Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Does homosexuality involve sex? Oh dear me yes, homosexuality involves sex. It involves sexual appeal, stimulation, excitement, arousal and ultimately, of course, orgasm. There can’t be any doubt about that. There is love too and love is bigger than anything else in the world as you know, but that doesn’t mean sex isn’t in there too, doing its best to simplify things. If only it were only about sex … how simple and jolly homosexuality would be, how simple and jolly heterosexuality would be. Still, at least we get Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Beethoven and Cole Porter as a reward for all the pain and heartache.

  I had been there then, at the bedside, worshipping at the throne of the cockhead as it were, knowing that this was something that was always going to have meaning for me. But it was disconnected, it was just a great gristly fat thing—all the poor lad wanted was for me to finish him off so that he could get to sleep of course, he had no interest at all in my psychic or romantic destiny—but for me this thing in my hands was at once a potent symbol of something that mattered and just a dick belonging to another boy, nothing more; the very disconnectedness of this dick, coupled with its swollen urgency and such a perplexed presentiment in me of the momentous weight and meaning such scenes as this were to have in my life, made the whole experience, and the dick itself, highly absurd, highly comic and very slightly frightening.

  So I giggled.

  4

  The beginning of my second year at Uppingham saw me no more clued up about this whole business of sex than I ever had been: I probably had a clearer idea of the terms and their meanings: cunnilingus, urinobibe, Fallopian tubes, epididymus, snatch, pussy, tit, jizz and clit, I knew the words all right. But then I knew what a diminished seventh was, but it didn’t mean I could play or sing. I knew what a googly was and I still couldn’t bowl a cricket ball without causing twenty-one boys to collapse in a heap of laughter. Knowledge is not always power.

  The erotic in life did not occupy me or engage my attention much because I was still neither physically developed nor sexually aware enough to have that need to “get my bloody rocks off” that seemed so to exercise the other boys, passing their Penthouses, sniggers, phwors and Kleenex boxes from study to study. Games and how to avoid them, that was still what mattered most to me. Sweets and where to get them from, that too. Sex, that could take a powder.

  And then …

  And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again.

  The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.

  This is where language is so far behind music. The chord that Max Steiner brings in when Bogart catches sight of Bergman in his bar in Casablanca, how can I bring that into a book of black ink marks on white paper? The swell and surge of the Liebestod from Tristan, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor—even Alfred Brendel can’t conjure that up from this keyboard, this alphanumeric piano beneath my fingers. Maybe, because sometimes pop music can hit the mark as well as anything, I could write you out a playlist. We would start with the Monkees:

  And then I saw her face, and now I’m a believer

  Naaah … it’s no use.

  There’s nothing for it but old words and cold print. Besides, you’ve been there yourself. You’ve been in love. Why am I getting so hysterical? Just about every film, every book, every poem, every song is a love story. This is not a genre with which you are unfamiliar even if by some fluke (whether a cursed fluke or a blessed one I would be the last able to decide) you have never been there yourself.

  It was the first morning of the winter term, the beginning of my second year at Uppingham. After breakfast, as was usual, I went to my study, now newly shared with Jo Wood, and collected the textbooks and blocks I would need for the morning’s teaching. A block was a pad of paper, special Uppingham-sized paper, shorter and squarer than A4, which could only be bought from the official school bookshop: essays, notes and everything else had to be written on paper from a block.

  The routine at a school with boarding houses goes like this, you see. The morning fag awakens you. You breakfast in your House, you walk into school for chapel and morning lessons and you don’t return to the House until lunchtime. All the form rooms, science labs and sports halls, the chapel, hall and library, they are grouped around the main school. Ekker (eugh!), then back to the House for showers (don’t get me started …) followed by afternoon lessons in school and another (sometimes the last of the day) return to the House for supper. After supper there’s a little free time before a bell will go, summoning you, if you are a junior, to hall where you do your prep (which means homework), supervised and kept silent by the praepostor on duty. If you’re a senior, your prep is done in the privacy of your study. Then there’s some more free time in which, unless through some infraction of the rules you’ve been gated (no doubt they now use the Americanism “grounded,” as in “your ass is grounded, Mister”), you can go down to the Art School or the Thring Centre (named after the side whiskers and containing electric typewriters, design studios, pottery shops and so forth: it has since been replaced by a splendid complex called, rather wetly in my opinion, the Leonardo Centre, designed by Old Uppinghamian architect Piers Gough and containing a TV studio, computers and all manner of larky toys) or you can see a play, listen to a concert, attend a lecture, go to play rehearsals, turn up for choir practice, or band practice or orchestra practice, or a meeting of the chess club, bridge club, judo club, poetry reading group, entomological society or whatever gathering of like minds suits your taste. Then it’s back to the House in time for evening prayers, which are taken by the housemaster or the house tutor, a master who hasn’t got his own House yet and acts as a sort of locum to the housemaster proper from time to time. Then, essentially, it’s cocoa, buns, biscuits and bed—the whole cycle to repeat itself the following day. On Saturdays, evening prayers take the form of a more informal compline. On Sundays, there are no games and no lessons, just two compulsory hours in your study that go under the strange name of Sunday Qs, short for Sunday Questions and designed, no doubt, to inculcate religiosity, healthiness and inward spiritual cleanliness. Dotted throughout the day in House there is a series of call overs, what they called appel in prisoner-of-war films. A list of all the boys in order of seniority downwards will be read out by the House captain, and each boy has to call “Here” at the sound of his name. One thinks of Rowan Atkinson’s inspired schoolmaster sketch, or that creepy play by Giles Cooper which was turned into a film with David Hemmings, the title of which came from the last three names of the roll … Unman, Wittering and Zigo.

  There. If you require any more information and believe in Buddhism, I suggest you live your life wickedly and get reborn as a middle class English boy in the mid-1950s: you’ll get the experience firsthand.

  So, back to Day Two, Term Four.

  I had stuffed what I needed for morning lessons into my briefcase and Jo Wood and I walked together out of our study and down the corridor that led to the path that led to the road that led to school.

  Four Houses were up at our end of town, Brooklands and Highfield were two. Brooklands was farther away from the centre of Uppingham, so far away indeed, that it had its own swimming pool. Opposite my House, Fircroft, was the Middle, that huge playing field I told you about, and perched next to it was Highfield, so named because it was on top of a hill and by a field. The fourth House was a little farther down the hill, towards the town and school, and we will call this House Redwood’s.

  Redwood’s doesn’t exist.

  There is no House between Highfields and the bottom of the hill.

  I want nothing I write in this book to cause anyone needless pain, shame or embarrassment. Everything I write will be true according to the light of my own memory, but the truth will be told with tact and with due recognition of fiction’s
often greater capacity to convey reality than can any bald recitation of fact. Some names and the setting, styling and structure of some scenes must be fictionalised. I do not believe you will always be able to tell which scenes and which settings, nor would I want you to try. You have stayed with me thus far and must trust me when I say that although there is rearrangement, there is no exaggeration or sensationalisation. If anything the contrary might be the case, for certain scenes and events of my school life, however heavily disguised, would enable any school contemporary of mine instantly to ascribe names and identities, and that would be grossly unfair. Two people, if they read this book, will recognise themselves but see that they have been well enough disguised for no one else to know but themselves who they really are.

  Enough already, Stephen—cut to the chase.

  It is a clear mid-September day, the kind of day that contains in exactly equal proportion a mix of summer and of autumn, the leaves are not yet in their October reds, golds and yellows, but their greenness is becoming just a little shagged by now, not as brightly, squeakily sappily green as it was in midsummer. To make up for it the light has lost its August haze and has a great softness, the rotten marshy smells of late summer have been dispelled too and there is a nutty, barky freshness in the air.

  Naturally, academic hours are the same throughout the whole school, so as we Fircroftians walk out on to the road, we join a stream of Brooklanders walking towards school, and a crowd of boys from Highfield cross the road towards us, for there is no pavement on their side; as we move down the hill, boys from Redwood’s will cross over too, so that the observer looking down the dip of the London road from the centre of Uppingham at the right time will see a third of the school swarming towards him, two hundred boys dressed in identical black jackets, black trousers, black ties, black waistcoats, black shoes and white shirts, lugging their briefcases and if, poor sods, they are slated for PE that morning, their duffle bags as well. Pollies will bicycle alongside whistling or twang humming Claptonian guitar licks, their boaters tipped at what they hope is an angle that says, “Boaters are fucking square, man. I wear mine, like ironically …” Yes, but you still wear it. You don’t have to, you know.

  I once got out my old Stouts Hill boater and wore it to school. This enraged a school pig I encountered on the way.

  “And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing wearing a boater?”

  “But this isn’t a boater, Merrick, it’s a sun hat. I am highly susceptible to excess heat.”

  “You’ll be highly susceptible to a kick up the arse if you don’t take it off.”

  This morning though, I’m thinking of nothing in particular. Still settling back into the rhythm and enjoying the fact that there is a whole crop of new boys who are now the lowest of the low. Indeed, I have to train one of them for the fag test.

  I will be taking my O levels this year. Fourteen seems a young age for them, but in those days, if they reckoned you could do them, you did them. I would take my A levels two years later and leave school at sixteen, then university at seventeen, that was my future, all charted out before me. That was how things were done then. If they felt you needed an extra year to cope with O levels, you were put into a form called the Remove. At prep school there had been a Remove and a Shell. I had been in Shell and I never understood quite what it meant.

  I know, I’ll look it up in the OED.

  Well, bless my soul. Does one live and learn, or what?

  15. The apsidal end of the school room at Westminster School, so called from its conch-like shape. Hence, the name of the form (intermediate between the fifth and sixth) which originally tenanted the shell at Westminster School, and transf. of forms (intermediate between forms designated by numbers) in other public schools; see quots.

  1736 Gentl. Mag. VI. 679/2 Near these [forms] ye shell’s high concave walls appear.

  1750 Chesterfield Lett. ccxxviii, Observe … what the best scholars in the Form immediately above you do, and so on, till you get into the shell yourself.

  1825 Southey Life & Corr. (1849) I. 151 He was floated up to the Shell, beyond which the tide carried no one.

  1857 Hughes Tom Brown i. v, The lower fifth, shell, and all the junior forms in order [at Rugby].

  1877 W. P. Lennox Celebr. I have known I. 43 The noise grew louder and louder, until the birch was safely deposited in a small room behind the shell, as the upper end of the room was called from its shape [Westminster].

  1884 Forshall Westm. Sch. 3 The Headmaster faced all the boys excepting the tenants of the Shell.

  1903 Blackw. Mag. June 742/2 The third shell, a form within measurable distance of the lowest in the school [Harrow].

  Well, there you go then.

  There was no shell at Uppingham so far as I remember.

  Actually, I am feeling rather pleased with myself as I walk along with Jo Wood this morning because the new form I have been put in this year is Upper IVA. This is more luck than a reflection of any academic brilliance from me during my first year: the school alternated annually between awarding the A status to the top English set and the top maths set—all part of that good all-round chap “philosophy.” This year it is the turn of English, so I find myself in Upper IVA and all the brilliant mathematicians have to put up with the indignity of being grouped in Upper IVB.

  You can be in the top form of your year, but be in lower sets according to subject. So I was in the top sets for English, History, French, Latin and so on, but in the bottom for physics, maths and chemistry. Geography I had given up in favour of German.

  My form master and English teacher I find to be an excellently civilised man called J. B. Stokes, housemaster of Meadhurst, given to a most peculiar use of what, if I have parsed this correctly, is an imperative interrogative form of a future conditional tense. In other words instead of saying “Shut up” he would say, “You’ll be shutting up?” “You’ll be sitting down?”

  It is too early in the season to shuffle leaves along the pavement as we walk down the hill, but Jo and I have our heads bowed down towards the pavement none the less. As a child one gets to know every crack in every paving stone on every section of one’s walk to school. Are we looking down because we don’t want to see or because we don’t want to be seen?

  I don’t know what it is that makes me look up. A vague awareness I suppose that the boys from Redwood’s opposite are crossing the road from their House to join the pavement, a little good-natured jostling might result, and the thick black line of boys will have swollen to its maximum size before the left turn, up the Chocolate Block, along the Magic Carpet and towards the chapel, whose bell even now is ringing us to morning prayers.

  His head isn’t even turned towards me but I know.

  How is that possible? How can it be that just the gait of him, the stand of him, the shape and turn away of him, can be enough for me to know and to know at once?

  Looking at it coolly one can say that anyone might be drawn to such a fine head of fair hair, seen from behind. One might say that anyone could see that this was a classy, peachy and supreme pair of buttocks confronting us.

  One might add too, in cynical tones, “You say ‘you knew,’ but just suppose he had turned his head and revealed the face of a pig with a harelip, a twisted nose and a squint, would you now be writing this?”

  Did I really, really know?

  Yes, reader, I did. I swear I did.

  The moment I lifted my head from the pavement and glanced across the road I saw, amongst the Redwood’s boys crossing, one of their number looking the other way, as if to check that there was no traffic coming. And at that moment, before his face came into view, it happened. The world changed.

  If he had turned out to be ugly, I think my heart would have sunk, but still the world would have been different, because that thing that stirred and roared in me would have been awakened anyway and nothing could ever have put it back to sleep.

  As it is, he was not ugly.

  He was the most beautiful th
ing I had ever seen in my life.

  I stopped dead so suddenly that a boy behind walked straight into me.

  “Watch where you’re going, you dozy tosser …”

  “Sorry.”

  Jo turned patiently and gave me the sour, constipated look that was peculiarly his own and had caused his nickname to be “Woodeeeeee” pronounced in the tones of one who groans on the lavatory, clutching the seat as he strains violently to disgorge a turd the size of Manchester.

  “What have you forgotten?” he said.

  He must have assumed that I had stopped because I had suddenly realised that I had left a vital textbook behind in the study. I knew from the heat in my cheeks that my face had turned the fieriest red imaginable. I somehow found the presence of mind to mumble, “Laces,” and stoop to fiddle with my shoes. When I stood, the redness in my face, I hoped, might seem to be the result of my head having hung upside down while I was lacing, a strategy that every human being uses to cover a blush and which fools no one.

  I was up quickly though and immediately I started to walk forwards. I had to see that face again.

  He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.

  There are many in Norfolk for whom “big city” means Norwich.

  “I been to Norwich once and I didn’t like it,” they say. “Swaffham’s big enough for me.” They can only guess at what London, Los Angeles or Manhattan might be like.

  I realised at this moment that I had only ever experienced the townships of Charming, Pretty, Attractive, Comely, Sweet, Delicious, Handsome and Cute and now I had finally penetrated the city limits of Beautiful. I was instantly aware of Beauty and the whole Greek and Keatsian fuss about it made sense.