Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  All these things I would get to know later of course. For the time being I had passed my fag test and could find my way around. That was what mattered.

  Peter Pattrick was pleased as punch, and punched me pleasedly and proudly on the arm to prove it. Being very well off (he was one of those boys I envied, who seemed endlessly to be in receipt of jaw-droppingly large cheques through the post connected with mysterious trust funds and shares, as if life for him were a continually successful game of Monopoly and the Community Chest eternally benign—I have a dim memory of getting myself, years later, hopelessly into debt with him) Pattrick could afford to stand me just about the biggest blow-out the Lower Buttery had ever seen. Unfortunately he ordered for me, amongst the eggs, bacon and sausages, a huge quantity of chips. Unlike almost everyone else I have ever known, I am not drawn by the appeal of chips and my heart sank as I saw that he was going to watch me eat my way through this heaping plateful down to the last greasy atom.

  It is on occasions like this where years of dorkily studying books on magic come in really useful. From the earliest days of Booton’s visiting mobile library I had fallen hungrily on any magic book I could find on its shelves. My “chops,” as magicians call technique, are not of the first order, it takes the kind of practice a concert musician is prepared to put into his music to perform just the standard pass with a pack of cards, but I can misdirect very well. Every now and then, without his knowing it, I would get Pattrick to look in a particular direction, gesturing with my fork towards a boy who had come in and asking his name for example, while with my other hand I would secretly grab a handful of chips and drop them on to a napkin in my lap.

  Magic, in the form of close-up sleight of hand in particular, is an art form I venerate, but it must be confessed that almost every technique in it was invented primarily for some venal purpose. Almost all of the palms, passes, jogs, steals, glides, culls, crimps, undercuts and fakes that form the repertory basis of playing-card magic, for example, were devised by riverboat gamblers in the nineteenth century in order, to put it baldly, to cheat, swindle and steal. These techniques can be found in the masterwork on the subject, Expert Card Technique, by Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue, published still, I hope, by Faber and Faber. I suppose those who do not like or approve of magic sense firstly that magicians are the kind of disreputable or vengefully nebbish outsiders who relish putting one over on others and secondly that they themselves, as the victims of a trick, are not quite confident enough in themselves to take it laughingly. They are the kind who tug violently at the magician’s sleeves halfway through a performance or say, with snorting contempt, that it is, after all, only a bloody trick.

  I suppose, and it grieves me to say it, that there was a connection between my love of magic and my stealing. I wouldn’t want you to argue backwards from that and say that any amateur of magic, from Orson Welles to David Mamet, is necessarily a potential thief, but in my case I fear it was true. The techniques of magic made me an excellent thief, I could sell a theft, I could patter a theft. Fortunately—in the last resort fortunately—the showman in me, as far as theft was concerned, always worked against the sly in me and I was usually found out, aces of spades raining from my grasped sleeve …

  Pattrick, anyway, hadn’t the least clue what I was up to. I got through every forkful of my gigantic feast, having transferred the napkinfuls of chips to another table at an opportune moment.

  I was in. I had passed the test and was now an entity.

  Maternal grandfather, Austro-Hungarian cavalry, 1914

  Same grandfather, Austro-Hungarian-English grandson, pudding-basin hair, sandals by StartRite of England

  Harnessed, strapped, restrained: Aged One

  With mother, garden of Sherwood House, summer 1958

  Second birthday party surrounded by friends and admirers

  Admiring my brother’s lederhosen, Sherwood House, 1959

  Aged Four: before the onset of the crippling modesty described passim

  Pride in my brother’s first day at Chesham Prep

  With brother (in Stouts Hill uniform) alarming a primate

  Sitting on trunk with brother and new sister, awaiting despatch to prep school, 1965

  Much travelled photograph of the house at Booton

  Booton Church: same architect, more extravagant style thoughts

  Healthiness: a picture of everything I was not

  With brother and sister, outside the Tack House

  Catalogue of specimen charges from Swindon Magistrates’ Court, 1975

  The prep-school master, summer term Cundall Manor School — second year of probation

  Playing chess with Hugh Laurie: my rooms at Cambridge, 1980

  3

  The first year at Uppingham passed more or less uneventfully for me. I found the work easy. The maths and the science I simply didn’t attempt, which made it easier still. I had decided years ago that I had a “maths block” and it infuriated me that this condition was not as properly recognised as dyslexia, for example, which was just beginning to be acknowledged as a syndrome or accepted condition. In fact I don’t have the numeral equivalent of dyslexia, if there really is such a thing; it was all, I fear, to do with my father. Anything at which he excelled I seemed to go out of my way to be not just bad at, but quite staggeringly and impressively awful at. Not just maths and science therefore, but music too. The combination of my singing hang-ups and my father’s talent made sure that music and I were never going to be public friends. Hemuss at Stouts Hill had written to my parents and begged to be excused the nerve-fraying task of teaching me the piano. At Uppingham I elected, Christ knows why, to learn the cello, which was taught by a rather sexy and stylish woman called Hillary Unna, whom I always think of whenever I see that impeccable screen goddess Patricia Neal. Hillary Unna liked me (I think) and I shall never forget that she said to me in a husky, vampy voice at our first meeting, “Well, here’s a lissom one …” At that time, and at that age, such a compliment to a boy so physically unsure made me glow for weeks. “Lissom,” what a kind word to give to a gangling youth. I was thin in those days of course, more than thin I was skinny and growing upwards at a frightening speed, but I believed myself to be awkward and physically uncoordinated, in fact the unpleasant word “unco” was always hooted at me whenever I dropped a ball or tripped over. There’s no point beating about the bush, I had Lord Nelson’s hand-eye coordination and the grace of a Meccano giraffe.

  Privately, the music school was my favourite place. There were double-doored practice rooms where one could sit at the piano and hammer furiously away like Beethoven in his last years of deafness. For hours I used to stamp out the descending chords and rising arpeggios that opened Grieg’s piano concerto fancying myself on the stage of the Wigmore Hall. There was a record library there too, where I locked myself in, screaming and roaring with pleasure as I wildly and doubtless unrhythmically conducted Beethoven’s Egmont and the overtures of Rossini—which to this day I still secretly place above the deeper artistic claims of Bach and Bruckner. I am still unable to smell the peculiar smell of vinyl records, dusty amplifiers and antistatic cleaning cloths without being transported back to that room, with its blackboard of ruled staves and its stacked jumble of music stands and chairs; back to that overwhelming surge of rapturous, tumultuous joy and the inexpressibly passionate deluge of excitement that flooded through me when the music bellowed from that one single Leak speaker. I could spend thousands now on the highest-end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.

  Amongst the boys of Fircroft there were the cool and the uncool. This was not, after all, Edwardian England, not a world of “May God forgive you, Blandford-Cresswell, for I’m sure I shan’t,” or “I say, that’s beastly talk, Devenish,” or “Cave, you fellows, here comes old Chiggers.” This was 1970 and hippiedom and f
olk rock were making their sluggish, druggy moves.

  In my first week Rick Carmichael (way cool) stopped me in the corridor and said, “You’re Roger Fry’s brother aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, could you take a message for me?”

  I nodded again.

  “See that bloke over there?” Carmichael pointed down the corridor towards a boy with dangerously long hair, hair that nearly reached his collar, hair at which this boy pulled, stroked and twiddled, thoughtfully, lovingly and dreamily as he leaned against a wall.

  “Yes,” I said. “I see him.”

  “Well, his name is Guy Caswell and I want you to say this to him. ‘Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.’ Got that?”

  “Sorry?” I had heard Captain Beefheart as Captain “Bee-fart” and thought this might be some terrible trick to get me into trouble.

  “It’s not difficult. ‘Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.’ Okay?”

  “All right, Carmichael.” I gulped slightly and moved down the corridor, repeating the strange mantra to myself over and over again under my breath. “Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.” It was utterly meaningless to me. May as well have been Polish.

  I reached the boy with the long hair and coughed tentatively.

  “Excuse me …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you Caswell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Er, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.”

  “What?” Caswell let his left hand fall from its ministrations to the glossy locks.

  Oh Christ, surely I hadn’t got it wrong? Maybe he had misheard.

  “Captain Beefheart,” I said with slow and deliberate emphasis, “is better than Edgar Broughton.”

  “Oh yeah? And what the fuck do you know about it?” snarled Caswell, straightening himself up and starting towards me.

  I hared off down the corridor as fast as I could go, past Carmichael, who was doubled up with laughter, and out into the quad, not stopping until I reached the back of the fives courts, panting and terrified.

  After tea, as I was making my way towards the study I shared with Whitwell, a new boy in my intake, there came a tap on my shoulder.

  “Hey, Fry …” It was Caswell. “No, no. It’s okay,” he said as he saw the fear leap into my eyes. “It was Rick, right? It was Carmichael. He told you to say that.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. Go to Carmichael’s study and tell him that the Incredible String Band is better than Jethro Tull.”

  Oh Lord, what had I got myself into here?

  “The Amazing String Band is …”

  “Incredible, yeah? The Incredible String Band is better than Jethro Tull.”

  “That’s it. Jethro Tull.”

  “As in the drill?” My factoid-rich, Guinness Book of Records mind knew that Jethro Tull was the name of the man who had invented the seed-planting drill in 1701, though why this rendered him inferior to an incredible string band, I couldn’t begin to guess.

  “The Drill?” said Caswell. “Never heard of them. Just say what I said, ‘kay?”

  There was enough friendliness of manner for me to know that there was no danger for me in this, and the idea of running messages appealed to the frustrated cub scout in me. I liked being thought of as useful.

  Carmichael had a study to himself in another corridor. I knocked on the door, only slightly nervously. Loud music was playing inside, so I knocked again. A voice rose from within.

  “C’min …”

  I opened the door.

  Every boy decorated his study differently, but most went to some lengths to make them as groovy as their incomes would allow. Fabrics were hung on walls and depended from ceilings, which gave the impression of Bedouin tents or hippie dens. These fabrics were known as tapestries, or tapos. Joss sticks were sometimes burned, to hide the smell of tobacco or just because they were far-out and right on. Carmichael’s study was highly impressive, a psychedelic tapo here, a low wattage amber light bulb there. It was nowhere near as impressive as his older brother Andy’s study, however. Andy Carmichael was something of an engineer and had constructed out of wood elaborate levels and ladders within the study, turning it into a cross between an adventure playground and Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. At the moment, the House was abuzz with the rumour that Andy Carmichael had nearly completed a hovercraft he had been building and that it was going to get its trial run on the Middle very soon. He did finish it eventually, I remember, and it worked too: every bit as noisy, useless and disgusting as the commercial hovercrafts that ply the channel today.

  I believe there was a yet older Carmichael called Michael, but he had already left the school. I liked the idea of his being told to get into the family car and used to repeat endlessly to myself, “Get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael … get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael.”

  What stunned me about Rick Carmichael’s study, however, was the sight of the books on his bookshelf. Six Penguin copies of P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves stories. On the frontmost, Jeeves in the Offing, I could see a photograph from a BBC series of three or four years earlier which had starred Dennis Price as Jeeves and, as Bertie Wooster … Ian Carmichael.

  Rick looked up and followed the direction of my eyes.

  “Are you … is he? I mean …” I stammered. “You know, on the telly …?”

  “He’s my uncle,” said Rick, turning down the volume on his record player, which had been pushing out a rather appealing song about tigers and India, of which more later.

  “I love P. G. Wodehouse,” I said solemnly. “I adore him.”

  “Yeah? Do you want to borrow one?”

  I had read them all, all the Jeeves stories, ever since Margaret Popplewell, a friend of my mother’s from her schooldays, had given me a copy of Very Good, Jeeves for my birthday. I had been collecting him in all editions for some time and had a massive collection. The great man wrote nearly a hundred books, so there was still a long way to go.

  “Could I?”

  He passed Jeeves in the Offing over to me. I am looking at that very copy now, it is on the desk next to my keyboard. On the front we see a photograph of a beautifully dressed Ian Carmichael wearing a monocle (a source of much debate amongst Wodehousians—there is only one actual reference to Bertie wearing an eyeglass, and that was in a painting of him which became a poster, but you really don’t want to know that), a red carnation is in his buttonhole and a wonderfully dim good-natured look of startlement beams through his exceptionally blue eyes. Above the tubby Penguin that stands next to the title is printed “3/6” (which was shortly to become known as seventeen and a half pence) and on the back we read:

  The cover shows Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster in the B.B.C. series “The World of Wooster” (Producer: Michael Mills, by arrangement with Peter Cotes. Photographer Nicholas Acraman)

  Many years later I worked for Michael Mills, who was a formidably shrewish and frightening man. There was very little he had not done in the world of Light Entertainment and he did not take kindly to unpunctual actors. I was booked for a part, very early on in my “career,” on a half-hour comedy called Chance in a Million which starred Simon Callow, whom I was desperate to meet, since his book Being an Actor had been a huge inspiration at university. I had not known that Teddington Lock, where Thames TV studios had their being, took well over an hour to get to from Islington, where I was living at the time, and had arrived at least half an hour late. Michael Mills, who was the kind of man who wore spacious cardigans and half-moon spectacles that dangled on black string, gave me a withering look and told me that he would be writing to my agent about the unprofessional hour at which I had arrived. He has died since, I believe, and I never got a chance to talk to him about the making of that 1960s “World of Wooster” series.

  It is strange to
touch this book now and know that it was handed to me, lazily and charmingly, by Rick Carmichael more than a quarter of a century ago. Stranger still, I suppose, in light of the fact that I was to spend four years myself playing Jeeves in another television adaptation of those same stories.

  “Anything else?” Rick said.

  “Oh!” I jerked up from my reverent gaze at the book. “Oh, yes. The Unbelievable String Band is better than Jethro Tull.”

  Carmichael smiled, “Er, I think you mean the Incredible String Band, don’t you?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Damn. Yes.”

  “Right,” said Carmichael. “You tell Guy that Carole King is better than Fairport Convention.”

  I can’t remember how many times I shuttled between Carmichael and Caswell delivering insulting messages on the subject of their favourite music, but it meant that somehow I became more or less accepted early on by these two and by Rick’s best friend, Martin Swindells, who was known as Mart and sometimes as Dog. They were also friendly with a boy called Roger Eaton, who was red-haired and called Roo. They were cool, this group, Guy, Rick, Mart and Roo. They knew more about rock music than I thought I could ever, ever learn. They were cool and they were amiable. They were not interested in status, ambition, gossip about the staff or schooly, status-bound things. They didn’t take joy in teasing the weak or sucking up to the strong. They liked music and they liked fun. One of them, I won’t say which in case their parents are reading this, showed me the first ever joint I had ever seen. He didn’t let me smoke it, but he showed it to me. For all I know it wasn’t a joint at all, just a cigarette rolled up to look like one.