Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Vaughan had his surgery at Guy’s Hospital in London and thither my father and I repaired.

  I completed some Bender Gestalt tests, interpreted a Rorschach blot or two and chatted. The thieving was a little puzzling to Vaughan, who felt that I should really be the offspring of a diplomat or a soldier. Teenagers who stole often did so, it appeared, because they came from families who were constantly uprooting. It peeved Vaughan that I should come from such a stable background.

  Nevertheless, my problem was diagnosed as “developmental delay”—academic maturity combined with emotional immaturity: a sixteen-year-old’s brain and a ten-year-old’s mind warring with each other inside a confused fourteen-year-old boy, resulting in an inability to concentrate, conform or settle. Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

  Vaughan’s cure came in the shape of an attractive yellow capsule called, if I remember rightly, Lentizol. The only effects, so far as I can remember, were a very dry mouth and terrible constipation. Perhaps this was part of the pill’s clinical function: they can’t steal if they’re on the bog kneading their stomach all day.

  Meanwhile, there was the problem of my academic work. If I was rusticated, it meant that I was at home for the rest of term. The following term, the summer, was my O-level term and my father was not about to let the grass grow under my feet, especially when it came to maths, a subject I was absolutely certain to fail. Failure in maths O level was disastrous because you couldn’t go on to do any A levels without it. I had passed English Language, the other essential, in November: why one sat an exam such as that so early I’ve no idea—simply to get it out of the way I suppose.

  Unfortunately for me, as I thought at the time, my father was as proficient in French, German, Latin and English Literature as he was at physics, chemistry and mathematics.

  It was maths that he concentrated on however. He was to become my private tutor.

  This was the deepest hell imaginable. The man I most feared and dreaded in the world, in whose presence all intelligence, coherence and articulacy deserted me, teaching me mano a mano, tête à tête the subject I most feared and dreaded in the world.

  How could he possibly understand how difficult maths was for me, he for whom mathematics was a language he spoke as a Norwegian speaks Norwegian, a Spaniard Spanish and a musician music?

  Worse was to come. He looked at the GCE Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level maths syllabus and found it wanting. It was, in his judgement, weak, cheap, and Fundamentally Unsound. Mathematics was beautiful, he believed. It should be part of the arts and humanities side of a school, not the science side, he believed. Unlike a science, you did not have to know anything to engage in mathematics, merely how to count, he believed. Even that could be discovered from first principles, he believed. Calculus could be taught to a six-year-old, he believed.

  There were some French lessons too: he would take down an old copy of a favourite book of his, Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin, and we would go through it together after a day’s mathematics. Yes, a day’s mathematics, day after day after day.

  When he grasped the completeness of my ignorance and my incompetence he did not gulp or gasp, I’ll give him that. He stuck by his own beliefs and went right back to the beginning. He taught me something that I did not understand: the equals sign.

  I knew what 2 + 2 = 4 meant. I did not understand however even the rudimentary possibilities that flowed from that. The very thought of an equals sign approximating a pair of scales had never penetrated my skull. That you could do anything to an equation, so long as you did the same to each side, was a revelation to me. My father, never once flinching at such staggering ignorance, moved on.

  There came the second revelation, even more beautiful than the first.

  Algebra.

  Algebra, I suddenly saw, is what Shakespeare did. It is metonym and metaphor, substitution, transferral, analogy, allegory: it is poetry. I had thought its a’s and b’s were nothing more than fruitless (if you’ll forgive me) apples and bananas.

  Suddenly I could do simultaneous equations.

  Quadratic equations I pounced on because there was a formula you could remember for solving them. My father was not interested in my remembering formulas. Any fool can remember a formula. He wanted me to see why. So we went back to the Greeks, to Pythagoras and Euclid.

  Oh shit. Geometry. I hated geometry.

  He decided that we would set out together, as if we knew nothing, to prove the suggestion that, so far as right-angled triangles were concerned, the square on the hypotenuse might well turn out to be equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

  Proof?

  How could you prove such a thing? The whole idea was completely alien to me. I suggested spending an entire day drawing right-angled triangles of different sizes and checking. If they all conformed to this theorem then that would suit me.

  Ho-no.

  I don’t remember the proof, I remember it took in circles and segments and sectors and angles which were temporarily designated the value Theta. But I remember that we got there and that I had followed it all the way and I remember too that when the final, triumphant QED! was written on the bottom of the page I felt a thrill of genuine joy.

  We moved on to trigonometry and some very baffling propositions concerning sin A equalling something and cos A equalling something else, a pair of propositions that were on the A level pure maths syllabus and nothing to do with basic O level mathematics at all.

  I can’t claim my father made a mathematician out of me. I still speak only stumbling, schoolboy maths with an atrocious English accent. I never quite got the hang of vectors. I have damned Descartes eternally for the foul things. My father can vectorise anything from Dutch Elm Disease, to a sunrise, to the act of opening a tin of beans. Plotting things against things, writing 4x = (x2—y2) on a graph line, that sort of runic weirdness—absolute mystery to me.

  It was a breakthrough, a breakthrough that enabled me to pass maths O level and a breakthrough in my relationship with my father. It was a permanent breakthrough in that I never hated him again (feared and dreaded, never hated) but temporary in as much as it altered nothing once I was back at school for the summer. Matthew Osborne still walked the planet, still inhabited almost every waking moment of my life, still gazed at me from every tree, every dawn, every brick in every wall. Indeed so brilliant a teacher was my father that he awoke a fire in me which was extrinsic to mathematics and which, amongst other things, I used to fuel my greatest love, poetry. Novels meant less to me (unless they were stories about my kind of love) and rightly too, for while the novel is an adult invention, the poem is universal but often most especially charged in the mind of the adolescent. The most common betrayal the literary-minded make as they grow up is to abandon their love of poetry and to chase the novel instead. To find oneself believing, as I did when in my twenties, that John Keats for example was strictly for moonstruck adolescents is as stupid and ignorant as to think that grown-ups shouldn’t ride bicycles. More stupid, more stupid by far. John Keats may not seem as sophisticated a paperback for the hip pocket of a self-conscious student as Beckett, Bellow or Musil, for example, but his greatness is not something that can be diminished by the stupidity of the newly adult. You can’t outgrow Keats any more than you can outgrow nitrogen.

  That isn’t what I was trying to say, however: you’ve got me off the point again. The very act of my father’s teaching inspired in me a love of the act of teaching in and of itself, that’s the point. I don’t suppose he had ever taught anyone anything before, but he taught me how to teach far more than he taught me how to “do maths.” I was so fascinated by my own progress that I became more excited by that than by what I was progressing in. Part of it may have been connected again (of course it
was) to Matthew. I fantasised awakening his mind to something in the same way. Not in order to be admired, not in order to win affection, but for the sheer pleasure of the thing, the sheer love of Matthew and the sheer love, the gardener’s love, of watching an idea germinate and blossom. I must suppose that my father, for all his apparently cold, Holmesian practicality, was motivated by love too, love of ideas and love of me. Self-love too, but self-love is fundamental to any other kind. Amour propre can also mean proper love, after all.

  My father had believed that I did not know how to think and he had tried to show me how. Showing, again, not telling, had proved efficacious. He knew that I was a natural mimic, intellectually as well as vocally and comically, but he knew that Mimesis is not the same as Reason.

  I had had good teachers. At prep school an English master called Chris Coley had awoken my first love of poetry with lessons on Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Charles Causley and Seamus Heaney. His predecessor, Burchall, was more a Kipling-and-none-of-this-damned-poofery sort of chap, indeed he actually straight-facedly taught U and Non-U pronunciation and usage as part of lessons: “A gentleman does not pronounce Monday as Monday, but as Mundy. Yesterday is yesterdi. The first ‘e’ of interesting is not sounded,” and so on.

  I remember boys would get terrible tongue lashings if he ever overheard them using words like “toilet” or “serviette.” Even “radio” and “mirror” were not to be borne. It had to be “wireless” and “glass” or “looking glass.” Similarly we learned to say formidable, not formidable, primarily not primarily and circumstance not circumstance and never for a second would such horrors as circumstahntial or substahntial be countenanced. I remember the monumentally amusing games that would go on when a temporary matron called Mrs. Amos kept trying to tell boys to say “pardon” or “pardon me” after they had burped. The same spin upper-middle class families get into this very day when Nanny teaches the children words that Mummy doesn’t think are quite the thing.

  “Manners! Say ‘pardon me.’ ”

  “But we’re not allowed to, Matron.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!”

  It came to a head one breakfast. Naturally it was I who engineered the moment. Burchall was sitting at the head of our table, Mrs. Amos just happened to be passing.

  “Bre-e-eughk!” I belched.

  “Say ‘pardon me,’ Fry.”

  “You dare to use that disgusting phrase, Fry, and I’ll thrash you to within an inch of your life,” said Burchall, not even looking up from his Telegraph—pronounced, naturally, Tellygraff.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Burchall?”

  “You can beg what you like, woman.”

  “I am trying to instil,” said Mrs. Amos (and if you’re an Archers listener you will be able to use Linda Snell’s voice here for the proper effect, it saves me having to write “A am traying to instil” and all that), “some manners into these boys. Manners maketh man, you know.”

  Burchall, who looked just like the thirties and forties actor Roland Young—same moustache, same eyes—put down his “Tellygraff,” glared at Mrs. Amos and then addressed the room in a booming voice. “If any boy here is ever told to say ‘Pardon me,’ ‘I beg your pardon’ or, heaven forfend, ‘I beg pardon,’ they are to say to the idiot who told them to say it, ‘I refuse to lower myself to such depths, madam.’ Is that understood?”

  We nodded vigorously. Matron flounced out with a “Well, reelly!” and Burchall resumed his study of the racing column.

  I can’t call such a teacher an inspiration, but there was certainly something of him in the mad general I played in Blackadder, and any teaching that drew attention to diversity in language, even the most absurd snobbish elements of it, was a delight to me.

  At Uppingham Stokes inspired in me a love of Jonathan Swift, William Morris, George Orwell and those two great Victorians, Tennyson and Browning. In fact my mother had already given me a great reverence for Browning. She, like my father and myself, has a prodigious memory. Hers is especially remarkable when it comes to people and to poetry. She used to reel off a lot of Browning when I was small. No one, sadly, has ever inculcated in me the slightest admiration for the novels of Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, although I adore the poetry of both, the first being quite magisterially great, the second being charming and often very funny.

  So although, as I say, I have been lucky enough to have had some good teachers at the various schools I’ve inflicted myself upon, none of them came close to my parents. Someone once said that all autobiography is a form of revenge. It can also be a form of thank-you letter.

  I returned to Uppingham for the summer term of 1972, better at sums, more fired up by ideas and the idea of ideas, but not fundamentally chastened. I was chastened by the shame and disgrace of having been found and proved a thief, but boys, as Frowde had told me they would be, are limitlessly generous, and they were inclined to treat the subject with immense tact, as if I had been the victim of an unfortunate illness, just as the citizens of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon treated their criminals. I was probably in my greatest period of physical growth too, shooting up an inch a fortnight it seemed to me. Pubescence was kicking in strong, making up for lost time. I never, thank God, was prey to spoes, as acne was called, but my hair became a little lank, and my eyes took on that strange adolescent brightness that lives under a film of sullenness. They were eyes that looked out, but never want to be looked into.

  Summer term was Matthew’s term because it was cricket term. I had always disliked summer, a hot, sticky, asthma-inducing time. It looked pretty, but it bit and it stung. I had a terror of insects, moths in particular, horrible scaly moths which flew through open bedroom windows and fluttered about the light bulb as I tried to read. I could not rest or relax in any room which contained a moth. Butterflies were fine during the day, but moths disgusted and terrified me.

  For Matthew’s sake, I tried to become good at cricket. Just so that I might occasionally find myself in the same nets as him, or be able to talk about Brian Close or Hampshire’s prospects for the Gillette Cup and other such crickety arcana.

  It is impossible for me to separate Matthew and cricket, so my current passion for the game must have much to do with him. As I write, it looks as if Australia will at least retain the Ashes at Trent Bridge (today is the Saturday of the 5th Test) and you have no idea what it is costing me to keep away from the television and radio—wireless, I do beg Mr. Burchall’s pardon.

  There is only one story to tell of this summer term and it is the story of the small act of physical consummation that took place between me and Matthew. Consummation is perhaps not the right word: it did not endorse or set the seal on our relationship, it did not fructify or sanctify it. It was a quick and sweet sexual act between two (from Matthew’s point of view) friends. At least I can say that it did not ruin the relationship or change my feelings for Matthew. It did not fortify them, for sex was never, as I have said, the point. Come to think of it I don’t know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes, procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

  It was after a late “net,” as we cricketers call practice. Matthew had asked if he might bowl at me for a while. His chief glory was his batting, but he bowled too. He was left-handed for both batting and bowling and had just taken an interest in wrist spin, which meant that he was experimenting with that peculiar ball, the chinaman. I was by no means a good enough batsman to deal with any kind of spinning ball: anything bowled on a good length at any pace, in fact, had me in trouble, but I was pleased to be asked (indeed had hung around casually all afternoon talking to others, his brother principally, occasionally to Matthew, being amusing and charming, simply in the hope that there might be such an outcome) and did my best.

  After a while we stopped and l
ooked around. We were almost the only two on the Middle by this time, the whole wide sward was deserted. Two or three late games of tennis were going on at the Fircroft end, otherwise we had the place to ourselves. Tennis was despised by Garth Wheatley, the master in charge of cricket and by the professional, an ex-Leicestershire player whose name I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. They both called it, disdainfully, “woolly balls.”

  “Too many promising cricketeers are being lured away from the game by the effeminate glamour of woolly balls,” I heard Wheatley say once, with a disparaging sniff.

  Matthew closed his cricket bag and picked up his blazer. “Oh, I love summer,” he sighed, looking around.

  “Me too,” I said. “Hang on, what am I talking about? I hate it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We started to walk, aimlessly it seemed, in a direction that took us away from both our Houses, away from the school, towards nothing but fields.

  I explained my hatred of insects, my asthma and my inability to cope with heat. “Let’s face it,” I said. “I’m made for the winter. The more clothes I keep on the better I look. In shorts I’m a mess. And unlike you, I don’t look glamorous in cricket whites.”

  “Oh, that’s rubbish,” he said and then after the briefest of pauses. “I quite fancy you, for a start.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, and gave him a push. “Trying to seduce me are you?”

  “Yeah!” he said, pushing back and knocking me over.

  It was all that quick and that silly. Nothing more than rolling and tickling in the long grass that turned into rubbing and sliding and finally angrily rapid mutual masturbation. No kissing, but at least plenty of giggling and smiling. Sex without smiling is as sickly and base as vodka and tonic without ice.