Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Still this persists. Enough people know by now what a mess my life has always been, yet they continue to believe either that “It’s all right for you, Stephen, you’ve got it sorted” or that I think it’s all right for me and that I think I’ve got it sorted, neither of which—however many times I scream it and however many times history and circumstances prove it—is true.

  This whole thread somehow started with my speculating about the gentle kindness of Ronnie Rutter and wondering whether maybe he saw. Perhaps it was written all over me, this agony of love, I wondered.

  That has been the big cleft stick of my life. It was around this time that I started punstering like a maniac, mostly dreadful nonsense, but I do remember being struck by discovering the happy accident of this:

  Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

  It’s sort of too neat and too perfect (perfect in the wrong way) to be amusing or even interesting, just another example of the weirdnesses thrown up by our extraordinary language, but the two stools that I fell between, and daily fall between still, are best described as being defined by the circumstance that I was and am both transparent and opaque, illegible and an open book.

  Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all my dissembling and simulation if so many friends, acquaintances, enemies (if I have any) and perfect strangers are able to see through my every motive, thought and feeling. Then I wonder what is the point of all my frankness, sharing of experience and emotional candour if people continue to misinterpret me to such an extent that they believe me balanced, sorted, rationally in charge, master of my fate and captain of my soul.

  My guess is that the instinct of Ronnie Rutter was that I was an “unhappy boy” and that he was too scrupulously well mannered or too trusting in the benevolence of time and fate as to enquire into the whys and wherefores.

  Matthew, the source of all my misery and all my joy, all my feeling and all my inability to feel, was completely blind to my absolute need for him, too lacking in imagination to be able to see that my happiness was entirely contingent upon him, and I blamed him for that without being able to see that I was trapped in a hole that I had dug. How could he possibly have known? How could he possibly have guessed? Until someone has loved they cannot possibly know what it might be like to be loved.

  Such then was the spin of my madness. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

  When I wrote the phrase, many pages back now, “unrequited love” I giggled to myself, for at the first go I committed the Freudian keyslip of typing “unrequired love.”

  It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness. He, after all, was to prove brave enough … but that is jumping the gun.

  The real Matthew Osborne is reading this now and laughing. Maybe he is groaning. Maybe he is writhing in embarrassment. It might fall out that one day in the future he will say to his wife or his children (for he is a family man now) that if they happen upon Moab Is My Washpot in a library or second hand bookshop they might be interested to know that he is Matteo. If they do read this book they will look at his grey, thinning hair and his paunch and his faded blue eyes and they will giggle and shake their heads.

  We walked back to the Thring Centre, Matthew thinking—what? Pondering my advice on friendship, ruing the snow that might cancel tomorrow’s match, hoping that his vase hadn’t cracked in the kiln, I could not guess. I walked by his side, everything inside me crying out to make this speech:

  “Come on, let’s just turn on our heels and leave this place. What does it hold for you? There’s nothing here for me. We’ll walk along the road to the end of town and, in the end, someone will give us a lift to London. We will survive there. Whom else do we need but each other? Me with my quick wits, you with your quick body. We could find work doing something. Painting, decorating, stacking shelves. Enough to buy a flat. I would write poetry in my spare time and you would make pots and play the piano in bars. In the evenings we could lie by each other’s side on a sofa and just be. I would stroke your hair with my fingers, and maybe our lips would touch in a kiss. Why not? Why not?”

  Instead, we made the rather awkward farewells of those who have just exchanged intimacies—exchanged? I had taken, he had given—and he returned to the pottery shop. With no stomach left for the keyboard I trudged my way back through the snow to Fircroft. I had a horrible feeling if I went to my study I might open my heart out to Jo Wood, so I decided to seek out Ben Rudder, the house captain, and ask his permission to have an early bath and go to bed with a book. I needed to clear it with him so that I could be absent from evening call-over. Rudder could be a stickler: strange to think that such an efficient public school authoritarian should go to Cambridge, get a degree, then a doctorate in zoology, and suddenly transform himself into a committed and far left socialist, ending up as editor of Frontline, the newspaper of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Strange, but true. I’ve lost touch, however, so maybe now he’s changed again. I hope so, not because I disapprove of the WRP, but because people who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.

  Rudder consented to my request and I went upstairs. That’s when it happened.

  Everyone has their own story. With some it’s a deliberate and concerted attempt to get things moving, with others it might be the result of a friend’s assistance. A common one is sliding down a rope, I believe. With me it was the old cliché of soap in the bath.

  Well, it gave me the shock of my life, I can tell you. I’ve described the slight revulsion of watching that boy’s penis at Stouts Hill suddenly sick up with semen, so I was prepared for the appearance of the stuff itself qua stuff; what I had no inkling of was the physical sensation. I don’t suppose anyone will be able to forget the head-swimming power of their first orgasm. Still, you don’t want to hear any more on that subject. We’ve all been there, unless we’re female in which case we’ve been somewhere else, but I dare say it amounts to more or less the same thing, but in different colourways.

  I am certain, certain as I can be, that this breakthrough of mine was a mechanical response to idle lathering and nothing to do with Matthew and my having had my arm round him. At least I think I am certain.

  Once I realised, at any rate, that I was not going to swoon into a dead faint or see hairs sprouting from the palms of my hands, I tidied things up and went to bed feeling rather pleased with myself. A good day.

  6

  The next day was a bad day. They really don’t come much worse. Like all bad days it started well and full of promise. The world was weddingcake white, there would be no games. What is more I had no PE on Tuesdays, so it looked like a day of gentle trotting about from lesson to lesson, followed perhaps by a nice fat pigout at the Lower Buttery.

  For which, it goes without saying, money would be required. My Post Office account book showed that I had five new pence in credit, not enough even in those far-off days for much more than a slice of bread, a glass of water and a Trebor Refresher. I had recently happened upon a new source of money however: Matron’s handbag.

  After lunch, Matron had coffee with the Frowdes and their guests, and this, I discovered, provided me with a marvellous opportunity to sneak into her flat, which was just off an upstairs corridor, dive into her handbag and snaffle what could be snaffled.

  So that lunchtime I was back at the House, after a morning’s Latin, English and horrid, horrid Maths, looking forward to the joys of a splendid afternoon. How was I to find out what Matthew might be doing? That was the only question that really concerned me. His match would be cancelled. There was talk of tobogganing down the slope that ran down from the Middle—Redwood’s was the nearest House to that area, maybe I would take the path a l
ong way round and see if Matthew was to be found there.

  I was still high on my breakthrough in the bath too. For a moment I had wondered if maybe I wasn’t whole. There is some absurd steroid that floats about inside the male and makes him feel ten foot tall just because he’s been able to come. It is founded no doubt on the soundest evolutionary principles, but it is ridiculous none the less. Since I was already close to being ten foot tall without the help of the steroid anyway, its effect may have been weaker on me than on many others, but there was still a great spring in my stride as I climbed the stairs after lunch and headed for Matron’s flat. I should have known better, it was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life’s most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays, and what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

  I walked casually up and down the corridor a few times to make certain that it was as deserted as usual and then opened the door and went down the little passageway that led to her flat.

  There on her bed was the handbag. I opened it, reached for the purse and then, with terrible swift suddenness, a cupboard swung open and Matron stepped out.

  There was nothing I could do or say.

  “Sorry” I think was the only word I managed. I said it perhaps a dozen times, rising in trembling tones.

  “Go to your tish and wait there.”

  It seems Matron had noticed the continual disappearance of money and had worked out when it was going. She had set a trap and I had walked straight into it.

  There was no possibility of escape nor any suggestion of an excuse. It was plain that I was the Thief. No hand was ever caught redder, no cash register drawer ever slammed shut on more palpably guilty fingers.

  By this time Fircroft knew there was a House Thief and most people guessed it was me, which is why, I suppose, I had diverted my attention away from the House changing rooms and confined my thieving to Matron’s handbag or the Sports Hall and swimming-pool changing rooms down in the school.

  Rudder the captain of house himself came to escort me down to Frowde’s office. The dear man was simultaneously distraught and furious.

  “Damn you, Fry!” he cried, slamming the table. “Blast you!”

  The decision had already been made. Rustication until the end of term. Rustication meant temporary banishment home, only expulsion was worse. The camel’s back was beginning to bend and creak.

  My father was already on his way. In the meantime I was to go upstairs and wait once more in my tish.

  The drive home was monumentally quiet, but I knew that words would come. My father’s analytical mind would not be content to know that I had erred and strayed from my ways like a lost sheep, nor would he simply forgive, forget, judge, punish or exhort. It would be far worse than that. He would need to understand. I did not want him to understand, no adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time, and most passionately of all I did not want him to know about Matthew.

  I am not sure that I thought then that Matthew was the root of the thieving. I am not sure that I know it now. I am sure, however, that he was at the root of the recklessness. He was at the root of all my emotions and I was not going to share them with anyone, least of all my parents, lest they somehow lead back to the truth.

  There was the inevitable analysis in the study, like the scenes that came on the mornings of the school report’s arrival, but more intense. Father at the desk in a dense fog of tobacco smoke, Mother on a sofa, alternately hopeful and tearful. I would become transfixed by the amount of smoke Father could inhale: after puffing and puffing at the pipe and ejecting the clouds from the side of his mouth, each cloud thicker than its predecessor, he would finally give one enormous puff and in one huge inhalation the thickest cloud of all would disappear, fractions of it emerging from his mouth and nostrils over the next minutes as he spoke. Sometimes a full ten minutes after this one massive inhalation he might laugh or snort, bringing up from the very bottom of the lungs one last wisp of smoke that had lingered there all that while.

  How he coped with the sullen “Don’t know,” “Don’t know” that answered every question asked I cannot guess.

  He had perception enough to see that there was something there lodged deep within me that he could not reach with reason, cajolement or threat. He continued to analyse and theorise like Holmes, of course, but like Holmes he knew that it was a cardinal error to theorise without sufficient data.

  One of his hypotheses was that he and I were very alike, an idea which I rejected as monstrous, nonsensical, absurd, unthinkable, insane and intolerable. I see the similarities now. His brain is better, his standards are higher and his capacity for work is far greater: he is, as a John Buchan hero might say, in almost all respects, the better man, but we do share characteristics. A particular colour of pride, a particular need to analyse. From my mother I have inherited qualities he lacks: an optimism, a desire to please, to cheer up and to gratify others, to make them feel good, and an ability to glide superficially, both where superficial gliding is actually a more efficient means of going forward than thrashing through murky waters and where superficial gliding is a kind of moral cowardice. I lack my mother’s goodness and ability to subsume her ego and I lack too her capacity to make everyone feel warmed by the radiancy of good nature. I think with my parents the old irony obtains: my mother is the practical one, my father the sentimentalist. I can far more easily imagine my mother coping with life on her own than my father. I don’t ever underestimate my father’s capacity to surprise and to solve problems, but nor do I forget that his very capacity to solve problems has burdened him with the propensity to find problems where none exists. We all know the ancient story of the Gordian knot, a tangle so complex that it was said he who could untie it would rule the known world: Alexander simply slashed it open with his sword. My father could never, never cut a Gordian knot—he might complicate it further and eventually solve it, but by the time he did so the known world would have moved on. Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury during my childhood and during my religious phase a hero and profound influence, was once accused by an interviewer of being wise.

  “Am I?” he asked. “I don’t think so really. I think it is probably just the impression given by the absurd fecundity of my eyebrows.”

  “Well, your Grace,” the interviewer persisted, “how would you define wisdom?”

  “Wisdom?” Ramsay chewed the word around in his mouth. “Oh, I should say that wisdom is the ability to cope.”

  On that definition, one with which I wholeheartedly concur, I should say my mother is the wiser of my parents.

  One inherits or absorbs just so much: my sneakiness, slyness and my wit, in its senses of funniness and of native wit, are all my own. My parents have wit in both those senses too, but it is not the same wit as mine, and best of all for them, each fits the other like teeth into a cog-wheel. From an early age I would watch them do The Times crossword each night. There was and is a type of clue that my father would always get and a type that my mother would always get, and between them they would, as it were, lick the platter clean. Occasionally they can complete a puzzle on their own, but I think they get infinitely more pleasure from doing it together. I could finish it by myself from a fairly early age and hated sharing it with anyone else, stiffening into cardboard if someone looked over my shoulder or asked for a clue. This is indicative of my need for independence, I suppose, proof that I didn’t need anyone in the way my parents needed each other, more than that, proof that I positively needed not to need, proof, in other words, of fear.

  My father also feared the kind of mind I possessed. He knew I was a clever clogs. A smart-arse. He saw a Look & Learn kind of a mind, eagerly competitive with a pastichey, short-cutting brain and a frantic desire to see its name in print, its knowledge praised. It won’t surprise you to learn that I had once begged my parents to apply to be on Robert Robinson’s television quiz programme, Ask the Family. Yes, I really was that dreadful, that insupportably,
toweringly, imponderably, unpardonably naff. By good fortune and sense my father would rather have sawn off his legs with the sharp edge of a piece of paper than gone anywhere near such a repulsive proceeding and he made that clear from the outset with a great snorting cloud of pipesmoke. My mother, God love her, may well have been prepared to bite the bullet on my behalf and go through with the horrid thing, but I suspect that even she, loyal to me ever, cheerfully relied on the blank certainty of my father’s absolute and categorical refusal.

  We know the type, and he knew the type, that’s the point. Blue Peter, Look & Leam, The Guinness Book of Records: facts, facts, facts. I exploded with facts much as contemporaries exploded with blackheads and Black Sabbath. Dates, capitals, inventors, authors, rivers, lakes and composers. I begged to be asked questions, begged to show off how much I knew, begged, like that little robot in the Short Circuit films, for Input … Input … Input …

  There’s nothing so desperately strange about this. It was perhaps rather more suburban a style than one might expect from a boy of my upbringing: my brother preferred to dream of farming and flying and other pursuits more usual amongst the country bred, but none the less I was one of the millions and millions of fact-collecting, did-you-know-ing, apparently-ing, it-is-a-little-known-fact-ing little shits that the world has put up with since Gutenberg first carved a moveable letter “a,” which, as every schoolboy tick like me knows, he did in Strasbourg round about 1436.

  Such a brain was not consonant with my father’s idea of intellect, work and the mind. The first and most urgent problem to be tackled, however, was this incessant thieving.

  It was decided that I should see a psychiatrist and the man chosen was Gerard Vaughan, later to become a Government Health Minister, and already I think a Conservative Member of Parliament by this time. I believe he had been recommended by a parental friend, Tommy Stuttaford, then a doctor and MP himself, but now the man hired by The Times to add footnotes to every news story that carries the slightest medical implication: Private Eye makes merciless fun of him in their “A Doctor Writes …” column. The Stouts Hill school magazine would have described him as an “Expert” in as many double inverted commas as their printer could spare.