilde.
She pointed at the book. ‘If that says “The Complete Works”, then I should think that’s the complete works, wouldn’t you, young man?’
‘Hm.’ It was hard not to see the justice of this. ‘Well, do you have anything about him, perhaps?’
Her soft, powdered cheeks pinkened a little, and in a rather quavery voice she asked me how old I was.
‘Oh, I’m a very advanced reader,’ I assured her. Being tall and with a voice that never broke but slowly deepened, I could usually pass as older than my real age; at this time, unless memory plays me false, I had just turned thirteen.
‘We-ell …’ she fossicked about the lower shelves and came up with a book called The Trials of Oscar Wilde by an author called H. Montgomery Hyde.
The book was like a kick in the teeth. A kick in the gut. A kick in the groin. A kick most especially in the heart. After reading about the character of this brilliant, engaging, gentle, exceptionally kind and quite remarkably gifted Irishman, to discover the truth of the sudden and calamitous third act of his life, the three trials (it is often forgotten that following the legal action he foolishly took against the Marquess of Queensberry, there were not one, but two criminal trials against him, after the first ended in a deadlocked jury), the exile and the squalid and unhappy travels and subsequent penurious death in Paris, all this was almost more than I could bear.