Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  “I take it you drink coffee? Good. And cake?

  That’s it, relax! Now look, Stephen—I may

  Call you that?—I’m not here just so’s to make

  Your life hell, you know. If, in any way,

  I can help you to settle down and take

  Your place at Brookfields House, then you must say.

  As for your being late for bed—it’s quite

  Okay, for you’ll be later still tonight.”

  Those blue, blue eyes to Stephen now appeared

  Fraternal, not so Hitleresquely bad,

  And all those fearful doubts at last were cleared.

  Those eyes that gazed so picturesquely had,

  When he misjudged him, been loathed and feared:

  Fry saw him by the little desk he had

  The tea-cups on, affectionate and kind,

  The best-intentioned prefect one could find.

  There follows a bit of coffee-spilling business which means they have to share the same chair. Richard gives Stephen a cigarette, which makes him choke and splutter and go dizzy …

  And meanwhile Richard gently rocked the chair

  They sat in (like a tarnished throne) and gazed

  At Stephen, softly, as he gasped for air,

  His mind befogged, his body numbed and dazed.

  But Richard only saw the glowing hair

  And soft and hairless skin. He was amazed

  That such a vision could assail his eyes,

  From satin locks to silk-pyjama-ed thighs.

  He stretched his arms towards our hero’s head:

  “What hair you have …” he whispered, “may I stroke it?”

  “How lovely,” Stephen thought, “Yes please,” he said.

  A blissful silence fell, and Stephen broke it,

  “If only—” he stopped, turning red.

  I know, I know,” breathed Richard. As he spoke it

  He swung one leg over the other side,

  And, straddling the two arms, he faced his bride.

  I will excuse you the pain of the actual scene, but there follows what we might call an Act of Carnal Violation, ruthlessly enacted by Jones on Fry, who is deeply hurt by the experience.

  He picked himself up and hobbled about:

  He dressed in silence choking back the tears.

  He carried inside him the seeds of doubt

  That had exchanged his new-fired hopes for fears

  So Jones had hurt him after all, and out

  Of joy and smiles there came forth grief and leers.

  Passions to passions, lust to lust shall pass:

  Life’s a bugger and a pain in the arse.

  Not a word was passed not a parting shot,

  As Fry to his dormitory hurried.

  He hit the mattress of his iron cot

  And his face in his pillow he buried.

  “He’s used me like you’d use a woman, not

  A friend,” said Fry, hot and hurt and worried.

  Thus was this boy, now sadly laid in bed,

  Quite robbed of comfort, sleep and maidenhead.

  I have to confess that it upsets me, that extract (literary shame aside): upsets me because it seems to indicate that I had been more devastated by my deflowering at the hands (hands?—hardly the right word) of Derwent than I had supposed. There again, reading further on, I think it possible that dramatic and poetic licence were laying the ground for more tender, lyrical scenes that follow with the arrival of the Matthew of the poem. The Don Juan form and tone, although unrealised and clumsily done, was probably the right choice, for Byron depends hugely on undercutting emotion and lyricism with bathos, polysyllabic rhyming and ironic juxtapositions of the grandiose with the banal. Since for me Matthew was a literal and living ideal, this comic style stopped me from descending into too much self-pity and idealising what was to my mind already ideal, lyricising what was already lyrical and poeticising what was already poetic: it allowed me some kind of objectivity. The odd thing, and I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it, is that I am not sure that I could now write anything close to those verses, doggerel as they are. I wouldn’t try, of course, my embarrassment glands would explode. Which is precisely what my fifteen-year-old self dreaded and predicted would become of me.

  Whatever the literary defects of the poem it serves now to remind me just how completely my mind, soul and being had stayed behind at Uppingham, not just during that summer following my expulsion from Fircroft and then from the Paston School, but later on too. For I retyped and amended this poem a year afterwards (changing Stephen to David throughout) and continued to work on it until I was eighteen.

  My only contact with Uppingham was with Jo Wood, who proved an amusing correspondent. I had, at one point towards the end, blurted out to him my passion for Matthew. I think I had been desperate to show someone, anyone, a section of a team photograph I had managed to steal, cutting Matthew’s face into an oval and clamping it into my wallet like a schoolgirl’s pressed flower. Jo had grunted sympathetically, he had never been attracted in a boyward direction, but he was good-hearted and perceptive enough to glimpse the sincerity of my passion behind the loose, self-indulgent wank of my rhetoric. Jo’s return to Uppingham had gone serenely and he was heading towards A levels and Cambridge, continuing, as always, to read and read and read. Occasionally in his letters he would slip Matthew’s name into some piece of news, carefully and without emphasis: I wonder if he knew that just the sight of the name written out still made my heart leap within me?

  My first year at Norcat was spent in digs, with an elderly couple called (you’ll have to take my word for it) Croote. Mr. and Mrs. Croote “took in” students once a year. There was one bedroom with two beds. I shared with a boy called Ian from Kelling, near Holt, whose passion was motorcycles. Just as I was drifting off to sleep he would awaken me with an excited cry of “Kawa 750!” as a distant engine note drifted through the night.

  Mrs. Croote had three passions: the strings of Mantovani, her Chihuahua, Pepe, and natural history programmes. Each night that Mantovani’s orchestra appeared (they had a regular BBC2 slot at this time) she would tell me solemnly that every member of his orchestra was good enough to be a concert soloist in his own right and I would say, “Gosh,” and nudge Ian, who would say, “Golly!” and I would add, “Goes to show,” and Ian would say, “It does, doesn’t it?” and Mrs. Croote would be satisfied. When a wildlife programme was on we would wait with baited breath until the moment Mrs. Croote would turn to us and say, at the sight of a dung beetle rolling dung uphill, a lemur feeding its young or an orchid attracting a fly, “Isn’t nature wonderful, though?” We would nod vigorously and she would say, “No, but isn’t it, though?”

  I never quite understood the “though.” It is hard to parse. I suppose it serves the office of what the Germans call a flick word. It does something to the sentence, but it is hard to tell precisely what. I do know that Mrs. Croote could no more say, “Isn’t nature wonderful?” without adding a “though” on the end than Tony Blair, bless him, could reply to a journalistic question without prefacing his answer with the word “Look.”

  Mr. Croote’s twin passions were a bright red Robin Reliant and the King’s Lynn Speedway team, which allowed him and Ian to talk about motorcycles a great deal, while I made appreciative noises about Mrs. Croote’s cooking, which was unspeakable.

  Norcat itself hovered between the status of school and university very successfully. They had good teaching staff in the English, French and History of Art departments, but as well as A-level courses they offered a large number of “sandwich courses” and “day release” courses for those learning trades in catering and engineering and so forth. The social mix was something I had never encountered before. I found there to be no difficulty with the differences of background, I was accepted by everyone there without any of the inverted snobbery I had dreaded.

  The place was also, it must be pointed out, full of girls. Two girls, Judith and Gillian, I mad
e friends with very quickly. Judith adored Gilbert O’Sullivan and wanted to be a novelist: she had already created a Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins type heroine called Castella, and would give us excerpts of work in progress. Together we pooled resources to buy Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun,” which one-off single smote us both deeply. I think Judith might have suspected my sexuality, for she was the kind of naturally simpatica, thickly red-haired girl who makes a natural confidante for gay men. Gillian, on the other hand, for a short time became a girlfriend of mine, and there were disco moments of ensnogglement and bra-fumbling which came to very little.

  It was in King’s Lynn that I swam into the orbit of a most extraordinary circle of intellectuals who met regularly in the bar of a small hotel and discussed avidly the works of Frederick Rolfe, the infamous Baron Corvo. The very fact that I had heard of him made me welcome in the circle. These men and women, who were led by a bespectacled fellow called Chris and a glamorously half-French baron called Paul, held regular Paradox Parties. Instead of a password or a bottle, the only way to gain entry to such a party was to offer at the door a completely original paradox. Paul, whose father was the French honorary consul (for King’s Lynn is a port), could play the piano excellently, specialising in outré composers like Alkan and Sorabji, although he was also capable of delighting me with Wolf and Schubert lieder. He was planning, like Corvo, to become a Roman priest. Also like Corvo, he failed in his attempt; unlike Corvo however he did not descend into bitterness and resentment but became finally an Anglican priest, which suited him better, despite his ancestry. He died unpleasantly many years later in his London parish. This group regularly produced a magazine called The Failiure Press (the spelling is deliberate) to which I contributed a regular crossword. A deal of The Failiure Press was written in the New Model Alphabet, which would take up far too much space for me to explain, but which nearly always looked like this “phaij phajboo ajbo jjjbo” and took a great deal of deciphering to the initiated. The rest was filled with Corvine material (relating to the works of Corvo) and latterly, after I had long since moved on, it plunged into a weird libertarian frenzy of polemical anti-Semitism, gall and bitterness: the tide had ever been a hostage to fortune or self-fulfilling prophecy. In its early days it was lighthearted, occasionally amusing, and always self-consciously intellectual. In a town like King’s Lynn, such spirits were rare and it was amongst this group that I found my temporary best friend, and indeed first and only real girlfriend, whom I will call Kathleen Waters, to spare blushes all round.

  Kathleen was in many of the same lecture sets as I, and she had the advantage of having her parents’ house just across the road from college. We would spend a lot of time there, playing records and talking. She had entered the phase of smoking Sobranie cigarettes, using green and black nail polish, wearing fringey silks and delighting in that strange mixture of the Bloomsbury and the pre-Raphaelite which characterises a certain kind of girl with artistic temperament and nowhere to put it. For my sixteenth birthday she gave me a beautiful green and gold 1945 edition of Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, which I have to this day, and a damned good fuck, the memory of which is also with me still.

  We were up in her room, listening to Don Maclean’s American Pie, as one did in those days, marvelling at the poetry of “Vincent” and how it spoke to us, when she remarked that it was odd that we had never screwed. I had told her early on that I was probably homosexual, but she did not see this as any kind of impediment at all.

  It was a perfectly satisfactory experience. It was not as I had imagined from that horribly misogynistic scene in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers which seemed to suggest that because Tchaikovsky was attracted to men he must also have vomited at the touch of women. I could not, afterwards, deny that the design features of the vagina, so far as texture and enclosing elasticity were concerned, seemed absolutely made for the job—ideally suited in fact. We remained friends and tried it again once or twice, in a field and in a car. My heart was never in it, but my loins were very grateful indeed for the outing and the exercise.

  The summer after my first year at Lynn I earned enough as a barman at the Castle Hotel (sixteen years old, but what the hell, they didn’t ask questions in those days) to buy a Raleigh Ultramatic Moped, which I now used to shuttle me the weekly thirty- something miles between Booton and King’s Lynn. For my second year I bade farewell to the Crootes, Pepe and Mantovani and took up accommodation in a hostel in college. I had two very good friends there, Philip Sutton and Dale Martin, both highly entertaining, charming, funny and resourceful. I must confess too that Dale was almost my first betrayal of Matthew for I found him terrifically cute. He looked like a seventeen-year-old Brad Pitt, which surely no one will deny is a wholly acceptable appearance to present. Matthew still burned a hole in my heart, but Dale was most comely to look upon. We lived on the top floor of the hostel, which had a kitchenette, and Phil and Dale patiently taught me over many weeks how to fry eggs and heat up baked beans, a skill I retain to this day to the sick envy and admiration of my friends.

  Both Phil and Dale were Norfolk down to their socks, but again they forgave me my background and treated me as one of them. Our idea of a really, really, really good time was to spend hour upon hour in a back parlour of the Woolpack, the pub next door to the college, playing three-card brag for money. Not huge sums, but enough to annoy us if we kept losing. I wasn’t in the least interested in alcohol and usually drank long pints of bitter lemon and orange juice, a St. Clements I think the drink is called. I discovered that I absolutely loved the company of completely heterosexual men, where the conversation ranged endlessly between sport, jokes, pop music and the card game. There was a reluctance to talk openly of women, not out of shyness but I think out of the same graceful good manners that is more stuffily enshrined amongst the smarter classes in all those college sconcing rules and admonitions never to “bandy a woman’s name.” Phil and Dale got me a job at Christmas as a waiter at the Hotel de Paris in Cromer. In a week I earned a hundred pounds, and by Christ I earned it. I think I must have walked two hundred miles between kitchen and restaurant, silver serving from breakfast to late, late dinner. The money was spent on cannabis, cigarettes and still (I blush to confess) sweets.

  I had been elected in my second year at Norcat on to the committee of the Students’ Union. I came upon this clipping the other day which I had proudly cut from the pages of the Lynn News & Advertiser.

  West Norfolk not to ban “Exorcist”

  Members of the environmental health committee of West Norfolk District Council exercised their powers as film censors for the first time on Wednesday.

  They watched the controversial film “The Exorcist,” and then approved it.

  The committee members attended a private showing of the two-hour film at the Majestic Cinema, King’s Lynn, to decide whether they were prepared to accept the recommended certification of the British Board of Film Censors.

  COMPLAINTS

  At a committee meeting afterwards the committee agreed that the film, which has an X certificate, could be shown in West Norfolk.

  Since April the committee has had the power to prevent cinema licensees from showing a film. “The Exorcist” was the first film they had viewed and they did so after receiving three complaints about it.

  Three co-opted members of the committee also saw the film—Canon Denis Rutt, vicar of St. Margaret’s Church, Dr. M. D. O’Brien, a consultant psychologist at Lynn Hospital, and Stephen Fry, representing the Student’s Union.

  Canon Rutt said he saw no reason why the film should be banned on ethical grounds.

  Dr. O’Brien said: “It is a film which would worry susceptible people—but you cannot protect the susceptible. A proportion of hysterical girls will faint and be carried out but it will not kill them. Presumably they want the thrill of being frightened and I would not regard this as serious.”

  Mr. Fry said: “Far from being disturbing, it made me more appreciative of goodness, I am not in favour
of even considering banning it.”

  But committee chairman Mr. H. K. Rose who did not vote, disagreed with their views. “I would have thought it was very offensive to the good taste of many people, I was horrified, but I am obviously in the minority.

  CRITERIA

  “If we approve of a film like this I see no point in having any censorship at all. If people are titillated it makes them go and see something to see if we are right or wrong,” Mr. Rose said.

  Canon Rutt commented: “This whole operation is giving the film the wrong sort of publicity.”

  The committee’s decision is based on the question of whether the film is offensive, is against good taste and decency and whether it could lead to crime or disorder.

  With its X certificate the film can only be seen by adults.

  Still a self-righteous little prig. I must have been jeeyust seventeen when I was co-opted on to this committee. Why they felt a seventeen-year-old would make a good judge of a film which was legally available only to those aged eighteen and upwards, I have no idea. My role on the Students’ Union was Officer in Charge of Films. This was in the days before video cassettes and it was my job to order reels of film from Rank and show them in the assembly hall of the college. I suppose that’s why I was chosen to represent the students for the Great Exorcist Debate. I remember the screening well. I had already managed to see the film twice before in London, so it hardly came as a surprise. The expression on Councillor H. K. Rose’s face when the possessed child played by Linda Blair growled to the priest in a voice like a cappuccino machine running dry, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Karras,” was wonderful to behold. His hand was still shaking as he dunked ginger nuts into his coffee in the committee room for the discussion afterwards, poor old buster. What he would have made of Crash or Reservoir Dogs one can only guess at …

  At this time at King’s Lynn I began to dress, in accordance with the latest vogue, in suits with very baggy trousers, their cut inspired by the Robert Redford version of The Great Gatsby which had just been released. I wore stiff detachable collars and silk ties, wellpolished shoes and, occasionally, a hat of some description. I must have looked like a cross between James Caan in The Godfather and a poovey Chelsea sipper of crème de menthe and snapper up of unconsidered rent.