Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Rock music, of course, was not the same as rock and roll. Nor was it the same as pop. Since the demise of the Beatles, pop and the single-play record had become singularly unhip, at public schools at any rate. Albums were where it was at. Albums meant Pink Floyd, Van de Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Genesis (nice Charterhouse boys with a cockney drummer) and—at the folksy end—Jethro Tull, Procul Harum, Steeleye Span and, bless them, the Incredible String Band.

  A lot of that rock would now be called Heavy Metal: Uriah Heep, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were, unless I’ve leapt ahead of myself, already going, and cool people already knew about David Bowie, whose “Major Tom” had flopped the year before but was a coming man. There was a rumour too that Long John Baldry’s old keyboard player, Elton John, had produced an album that was so far-out it was far in. These were things I did not know.

  There was one band, however, that I soon came to know everything about. About halfway through my first term, Rick Carmichael ran out of cash and decided to hold a Study Sale, an auction in which all the stuff, gear and rig he could do without became available to the highest bidder. I came away from this sale with the complete set of BBC tie-in Jeeves Penguins and an LP, the very album whose first track, “Hunting Tigers out in India,” had been playing when I had first knocked on Rick’s door. It was called Tadpoles and was the work of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

  I had heard of them because they had enjoyed their one and only number one hit with “The Urban Spaceman” while I was still at Stouts Hill. This album was most strange and wonderful to look upon. It had holes pierced in the eyes of the band members on the front and, inside, a card which you could slide backwards and forwards, which made all kinds of shapes pass in and out of the blank eye sockets. Below the tide Tadpoles was the phrase

  Tackle the toons you tapped your tootsies to in Thames TV’s Do Not Adjust Your Set

  … which, it grieves me to say, meant nothing whatever to me, our house not being an ITV house. I am not even sure if my parents’ television could get ITV at this stage. I remember, to divert for a moment, that when we had moved up to Norfolk, aged nine and seven, Roger and I had been desperate to watch television that first evening because the week before, in Chesham, we had seen the first ever episode of Doctor Who and were already hopelessly hooked. Something had happened in transit to the mahogany Pye television with its tiny grey screen and it wouldn’t work. We missed that second episode and I grieve still at the loss.

  Do Not Adjust Your Set, I now know, was an early evening comedy show which had featured Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, who had by this time already gone on to join John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was just beginning to seep into our consciousnesses. The music for Do Not Adjust Your Set was provided by a very strange collection of art students and musicians who called themselves the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. By the time I began seriously to get into them, they had dropped their Doo-Dah and were just the Bonzo Dog Band. The two leading lights of the band were the immensely skilled musical pasticheur Neil Innes (who continued his association with the Python people by writing the songs for and appearing in The Rutles and The Holy Grail and so on), and the late, majestic and remarkable Vivian Stanshall, one of the most talented, profligate, bizarre, absurd, infuriating, unfathomable and magnificent Englishmen ever to have drawn breath.

  Stanshall (Sir Viv to his worshippers) died in a fire a few years ago and I felt terrible because I hadn’t been in touch with him for years—ever since I had helped him out a little by investing in a musical he had written called Stinkfoot which played, to generally uncomprehending silence, in the Shaw Theatre, London, some ten or so years ago.

  Over the next year at Uppingham I bought their other albums, Gorilla, A Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, Keynsham and finally Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly, their last, which contained Stanshall’s short story, “Rawlinson End” which I can still recite by heart and which he went on to develop into that outré film masterpiece Sir Henry at Rawlinson End starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry and J. G. Devlin as his butler, Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer. When I first heard the joke, “Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer,” I laughed so much I honestly thought I might die of suffocation.

  Oh, very well, it isn’t Alexander Pope or Oscar Wilde, but for me it was as delicious as anything could be delicious. With Stanshall, it was as if a new world had exploded in my head, a world where delight in language for the sake of its own textures, beauties and sounds, and where the absurd, the shocking and the deeply English jostled about in mad jamboree.

  It was Stanshall’s voice, I think, that delighted me more than anything. It had two registers, one light and dotty, with the timbre almost of a 1920s crooner, and capable of very high pitch indeed, as when he sang songs like the Broadway standard “By a Waterfall”; the other was a Dundee cake of a voice, astoundingly deep, rich and fruity, capable of Elvis impersonations (the song “Death Cab for Cutie” for example) as well as great gutsy trombone blasts of larynx-lazy British sottery, to use a Stanshally sort of phrase.

  Most people will know his voice from the instruments he vocally introduces on Mike Oldfield’s otherwise entirely instrumental album Tubular Bells, which sold in its millions and millions in the early 1970s and founded the fortune of Richard Branson.

  The Bonzos were my bridge between rock music and comedy, but comedy was more important to me by far than rock music. I did eventually buy an Incredible String Band album called, it grieves me to relate, Liquid Acrobat as Regards the Air as well as Meddle, Obscured by Clouds and other early Pink Floyd, but my heart wasn’t really in them. It was comedy for me. Not just the modern comedy of the Bonzos and Monty Python, nor the slightly older comedy of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, much as I adored those geniuses. I also collected records with titles like The Golden Days of Radio Comedy and Legends of the Halls and learned by heart the routines of comics like Max Miller, Sandy Powell, Sid Field, Billy “Almost a Gentleman” Bennett, Mabel Constandouros, Gert and Daisy, Tommy Handley, Jack Warner and most especially, Robb Wilton.

  Perhaps we’re getting back to that “can’t sing, can’t dance: won’t sing, won’t dance” subject. If I learned all the comedy, I could repeat it, perform it, which was as close as I could come to singing or dancing. I’m not a bad mimic, no Rory Bremner or Mike Yarwood, but not bad, and I could repeat back the comedy I had learned, word for word, intonation for intonation, pause for pause. Then I might be able to try out some of my own.

  I was not alone in this. Richard Fawcett, a boy of my term, shared this love of comedy. He was a fine mimic too, and an astoundingly brave and brilliant actor. He and I would listen to comedy records together, pointing out to each other why this was funny, what made that even funnier, trying hard to get to the bottom of it all, penetrating our passion, wanting to hug it all to us in heaping armfuls, as teenagers will.

  Fawcett had a collection which included routines by Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, as well as an extraordinary song called “The Ballad of Bethnal Green” by someone whose name I fear I have forgotten (I think his first name was Paddy, I expect someone will write to me and let me know) and which included delightfully weird lyrics like:

  Rum-tiddle-tiddle, rum tiddle-tiddle

  Scum on the water

  Lint in your navel and sand in your tea

  And somewhere in this ballad came the splendid phrase

  With a rum-tiddly-i-doh-doh

  I hate my old mum

  Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as “strobile” and “magniloquent,” daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. “Strobile” was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fircone, but “magniloquent” I did manage.

  I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There
was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn’t when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world.

  “So, Fry. ‘A lemon yellow colour’ is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use three words where one will do. Hm?”

  I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later.

  “Well, Fry? It’s a simple enough question. What is titration?”

  “Well, sir … it’s a process whereby …”

  “Come on, come on. Either you know or you don’t.”

  “Sorry, sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think …”

  “Anxious to avoid what?”

  “Pleonasm, sir.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I meant that I had no wish to be sesquipedalian.”

  “What?”

  “Sesquipedalian, sir.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I allowed a note of confusion and bewilderment to enter my voice. “I didn’t want to be sesquipedalian, sir! You know, pleonastic.”

  “Look, if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. What is this pleonastic nonsense?”

  “It means, sir, using more words in a sentence than are necessary. I was anxious to avoid being tautologous, repetitive or superfluous.”

  “Well why on earth didn’t you say so?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll remember in future, sir.” I stood up and turned round to face the whole form, my hand on my heart. “I solemnly promise in future to help sir out by using seven words where one will do. I solemnly promise to be as pleonastic, prolix and sesquipedalian as he could possibly wish.”

  It is a mark of the man’s fundamental good nature that he didn’t whip out a knife there and then, slit my throat from ear to ear and trample on my body in hob-nailed boots. The look he gave me showed that he came damned close to considering the idea.

  Christ, I could be a cheeky, cocky little runt. I gave the character of Adrian in my novel The Liar some of the lines I liked to use to infuriate schoolmasters.

  “Late, Fry?”

  “Really, sir? So am I.”

  “Don’t try to be clever, boy.”

  “Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?”

  I regret that I cut such an odious, punchable figure sometimes, but I don’t ever regret those hours spent alone or with Richard Fawcett trawling the dictionary or playing over and over again comedy record after comedy record.

  Whether we are the sum of influences or the sum of influences added to the sum of genes, I know that the way I express myself, the words I choose, my tone, my style, my language is a compound which would be utterly different, utterly, utterly different if I had never been exposed to any one of Vivian Stanshall, P. G. Wodehouse or Conan Doyle. Later on the cadences, tropes, excellences and defects of other writers and their rhetorical tricks, Dickens, Wilde, Firbank, Waugh and Benson, may have entered in and joined the mix, but those primal three had much to do with the way I spoke and, therefore, how I thought. Not how I felt but how I thought, if indeed I ever thought outside of language.

  I have diverted into this world of the Bonzos and comedy because I am coming soon, all too soon, to my second year at Uppingham, and I don’t want to create the impression of a lone mooncalf Fry, absorbed only in love and the pungent pain of his lonely pubescence. There was a context: there were fifty boys in the House, they had their own lives too and we were all touched by the outside world and its current fads and fantasies.

  In my first year I had Fawcett as a friend, and later, a boy called Jo Wood, with whom I was to share a study in my second year. Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world.

  But one day he said to me:

  “I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.”

  The next time I saw him he had a Hermann Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read. He taught me a lot about the human will, Jo Wood. But more than that, he was a kind patient friend who had much to put up with in our second year when he had to share a study with a boy whose life had suddenly exploded into a million pieces.

  The only real fly in the ointment that first year, senseless brushes with authority aside, came in the form of games. Ekker. Sports.

  There is a fine Bonzo number called “Sport” which follows a sensitive boy at school (called Stephen, pleasingly enough) who prefers to lie in the long grass with his pocket edition of Mallarmé (another Stephen) while the big rough boys are at their football. The chorus calls out gruffly:

  Sport, sport, masculine sport

  Equips a young man for society!

  Yes, sport turns out a jolly good sort

  It’s an odd boy who doesn’t like sport!

  I laughed at that song, but inwardly I wept at it too. I hated sport, ekker, games, whatever they wanted to call it. And it was a fuck sight harder to get off ekker at Uppingham than it had been at prep school. “A fuck sight” was the kind of language one used at Uppingham all the time, out of the hearing of staff. It was one of the first things I had noticed about the difference between Stouts Hill and Uppingham, the language, just as for Robert Graves in Good-bye to All That it had been the transition from Charterhouse to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers that had marked a startling move up in the swearing stakes. From a world of “bloody heck” and the occasional “balls” I had been hurled into a society where it was “fuck,” “wank,” “bollocks,” “cunt” and “shit” every other word. To say that I was shocked would be ridiculous, but I was slightly scared. The swearing was part of the move up towards manliness, part of the healthiness. Study sales, butteries and shops, that kind of independence I could appreciate, but things that were manly frightened me. And nothing was more manly than games.

  Games mattered at Uppingham. If you had your First Fifteen colours, you were one hell of a blood. If you represented just your House, let alone the school in some sport, it gave you something, an air, a reason to feel good about yourself, a sense of easy superiority that no amount of mental suffering with irregular verbs could threaten. Work was ultimately poofy and to be bad at work was no cause for shame.

  Games went on all the time. House ekker was a daily thing, except on Fridays. It was no good cheering when Fridays came around however, for Fridays were compulsory Corps days, when we had to march up and down in Second World War battle dress as part of the school’s Combined Cadet Force. I was Army, poor bloody infantry; my brother wisely chose the Air Force. I must have looked as much like a military unit as Mike Tyson looks like a daffodil, shuffling about the parade ground in my badly blancoed webbing, clodding corps boots, an overtight black beret that would never fold down and made me look more like a French onion seller than a soldier, writhing in an itchy khaki shirt, trying to march in step with a clunking Lee Enfield rifle over my shoulder and the school sergeant-major, RSM “Nobby” Clarke, yelling in my ear.

  But you could fuck me with a pineapple and call me your suckpig, beat me with chains and march me up and down in uniform every day and I would thank you with tears in my eyes if it got me off games. Nothing approached the vileness of games, nothing.

  Grotesque “Unders versus Overs” matches would arise from time to time, in which under sixteens played over sixteens, and school matches that you had to watch an
d cheer at. PE lessons cropped up in the syllabus, in academic time: absurd Loughborough-educated imbeciles calling everyone “lads” and using Christian names as if they found the snobbery of public school inimical to their healthy, matey world of beer, bonhomie, split times and quadriceps.

  “Good lad, Jamie!”

  Oh, there was always a Jamie, a good-lad-Jamie, a neat, nippy, darty, agile scrum-halfy little Jamie. Jamie could swarm up ropes like an Arthur Ransom hero, he could fly up window frames, leap vaulting horses, flip elegant underwater turns at the end of each lap of the pool, somersault backwards and forwards off the trapeze and spring back up with his neat little buttocks twinkling and winking with fitness and firmness and cute little Jamieness. Cunt.

  Then they had the nerve, these barely literate pithecanthropoids in their triple-A T-shirts and navy blue tracksuit bottoms, with their pathetically function-rich stopwatches around their thick, thick necks, to write school reports citing “motor development percentiles” and other such bee’s wank as if their futile, piffling physical jerks were part of some recognised scientific discipline that mattered, that actually mattered in the world. Even a tragic management consultant bristling with statistics and psychological advice on the “art of people handling”—art of the so-fucking-obvious-it-makes-your-nose-bleed more like—has some right to look himself in the mirror every morning, but these baboons with their clipboards and whistles and lactic acid burn statistics, running backwards with a medicine ball under each arm, shouting “Come on, Fry, shift yourself, let’s see some bum …”

  Yeugh! The squeak of rubber soles on sports hall floors, the rank stench of newly leaking testosterone, the crunch of cinder racing tracks, the ugly, dead thump of a rugger ball taking a second later than the ugly, dead sight of it hitting the hard mud as you sullenly watched the match, the clatter of hockey sticks, the scrape of studded boots on pavilion floors, the puke-sweet smell of linseed oil, “Litesome” jockstraps, shin guards, disgusting leather caps worn in scrums, boots, shorts, socks, laces, the hiss and steam of the showers.