Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  No, there was something, a look, a cast of expression, a slight downward dip of the head when it turned. They both had that. Nick’s eyes were blue too, but without any lapis lazuli depths. Just blue eyes.

  There was a German lesson that afternoon, I would make sure I sat next to Nick and start to cultivate him.

  Back at Fircroft after lunch I went to my study and sat alone to think about things. I was magnificently, triumphantly off games for at least a week with asthma: my doctor at home had come up trumps with an unequivocal note after a bad attack in late August just after my fourteenth birthday.

  I took a block from my desk and started to write down what I knew.

  He was Matthew. He was Matthew Osborne. He was at Redwood’s, like his brother.

  Matthew Osborne (R).

  I would find out his middle initials later. Osborne, M. J.? No, his brother was Osborne, N. C. R., so Matthew would probably have two middle names as well. Osborne, M. P. A.? Matthew Peter Alexander, for example? It was possible. Osborne, M. St. J. G.? Matthew St. John George. That was just as possible.

  The most important thing to sort out was the why.

  Why did he do what he did to me? I wrote that down.

  And the what.

  What was it that he did to me? I wrote that down too.

  And the how.

  How did he do what he did for me? I started to write that down until I realised it was very nearly a song lyric. Gerry and the Pacemakers? Freddie and the Dreamers? Something like that. Not very dignified. “How do you do what yah do for me …” Banal. Won’t do, won’t do at all. I crossed it out. Crossed it all out, screwed up the paper, ripped it into tiny shreds and started again.

  In The Liar I compressed the whole thing jokily, like this.

  He had fallen in love with Hugo Alexander Timothy Cartwright the moment he laid eyes on him when, as one of a string of five new arrivals, the boy had trickled into evening hall the first night of Adrian’s second year.

  Heydon-Bayley nudged him.

  “What do you reckon, Healey? Lush or what?”

  For once Adrian had remained silent. Something was terribly wrong.

  It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One.

  Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair, Cartwright of the Limbs and Lips: he was Petrarch’s Laura, Milton’s Lycidas, Catullus’s Lesbia, Tennyson’s Hallam, Shakespeare’s fair boy and dark lady, the moon’s Endymion. Cartwright was Garbo’s salary, the National Gallery, he was cellophane: he was the tender trap, the blank unholy surprise of it all and the bright golden haze on the meadow: he was honey-honey, sugar-sugar, chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep and his baby-love: the voice of the turtle could be heard in the land, there were angels dining at the Ritz and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

  Adrian had managed to coax Cartwright into an amusing half-hour in the House lavs two terms previously, but he had never doubted he could get the trousers down: that wasn’t it. He wanted something more from him than the few spasms of pleasure the limited activities of rubbing and licking and heaving and pushing could offer.

  He wasn’t sure what the thing was that he yearned for, but one thing he did know. It was less acceptable to love, to ache for eternal companionship, than it was to bounce and slurp and gasp behind the five courts. Love was Adrian’s guilty secret, sex his public pride.

  All very well for me to write that nearly twenty years later, but even as I was writing it in the year 1990, I felt a twinge of guilt that I could be so cavalier, so casually sophisticated and so knowing about my former self and the acuteness of my feeling and the depth of my confusion.

  “It had taken him two painful terms”—well, I suppose those seven words have the virtues of honesty and brevity. No pleonasm there. There is a hoary old chestnut in the film business: What is the most expensive stage direction you can write in the fewest number of words? So far as I know the winner, which was written into a genuine script, is still this:

  The fleets meet.

  “Two painful terms” is probably my equivalent in the field of emotional budgeting.

  It took my mind, which is painfully slow when it comes to the acknowledgement of interior truths or to the achievement of any self-perception, a long time to realise what I sensed in an instant.

  I was in love. Very well. I could use that word. It had been translated and I understood it. All those dreary romantic plots made sense now. Those interminable screen looks between men and women shot in soft focus to the accompaniment of high strings, they had a meaning. That I could grasp.

  So I wrote it down that first afternoon.

  I love Matthew Osborne

  I instinctively knew this meant that everything was changed. It was not the same thing at all to write

  I love Matthew Osborne

  as it was to write

  I love Paris

  or

  I love pizza

  So I had to add

  Everything is different

  Even so, despite my knowing that “everything was different” I did not realise that everything—each thing that existed—was—truly, really, positively, actually was—different—not the same, other, ineradicably altered.

  After all, my timetable looked the same: still German at four and Maths at four fifty, still CCF on Fridays, still Saturday compline and Sunday Qs. The study that Jo and I planned that evening to set about decorating, that looked the same. The quad outside appeared to be the same quad. The records on my shelf were the same records.

  I screwed the piece of paper up once more and stared out of the window.

  5

  I can’t remember, I honestly can’t remember if the events I am going to describe happened on the same day I laid eyes on Matthew Osborne. In my imagination it has become the same day, so that will have to do.

  I got up and left the study. I crossed through to the main part of the House and entered the changing room.

  There were pretty boys in Fircroft too. I went to the locker of the prettiest of them and opened it. The back of my hand just touched the jacket hanging inside and I heard the clink of money.

  I stole it.

  I stole it all, left the House, went down the music school and conducted my favourite Rossini piece as it had never been conducted before. Not William Tell, or The Barber of Seville, but the overture to The Thieving Magpie and do you know, never up to this very minute has the significance of that title struck me? I knew the piece so well that its individual words had stopped meaning anything. The Thieving Magpie. It seems so neat and organised and obvious as to resemble fiction, but it is God’s honest truth. Or the devil’s. Maybe that should have been the tide for this book. The Thieving Magpie … or The Devil’s Honest Truth, for that matter …

  I’ve slipped it on now, La Gazza Ladra as it calls itself in this compilation, and I am listening and jumping in my chair as I type this and I can see what I saw in it, and hear what I heard in it. For Rossini the sun always breaks out with such a joyful jerk that nothing, for a while, can ever seem bad, not even the stolen money in your pocket that chinks and clinks as you bring in the woodwinds and the brass section, thrashing like an epileptic in your hysterica passio, twitching with spastic arrhythmic heaves and thrusts, not even the hard stone of new knowledge that was born in you that day that childhood is over and that something new has come into your being that may well unseat your reason forever.

  This now became a pattern. I had always been Bad both publicly and privately. Bad in terms of “mobbing” and “ragging,” showing off in front of the other boys, daring to go those extra few yards towards trouble and punishment, and Bad in the realms of secret wickedness. But now I didn’t care. I just did not care. My behaviour in the first year may have been judged to be purgatorial, now it became unequivocally infer
nal.

  Sometimes it made me popular, sometimes it made me loathed. In my first year I had tried to improve my judgement of the bounds of propriety that boys set in their tribally codified way. I became better at sensing when I was going too far and risking disfavour, better at riding the bucking bronco of popularity.

  Sometimes the jokes worked well and I would rise above my generation in a bubble of fame and admiration. I think it fair to say that of all my intake in my first year I rapidly became the best known in the school. Not the most liked or the most admired, but the most recognisable and the most talked about.

  One great achievement was to be the Brewer affair, which earned me many thumps on the back and chuckling congratulations.

  The Uppingham School Bookshop, where blocks and stationery were bought as well as textbooks, fiction, poetry and other more usual bookshop fare, was run on behalf of the school by a rather fussy man called Mr. Brewer. Most items were bought by use of the Order Form, a chit which one got one’s housemaster to sign after lunch to authorise the purchases, which would end up on the parental bill at the end of term. A typical order form might look something like this:

  UPPINGHAM SCHOOL ORDER FORM

  NAME…………………….HOUSE…………………….

  6 blocks

  1 bottle ink (blue-block)

  1 bottle ink (green)

  1 pencil sharpener

  SIGNATRE…………………….AUTHORISED…………………….

  The Signature field, as we would say in computer jargon today, was for oneself to sign, the Authorised field was for the housemaster’s initials.

  “Green ink, Fry?”

  “Well, sir, for English essays. I think it’s more stylish.”

  “Oh, Lord. Very well.”

  Naturally, I was adept at Frowde’s hastily scribbled “G.C.F.” and on the rare occasion when I could lay my thieving hands on a blank order form pad I would go mad with purchase.

  Something about Mr. Brewer, however, some quality of fussiness and distrust, made one absolutely desperate to mob and bait the man to distraction. My first scheme was to persecute him by telephone. I had discovered, God knows how, that in those days of pulse telephony, before the introduction of the digital exchange and tone dialling, you could call a number by striking the receiver buttons in Morse code style, ten times for zero, nine times for nine and so on, a small gap left between each number. If you got the rhythm right you could tap out “350466” in a public phone box and get through without having to pay a single penny. Today’s phreaking and hacking make this look like child’s play, of course, but fun could be had with it.

  There was a red telephone kiosk in the marketplace just opposite the High Street windows of the bookshop, which meant we could call up Brewer and watch one of his assistants passing him the phone.

  “Is that Mr. Brewer on the line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’d better get off, there’s a train coming.”

  A feeble start admittedly, but it got better.

  “Mr. Brewer? This is Penguin Books here calling to confirm the order of four thousand copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

  “What? No, no. It’s those boys! I never made the order. Cancel it! Cancel it!”

  “I see. And the order for ten thousand of Last Exit to Brooklyn?”

  Tee-hee.

  Or one could get elliptical and weird, which worked best when he picked up the phone himself.

  “Uppingham School Bookshop.”

  “Yes?”

  “Uppingham School Bookshop.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How can we help?”

  “This is the Uppingham School Bookshop here.”

  “So you keep saying, but what do you want?”

  “You made the call.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Well what number did you want?”

  “I don’t want any number. I just want to get on with my life without being pestered by Uppingham School Bookshops, whatever they might be. Nuisance calls are against the law you know.”

  “But you called me!”

  “Look, if you don’t get off the line I shall call the police. The bishop is awaiting a very important call from one of his wives.”

  “It’s a boy, isn’t it!”

  “This particular one isn’t, no.”

  “I can see you out of the window! I shall report you all.”

  One day I was with Jo Wood in Boots the Chemists. I had been planning to buy a bottle of aniseed liquid to sprinkle on my trouser turn-ups to check out Jeeves’ theory that this would cause dogs to follow me (it didn’t work, incidentally, just made them yap and howl) and I noticed Brewer in another aisle. He hadn’t spotted me or Jo and an idea arose within me.

  “No, it’s so simple,” I said, in a sudden, artificially low whisper, the kind that causes ears to prick up everywhere. “Brewer is so blind he never notices.”

  Jo looked at me in his usual strained and constipated manner, but was sharp enough and familiar enough with my ways to realise that I must be up to something. I could tell from the sudden silence and stiffening in the neighbouring row that Brewer had frozen into a keen listening attitude.

  “You just go in with your duffle bag apparently full, a pair of old plimsolls on the top, go up to the book section and stuff as many books as you like in the bag. Put the plimsolls back on top, sling the bag over your shoulder, then go up and buy a pencil or something. Best when the shop’s really busy, during break, some time like that. He never, ever notices a thing. I’ve stolen literally hundreds of books that way. Come on, if you’re done here, let’s hit the buttery.”

  I spread the word amongst a few friends and the next morning about seven of us entered the bookshop and oh-so-casually wandered up to the book section, which was on a raised level overlooking the rest of the shop. We all fell to our knees at different shelves, examined books, shot guilty glances over our shoulders and seemed to fumble about with our duffle bags, causing gym shoes to fall out which had to be hastily replaced.

  Down the steps we went, duffle bags over shoulders, towards the girl at the cash desk. We proffered order forms for the acquisition of one block or one pencil (HB), swallowing nervously.

  Suddenly Brewer sprang up as if from nowhere. He had, rather pathetically, been hiding under the counter, which was enough to cause one of our number to give a premature scream of laughter that only a swift hack on the shins from me snuffed out.

  “Just a moment, gentlemen!” said Brewer.

  Looks of startled innocence and amazement.

  “Yes, Mr. Brewer?”

  “All of you. Kindly empty your duffle bags on to the counter.”

  “Really, Mr. Brewer …”

  “Do as I say!” he rasped. “One at a time. Mr. Fry first, I think. Yes. You first, Mr. Fry.”

  I shrugged resignedly and turned my duffel bag upside down, grasping the sides so that only a pair of tattered black gym shoes fell on to the surface of the counter.

  “Everything!” said Brewer, a squeak of triumph entering his voice.

  “Everything?” I repeated nervously.

  “Everything!”

  “If you insist, Mr. Brewer.”

  “I do, Mr. Fry!”

  I shook and shook the duffle bag and out tumbled:

  • 6 very dirty jockstraps

  • About 70 loose mixed Jelly-tots, Bassett Mint Imperials, Liquorice All-Sorts and Trebor Refreshers

  • 12 broken Digestive biscuits

  • 4 of Mr. Lanchberry’s best Cream Slices (three days old)

  • 200 assorted fishing weights and air-pistol pellets

  • Pencil shavings

  • 1 leaking botde of Vosene Medicated shampoo

  • 1 brand-new copy of Sons and Lovers (W. H. Smith’s receipt carefully tucked inside)

  • 1 packet of Embassy Regal cigarettes and 1 box of matches

  It was extr
emely hard not to fold up in a heap, but we managed to keep our faces straight and earnest.

  “Get those things off my counter!” screamed Brewer, grabbing at Sons and Lovers, but already the other boys had started adding their own itemries, including condoms (which, with the artful addition of globs of Copydex and paste, presented the horrible appearance of having been very passionately used), a fish, rotting cheeses, a slippery heap of lambs’ kidneys and much, much more.

  “Stop, stop!” shrieked Brewer.

  “But, Mr. Brewer, you said …”

  “You did say, Mr. Brewer!”

  “We heard you.”

  “Gosh, look at the time, everyone!” I called in panic. “The bell’s about to go any minute. We’ll be back at lunchtime, Mr. Brewer, I’ll need the Lawrence book for an English lesson this afternoon. In the meantime do make free with anything you like the look of. I will want the jockstraps back eventually. You know, when you’ve done with them.”

  And out we streamed, deaf to his protests. I was especially enjoying the possibilities of the one little ray of hope I had left him, the packet of Embassy and the matches. The Embassy pack was filled with slugs and the matchbox wriggled with a dozen spiders.

  This was all part of the thirteen-year-old innocence of my first year. Coupled with my acceptance within the House by boys like Rick Carmichael, Mart Swindells and Roger Eaton and my friendships with Richard Fawcett and Jo Wood life was good. My brother, Roger, did not have too much cause to blush for me yet. He was getting on with life in the benign way he had, with malice to none.

  Another older boy in our house who made me feel accepted was Paul Whittome, who simply exploded with paintings, drawings, surreal rock operas and poems, excellent at both the double bass and rugger. He found me amusing enough to include me in a band that he assembled with a saxophonist friend of his from Brooklands and Rick Carmichael, who played the piano superbly. We performed Jack Teagarden jazz standards, the Bonzo numbers “Hunting Tigers out in India” and “Jollity Farm” and classics like “Rock Around the Clock” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rocking Chair.” My party piece was to play the trumpet solo in “Rocking Chair” with staggering physical passion and bulging Dizzy Gillespie cheeks. Meanwhile the curtain behind would accidentally rise to reveal that in fact the real trumpeter was a boy called Sam Rudder, who stood there, barely moving, playing with completely serene calmness. Aside from that, I can’t remember what I actually did to justify my presence in the band, apart from a little incompetent hammering on the piano when Rick was playing the guitar or singing. I suppose I just arsed about entertainingly. We did well enough to be invited to perform at the public school in Oakham, six or seven miles away. When Paul Whittome left Uppingham he almost instantly made himself a millionaire, as he had promised Frowde he would. He started by selling vegetables in a stall off the A1 and rapidly became a King of Potatoes and Potato Broking. He sold his spud business and now runs probably the most successful hotel restaurant in East Anglia. I go sailing with him and his wife sometimes and had the honour of being asked a few years ago to open a new set of guest rooms for his inn, the Hoste Arms in Burnham Market. He would never forgive me for not giving you the name and address of his establishment for he is quite miraculously shameless and brazen when it comes to publicity. How else does a man get to be a millionaire at twenty-two? Besides, I owe it him for his kindness in believing in me enough to put me, musically talentless as I am, in a band.