Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  What am I saying? I won Third Prize (a grand certificate and a two pound book token) in the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools’ National Art Competition for my portrait entitled An Unforgettable Character. I had misread a pot in the art room which I had thought announced itself to be “Vanishing Fluid” and, in attempting to correct a defect around the eyes of my Unforgettable Character, varnished his features so thoroughly that the work more than lived up to its title. Indeed it is probable that the judges even to this day are unable to forget the lustrous, glittering eyes and glossily menacing brows, beard and spectacles of my subject and that he gleams still in their nightmares like a lacquered Sigmund Freud.

  Now I come to think of it, there was such a thing as a “sub-prefect” at Stouts Hill whose duties were unclear and privileges non-existent. It sounds splendidly Casablanca—“An exit visa may be obtained from the office of the sub-prefect for the usual fee”—but the position I believe came into being merely to offer an opportunity for hopeless cases like myself to put something down on their entrance forms for later life. I think I was also entitled to claim myself to have been 3rd XI Scorer, a role I filled once or twice, but only for Home Matches—Stouts Hill wasn’t going to let me loose on other schools for a minute.

  Not quite expelled then, I lived out the summer holidays, turned thirteen halfway through them and arrived at Uppingham in the September of 1970. Roger had already had a year at Uppingham and was bracing himself with his usual good humour for the arrival, yet again, of his troublesome younger bro.

  In those summer holidays he and I were inseparable; at school we did not expect to be. We had arguments, of course, as brothers will (I remember throwing a dart at him on one occasion: the image memory of it sticking out of his knee sickens me still) but it is extraordinary, looking back, how creatively we managed to fill the holidays in a place so far distant from urban excitements. We were in the same predicament as the Reverend Sydney Smith who, finding himself stuck in the country, wrote to a friend that he could best describe his situation as being “simply miles from the nearest lemon.” Sydney Smith, in case you don’t know him, is well worth discovering; he had a unique brand of at once sophisticated, surreal and good-natured wit: he said, for example, of meeting Daniel Webster that he struck him as “much like a steam engine in trousers” and was overheard telling a woman at a dinner party “Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.” Well, Roger and I were not only simply miles from the nearest lemon, we were simply miles too from the nearest café, the nearest cinema, the nearest toy shop, the nearest bowling alley and the nearest friend. So we had each other. By this time too, we had our sister, Jo, who was six that summer of 1970 and who adored and trusted me implicitly. I told her gravely that I knew how to fly and that when she was seven I would teach her the trick of it. Shortly after her seventh birthday, returned from my first term at Uppingham, she reminded me of this promise. I took her upstairs, sat her high on a window ledge and told her that all she had to do was jump and that my magic would do the rest. After a little thought, she decided not to take me up on the offer. I am glad to say that she never gave the slightest outward show of disappointment or disillusionment in her brother.

  To thirteen- and fifteen-year-old boys however, six-year-old girls are not very much more than toys and Jo spent most of her time in the company of the great Nanny Riseborough, who had served in our house, for the previous owners, since she was a small girl.

  Lest the reader run away with too Bridesheady a picture of my childhood, I had better describe life in Norfolk just a little. The house where I grew up, and where my parents live to this day is big certainly, but then it had to be big, for my father had needed somewhere with space ever since he had settled against an academic career, discovered that life in mainstream industry did not suit him and decided to set up on his own. While we had lived in Chesham we had spent many days meandering around England looking for suitable properties with plenty of outhousery. I recall endless drives to huge, unsaleable houses with overgrown gardens. My mother would gulp at the kitchens and public rooms, my father frown and shake his head at the inadequacy of the outhouses. Roger and I would romp about in the unweeded kitchen gardens, bored to distraction.

  One of my grandfather’s employees, a sugar worker, happened one day upon a house for sale in the tiny Norfolk village of Booton. It was an imposing Victorian mansion, with an enormous stable block and an absurd quantity of other outhouses, as well as an attached cottage the size of a substantial townhouse. It boasted, inexplicably, five outside lavatories as well as a splendid kitchen garden that offered asparagus beds, an apple orchard, a tennis court, a badminton lawn, a pigsty, a paddock, hen coops, sinister rhubarb patches and a summer house. It was the size and condition of the stable block that clinched the deal. This could be Father’s laboratory. There was room for as many lathes, oscilloscopes and things that go beep, tweet, whoop and boing as the maddest boffin could hope for.

  In those days it was well serviced too. Mrs. Riseborough cooked and nannied Jo. She had sisters-in-law and friends from the village of Cawston who scrubbed and cleaned and lit the fires in winter. The Tubby brothers gardened, but they eventually left to be replaced by Mr. Godfrey, who ran the garden for many years and who delighted my brother and me by talking to himself a great deal in an endless stream of complaint about how the soil was “a bitch” whenever it was cold. Given that he was an old man who consumed a large quantity of hand-rolled cigarettes every day, no doubt the frosty earth was indeed a bitch and I hate the picture of us giggling at him. It was quite a garden to run, fully Victorian and designed to provide a large household with fruit and vegetables the year round. The outhouses could store apples, pears and potatoes throughout the winter and Mrs. Riseborough made jams, pickles and jellies from the plums, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, damsons, gooseberries, blackberries, red currants and black currants that the garden bore. Always providing my mother didn’t get to them first, that is. My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.

  I am not so very old you know, but this does seem another life: a life that moved with the rhythm of the seasons, a life that had essentially remained unaltered for decades. Everything was delivered: fish came on Wednesdays (not being Catholics we had no interest in reserving it for Fridays), delivered by horse and cart. It is ridiculous but true, I am really not that old, but to the house the fishman came, every week, his horse clopping along like a gypsy caravan. Bread was delivered too, three times a week I think. On Wednesday mornings my mother would call up Riches of Reepham and order the groceries, which were delivered in a van by Mr. Neale, who greeted me, as all Norfolk people greet young boys, with a “Hello there, young man!” and a squeeze to the cheeks. Milk came from a local dairy in waxed cartons which, after use, made good fire kindling that hissed, spat and crackled. The yellowest sweatingest butter we had too, neatly patterned on all sides with the marks left by the patting paddles. Meat came by van from Tuddenhams’ of Cawston, it being understood somehow in the community that the Cawston butcher was superior to the Reepham. The coal merchant came every month or so and a mobile library stopped by the house once a week.

  Fruit and vegetables (oranges, lemons and bananas excepted) came from the garden.

  “Never eat asparagus after Ascot,” was one of my mother’s rules.

  An asparagus bed needs to go to seed in late June, so this seems a sensible idea. Somewhat inconsistently however, my mother was forever raiding the beds for their exquisite ferns which look very well in flower arrangements. I remember that asparagus also needed huge quantities of salt in the autumn. Mr. Godfrey (helped by me sometimes) would empty sack after sack of ICI salt on each raised bed until they twinkled and glittered as if struck by an early rime frost.

  The kitchen garden itself had been divided up by its Victorian makers using row upon row of little gravel pathway
s, lined with box hedging, “a bitch to keep tidy” as poor Mr. Godfrey liked to remind me, my brother or any rabbits or jackdaws that might be listening.

  Mr. Godfrey lodged with a certain Mrs. Blake and from time to time he would ask permission to take excess vegetables from our garden for their supper table. One day he startled Cawston by making an honest woman of her, but even after their marriage he continued to refer to her as Mrs. Blake. Norfolk people are slow to change. I remember an old couple who used to live in a small cottage with an outside lavatory. They moved, many years ago, to a smart new council house in which all modern conveniences were installed. Even today however, if you visit them and one of them wants to go to the loo they will startle onlookers by saying, as they climb the stairs, “I’m just going down the garden …”

  At the back of our garden was a red wooden pigsty, sadly unused in our day, and behind that a paddock where for a time we kept a huge flock of geese, which were insupportably bad tempered, loud and greedy, eating everything but stinging nettles, which gave the paddock a rather scrappy and tattered look.

  Mrs. Riseborough cooked lunch every day and cooked in a way that few people are capable of now. I don’t suppose she had ever seen or looked at a cookery book, a food mixer or a freezer cabinet in her life. She made egg custards, apple pies, rhubarb crumbles, steak and kidney puddings, marrow stuffed with mincemeat, cauliflower and macaroni cheeses and all manner of good English pies, tarts and flans. Roger liked treacle tart with cornflakes on top, I liked them without, so each Thursday we would alternate. Mrs. Riseborough taught me how to make a rose for the centre of a pie by taking a layer of pastry and laying it on my thumb and then adding another layer at forty-five degrees to the first and so on, and then cutting them over the thumb gently with a knife. In August or September she made her mincemeat and the Christmas puddings, five or six of them in huge bowls. The pudding mixture included carrots and Mackeson Cream Stout. The mincemeat would then be steeped in brandy and stored for the mince pies which were made later.

  Mrs. Riseborough’s idea of a salad would be laughed at now, with its English kitchen garden produce of beetroot, radishes, Tom Thumb and butterheart lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber, topped with hardboiled egg and a sprig of parsley, not a rocket, radicchio, frisée lettuce or coriander leaf in sight: I could never get enough of it, so long as there was enough Heinz Salad Cream to go around.

  She did have some strange ideas, however. She was firmly convinced that the addition of a lump of coal to a bowlful of lettuce in water would keep the lettuce crisp, and from time to time she believed that she had too much blood and needed a nosebleed. Again, who knows? I understand leeches have made a comeback in some hospitals, maybe cupping will return too.

  She worked in the kitchen, which had no sink and one very low tap, hardly a foot from floor level. We were not on the water mains in Booton; each day the procedure of “pumping up” had to be gone through. There were two wells, one with hard drinking water from the water table, the other a rainwater collection cistern providing water for washing and bathing. The low tap in the kitchen was the only drinking water tap in the house. Guests, especially Londoners, always commented on the beautiful softness of the water when they bathed—it lathered beautifully and never left the scumline that lime-loaded London water does—but most of them wondered how we could go through the nonsense of daily pumping and why in winter it was always colder inside the house than outside.

  The pump house had been fitted with an electrically driven motor; I wouldn’t want you to picture Roger and me laboring away like medieval parishioners on the village green. The motor drove enormous wheels which were connected by great belts that slapped away as the pump worked. When we had first arrived at Booton a health inspector had taken a sample of water for analysis (the bottom of the holding tank had been alive with bright red nematodes). Some months later a report came back saying that the water could be consumed, but not by infants under a year old. Since Jo had been drinking nothing else for months, it was decided to ignore such nonsense.

  As the house had been untouched since it was built, its offices and amenities were (and still are) Victorian, a series of larders, game larders, sculleries, outer sculleries and something called a china pantry surrounded the kitchen. The lavatories were gigantic wooden affairs with chains that said “pull” on them and washbasins that you tipped on a swivel to empty. The ironing was done by a gigantic electric linen press, all levers topped with Bakelite knobs. A great box made by Mann Egerton’s of Norwich, before they decided there was more money in selling Rolls-Royce’s I suppose, high on a wall in the back passage shook a tin star to indicate in which room a bell had been rung, and next to it hung the thickened blue and red sally of a bell rope, to be pulled to summon us children from the garden for lunch or tea, or for a ticking off.

  In the afternoons, after the silent lunch (Father frowning at my inability to hold a fork properly or at the inanity of some Guinness Record I had solemnly announced), Nanny Riseborough would take Jo for a walk, first in her pram, then by pushchair, until finally they went on foot together. Sometimes Jemina the Siamese cat and I would accompany; according to season we would return with punnet upon punnet of blackberries or trug upon trug of daffodils, to which it transpired, after one afternoon’s heavy picking, I was allergic. I had to be rushed to the nearby town of Aylsham (nearby being seven miles away) to receive an adrenaline shot from the doctor. Only champagne and a beer brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium have ever given me worse attacks.

  The stable block, where my father worked, was called “over the Way.” “Is Daddy over the way?” became the most urgent question of the day. If he was, then it meant we could muck about inside, slide down banisters, play games, relax and even, if we were daring, watch television.

  If Daddy was not over the way, it meant he was in his study, in which case we trod gingerly about the house as though on eggshells. The most terrible thing was to believe he was over the way and then discover that you had not heard him returning. In the middle of some game we would hear the telltale sound of his pipe being banged down into an ashtray to dislodge the plug and dottle and realise that, horror of horrors, Daddy was In. Instantly, fun, freedom and relaxation turned into terrified silence. The best answer was to steal from the house and find something to do in the garden.

  Sometimes there were magical days when he had to leave Booton entirely and drive to Norwich or even as far away as Yorkshire. If it was a weekday, this meant we could visit the men over the way, the men who worked for Father in the stable block. They would look up from their soldering irons, wink and give a cheerful “Hello there, young man” when we came in and we would twiddle with the knobs on the oscilloscopes and press the inviting green buttons on the machines.

  At various times my father manufactured a whole range of different items. He had invented an object called an Arc Rule, which was actually demonstrated to my enormous excitement on Tom-Tom, the BBC’s predecessor to Tomorrow’s World. At one stage most of the stable block was given over to the manufacture of electric Sellotape dispensers, cheerfully assembled by women from the surrounding villages who listened to Radio 2 when the Boss wasn’t about. On another occasion Father helped the Ford Motor Company with electronic governing systems for their automatic transmissions and the place was littered with bits of Capri. There were objects made throughout the 1970s called “thyristor controls” and I have no idea what they did, but they were cleverly sealed in Araldite so that no one who bought them could find out how they worked without smashing them to pieces.

  Later, Father designed and built the most entertaining contraption the world has ever seen, a machine for chugging out Tack-Strip, something the furniture industry liked to have about the place. The machinery resembled the mongrel love child of a cinema projector, a steam hammer and a Toblerone production line, all put together on a day when Heath Robinson had thought it might be fun to try hallucinogenic mushrooms for breakfast. I could watch Tacky going for hours and hours; I w
ould follow, in a trance, the thousands and thousands of little metallic blue tacks as they shuffled around in a great vibrating bowl and then scuttled like soldier ants down a chute that blasted them with an air-compressed hammer at a rate of six or seven a second into a moving strip of thick cardboard that then folded itself over and continued its journey towards the packing box. The boxes were stacked on to pallets and a small electric forklift truck hummed about tidying up. The fights between my brother and me, when Father was away, to be the one to drive the forklift truck were harrowing to behold.

  My father was inevitably thought of in terms of awe by some local people who referred to him as the Mad Inventor. When strange noises came from the stable block at three in the morning, I half expected to see a stolid posse of villagers surround the house, flaming torches in hand, demanding to know with what strange forces he be meddling. Years would pass without the villagers ever seeing him, which only added to his mystique. If my mother was not around to order the last detail of his life, as a result of a bout of flu for example, my father might be forced to drive two miles into the village of Reepham to stock up on tins of pipe tobacco. The sight of him helplessly proffering a palmful of coins to the tobacconist like a frightened foreigner was most extraordinary. I don’t suppose to this day he could describe a twenty-pence piece or tell you which British heroes were on the back of which currency notes. I mustn’t exaggerate: he managed to attend British Legion and Conservative Party meetings (in the 1960s and 1970s before the Conservative Party went mad), sail every now and then across the North Sea to Holland with a nautical friend and more recently he served as an exceptionally committed and hard-working governor of Reepham High School. He was never entirely Professor Caractacus Potts, but then he was never the beaming fellow from the Daddy’s Sauce label either.