Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  “Is it switched off then?” I asked.

  “There’s a ticker,” he said. “Listen.”

  Sure enough, from some control device on one of the corner fence posts came a regular ticking sound.

  “Every time it ticks,” said Donaldson, “it sends a charge. But if you grab it in between ticks, you’re okay. Go on. Have a go.”

  Still fearing some practical joke, I listened to the ticks until I felt sure of their tempo and then touched the wire and let go quickly.

  Nothing.

  I laughed. This was fun.

  We carried on with the game, refining our ability to touch the wire for longer and longer periods as we became more and more familiar with the rhythm of the ticker and together, Donaldson and I bonded in one of those complete moments of childhood friendship that last only as long as the particular period of play, each of us knowing that the next time we met we would be no closer than we had been before.

  We were soon joined by other boys, returning from their cricket, rounders and athletics, and Donaldson and I, masters of ceremony, initiated them into the Ways of the Ticker.

  Then I had an idea.

  “What about this?” I said. “Suppose we all link hands and stretch out in a line. Then one of us grabs the wire and actually gets a shock. The current should go all along the line getting weaker and weaker until it reaches the last person.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “Well, the winner is the person with the most points. How many of us are there? Fifteen. So the person who actually touches the wire gets fifteen points, the person next to him fourteen and so on, down to the last person, who gets one. If you break the link you’re out.”

  It took a certain amount of organisation, but eventually some rules were roughed out that allowed everyone to get the chance to be the Fifteen Man, the one who touched the wire and bore the brunt of the current.

  Never physically brave I decided for who knows what reason that I should be the Fifteen Man first. Donaldson was next to me and grasped my free hand. When we were all firmly linked I leaned towards the wire.

  “Remember,” I said sternly, “anyone who lets go is O-U-T out. Forever.”

  Fifteen heads nodded solemnly. I reached forwards, held my breath and grasped the wire.

  The first tick sent a surge through me that almost knocked me off my feet, but I held on for a second tick, almost unaware of the screams and giggles that were spreading out along the line.

  After the third or fourth shock, I let go and looked back.

  Fifteen boys were jumping up and down, yelling and giggling. The line had held.

  The boy at the end, who had received the least shock, was none other than Bunce and he was pink and grinny with the pleasure of having kept his nerve and held on.

  We played this game for another half hour and I’m not sure I had ever been so completely happy. There was a combination of delights here that had never come together for me before: the knowledge of sweets and sweets and sweets in my pocket, the pride of a new-found physical courage, the pleasure of being not just part of a game, but master of it, the delicious awareness that I had somehow persuaded fifteen boys to break a school rule. We were in it together. I hadn’t joined in with them, they had joined in with me.

  Bunce had never overlooked the casual kindness of our first meeting in the Paddington train. He didn’t ever tag, having too much dignity to be one of nature’s hangers-on, but he always liked me, no matter what I did, and he always grinned when he caught my eye and looked sad when I was teased or shouted at or in trouble.

  Everyone had enjoyed a turn as the Fifteen Man; we had worked out the right number of pulses to hold on for to ensure the maximum pleasure and now Donaldson and I were conferring on refinements. He suggested that the chain should actually be a semi-circle and that the last man in the line should touch the wire at the same time as the first. Someone warned with awe and dread in their voice that this would cause a Short Circuit and that the person in the middle, when the two pulses of current met, would be burnt to a cinder. Perhaps we should collect a pony and use that as a guinea pig. A pony in the middle of the semi-circle seemed a very funny idea, and a pony being fried to a crisp struck Donaldson as the most fantastically amusing proposition he had ever heard.

  “Oh, we’ve just got to,” he said. “Look! There’s Cloud. We’ll use Cloud.”

  Cloud was an elderly grey pony with a great Thelwell-style under-hang of a belly. Cloud was the first pony I had ever ridden and I hated the idea of her being electrocuted. I had inherited from my parents a love of animals that I frankly confess to be anthropomorphic, sentimental and extreme. The very sight of bears, seals and the more obviously endearing mammals will cause us all to weep copiously. I shall never forget the red mist that descended over me, years later, when I once saw youths throwing stones at some ducks in a park in King’s Lynn. I picked up some huge pieces of builder’s rubble nearby and started to hurl them at the boys, roaring the kind of meaningless obscenities that only pure fury can put into the mind. “You shit spike wank turdy bastardheads … how do you fucking like it, you tossing tossers …” that kind of thing.

  Were Donaldson and I going to fall out over the use of Cloud in the game? I really did not want that, nor did I want to be the wet blanket that doused the spreading warm glow of the moment, the killjoy that dislocated that perfect rhythm of these unfolding new ideas. Improvised childhood games, like children themselves, are imponderably unpredictable in their robustness and their fragility.

  I don’t want to paint Donaldson as some cruel monster. I am certain he would no more have countenanced the zapping of an innocent old pony than any of us.

  But this was never put to the test.

  A voice came clear down the hill to interrupt us. It was the deep and almost broken voice of Evans, a prefect and the school’s best bowler. One of his faster deliveries had once cracked a middle stump in two. He took the Cricket Ball Throwing Cup every year, on one occasion throwing the ball so far that it went clean over a lane and was never found.

  “Fry! Is Fry Minor down there?”

  “Uh oh!” said Donaldson, nudging me.

  I brushed silently past Donaldson and the others, all pleasure drained from me, and started to climb the hill towards the silhouette of Evans outlined on the ridge.

  What had I done wrong?

  That’s absurd, I knew what I had done wrong, but I could not understand how I could have been found out. It was impossible.

  Maybe Mr. Dealey had seen me coming out of Cromie’s study. Maybe someone had missed a few pennies from their pocket and had guessed that I had stolen them. Maybe there had even been a witness.

  “Get a move on, will you?” Evans stood under the great horse chestnut at the top of the hill and glowered down at me as I laboured up towards him. “Haven’t got all day.”

  He was in his cricket whites, streaked with the long green grass stains of a man who isn’t afraid to dive.

  “Sorry, Evans,” I said. “Only, it’s my asthma. I can’t run too much in this weather …”

  “Oh yes, your asthma. Well, never mind that, I’m to take you to the headmaster’s study.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Asthma and deafness too?”

  “But why? What have I done?”

  Evans turned away as I reached the ridge of the hill, not even looking to see whether I would follow. “You’d know that better than me. Cromie just puts his head out of his study door, sees me and says, “Evans, track down Fry the Younger and bring him to me at once.”

  For Evans the event was merely a distraction from nets or from whatever else he had on his mind and I could see that he led me without either relish or sympathy, only with careless disinterest. I trailed behind him like a wet spaniel wondering furiously what it was that Cromie could know.

  We reached the outside of his study too early for any excuse to have come to my head, nor had I had time to rehearse fully in my mind the stout and stolid
style of blank innocence that would come to me when Cromie confronted me with my crime, the hot indignation of my denial, the hooting outrage that would possess me the moment he accused me of … of what?

  “Enter!”

  Evans had rapped on the door. I stood there, legs braced.

  “That means ‘come in,’ ” said Evans, swinging the door open for me.

  Cromie was not at his desk. He was sitting in one of his two leather armchairs, reading. The first thing I looked for, with the quickest darting glance, was any sign that the secret drawer to the desk was open. It was not.

  “Thank you, Evans. Very prompt.”

  “Sir.”

  Evans vanished with another turn on his heel. He went on in later life to Harrow, playing cricket for the school and shining in the cadet force, where his ability to turn smartly on his heel won him, I have no doubt, the Sword of Honour and the admiration of all.

  I lingered in the threshold. There was a jaunty gleam in Cromie’s exceptionally blue eyes, and a crisp upturn to his russet moustache that puzzled and frightened me.

  For all I know Cromie’s eyes are brown and his moustache was green: I hope he will forgive any inaccuracy. I believe he is a wise enough man to know that false memory can be more accurate than recorded fact.

  “Come in, Fry, come in!” he cried with the affable assertiveness of an archdeacon inviting a curate in for a friendly talk on Pelagianism.

  “How kind, sir,” I said, ever pert.

  “Sit,” said Cromie, indicating the other armchair, the armchair whose seat and cushions, up until this moment, I had only ever seen from upside down, while bent over one shining leather arm preparing to receive the cane.

  I sat in some bewilderment.

  I was too far away from leaving the school to be ready to receive the famous Leaver’s Talk about which the school whispered fiercely at the end of each term, the Leaver’s Talk which told everyone what they already knew about Vaginas and Babies and Testicles and Urges and Some Other Boys.

  I stared at the carpet hopelessly confused.

  After what seemed an age, Cromie put down whatever it was that he was reading and twinkled across at me.

  “Fry,” he said, slapping a cavalry-twilled knee. “I am going to make a prediction.”

  “Sir?”

  “You are going to go far.”

  “Am I, sir?”

  “Believe me, yes. You are going to go very, very far. Whether to the Palace of Westminster or to Wormwood Scrubs I can’t quite tell. Probably both, if I know my Fry.” He rubbed the knee he had already slapped in the manner of an older man, a man whose arthritis or war wound might be playing merry hell, but was none the less a companionable reminder of better days. “Do you know why you will go far, Fry?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’ll go far because you have the most colossal nerve.”

  “Have I, sir?”

  “For colossal nerve, for sheer, ruddy cheek, I have never met anyone to match you.”

  All this said so easily, so chummily, so—there was no escaping the word, mad as it seemed—so admiringly.

  “Fry has a problem,” Cromie went on, seeming now to be addressing the bookcase. “He has a parcel he wishes to send, but, drat and curse it, he has no stamp. So what does he do? He goes into Sir’s study, cool as you please, sees a heap of letters and packages waiting to be stamped, puts his own on top of the pile and leaves. ‘Old Dealey will take the whole lot out to the post office and mine will be stamped along with the rest of them,’ he thinks to himself. How was he to know that Sir might come along before Dealey had taken them away and recognise the highly individual handwriting of the most impudent scoundrel this school has ever had the honour to house?”

  God, God, God … the joke shop order … the pennies stuck together. I had clean forgotten.

  In all the excitement of discovering those sweets I must have laid the package down on the desk when fiddling with the secret drawer.

  Great heavens almighty.

  “Such cavalier insolence deserves a reward, Fry,” said Cromie. “Your reward is that Dealey has duly taken your parcel to Uley along with the others and it will be sent to its destination at the school’s expense and with my compliments.”

  He rubbed his chin and chuckled.

  Maybe Jesus Christ and Granddaddy did not judge and punish. Maybe they loved me.

  I knew what was expected of me in return and gave Cromie the full repertoire: the ruefully apologetic stretching of the lips, the bashfully sheepish grin, the awkwardly embarrassed shifting in my seat.

  “Well, you know, sir. I just thought …”

  “I know very well, sir, what you just thought,” said Cromie, smiling back as he stood. He looked about him. “This must be the first time you’ve been inside this room without leaving it with a sore backside. Well, count yourself lucky. Use some of that colossal nerve to better account in future.”

  It was true that the only times I had been in that study in Cromie’s company had been to receive two or three of the best. The last time had been for a visit to the village shop. Three strokes, with a promise of double that amount next time.

  I stood up now, and squeezed my eyes tight in horror as I heard the rustle of paper bags in my trouser pockets. This would be no time for illegal sweets to tumble from me like coins from a one-armed bandit.

  “It’s all right, there’s no need to look so frightened. Off you go.”

  “Thank you very much and I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Go and sin no more, that’s all I ask. Go and sin no bloody more.”

  Sitting under a cedar of Lebanon half an hour later, stuffing foam shrimp after foam shrimp into my mouth, I mused on fate. Maybe I was brave, in a certain sort of way. It took courage to be deceitful and dishonest and conniving and wicked. More courage than it took to toe the line.

  The late summer light was lovely on the lawns and lake, there were more fruit salads and a bag of flying saucers left in my blazer pocket.

  “F-r-r-r-ry!”

  When the name was called with such rolling menace, it could only mean Pollock, Pollock the head boy with raven black hair and a sadistic hatred of all things Fry the Younger.

  He came round from behind the tree and had snatched the bag from out of my hand before I knew what was happening.

  “So we’ve been to the village shop again, have we?”

  “No!” I said, indignantly, “we have not.”

  “Don’t bother lying. Shrimps, milk bottles, flying saucers and blackjacks. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Yes I do, Pollock. I do think you’re an idiot. I haven’t been to the village shop.”

  He struck me across the face. “Don’t be cheeky, you little creep. Empty your pockets.”

  Because of that fall at Chesham Prep my nose has always been immensely sensitive to the slightest percussion. The least strike will cause tears to spring up. In those days the tears were added to by the humiliating realisation that they looked like real tears.

  “Oh for God’s sake, stop blubbing and empty your pockets.”

  There is nothing like a false accusation to cause even more tears.

  “How many times do I have to tell you,” I howled. “I haven’t been to the village shop!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure you haven’t. And what have we got here then?”

  If the memory weren’t so absurdly anachronistic, I could almost swear that Pollock ripped open one of the flying saucers and put his tongue to the sherbet like a Hollywood cop tasting white powder.

  “But it’s not from the village shop! It’s not, it’s not!”

  There was no getting through to this idiot.

  “Christ, you’re for the high jump this time,” said Pollock, turning away with all my spoils.

  As he spoke we both heard the bell ring for tea. He looked up towards the main school buildings.

  “By the ships straight after tea,” he grunted and stumped up the hill.

  How strange tha
t the phrase “by the ships” has only just come back to me.

  At one end of a corridor, the other end of which led to the headmaster’s study, there were two model battleships mounted in glass cases. A prefect who sent you to see the headmaster always said “By the ships, after lunch …” or “One more squeak from you, and you’ll be outside the ships.” Odd that I didn’t remember those ships earlier on in the telling of the story. I think one of them may have been HMS Hood, but maybe I’m wrong. I am certain too that they had red paint on the funnel which seems unlikely in a royal naval vessel. Perhaps they were cruise liners. Whatever they were, they spelled disaster.

  With rising panic I stumbled up after Pollock screaming at him that I hadn’t, I hadn’t, I hadn’t been to the village shop. I heard only answering echoes of laughter as he disappeared into the school.

  I heard a small voice at my elbow.

  “What’s the matter, Fry? Whatever is the matter?”

  I looked down to see the anxious brown eyes of Bunce blinking up at me.

  I wiped a sleeve across my snot-running nose and tear-stained cheeks. I could not bear it that one who so admired me should see me in such a state.

  As I was wiping that sleeve the idea came into my head fully born and fully armed. The speed of its conception, birth and growth almost took my breath away. I had followed Evans earlier in the afternoon all the way from the electric fence to Cromie’s study without being able to think of any defence to any accusation and now—in deeper trouble by far—a rescue plan had emerged in a second. It was complete in my mind before I had even removed the sleeve from my face.

  As Biggles never tired of telling his comrades, there is always a way. Always. No matter how tight the squeak, and remember, chums, we’ve been in tighter squeaks than this, there is always a way out. Algy, look lively and pass me that rope …

  “Pollock’s just caught me with a load of tuck from the village shop,” I said in a low voice, laden with doom.

  Bunce’s eyes rounded still further. I could tell that the glamour and exoticism of village tuck shop frightened and fascinated him. This was by now at least his second year, I suppose, but somehow, like little Arthur in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he was always functionally the youngest boy in the school. I remember that earlier on this summer term, a master had casually pointed out to him that he had turned up to a PE lesson in white plimsolls instead of black and he had gone redder than a geranium and wept and wobbled for days afterwards. His sixth term at the school, he hadn’t even been close to punishment or the gentlest chastisement, but it was his first ever deviation from the letter of school law and it had upset him deeply.