Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  He left me there, lying in the grass. I leaned up on one elbow and watched him go, until his shape, cricket cream coloured against the grass, disappeared from view. He never once turned back.

  I lay back, stared at the sky and fell asleep.

  I passed maths O level, not with distinction, but I passed. The only exam I failed was physics, a determined cock snooked at my father to remind him that I was still myself. He had not made me his creature, his good science boy. For physics, above all, was what father was about.

  I did not just fail physics, I ploughed it spectacularly. Such was my pride that I could not bear to be seen to fail anything unless it was quite deliberate.

  There had been a question in the examination paper which asked about something called EMF. To many of you reading this, EMF probably means that Forest of Dean combo whose excellent single “Unbelievable” had us all foot tapping five or six years ago; to Mr. Pattinson, the poor sod whose job it was to try and get some physics into my head, EMF meant Electro-Magnetic Force, or Field or something vaguely similar, please don’t ask me to elaborate.

  The question read:

  Describe the EMF of a bicycle torch battery.

  Well, I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were on about, so I spent the entire physics exam drawing a bicycle. I wasn’t bad at this, Object Drawing was the part of the art O level that I was best at, my painting had never again reached the heights of the IAPS award-winning Unforgettable Character, but copying, I could always copy.

  The bicycle I drew had a crossbar, saddle bags (an open cross-section of which revealed the presence of a Tupperware box containing an apple, a Mars bar and some cheese and chutney sandwiches) and, naturally, torches front and rear.

  My last act, at the end of the exam, was to rule a line towards the front torch and write at the other end:

  “This is the torch that contains the battery that contains the EMF that the questioner seems so desperate to know about.”

  O levels in those days came in grades 1 to 6, which were passes, and then 7, 8 and 9, which were fails. I achieved none of these. I achieved something far more magnificent. I was awarded an Unclassified, which included a letter to the school.

  I don’t think my father was hugely surprised when the results came through in the summer holidays. At least I had passed maths, that was the great thing.

  I decided, as my third year began, my sixth-form year, that I would do English, French and Ancient History for A level. My father tried, with half-hearted idealism, to suggest that there would be more of a challenge to me intellectually if I chose maths, but my choice prevailed.

  Some two or three weeks after my fifteenth birthday, therefore, I was a member of Lower VIA. I was far too young to be a sixth-former. Too young literally, and much too young if one believed Gerard Vaughan’s diagnosis of “developmental delay.”

  I had the joy of Rory Stuart, a remarkable teacher. Actually a Cambridge classicist of distinction, his enthusiasm (and he was the living embodiment of that divine Greek quality) had turned to English Literature. He went on to become head of English at Westminster and then, on the death of a plants-woman aunt whose cottage and grounds he inherited, he altered direction once more, this time reinventing himself as a landscape gardener. He calls himself, with splendid impudence, RHS Gardens (using his genuine initials but infuriating the pompous arses of the Royal Horticultural Society in Wisley) and does a little teaching still at the nearby Cheltenham Ladies’ College. He co-wrote a book about making a garden with the novelist Susan Hill, a book I thoroughly recommend. His pupils are spread wide around the world and feel themselves to be part of a special club. Sometimes I will bump into someone in the street who’ll say, “Excuse me, weren’t you taught by Rory Stuart?” and we will stand there together swapping stories about him and what he did for us. Like me, there was something immensely distant and aloof about him in private, he was very unknowable there, but once his metaphorical teaching cap was on, he was energetic, charged and boundlessly creative. Anything that was said he could open like a flower, examine as a geologist might examine a stone or a squirrel a nut: a stupid and flippant remark could be as excitedly chased down as serious. Every remark or thought from any boy came to him as if it was utterly new and vibrating with possibility.

  Given what I have already said about my parents, Stuart was the teacher that some are lucky enough to have in their lives. Others will always blame the lack of such a being for their failure to progress. Maybe they are right to do so, but I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that—don’t you?—when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It’s too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then. There were pictures of Pol Pot last week, tremblingly enchained: again, too late one feels, too late. Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion. There were those who might have been able to save me from myself. It is possible that somewhere in the chain of events from Chesham Prep to prison I could look back and say, “He failed, she failed, they never tried,” but where would that get me now? Off the hook? I don’t feel that I’m on one. “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,” said Rilke in sharp defiance of the future industry of TV and self-help-book exorcism.

  Maybe it’s my mother’s side in me that makes me one who would rather look to people to thank and praise than people to blame and damn. Don’t get me wrong, unlike my mother, I’ve a wicked tongue in my head and when it comes, for example, to that pallid, fraudulent, dangerous twentieth-century version of true mysticism, the charlatanism of runes, tarot, horoscopy, telepathy, rootless opinion, stale secondhand “open-mindedness” and all that shite I get blisteringly unforgiving and furious. I am capable of being horribly polemic and culpatory in many arenas, but in the arena of the past I see no point. Had I been palpably abused in any senses of that much (ha!) abused word, then maybe I would think differendy—as it is and as I have never tired of restating, I am the one who did most of the abusing: I abused trust, love, kindness and myself.

  As a sixth-former life was, technically, more relaxed. As a fifteen-year-old it was, naturally, growing more complex every day. My feeling for Matthew had not altered. We never repeated the allegro rapture of our one sexual experiment, and we never referred to it. I still don’t know why it happened. Maybe he had guessed the depth of my feeling for him and had thought it was founded in lust and had as a result wanted to get all that out of way because he valued my friendship. Maybe he was being kind. Maybe he was just a healthy fourteen-year-old who fancied a quick bit of nookie. Maybe he felt for me what I felt for him. I’ll never know and that is as it should be. I’ll always have that memory at least … the heat of him, the heat of him from his day’s exercise, the heat that radiated from the base of his throat, the heat under his arms, the heat-of-the-moment heat of that moment. Oh dear, will these memories never lose their heat?

  I acted in a play in Trog Richardson’s brand new Uppingham Theatre, being amongst the first three to step on its stage. Patrick Kinmonth, Adrian Corbin and I were the weird sisters (none weirder, believe me) in the theatre’s baptismal production of Macbeth. I had read David Magarshak’s translation of Stanislavsky’s Art of the Theatre and had decided that acting was my destiny.

  The director, Gordon Braddy, wanted the witches to design their own costumes, a decision he came to regret, since I announced that I wanted my costume to hang with fresh livers, lungs, kidneys, hearts, spleens and other innards, all bound by intestines. And why not, I argued, produce real eyes of frog and genuine tongues of newt from the cauldron? This was considered too much, but my offal-trimmed costume was permitted. The costume itself was constructed of strips of PVC. Kinmonth, who is now a highly respected painter anyway so it wasn’t fair, designed something excellent. Corbin too managed to snip
something out of plastic that was at least wearable. The Christine-Keeler-meets-the-little-red-murderer-from-Don’t-Look-Now nightmare that I threw together haunts me still and, I swear to you, for I have returned many times, the smell of rotten guts still informs the understage dressing rooms.

  I returned to that Uppingham Theatre for the first time, as it happens, in 1981, just after leaving Cambridge, with Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery and the rest of our Footlights troupe, to perform prior to Edinburgh. Uppingham had become, because of Chris Richardson, a common stop-off place for comedians. It had started with Richardson designing the set for Rowan Atkinson’s original one-man show. Rowan always tried out his new material at Uppingham and the Footlights followed.

  I have since been back to give little talks and readings and so forth, Old Boy on the Telly, Sleb Speaker, all that, but every time I stand on that stage I see Richard Fawcett as Seyton and Third Murderer, Tim Montagnon as Banquo, David Gaine laying on as Macduff and above all Rory Stuart as Macbeth. Like most actors I forget the lines of any play a week or so after the run is over, but I have forgotten hardly a single word of Macbeth, from “When” to “Scone.” It is too far distant to recall Rory’s performance in any detail, but I was thrilled, simply entranced, by the way he delivered the climax to the great “If it were done when ‘tis done” soliloquy—

  And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

  That tears shall drown the wind.

  Hoo-werr … I still shudder at it. I may have felt guilt and fear of punishment in my day, but it was never quite that bad. A few people whispering in corners, the soul of my dead grandfather, the sad-eyed Christ, those things have bothered and shamed me, but I never imagined heaven’s cherubim blowing the horrid deed in every eye or Pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast. God where did he get it from, that man, that Shakespeare?

  None the less, nemesis was drawing up her skirts ready to charge, and as always with that fell dame, I wasn’t looking for her in the right places.

  My parents, with as much realism, I fear, as generosity, had made it plain that if ever I was short of money, I was to go to Mr. Frowde and he would advance me enough to buy as many of Mrs. Lanchberry’s lard-fried eggs and her husband’s cream slices as I could eat. It must have been something more than slightly sickening and slightly frightening for them to know that the most efficient way to stop me stealing was to let me have as much money as I wanted. It’s like proving Pythagoras by drawing and measuring as many different right-angled triangles as you can.

  I had more or less stayed out of trouble for the first month or so of that sixth-form term. The work was fun: I liked Anouilh’s Antigone, the first French set text we had reached, and I liked Ancient History too, which was actually a cop-out: I should have chosen Latin and Greek, but I saw Ancient History as a good dossy compromise.

  I developed around this time a mania for climbing around the roofs of the school buildings. Any psychologist who can interpret this convincingly for me will earn my thanks. The School Hall, a great Victorian building with onion domes at each corner, and the chapel itself both yielded wonderful runs of leaded channels and strange platforms from which one could survey the school beneath. I knew where Biffo Bailey, the school porter, kept the keys to everything and had become a master at the art of this particular form of non-theftual cat burglary.

  (“Did he just say non-theftual?”

  “He did, you know.”

  “I thought so. Shall I, or will you?”

  “Best let it pass, I think.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm. Only encourage him otherwise.”

  “Well, if you say so. Personally I’ve half a mind to call the police.”)

  Both the chapel and the hall also contained two enormous Walker organs, with gigantic thirty-two-foot wood diapasons. If you stuck a piece of paper over the vent of one (I’m sure there’s a better name for it than “vent,” but I’ve lost Howard Goodall’s telephone number) a single one-second blast on a bottom A would break the paper in two. Best of all, the lectern could be raised to reveal a huge array of presets. Between each of the three keyboards, you see, were buttons numbered one to, I think, eight. The organist, instead of having to grab at and pull out a clutch of different stops while in mid-Toccata, could just press Button 3, say, which would automatically push out a preset combination of, for example, viol, tromba and clarion. I discovered, one Saturday afternoon while the rest of the school was thrilling to the excitements of the Oundle match or whatever frantic tourney was being enacted on the field of battle, that I could alter these presets, and I did so. All you needed, with the lectern lifted and balanced on your head, was to use the tip of a biro to flick a series of dip switches, as I believe they’re called. I changed every preset which was loud and thunderous to a preset that used one feeble oboey wail and every preset which was dulcet and faint to a great combinatory blast of the very loudest, most thundering pipes.

  The following morning, Sunday, as we walked down to the chapel I explained to Richard Fawcett, Jo Wood and a few others what I had done.

  “You wait,” I said. “You just wait.”

  The organ on Sundays was usually played by one of the music staff rather than a boy. It would either be Dr. Peschek, whose son Dickon was at the school and a friend, or by Mr. Holman, who had wild dark curly hair and looked like Professor Calculus from the Tintin books.

  As we reached the Magic Carpet, I saw Holman hurrying along with sheaves of music under his arms. Splendid, I thought. Splendid.

  The result was indeed splendid.

  The moment for the entry of the choir arrived and Holman, as he improvised the quiet preludey music that organists favour while congregations settle, was beginning to look a little rattled already. A huge blasting fart had emerged in the middle of one of his gentle, meandering doodles and blown back the hair of the first two rows of School House who were sitting in front of the diapason array and had directed at him the most indignant looks. This had unnerved him and we could see, between peeping fingers, that he was beginning to lose faith in his beloved presets. But there was no time for him to do anything about it, the chaplain and servers were there at the back with the choir and candle bearers, it was time for action and the procession. Holman raised his two hands, a tiny knuckle crack was heard as he bent his fingers and—

  “Neeeeeeeeee …”

  Handel’s stirring anthem “Thine Be the Glory,” instead of roaring the faithful to their feet, peeped like a shy mouse from the wainscoting. Headman at the back of the procession shot a look up at the organ loft, and Holman’s wild face, reflected in the mirror for us all to see, turned a bright shade of scarlet. The fingers of one hand flew around the stops, pulling frantically, while the other hand vamped ineffectually and the feet trod up and down the pedals which gave out tiny squeaking thirds and fifths, the kind of waily wheeze someone produces when they pick up a mouth organ for the first time.

  The school rose uncertainly to its feet, all save Jo Wood, Richard Fawcett and I, who were under the pew, biting hassocks and weeping with joy.

  Further stabs of delight assailed us when we saw, during sermons and lessons, Holman furtively lifting the lectern and trying to make adjustments, looking for all the world like the form’s bad boy peeping at a porn mag in his desk.

  A few weeks later the school had the excitement to look forward to a Day Off. The kingdom was to celebrate the excitements of the Silver Wedding of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and had declared a Monday Bank Holiday in its patriotic fervour. Jo Wood and I had even more to look forward to, for Geoff Frowde had given us permission to go to London.

  I had a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to attend, and had invited Jo to come along as my guest.

  For many years now I had been a member of this harmlessly dotty sodality
. I had been the youngest member for a long while, though by now some snot-nosed little creep had limbo-danced under me to that distinction. The organisation was run by eccentric men like Lord Gore-Booth, the president, who dressed up as Holmes every year when the Society went to Switzerland to re-enact that final, fateful tussle between Moriarty and Holmes by the Reichenbach Falls. Gore-Booth’s wonderful daughter Celia, who died way before her time (I think she was his daughter, not niece), I got to know many years later when she was one of the many remarkable actors in the troupe known, slightly embarrassingly, as Théâtre de Complicité.

  Another leading light was the editor of the Journal, the Marquess, or possibly Marquis (I have no Debrett’s to hand, I fear) of Donegal. The Journal ran fierce articles on hot Holmesian topics and ran a correspondence page calling itself “The Egg Spoon,” in honour of the item of cutlery that Watson wagged petulantly at Holmes one breakfast very early in their relationship, Watson using the splendid phrase, if I remember rightly, “Ineffable twaddle!” to describe an article he was reading, which turned out of course to have been written by Holmes himself.

  The usual meeting room was the old Royal Commonwealth Club in Villiers Street, off the Strand (deemed propitious, I suppose, since Holmes made his appearance in The Strand magazine).

  Anyhoo, as Ned Ryerson likes to say in Groundhog Day, Frowde had consented to our attendance of a Saturday evening meeting of the Society. We had booked hotel rooms for ourselves in Russell Square and were due to return on Monday afternoon, which gave us almost three days of London.

  Only it didn’t, because we had rushes of blood to the head and went to the cinema and watched A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and Cabaret, over and over and over and over and over again for four days in a row. Hell of a year for cinema, 1972. All the films were X-certificate of course, but both Jo and I looked as if we just might pass as eighteen.