Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Ian Hicks

  I was worried about the lessons and wondered if I would be hacked playing football and what the food would be like and whether I would get indigestion like I always did at home. Then how was mum in the car and had she got back all right. I went to bed and everybody asked me my name. Then the next morning the master came into lessons and said “Hicks, have you learnt to do History yet?” “Yes, a bit” came the reply. By lunch I had settled down.

  R. Coley

  My first night at school the thing I dreaded most was seeing mummy and daddy go down the drive. However I found another new boy named Povey. We walked around a bit till the tea bell rang and we went to tea. Everybody thought I was most peculiar because I had 3 cups of milk and 5 slices of bread and 3 buns.

  M. Dolan

  At bed time we go to wash and go to bed. We are allowed to talk until 7 o’clock and we talk all the time. When we are closed down we talk lots of times and get caught and have to stand out for twenty minutes. Our legs get tired.

  I found myself dreading this strange world of ice-cream days and third game pavilions and being put as square leg. The idea that I might be asked if I had learnt to do History yet also filled me with horror. I knew plenty of history, thanks to my mother, herself a historian, and the endless quizzes I pestered her to give me as I followed her about the house, but I was certain that I hadn’t in any way “learnt to do History.”

  Another essay in the magazine puzzled me, puzzles me to this day. I felt it was getting at something, something awful to which it didn’t dare put a name. Ironic, given its title.

  “FEAR,” BY S. ALEXANDER

  Fear is the basis of cowardice and cowardice is the opposite to courage, but fear is not the opposite to courage. In many cases, fear is even the basis of courage and so it is an extraordinary thing.

  It gets complicated after that—the author presses Socrates and Douglas Bader into the argument and I get a trifle lost even now.

  I was more heartened by the following:

  WINNIE

  Winnie was a loveable little pony. She had a gentle temperament and liked having a fuss made of her. She was very old when she died. Everyone who rode her will probably remember her for a long time. She was very persevering and would tolerate a tremendous amount of hitting around. I have never known her to lose her temper, so I think if there is a heaven, Winnie is there. Winnie passed into the next world on the afternoon of the 30th January. May she find rest in the endless pastures of Paradise.

  J. Bisset.

  I think I remember this Bisset. I believe he came from Rhodesia and had a younger brother who arrived at Stouts Hill at about the same time as me. The younger Bisset quite suddenly and inexplicably announced one term that he had changed his name to Tilney, something we all rather envied and I, personally, decided to emulate at once. I informed the master on duty that from now on I was to be referred to as Whatenough, Peregrine Ainsley Whatenough, but was told not to be an arse, which struck me as unfair. Looking back, one assumes the Bisset/Tilney name change was something to do with step-fatherage, a broken home and other things that were kept from us.

  Returning to the magazine, there follow endless pages cataloguing the achievements of old boys, with the usual depressing information as to their destinies.

  We were delighted to hear from Ian who is doing very well at Price Waterhouse and still plays squash regularly.

  John has done extremely well with an Agricultural firm dealing with machinery in Uganda.

  Adam Carter wrote to us from Gibraltar where he is stationed with the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry.

  No reunion or social gathering would be complete without Charles Hamilton. He looked splendid at the Berkeley Hunt Ball in his kilt.

  We hear Martin Wood is very happy at Stowe and is now a keen Beagler.

  Peter Presland goes up to London every day, where he is with a firm of solicitors, Bracewell and Leaver, where he specialises in commercial work during the day and at night is a libel “Expert” for a daily newspaper.

  I like the capitalised, double inverted-commas “Expert,” lending it a properly disreputable air.

  Of one old boy, later to become well known through marriage, we learn:

  Mark Phillips (1957-1962) Marlborough

  We were all delighted when Mark once again won at Badminton.

  … the annual three-day eventing horse trials, one assumes, not some ordinary game of shuttlecock and battledore …

  Stouts Hill was a country school, this is the point that seems to emerge most from the magazines. London and all things urban were miles away. Whenever I picture myself at prep school, I picture myself out of doors: walking, sliding, tumbling, den building, boating, fishing and in winter, sliding across the thickly iced lake, tobogganing and rolling snowballs down slopes until they grew to be the size of small vans. I remember being taught the names of wildflowers and birds, climbing trees, penetrating the woods and scaling the Bury.

  None of these activities came without pain. The pain began with bad luck over which I had no control but ended in a physical self-consciousness that has dominated my life ever since.

  The bad luck was principally asthma, a congenital condition inherited, I suppose, from my father, who had spent a year in hospital as a child.

  I had joined the school’s tree climbing club and found to my surprise that a dread of heights did not prevent me from climbing trees quickly and without fear. Then, when I was nine, I developed a terrible allergy to whatever it is that lime trees put out in the summer, that same stuff that deposits its layer of sticky goo on the roofs of cars that are foolish enough to park in lime avenues. The result was two days in bed with my lungs wheezing like mouse-nibbled organ bellows. A number of boys at Stouts Hill had asthma; the Gloucestershire air was said to be good for them. One boy came for that very reason but made no improvement. He left for Switzerland after only five weeks, a five weeks spent with an inhaler constantly at his lips. The following term at morning prayers the headmaster reported his death to us and everyone turned to look at me.

  Later, at public school in particular, I became adept at using my asthma as an excuse for avoiding undesirable activities. I could induce attacks easily by burying my head inside dusty desks or in bushes and shrubs which I knew to be dangerous. I became intensely proud of my asthma, just as I was to become proud of my Jewishness and proud of my sexuality. Taking an aggressively defiant stance on qualities in myself that others might judge to be weaknesses became one of my most distinctive character traits. Still is, I suppose.

  Seesawing with a friend one afternoon, I fractured the humerus bone of my left arm and went about in a sling for the rest of the term. Two days later my brother broke his arm in exactly the same place, a genuine coincidence. He had broken it in the field of battle, at rugger. I was the fool who could have avoided it, he was the brave soldier. As it later turned out, Roger had actually broken his arm by trying to pinch some food from the kitchen under the eye of Abiel, who had hurled him up some steps. In those days, things like that were hushed up. Poor Abiel hadn’t meant any harm, and a rugger injury looked better all around.

  I can’t separate out the connections, the causes and effects, but by my third year at Stouts Hill, after the onset of asthma and the breaking of my arm, I began to dread physical activity of almost any kind. I became prey to an acute sense of physical self-consciousness. This has sexual connections which we will come to later.

  In a prep school set in the country, in love with the country, inspired by the country and dedicated to the country, the boy who fears the country, fears it in all its manifestations, naturally becomes something of a loner: if his home life is also spent in even deeper country he has a problem. The terror of the rotting mole and of the insects that gorge on dead flesh had never left me. I was scared to distraction by the mere thought of silverfish and lice, maggots and blow flies, puffballs and exploding fungi. The malignancy and stench of death that hung over the forests, copses and lak
eside woods at Stouts Hill expunged any pleasure I derived from the lively quickness of squirrels and badgers, from the gentle dignity of alders, larches, elms and oaks and from the delicate beauty of the herb robert, the campion, the harebell and the shepherd’s purse.

  More than that, the fearlessness of the other boys became itself something new to fear. That they could not see what was amiss with the world showed them to be strong and me to be weak.

  I was at the time, I think, unaware of all this at any conscious level worth bothering with. Other boys, after all, were what we would call today wimps. Some were wimpier than me by far. Some wore absurd spectacles with lenses an inch thick, others had spazzy walks and possessed eye-hand coordination that made me feel positively athletic. One boy was so afraid of horses that he would break out into a sweat if he came within twenty yards of the smallest pony.

  Two defects of mine did haunt me consciously however, and I cannot claim ever to have entirely exorcised myself of them.

  Natation first. The school had an excellent lake, in which some supervised swimming was allowed. There was a swimming pool too, a most extraordinary white oval affair which might have been designed by Gropius, with an elaborate gravel filter for the water, which showed itself in the form of an endlessly playing fountain beside the pool. At either end was a bowl filled with a deep purple liquid into which one had to dip one’s feet before entry—something to do with verrucas, I believe.

  If a boy had been officially witnessed to have swum two full unassisted lengths of the pool he was a Swimmer and entitled to wear blue swimming trunks and enjoy access to the deep end and the diving board. Non Swimmers wore red trunks and had to paddle in the shallow end holding preposterous polystyrene swimming aids sculpted into the shape of tombstones or, worse still, have inflatable water-wings sealed about their skinny arms.

  I was a Non Swimmer until my very last year.

  All my life I have never since bought a pair of red swimming trunks.

  At night, as others slept, I projected films in my head, films in which I swam like Johnny Weissmuller, Esther Williams and Captain Webb. Dipping, rolling and diving, head facing down into the surface of the water, I powered myself with easy, rhythmically pumping feet. I launched myself backwards and forwards, up and down the pool, head rising up to take one lungful of air for each length, while boys crowded round the pool, their mouths rounded in wonderment and admiration, watching me, praising me, cheering me on …

  I could do it, I knew I could do it then. It was clear to me that the achievement was all in the knowing. The only reason I couldn’t swim was that I had been told that I was a Non Swimmer. But there, on my hard-sprung Vono bed, while the others slept, I knew that I was an otter, a sea lion, a leaping dolphin, Poseidon’s child, Marine Boy, the friend of Thetis and Triton, at one with water.

  If only they would let me wear blue trunks, then I would show them.

  The loud collision of detail, noise and hurry in the daytime confused everything and threw me off balance.

  “Aren’t you changed, Fry?”

  “Right, in you get.”

  “Come on, boy!”

  “It’s not cold, for God’s sake …”

  “Legs! Legs, legs, legs! Get those legs working!”

  “Get your head down. It’s water, it’s not going to bite you …”

  “What a spazz …”

  The explosions of other boys laughing and bombing and belly flopping at the deep end turned into a distant mocking echo as the blood and fear flooded into me.

  “But I could do it last night!” I wanted to shout. “You should have seen me last night. Like a salmon, I was … like a leaping salmon!”

  Blue and shivering, I would push the polystyrene tombstone out before me, eyes screwed shut, head up so far that my neck bent backwards, thrashing myself forwards, my legs kicking up and down, panting and whooping with exertion and panic. Then I would rise, gasping and choking like a newborn baby, twisted strings of snot streaming from my nose, chlorine burning my throat and eyes, sure that this time, this time, I had covered at least half the length of the pool.

  “Congratulations, Fry. One and a half yards.”

  Hurrying across the grass, I would wrap myself in a towel, shivering and gulping with shame and exhaustion.

  The aching and the longing in me as I watched Laing silently glide underwater from end to end like a silver eel. He would break the surface without a ripple or a gasp, and then, laughing like a lord, backstroke, sidestroke and butterfly to the other end, rolling over and over as he swam, the water seeming to encase him in a silver envelope that glistened and pulsed like the birth sac of a gigantic insect.

  With my towel Balinese tight about my waist, I would, in Adam’s primal pudeur, perform the awkward ballet of swapping trunks for underpants, so absolutely, unconditionally and helplessly cast into black misery that nothing, not money, hugging, sweets, understanding, friendship or love, could have offered me the smallest sliver of joy or hope. The fierce knot of admiration, resentment, shame and fury that tightened in the pit of my stomach is one of those background sensations of childhood, like the taste of lemon sherbet or tomatoes on fried bread, flavours that can be blown back on the wind of memory or association to torture and now, of course, to amuse.

  Swimming was for me the closest a human being could come to flight. The freedom of it, the ease, the elegance, the delirious escape. Every living creature but Fry could swim. The tiniest tadpole, the most reluctant cat, the most primitive amoeba and the simplest daphnia.

  And I would never be able to do it, never. Never be able to join in, splashing and laughing and ducking and grabbing and roaring with the others. Never. Save in my mind.

  We talk of the callousness of the young. “Children can be so cruel,” we say. But only those who are concerned with others can be cruel. Children are both careless and carefree in their connections with others. For one nine-year-old to think passingly about the non-swimming agonies of another would be ridiculous.

  There were contemporaries of mine at prep school who laboured and tortured themselves over their absolute failure to understand the rudiments of sentence structure: the nominative and accusative in Latin and Greek, the concept of an indirect object, the ablative absolute and the sequence of tenses—these things kept them awake at night. There were others who tossed in insomniac misery because of their fatness, freckledness or squintedness. I don’t remember, I don’t remember because I didn’t care. Only my own agony mattered.

  Nothing prayed for—it is life’s strictest and least graceful rule—comes to you at the time of praying. Good things always come too late. I can swim now.

  I cannot recall how and when I passed my test and won those blue trunks. I know it did happen. I know that somehow I learned to doggy paddle without the tombstone and the water-wings and that I completed my two compulsory lengths. I know too that I discovered how swimming was never going to be that fine, free soaring expansion of joy I had dreamt it would be.

  The pain of the red trunks, however, was as a minor aggravation, a teasing itch when compared to the blistering agony of Cong Prac.

  Stouts Hill never gave off an atmosphere of being any more or less religious than other schools I have known. It was with some surprise that I discovered not long ago that Robert Angus, the headmaster, had been a writer of deeply spiritual Christian poetry. Today, with the foul miasma of evangelism rising up to engulf us from every corner of God’s poor earth it is hard to remember that good Christian lives were once lived without words like “outreach” and “salvation” being dragged into general conversation. God was a dignified, generous father and Christ his beautiful, liquid-eyed son: they loved you even when they saw you on the lavatory or caught you stealing sweets. That was Christianity, something quite unconnected to hymns, psalms, anthems and the liturgy of the Church.

  In the 1960s Britain was just beginning to slither about in the horrid mess made by sacred music written especially for children—“Jonah,” “The
Lord of the Dance,” “Morning Has Broken” and all that preposterous rubbish. New tunes for “O Jesus I Have Promised” were being composed, as music masters and idle, fatuous composers the length and breadth of the land were bothering us all with new carols and new settings for the Te Deum and Nunc Dimittis, some of them even ransacking the rhetoric of negro spirituals and American gospel songs, with results so nauseatingly embarrassing that I still blush to recall them. White, well-nourished British children who holidayed with their parents in old plantation houses in the Bahamas and Jamaica, clapping their hands, thumping tambourines and striking triangles to the lisped words of “Let my people go” and “Nobody knows the trouble I seen,” to a clash of cymbals and symbols that still harrows the imagination.

  But there, the very thought of music masters clapping their hands in rhythm and calling out “And one and two and three and ta-ta-ta-tah!” will always send the blood simmering to my head, never mind ethnic guilt and other associations.

  Every morning after breakfast at Stouts Hill, a bell rang for chapel, a service which involved no more than a perfunctory clutch of prayers, a lesson read by a prefect (hitting hard, in time-honoured British fashion, the italicised words of the text of the Authorised Version as if they had been put there for emphasis) and a known hymn, but on Sundays there was held a proper service, with collects, psalms, canticles, versicles, responses, anthems and a sermon. The choir dressed up in blue surplices and starched ruffs and processed with candles, the masters added the appropriate ermine or scarlet hoods to their gowns and we boys turned out in our best suits and tidiest hair, all checked up in the dormitories by Sister Pinder, Matron and a squad of sergeant-majorly prefects. Each Sunday service, according to litany and season, had its own psalm, and Mr. Hemuss, the music master, liked also to use Sundays as an opportunity to introduce us to hymns we had never sung before. This meant they had to be learned. After morning prayers on Saturday therefore we stayed behind in the chapel (actually a gymnasium with an altar) and Cong Prac was held—an abbreviation, though it never ever crossed my mind as such at the time, for Congregational Practice. Here the setting for the morrow’s psalm and the tunes for the morrow’s unfamiliar hymns would be gone through, bar by bar. Saturday’s breakfast was always boiled eggs, and there is nothing so unpleasant in all this world as a roomful of human beings who have just eaten boiled eggs. Every fart and burp sulphurises the room with the most odious humming guff, a smell I can never smell to this day without returning to the hell of Cong Prac.