Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  The most pleasing objects by far to emerge from his stable block laboratories were a line of objects known as Things. Thing was a vast steel cabinet covered with more knobs and switches than you can imagine. It took weeks and weeks for Father and the men to make a single Thing, which was usually destined for a subsidiary of ICI in Mexico, Israel or Turkey where it sat there, Thing-like and Controlled. What it controlled and how it controlled, I have no idea, but Project Thing had taken Father months in the study with slide rules and paper to dream up and then even more months in the drawing office, designing the scores of circuit boards which slotted into Thing like honeycomb frames into a hive.

  While Thing was being made it was all guts: wrapped in miles and miles of cabling and bulging with power supply objects tightly coiled in copper wire that looked like solenoids, Thing had a very vulnerable and naked look to it. When all the wiring was done and the circuit boards had been soldered and inserted down to the last one, Thing’s metal cowling was stove enamelled a wonderful 1930s green and the switches, dials and knobs were added. The last thing to go on was the plate which had Alan Fry Controls Ltd., Booton, Norfolk, England printed upon it and the company logo, which took the form of the letters “f-r-y,” designed by my father to resemble the trace of some pulse of power as shown up on an oscilloscope.

  Meanwhile my mother would have been typing and telephoning away to arrange all the bills of lading, export documents and God knows what other administrative and bureaucratic nightmares that the despatch of a Thing entailed. Sheets and sheets of documentation seemed to be entailed and the sweetest-tempered woman in the world would become, for a week or so, a tiny bit of an old snapdragon. Only the packing of the trunk for school occasioned more drama and crossness from a woman otherwise more cheerful than Pickwick, Pollyanna and Mrs. Tiggywinkle on a sunny day in Happyville.

  Finally, Thing, which was far too heavy to carry and which had been assembled in the largest room in the stable block, which was upstairs, had to be lowered down into the stable yard through a giant trapdoor by a system of chains and pulleys, what I suppose is called block and tackle, a principle I have never understood. The family would gather in pride as Thing descended, green, gleaming, perfect and entirely like something out of Doctor Who. We all wanted to pay our respects and to enjoy the atmosphere of a Clydeside ship launch, but most of all I wanted to watch the most amusing part of the whole operation, the part that preceded the loading on to the lorry and the final farewell. Thing, being nearly always destined for hot countries, had to be protected against the changes in temperature that it would inevitably undergo in transit. In other words, to inhibit condensation, Thing was wrapped in a huge sheet of transparent plastic, which was then heat-sealed until only a tiny hole remained. My father would then solemnly insert into this tiny hole the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner and proceed to suck out all the air.

  The sight of the plastic sheet sucking in its cheeks as it were and snugly pressing itself against Thing’s every declivity and protuberance was greatly impressive, comic and delicious, exactly the reverse of the pleasure you get from watching the stirring, twitching and swelling as a hot-air balloon or an air ship is inflated. That naturally abhorrent phenomenon, the perfect vacuum, could naturally never be achieved by this method, but when the Hoover nozzle was removed and the tiny hole instantly sealed up, Thing looked like the most impressive object in the world and my pride in my father knew no bounds.

  He was and is a simply remarkable man. Many sons are proud of their fathers, and no doubt have reason to be—for there are many remarkable men in the world. For sheer brain-power, will, capability and analytical power however, I have to say, all family loyalty aside, that I have never met anyone who came close to him. I have met men and women who had known more and achieved more, but none with so adaptive and completely powerful a brain. His ability to solve problems—mechanical, mathematical, engineering problems—is boundless, which is to say bounded only by the limits of the universal laws he holds so dear, the laws of Newton and the laws of thermodynamics. The clarity of his mind, the perfectionism and elegance of his abstract mathematical and intellectual modelling and practical design and his capacity for sustained concentration, thought and work stagger me, simply stagger me.

  To grow up under the brooding, saturnine shadow (for in his thirties and forties he brooded greatly) of a man so fiercely endowed with mind power was immensely difficult for all of us. He worked every day, Christmas Day and bank holidays included, for years and years and years. No holidays, no breaks for television, nothing but work. Just occasionally one might hear the sounds of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach or occasionally Scarlatti or Chopin coming from the Broadwood grand piano he had taken apart and rebuilt in the drawing room, but that did not mean relaxation. Music too was something for analysis, deeply emotional analysis often, but analysis founded on a deep knowledge of theory and form.

  A school friend on first catching sight of him exclaimed, “My God—it’s Sherlock Holmes!”

  My heart sank on hearing this, for Sherlock Holmes had long been a passion. I was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London (a membership that was directly to connect with my expulsion from Uppingham) and knew most of the stories almost by heart. I had never realised, or admitted to myself before, that whenever I thought of Holmes, or heard his voice, it was really my father whose voice and image came into my head. The descriptions Watson gives of that infuriatingly cold, precise ratiocinating engine of a brain fuelled by a wholly egocentric passion and fire exactly tallied with my view of my father. Like Holmes, my father would never think of food, creature comforts or society when the working fit was upon him. Like Holmes he had a great musical gift; like Holmes he could be abominably rude to those close to him and charm itself to total strangers; like Holmes he delighted in piquancy and problem solving for their own sakes, never for gain or fame; like Holmes he combined dreamy abstraction with ruthless logic and an infinite capacity for taking pains; like Holmes he was exceptionally tall, strong and gaunt. Damn it, my father even smoked pipes—for years he virtually lived inside a cloud of thick smoke.

  Unlike Holmes my father never went out; unlike Holmes my father never solved life problems for others; unlike Holmes my father never achieved household fame and the respect of popes, princes and prime ministers. Unlike Holmes my father was real. He was my father.

  I have rarely met a man so pig-headedly uninterested in the world of affairs. I was ever a greedy soul and have always loved the creature comforts and symbols of success. It frustrated me to see someone who could have made a massive fortune many times over, whether by designing top-end hi-fis, computer software, commercial gadgetry or industrial plants, stubbornly refuse to sell himself. I admire such a reluctance of course, and am proud of it: huckstering, boastfulness and noisy advertisement are not appealing, but there is an egotism in excess modesty too, and I thought I detected a misanthropy and arrogance in him that drove me to distraction, partly, of course, because it contrasted with my own worship of success, fame, money and status.

  I used my mother as an excuse for resenting my father. I felt she deserved better than to have her life revolve entirely around the demands and dictates of a wilfully unworldly husband. I thought she deserved holidays in the sun, warmth in the winter, the right to accept a few more invitations and the chance to go on shopping trips to London. I have no doubt I was jealous too, jealous of the adoration she had for him and the energy she put into making his life as easy as possible.

  I cannot remember my parents arguing ever. I only recall one occasion when I heard my parents’ voices raised against each other and it terrified the life out of me.

  It was night and I had been in bed for about an hour, when, through three floors of the house, there came to my ears the sound of my father shouting and my mother wailing. I padded fearfully into my brother’s room and shook him awake.

  “Listen!” I hissed.

  We stared at each other in fear and astonishment. This was entirely unpre
cedented. Simply unheard of. Our parents never argued, never shouted at each other. At us, yes. Occasionally. But never at each other. Never, never, never.

  We crept down the back stairs, my brother and I, and listened quakingly for perhaps ten minutes to the sounds that were emerging from my father’s study. He was raging, simply raging while my mother howled and screeched unbearably. There was nothing we could do but tremble and wonder. We edged back up the stairs and talked to each other for a while about what it might mean and then went to our separate rooms to try and sleep.

  The next morning I came fearfully into the kitchen, half-expecting to see my mother hunched over the table in tears.

  “Morning, darling!” she said cheerfully, grinning as usual like a tree frog who is having its toes tickled.

  I waited until Mrs. Riseborough was out of the room before tentatively asking whether everything was all right.

  “All right? What do you mean?”

  “Well, last night. Roger and I … we couldn’t help overhearing.”

  “Overhearing?” She looked genuinely puzzled.

  “You were crying and Daddy was shouting …”

  “Crying …?” A look of complete bewilderment crossed her face and then suddenly she brightened and began to giggle.

  “Crying? I was laughing!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it was the funniest thing …”

  It turned out that the previous night in the study my father had started to hunt about on his desk for a file that he needed.

  “Bloody hell, you put something down for a second and it completely disappears … I mean what is going on?”

  My mother could see from her position on the sofa that he was actually sitting on this file, and for ten minutes my father continued to sit on it, all unaware, throwing papers around, pulling open drawers and getting more and more Basil Fawlty in his ungovernable fury at the thing’s disappearance while my mother became more and more overcome by greater and greater transports of laughter.

  That was what we had heard.

  Not the greatest story in the world I know, but its point lies in the extreme oddity (as I now know it to be) of a married couple who never shouted at each other or had any kind of row—at least never within the hearing of their children. They adore each other, worship and value each other entirely. I’m sure they have been frustrated by each other sometimes, it would only be natural, and I know it upset my mother that for years my relationship with my father was a mess. She would have to bear my sulking adolescent grunts of “I hate Father. I hate him,” just as she would have to hear him telling me how arrogant, shiftless and incapable of thought or application I was.

  When I first heard other children’s parents shouting at each other I wanted to die with embarrassment. I just did not believe such things could be, or that if they were, that they could be tolerated. I still find any sort of confrontation, shouting or facing off unbearable.

  It is possible that the closeness, interdependence and unconditional love each bears for the other may have contributed to whatever fear it was that kept me from partnering anyone for so many years. It always seemed impossible to me that I would ever find anyone with whom I could have a relationship that would live up to that of my parents.

  They fell in love at first sight and knew instantly when they met that they would marry. They had both been students at London University, my mother a history scholar at Westfield College, my father reading physics and running the music society at Imperial. My father was pleased with my mother’s Jewishness, her father adored this brilliant young man and was, I think, especially delighted that my father could speak German, which he had learned in order to read papers on physics, so many of which were published in that language. My grandfather himself was ridiculously multilingual, speaking Hungarian, German, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, Rumanian and English. I have a picture of him as a young man, splendid in his Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer’s uniform, taken just before he went off to face the Serbian guns at the very start of the First World War. He came to England in the 1930s to teach British farmers how to grow sugarbeet, so my mother, the youngest of three girls, was born in London and grew up in Bury St. Edmunds and Salisbury, attending Malvern Girl’s College from a very young age, to all intents and purposes a very English little girl—for the Nazis were about to arrive in Britain at any moment, and my grandfather knew something of what Nazis did to Jews. His name was Neumann, which he changed in England to Newman. His father, my great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew also of course, had lived for a time in Vienna, and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to give you the coat off his back. You can imagine how my blood ran cold when I read this in Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, while reading about the early life of Hitler for my last novel, Making History:

  After their quarrel Hanisch lost sight of Hitler, but he gives a description of Hitler as he knew him in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. He wore an ancient black overcoat, which had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees … Neumann … who had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-Semitism.

  I suppose there were many Hungarian Jews in Vienna in 1910, and I suppose many of them were called Neumann, but one can’t help wondering if it really might be true that one’s great-grandfather might have befriended and kept warm a man who would later decimate a large part of his family and some six million of his people.

  My parents wed secretly: my mother’s scholarship would, for some odd reason, have been forfeit had it been known that she was married while still an undergraduate. Now, after forty-two years together, it still warms my heart when I hear them in another room, this remarkable couple, chattering away as if they’ve just met.

  The house has hardly changed at all. The pumping-up process for water is now simpler than it was, but the kitchen still has only one low tap—all the washing up goes out to a scullery. The Aga has to be riddled every night to shake the ash down and there is still no central heating. People who visit it show wonder at its time-capsule dignity and might even express envy at my good fortune in growing up in such a place.

  I used to think I hated living there, but throughout all my years of rebellion, ostracism and madness I always carried a photograph of the house with me: I have it still, tattered and torn, but the only copy left in the world of an aerial picture taken, I think, around the very time of my life between prep and public school. Maybe I had just started my first term at Uppingham, maybe it was taken just before I left Stouts Hill for the last time, for my brother and I are nowhere to be seen in the picture, unless we were cantering about on the badminton lawn which is hidden from view. I wouldn’t have kept this picture all those years if the house didn’t mean something to me, and I wouldn’t be gulping down tears now, looking at it, if the memories it invoked were impotent and sterile and incapable of touching me deeply.

  It was the house where I grew up.

  It contains my brother’s bedroom, with its peeling William Morris wallpaper; it contains the bedroom I spent most of my life in, lying awake for hours and hours and hours with the self-induced insomnia of adolescence, peeing out of the window into the night air and killing the honeysuckle below because I was too lazy, slobby and sluttish to go downstairs to the lavatory; it contains the bedroom of my sister, with posters of the cricketer Derek Randall still hanging on the wall. It contains the study on whose carpet I stood so many times, facing my father over some new school report, some new disaster, some new affront to authority, some new outrage that might send my mother from the room clutching a handkerchief to her mouth in grief and upset. It contains the same objects and the same memories, and it contains the same two parents who made me from their flesh and whom I adore so much. It is home.

  In the book of Uppingham school rules the first rule is this:

  A BOY’S STUDY IS HIS CASTLE

  The only other fortress of privacy afforded a boy
at Uppingham came in the shape of the tish, a dormitory cubicle that housed his bed, a small table and such private items as might be fitted into the table or under the bed and vice versa. A curtain could be pulled across and then a tish too, became a boy’s castle. One assumes that the word “tish” descends, not from the German for table, but from a contraction of the word “partition,” but applying logic to English slang is never a sound idea. I think we can be fairly sure however, that “ekker,” the word used at Uppingham for games, derived from “exercise.” “Wagger,” or “wagger-pagger-bagger,” which was used to denote “waste-paper basket,” is an example of that strange argot prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s that caused the Prince of Wales to be known as the Pragger-Wagger. Even today, in the giddy world of High Anglicanism in such temples of bells, smells and cotters as St. Mary’s, Bourne Street, SW3, I have heard with my own two ears Holy Communion referred to by pert, campy priests as “haggers-commaggers” and my mother still describes the agony and torture of anything from toothache to an annoying traffic jam as “aggers and torters.”

  The only other jargon to offload at this stage is the name for the prefects, who at Uppingham, as at some other public schools, were called “praepostors,” which happily preposterous name is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “Syncopated form of praepositor.” The OED then cites the following as an example of the word’s usage:

  1887 Athenæum 29 Oct. 569/3 He [Rev. E. Thring] strongly encouraged self-government among the boys, and threw great responsibilities upon the præpostors.

  It is good to know that Thring of the enormous side whiskers, or Dundreary Weepers (buggers’ grips my mother calls them), was a master of the modern art of delegation.

  Eighty-three years after that Athenæum article, a great deal of responsibility was still being thrown upon the præpostors, who were known universally as pollies. There were the house pollies, who had authority only within their Houses, and the school pollies, who had authority everywhere. A school polly could carry an umbrella and wear a boater. With that embarrassingly faux anger that middle class rebels have made a speciality, pollies were called, out of their hearing, “pigs,” as in: “He’s only a house pig, he can’t tell you what to do,” or “Did you hear that Barrington has been made a school pig? Tchuh!” This sort of remark was usually made with the kind of muttered Worker’s Revolutionary Party snarl that public school boys are very good at reproducing, but which ill suits their minor grievances.