Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  “Golly,” he said. “Didn’t you get the whack last week for …?”

  “Exactly,” I said, interrupting. The thing was to keep the little chap off balance. “And Cromie said if I was caught again I would be expelled.”

  “Expelled?” Bunce breathed the word in a terrified whisper as though it were nitroglycerine that might explode if handled too roughly.

  I nodded tragically. “I don’t know what my mother and father would do if I were expelled,” I said, sniffing a little sniff.

  “But why?”

  “Why? Because it would upset them so much, of course!” I said, nettled by such denseness.

  “No, I mean why did you go to the village shop again if you knew you would get expelled?”

  Well, I mean really. Some people.

  “It’s … it’s hard to explain,” I said. “The thing is, never mind why, there’s just no way out, that’s the point. Pollock’s confiscated the evidence and he’s going to …” My voice trailed off in sudden wonderment as an idea seemed to catch hold.

  “Unless, that is, unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “No, no … it’s asking too much,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Unless what?” squeaked Bunce again.

  “It’s no good, I’d better face it. I’m done for.”

  “Unless what?” Bunce almost stamped the ground in his desperation to be told.

  “Well … I was thinking that if I could say that I hadn’t been to the village shop but that I had got the tuck from someone else …”

  I let the thought hang in the air.

  “You mean,” said Bunce, “that if a boy said that he was the one who had been to the village shop not you then you wouldn’t be the one who had been and you wouldn’t be expelled?”

  I didn’t bother to follow the literal meaning of that peculiar sentence but assumed he was along the right lines and nodded vigorously. “Trouble is,” I said grimly, “who on earth would do that for me?”

  I watched, with the detached and curious interest of the truly evil, as Bunce blinked, bit his lip, swallowed, bit his lip and blinked again.

  “I would,” he said at long last.

  “Oh, no!” I protested. “I couldn’t possibly ask you. I mean you’re far too …”

  “Far too what?”

  “Well … I mean, everyone knows you’re a bit of a … you know …”

  I allowed myself to stumble, too tactful to finish the thought.

  Bunce’s face grew dark. “A bit of a what?” he said, in something close to a growl.

  “Well,” I said gently, “a bit of a goody-goody.”

  He flushed and looked at the ground. I may just as well have charged him with complicity in the holocaust.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the idiot. I don’t know what it is with me. I just can’t help being bad.”

  He looked up at me, suddenly and for the first time annoyed with himself because he just couldn’t help being good. Which is what I had wanted him to feel. Christ, I’m smart, I said to myself. Perhaps this is what is meant by “approaching genius.” Do I know how to play a person like a fish, or do I not …

  I could see that Bunce was coming to an independent decision, or rather that he believed he was coming to an independent decision.

  “What’s got to happen,” Bunce said, in a voice firm with resolution, “is that you’ve got to tell Mr. Cromie that it was me who went to the village shop. Me not you.”

  “Oh but, Bunce …”

  “No. That’s what you’ve got to do. Now come on, or we’ll be punished for being late for tea as well.”

  “Good Christ, Fry!” Cromie yelled, pacing up and down the study like a caged Tasmanian devil. “Not an hour after I congratulate you on your nerve than you’re back here proving to me that it’s not nerve, it’s cheek, it’s rudeness, it’s bloody insolence!”

  I stood on the carpet, biding my time.

  “Did I, or did I not, boy, warn you last time that if you dared so much as to smell that blasted shop again I would have your guts for garters? Well?”

  “But, sir …”

  “Answer me, damn you! Did I, or did I not?”

  “But, sir, I haven’t been to the village shop.”

  “What?” Cromie stopped mid-stride. “Are you trying to tell me …” He gestured towards the bags of confiscated sweets on his desk. It simply amazed me that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind to check his own stash in the secret drawer. Maybe he had forgotten all about it.

  “No, sir. I was eating those, but …”

  “But what? You picked them off a tree? You fished them out of the lake? I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

  I wasn’t born yesterday. Pull the other one. Have your guts for garters. Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Pull your socks up. Buck up your ideas.

  I wonder if schoolmasters still talk like that.

  “No, sir, it’s just that I didn’t go to the village shop.”

  “What do you mean?” Cromie almost clawed the air in his frustration. “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Well, sir, what I say, sir.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that someone else gave you those sweets?”

  I nodded. At last he understood.

  “And who, may I ask, is this charitable person, this extraordinary philanthropist, who visits the village shop just so that he might bestow sweets on his friends like some benevolent lord of the manor distributing largess to his villeins? Hm? Who might this person be?”

  “I … I don’t like to sneak, sir …”

  “Ho, no. Ho no you don’t.” Cromie wasn’t buying that one. “If you don’t want your promised six strokes, then you had better tell me and tell me this minute.”

  My lower lip wobbled as the betrayal was wrung from me. “Well, sir. It was Bunce, sir.”

  I do not believe I have ever seen a man more surprised. Cromie’s eyebrows shot up to the ceiling and his lips went instantly white.

  “Did you just say Bunce?” he asked in a hoarse whisper of disbelief.

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Bunce as in Bunce?”

  I nodded.

  Cromie stared at me, eyeball to eyeball for about five seconds as if trying to pierce through to the very back of my soul. He shook his head, strode past me, flung open the door and yelled in a voice that thundered like Krakatoa, “Bunce! Bunce! Somebody find me Bunce!”

  “Oh dear,” one of the parrots remarked, kicking the husk of a nut out of its cage. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

  I waited, standing my ground as I listened to the cries for Bunce echo around the school like calls for courtroom witnesses.

  During tea I had looked across at Bunce’s table from time to time. He had been listlessly pushing fried bread into his mouth like a condemned man who has chosen the wrong last breakfast. When he had looked up and happened to catch my eye, his cheeks had blazed scarlet but his head had nodded emphatically up and down and his mouth had formed the word “Yes.” I had no doubts about my Bunce. Bunce was brave and Bunce was true.

  Within three minutes Bunce was beside me on the carpet in Cromie’s study, his hands behind his back, his mouth set in a firm line, but his legs wobbling hopelessly in their shorts.

  “Bunce,” said Cromie, sweetly, “Fry tells me that …”

  This was as far as he managed to get.

  The dam burst and the torrent filled the room.

  “Sir, it’s true, sir. I went to the village shop, sir. I went. I did. I did go there. Fry went. I didn’t. I mean, I went, Fry didn’t. I went to the village shop, not Fry. I got the sweets for him. He didn’t buy any. It was me. I bought them all. I went to the village shop. I went to the village shop. I did …”

  All this came at a pace that made Cromie blink with astonishment. It ended in a howling cyclone of weeping that embarrassed us all.

  “Fry, get out,” said Cromie.

  “Sir, does that mean …?”
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  “Just go. Wait outside. I shall call for you later.”

  As I closed the door I heard Bunce’s voice squeaking out the words, “It is true, sir. Every word. I went to the village shop and I’m so sorry, sir, I shan’t ever again …”

  There were too many people milling about to allow me to stay near and eavesdrop. The great cry for Bunce had fascinated the school.

  “What’s up, Fry?” everyone wanted to know.

  I shrugged my shoulders as if I didn’t care and walked to the end of the corridor down towards the ships.

  Higher up the wall, above the Hood and the Dreadnought, or the Invincible and the Repulse or whatever they were, were wooden panels where the gilt names of scholars and other great achievers had been painted. I stood and looked at them. Le Poidevin, Winship, Mallett, de Vere, Hodge, Martineau and Hazell. I wondered for a brief second if my name would ever be up there, but dismissed the idea at once. I knew that it would never be. This was a list of the names of those who had joined in. They had gone on from being captains of rugger and captains of cricket to being captains of school and captains of industry. I wondered if, in a phrase that Major Dobson loved, they had also become Masters of their Fate and Captains of their Soul.

  “Are you a Major of your Soul then, sir, and is that better than being a Captain of your Soul?” I remember I had asked him this once when he had read that Henley poem to us and he had smiled cheerily at the question. I had loved Major Dobson because he had been a good teacher and because, in that strange and inappropriate way that children have, I had felt sorry for him. I think my mother had taken me to see a production of Rattigan’s Separate Tables at the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich when I was quite young, and since then I had always associated majors with disappointment, regret and, that awful phrase, “passed over.”

  “Not bad for a passed-over major …” Colonel Ross says to Major Dolby in The Ipcress File.

  In fact, I now know, Major Dobson had been captured by the Germans with the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. He then escaped and fought throughout the war right up through Sicily and Italy. True to the old cliché, he never talked about it. No more than did Mr. Bruce, who had spent the war years in a Japanese internment camp and taught History and Divinity with the panache and brio of an ancient fabulist. Being fiercely Scottish, the history he taught with such passion was of William Wallace, the Montrose Rebellion and the Jacobite Wars of 1715 and 1745. I have special reason to bless Jim Bruce, as you will discover later.

  I discovered these and other biographical details only two weeks ago when Ant Cromie kindly sent me a list of answers to a cartload of questions about Stouts Hill. Charles Knight, who taught me Latin and Greek and looked like Crippen the murderer but was the kindest and gentlest man who ever taught me, a man who loved to teach, had no interest in discipline or punishment whatsoever, and took immense pride in my taking the school’s Senior Greek Prize when I was twelve (I have it still, the collected works of John Keats)—he fought in the desert and in Italy too. I remember so clearly history lessons that involved the war, I remember its universal fascination to all of us, for all that it had ended twelve or thirteen years before we were born. Almost every boy in the school could identify the silhouette of a Dornier and a Heinkel and draw Hurricanes, Spitfires and Panzer tanks. Yet not once do I remember a single master referring to war as a personal experience. I would have bombarded, strafed and sniped them with questions, had I known. It puzzles me still, this silence of old soldiers.

  Looking up at the names of the old boys always made me think of the war. Although the school had only been founded in 1935, those names above the ships looked like the names of the war dead, they shared that same melancholy permanence. A contemporary school roll, however outré or grand the names, always sounds perky and chipper; the school roll of a generation ago has the sombre muffled note of a funeral bell.

  I had not been staring up at le Poidevin and Winship and Mallett for long before I saw, reflected in the glass case of the ships, the study door open at the end of the corridor. I turned.

  Cromie stood in the doorway and beckoned with a single curling finger. I walked down the corridor jauntily.

  Somehow, I knew the game was up. I think too that I knew that it was right that it was up. Like a scared mutt darting out from between his master’s legs, Bunce shot from the study and rocketed down the corridor towards me. I caught the rolling whites of his eyes as he passed and thought I heard a panted word, which may have been “Sorry.”

  As I approached Cromie and the open study door he turned to the six or seven boys who were hanging around, pretending to talk to the parrots and examine the pictures on the walls.

  “What are you lot doing here?” he yelled. “Nothing better to do? Want some extra work?”

  They fled in instant silent panic.

  Now there was only me in the corridor, walking towards Cromie, who was framed against the doorway, his outline dark against the window at the back of his study. The corridor seemed to be getting longer and longer, as in some truth-drug-induced hallucination scene in The Avengers or Man in a Suitcase. Still his finger seemed to beckon, still every step that I took seemed to take me further from him.

  When the door did close behind us the room was deadly quiet and the sounds of the school could not be heard. Even the parrots and the mynah bird had fallen into silence.

  Cromie turned towards the window where the shutters were. The shutters that housed the canes.

  “Of course you know,” said Cromie with a sigh, “that I am going to beat you, don’t you, Fry?”

  I nodded and licked my lips.

  “I would just like to believe,” he went on, “that you know why.”

  I nodded again.

  “To go to the village shop is one thing. To send a boy like Bunce to go in your place is quite another. Let us not fool ourselves. Bunce would never have gone unless at your bidding. If you can see how cowardly that is, how vile and low and cowardly, then perhaps there is a scintilla of hope for you.”

  That was the first time, I remember, that I ever heard the word “scintilla.” It is funny how the exact meaning of a new word can be so precisely understood in all its connotations, just from its first hearing.

  “Eight strokes, I think,” said Cromie. “The most I have ever given. I hope never to have to give so many again.”

  Bunce never forgave himself, in all the time I knew him, for letting me down. He remained convinced that somehow he could have played it better. He should have swaggered, acted the part of the real, wicked, dyed-in-the-wool village shopper. I wanted to hug him for his sweetness. Just a great hug to reward such goodness of nature.

  I wanted to hug myself too.

  I wanted to hug myself for fooling Cromie.

  He still didn’t get it. Still didn’t know the real truth. I had stolen his sweets, stolen money from his pupils and verbally tortured a fine child into lying for me. And all I had been beaten for was the schoolmasterly crime of being a “bad influence.”

  The boys of Cundall Manor School loved me to tell them that story when I was a schoolmaster in the late 1970s. I didn’t paint myself in quite the terrible colours I should have done, I left out the parts involving real theft, but otherwise I told it as it was and they loved it.

  “Tell it again, sir. The story of you and Bunce … go on, sir!”

  And I would light my pipe and tell them.

  I look back now at Stouts Hill, closed during my first term at Cambridge, and I shake my head at the person I was. The child was more malevolent, I think, than the adolescent, because at least the adolescent had love as an excuse. All the child wanted was to tear at sweets with his teeth.

  It never quite managed to move with the times, Stouts Hill. Ant Cromie was ambitious and built a fine theatre. But he never liked the idea of too many day boys. The fees were high, the uniform remained fabulously classy and meanwhile the parents became less interested in ponies and Greek and more interested in Common Entrance
results and money. They had voted Mrs. Thatcher in and they voted out Cloud the pony and the boathouse and the lake and the old majors and commanders. On my bookshelf I still have a copy of Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches, lent to me by Paddy Angus’s husband, Ian. I really must send it back to him some time. Fitzroy Maclean is dead now and so is Stouts Hill.

  I wonder what those who have used it as a time-share facility make of the place. I wonder if I left any guilt and shame in the air? I wonder if Bunce’s grief at his own goodness is soaked into the walls?

  I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

  FALLING IN

  I

  Uppingham School was founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, but like most public schools did nothing but doze lazily where it was, in the cute little county of Rutland, deep in prime hunting country, until the nineteenth century, when a great pioneering headmaster, as great pioneering headmasters will, kicked it up the backside and into a brief blaze of glory.

  Uppingham’s great pioneering headmaster was Edward Thring and one must suppose he had some connection with Gabbitas and Thring, the scholastic agency. Certainly Edward Thring founded the Headmasters’ Conference, the public schools’ defining body. Even today, if you are not a member of the HMC you are not a public school, merely an Independent.

  Thring believed, like all Victorian pioneering headmasters, in simply enormous side whiskers and in the Whole Boy. Uppingham School, under his command, was the first public school in Britain to build a swimming pool. Thring encouraged the development of carpentry, woodwork, pottery, printing and crafts. He believed that every child had a talent and that it was the duty of the school to find it. If a boy was a duffer at Latin, Greek or the Mathematics, Thring argued, then something else must be found at which he could excel, for Every Boy Is Good at Something. Edward Thring had wider and more substantial sideburns by far than Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, but Uppingham had no Webb Ellis to invent a new field game and no Thomas Hughes to invent a new literary genre, and thus, despite the staggering impressiveness of Thring’s whiskers, which flew from his cheeks like banners of flame, Uppingham never quite attained Rugby’s heights of fame and glory and throughout the passage of the twentieth century it slowly floated down to its current middle level of middle class, middle-brow, middle-England middledom.