Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Out in the corridor I walked towards Mr. Kett’s classroom door. I stood there ready to knock when I heard laughter coming from inside.

  No one in life, not the wartiest old dame in Arles, not the wrinkledest, stoopingest Cossack, not the pony-tailedest, venerablest old Mandarin in China, not Methuselah himself, will ever be older than a group of seniors at school. They are like Victorian photographs of sporting teams. No matter how much more advanced in years you are now than the age of those in the photograph, they will always look a world older, always seem more capable of growing a bigger moustache and holding more alcohol. The sophistication with which they sit and the air of maturity they give off is unmatchable by you. Ever.

  The laughter from inside Mr. Kett’s room came from nine- and ten-year-olds, but they were nine- and ten-year-olds whose age I will never reach, whose maturity and seniority I can never hope to emulate. There was something in the way their laughter seemed to share a mystery with Mr. Kett, a mystery of olderness, that turned my knees to water. I pulled back my hand from the door just in time to stop it from knocking, and fled to the changing room.

  I sat panting on a bench by the lockers staring miserably at Miss Meddlar’s sheet of paper. I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t walk into that senior classroom.

  I knew what would happen if I did, and I rehearsed the scene in my head, rehearsed it in such detail that I believed that I actually had done it, just as a scared diver on the high board finds his stomach whoomping with the shock of a jump he has made only in his mind.

  I shivered at the thought of how the scene would go.

  I would knock.

  “Come in,” Mr. Kett would say.

  I would open the door and stand at the threshold, knees wobbling, eyes downcast.

  “Ah. Stephen Fry. And what can I do for you, young man?”

  “Please, Mr. Kett. Miss Meddlar told me to give you this.”

  The seniors would start to laugh. A sort of contemptuous, almost annoyed laughter. What is this squidge, this fly, this nothing doing in our mature room, where we were maturely sharing a mature joke with Mr. Kett? Look at him … his shorts are all ruckled up and … my God … are those StartRite sandals he’s wearing? Jesus …

  My name being first on the list would only make it worse.

  “Well, Master Fry. Nineteen and a half out of twenty! A bit of a brain box, by the look of things!”

  Almost audible sneers at this and a more muttered, angry kind of laughter. Spelling! Adding Up for Christ’s sake …

  No, it was intolerable. Unthinkable. I couldn’t go in there.

  I wanted to run away. Not home. Just away. To run and run and run and run. Yet I was too frightened to do that either. Oh dear. Oh double dear. Such terrible, terrible misery. And all because I had done well. All because I had stretched up my hand so high and squealed “Oh, Miss, me, Miss! Please, Miss” so loudly and so insistently.

  It was all wrong, the world was all wrong. I was Stephen Fry in a changing room in a small school in Norfolk and I wanted to be someone else. Someone else in another country in another age in another world.

  I looked down at Miss Meddlar’s piece of paper. My name at the top was running saltily into the name of Darren Wright below. Darren Wright had fourteen marks out of twenty. Fourteen was a much more sensible mark. Not at all embarrassing. Why couldn’t I have scored fourteen?

  I screwed the paper into a ball and stuffed it into a Wellington boot. It was Mary Hench’s Wellington boot. It said so in clear black writing on Elastoplast stuck to the inside. Mary Hench and I were friends, so maybe she wouldn’t tell if she found it.

  I stood up and wiped my nose. Oh dear.

  Over the next ten years I was to find myself alone in changing rooms many, many times more, the longest ten years of my life. This occasion was innocent and infantile, those future visits guiltier and more wicked by far. To this day institutional changing rooms make my heart beat with a very heavy hammerblow of guilt. The feeling of wanting not to be Stephen Fry, wanting to be someone else in another country in another age, that was to return to me many times too.

  I left this ur-changing room, this primal prototype of all the changing rooms that were to be, and had no sooner sunk tremblingly back into my seat in Miss Meddlar’s classroom than the bell went for morning break.

  As was my habit I joined Mary Hench and the other girls at the edge of the playground, hard by the painted hopscotch lines. She was a large girl, Mary Hench, with gentle brown eyes and a pleasant lisp. We liked to bounce tennis balls against the wall and talk about how stupid boys were while we watched them playing football and fighting in the middle of the playground. Soft, she called them. Boys were soft. Sometimes I was soft, but usually I was daft, which was a little better. With Mary Hench was Mabel Tucker, the girl I sat next to in Miss Meddlar’s. Mabel Tucker wore National Health spectacles and I of course called her Table Mucker, which she hated. She would shout out loudly in class when I farted, which I did not believe to be playing the game.

  “Please, Miss. Stephen Fry’s just farted.”

  Not on. Outside of enough. You were supposed to giggle secretly and delightedly or pull your sweater up over your nose. To draw adult attention to the event was quite monstrously wrong. Besides, I wasn’t sure that adults knew about farting.

  Just as break was coming to an end, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Miss Meddlar surveying the playground. I tried to hide behind Mary Hench, who was bigger than me, but she told me not to be so soft and pushed me ahead.

  “Stephen Fry,” said Miss Meddlar.

  “Yes, Miss?”

  “Mr. Kett says that you never did give him that sheet of paper.”

  Boys and girls were pushing past me on their way back to their classes.

  “No, Miss. That’s right, Miss. He wasn’t in his classroom. He must have gone out. So I left it on his desk.” Said airily. Jauntily. Insouciantly.

  “Oh. Oh I see.” Miss Meddlar looked a little confused, but in no sense incredulous.

  With a calm “if there’s nothing further?” cock of the eyebrow, I moved on.

  At lunch Mr. Kett came to my table and sat down opposite me. I felt a thousand eyes burning into me.

  “Now then, young man. What’s this about me not being in the classroom this morning? I never left my classroom.”

  “Well, I knocked, sir, but you didn’t answer.”

  “You knocked?”

  “Yes, sir. As you didn’t answer I went away.”

  “Miss Meddlar says you said you left the mark sheet on my desk.”

  “Oh no, sir. As you didn’t answer my knock I went away.”

  “I see.”

  A pause, while, all hot and prickly, I looked down at my lunch.

  “Well, if you give me the mark sheet now then …”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll take it now.”

  “Oh. I lost it, sir.”

  “You lost it?”

  “Sir. In break.”

  A puzzled look spread over Mr. Kett’s face.

  Get to know that puzzled look, Stephen Fry. You will see it many times.

  For Narcissus to find himself desirable, the water he looks into must be clear and calm and sweet. If a person looks into a turbulent pool his reflection will be dark and disturbed. That was Mr. Kett’s face, rippled with dark perturbation. He was being lied at, but lied at so well and for so impenetrable a reason.

  I can see his perplexity so clearly. It looms before me now and the turbulence in his eyes makes me look very ugly indeed.

  Here was a bright boy, very bright. He came from a big house up the road: his parents, although newcomers to Norfolk, seemed nice people—even qualifying for what used to be called awfully nice. Their boy was only here at this little school for a term before he went away to prep school. Kett was a man of his village and therefore a man of the world. He had seen bright children before, he had seen children of the upper middle classes before. This boy seemed presentabl
e enough, charming enough, decent enough and here he was telling the lie direct without so much as a blush or stammer.

  Maybe I’m over-refining.

  There is very little chance that John Kett remembers that day. In fact, I know he doesn’t.

  Of course I’m over-refining. I’m reading into the incident what I want to read into it.

  Like all teachers, John Kett overlooked and pardoned those thousands of revelatory moments in which the children under his care exposed the animal inside them. Every day he must bid good morning to men and women, parents now themselves, whom once he witnessed thrashing about in mad tantrum, whom once he saw wetting themselves, whom once he saw bullying or being bullied, whom once he saw bursting into terrified screams at the sight of a tiny spider or the sound of distant thunder, whom once he saw torturing ladybirds. True, a cold lie is worse than animal savagery or hot fright, but that lie is and always was my problem, not John Kett’s.

  This Affair of the Test Results in Mary Hench’s Wellington Boot is a big episode for me simply because I remember it so clearly: it is significant, in other words, because I have decided that it is significant and that in itself is of significance to me. I suppose it seems to mark in my mind the beginning of what was to become a pattern of lonely lies and public exposures. The virtue of this particular lie was that it was pointless, a pure lie, its vice that it was so consciously, so excellently done. When Kett sat down to question me at the lunch table I had been nervous—mouth dry, heart thumping, hands clammy—but the moment I began to speak I found I became more than simply nerveless, I became utterly confident and supremely myself. It was as if I had discovered my very purpose in life. To put one over, to dupe: to deceive not only without shame, but with pride, with real pride. Private pride, that was always the problem. Not a pride I could share in the playground, but a secret pride to hug to myself like miser’s gold or pervert’s porn. The hours leading up to exposure would have me sweating with fear, but the moment itself would define me: I became charged, excited and happy, while at the same time maintaining absolute outward calm and confidence, able to calculate in microseconds. Telling lies would bring about in me that state the sportsman knows when he is suddenly in form, when the timing becomes natural and rhythmic, the sound of the bat/racket/club/cue sweet and singing: he is simultaneously relaxed and in deepest concentration.

  I could almost claim that the moment the police snapped the cuffs about my wrists eleven years later was one of the happiest of my life.

  Of course, someone might try to make the connection between all this and acting. When acting is going well, the same feeling of mastery of time, of rhythm, control and timing comes over one. Acting, after all, is lying, lying for the pure exquisite joy of it, you might think. Only acting isn’t that, not to me at any rate. Acting is telling truth for the pure, agonising hell of it.

  People always think that actors make good liars: it seems a logical thought, just as one might imagine that an artist would make a good forger of other people’s signatures. I don’t think there’s any especial truth in either assumption.

  Things I often heard from parents and schoolteachers:

  “It’s not that you did it, but that you lied about it.”

  “Why did you lie?”

  “It’s as if you actually wanted to get caught.”

  “Don’t lie to me again, Fry. You’re a terrible liar.”

  No I’m not, I used to think to myself. I’m a brilliant liar. So brilliant that I do it when there isn’t even the faintest chance of being believed. That’s lying for the sake of it, not lying purely to achieve some fatuous end. That’s real lying.

  All of this is going to return us to Samuel Anthony Farlowe Bunce before long.

  First I will tell you what in reality John Kett chooses to remember about me. One by-product of slebdom is that those who taught you are often asked to comment about your young self. Sometimes they do it in newspapers, sometimes they do it in public.

  A few years ago I was asked by John Kett’s successor to open the Cawston School Fete, or Grand Summer Fair, to give it its due title.

  Anyone who grew up in the country twenty or thirty years ago knows a lot about fetes. Fetes worse than death, as my father called them with self-ironising ho-ho jocularity.

  At East Anglian country gatherings there was dwile flonking—now sadly being replaced by the more self-conscious urban appeal of welly throwing. There was bowling for a pig—in those days country people knew how to look after a pig. I expect today’s average Norfolk citizen if confronted by such an animal would scream, run away and sue. There was throwing a wet sponge at the rector (or vicar—generally speaking Norfolk villages thought it smarter to have a rector than a vicar—I believe the difference is, or was, that the bishop chooses a vicar and the local landowner chooses a rector). There were bottle stalls, bran tubs filled with real bran, Guess the Weight of the Ram for a Penny competitions, coconut shies and tractor or traction engine rides for sixpence.

  If my brother, sister and I were very lucky, a local fete might offer Harry Woodcock, a local watchmender and seller of ornaments, whose shop sign proclaimed him to be:

  HARRY WOODCOCK

  “THE MAN YOU KNOW”

  Woodcock went from fete to fete carrying with him a bicycle wheel attached to a board. The wheel had radiating from its centre like the minute hand of a clock an arrow which was spun for prizes. Nicky Campbell does much the same thing on British television, and Merv Griffin’s American original Wheel of Fortune has been showing on ABC for decades. Harry Woodcock blew such professionals out of the water and left them for dead. He wore extravagantly trimmed pork-pie hats and pattered all the while like a cockney market trader. East End spiel in a Norfolk accent is a very delicious thing to hear.

  My sister approached me during one such Saturday afternoon fete just as I was estimating how many mint imperials there might be in a huge jar that an archdeacon bore beamingly about a thronged deanery garden.

  “You’ll never guess who’s here …”

  “Not …?”

  “Yup. The Man You Know.”

  And off we scampered.

  “Hello there, young man!” boomed the Man You Know, tipping his hat as he did to everyone and everything. “And young Miss Fry too.”

  “Hello, Mr. Man You Know,” we chorused, striving with a great effort of will not to dissolve into a jelly of rude giggles. We paid a shilling and received a tickety-boo each. These were blocks of polished wood with a number from nought to twenty painted on each side. All tickety-boos were to be tossed back into a basket, to another tip of the hat, after each spin of the wheel. The Man You Know had attempted some grace with the brush when painting the numbers, giving each digit a little flourish. I could picture him the day he made them—they were decades old by this time—his tongue would have been poking out, as it did when he examined broken watches, while he sissed and haahed out his breath and ruined each wooden block with too much of an effort to be decorative and neat. My sister, who had and has great talent with brush and pen, could have stroked out twenty numbers in twenty seconds and each one would have been graceful and fine and easy. There was a mournful clumsiness about the Man You Know, his dignity and his tickety-boos.

  As indeed there was about his patter.

  “Roll, bowl or pitch. You never do know, unless you ever do know. Lady Luck is in a monstrous strange mood this afternoon, my booties. She’s a piece, that Lady Luck, and no mistake. A lucky twenty tickety-boos and a lucky twenty numbers, each one solid gold, or my name’s not Raquel Welch. You can’t accoomerlate, less you specerlate, now if that aren’t the truth I’m not the Man You Know. And I am, oh yes, but I am. I yam, I yam, I yam, as the breadfruit said to Captain Bligh. Here’s a fine gentleman: two more punters needed fore I can spin, better give me a bob, sir—you might win a present to keep that wife a yours from straying. Thanking you kindlier than you deserve. Here comes a lovely lady. My mistake, it’s the curate, no, that is a lovely lady. Up you ste
p, my bootiful darling, I shan’t let you go—that’s either a shilling for a tickety-boo or you give me the biggest smacker of a kiss that you ever did give in all your born days. Blast, another shilling. I’d rather a had the kiss. Lays and gen’men … The Man You Know is about to spin. The world …” here he would hold his finger exaggeratedly to his lips, “the world … she hold her breath.”

  And so the world did hold her breath. The world, she held her breath and the wheel ticked round.

  Well, the world has stopped holding her breath. She has exhaled and blown us a gust of bouncy castles and aluminium framed self-assembly stalls that sell strange seamed tickets of purple pulped paper that you rip open and litter the grass with when you find that you have not won a huge blue acrylic bear. The sideshows we queue for now are the Ride in the All New Vauxhall 4×4 Frontera (courtesy Jack Claywood Vauxhall Ltd.), the Virtual Reality Shoot Out and the chance to Guess the RAM of the Compaq PC, kindly provided by PC Explosion of Norwich.

  Hang on, I hear the voice of Mary Hench telling me that I’ve gone soft. Thinking about the countryside can do that to me.

  When I was a literature student one was forever reading that all great literature was and always had been about the tension between civilisation and savagery:

  • Apollo and Dionysus

  • Urbs et rus

  • Court and forest

  • City and arcadia

  • Pall Mall and maypole

  • Town and country

  • High street and hedgerow

  • Metropolis and Smallville

  • Urban sprawl and rural scrub

  It is fitting that as I write this I am half-listening to David Bellamy, Jeremy Irons and Johnny Morris as they address a mass rally gathered in Hyde Park. They are warning the nation about the danger being done to the countryside by urban ignorance and misplaced metropolitan sentimentality. The point d’appui of the rally was to save foxhunting, but it seems to have turned into something bigger.

  I’ve just turned on the television … it is a huge crowd, almost as large as the number of townies who flock to the Yorkshire Dales every Sunday, but these people, I suspect, will at least leave the park tidy and free of litter.