Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Margaret, to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude for presenting me with my first Wodehouse book, had been at school with my mother. Her husband, Oliver, a team member along with Peter May and Jim Prior of the Charterhouse XI immortalised by Simon Raven, won his Blue at Cambridge and then turned to the law. He kept in touch with the cricket establishment however and only last year completed a two-year term as president of the MCC: he now judges away full-time in the law courts. One of the greatest regrets of my life was to turn down his offer to put me up for MCC membership. I don’t know why I declined, a kind of embarrassment I suppose. Two years later I changed my mind but by then the waiting list had gone supernova and the opportunity was lost. Whether coaching me in cricket as a tiny tot along with his sons, or later as a skipper trying to teach me the rudiments of sailing, he always presented the image of a bluff, Hawk’s Club, won’t-put-up-with-any-of-this-intellectual-nonsense hearty, which belied a deep intelligence and very real sensitivity—as we shall see. The oldest son, Nigel, closest in age to me, was also to become a Cambridge Blue, double Blue in fact, and went on to play for Somerset, in the cupwinning side that included Ian Botham, Joel Garner and Viv Richards. He too is now a lawyer.

  My mother tells me that, aged five, I once returned from an afternoon in the Popplewell garden, bowling and batting and fielding, and said to her, “Mummy, are you allowed to choose your husband?”

  “Why of course, darling.”

  “Do you mean you picked Daddy when you could have chosen Mr. Popplewell!” I exclaimed in outrage and disgust. For years the Popplewells symbolised to me everything that was successful, integrated and marked down by the gods for effortless achievement. What is more, they were impossible to dislike: they proved to me that it was feasible to conform and to excel without losing integrity, honour, charm or modesty. I had always believed that my father, with his irksomely onerous integrity and pathologically intense distaste for worldly rewards, could have been like them if only he hadn’t escaped to the remote defensive fastness of rural Norfolk.

  Maybe I believed that the failures I associated with Booton and with Uppingham could be wiped out by this return to Chesham. If I had not been taken from Chesham to Norfolk in the first place, I could have been a glowing success like the Brookes and the Popplewells, I would automatically have joined in. I would have grown up healthy, sensible, talented, law-abiding and decent, instead of being transformed into the mess of madnesses that I had become. I don’t know if that is what I thought, but the Brookes and Popplewells were immensely kind and welcoming, either swallowing the story that I was just holidaying around England before A-level results and university or tactfully choosing not to probe. The Popplewells had two of the Australian test side staying with them, Ross Edwards and Ashley Mallet, whom I met in a lather of dripping excitement: cricket by now had entered my soul for keeps. Ashley Mallett told me something that I did not want to believe, something that troubled me deeply. He told me that professional cricket was ultimately hell, because the pain of losing a match was more intense than the joy of winning one. Edwards disagreed with him, but Mallett stuck fast to his belief. It was, I see now, simply a personal difference of outlook between the two of them, but to me it was fundamental. One of them must be right and the other must be wrong. Was the pain of failing a deeper feeling than the joy of success? If so, Robert Browning and Andrea del Sarto were wrong: a man’s reach exceeding his grasp did not justify heaven, it vindicated hell.

  After a week or so of cheerful, tumbling merriness in the Brooke household I left, brimming with charm and gratitude.

  I took with me Patrick Brooke’s Diner’s Club card, and the insanity really took hold.

  In those days any credit card purchase under the value of fifty pounds was a simple matter of signature and a roller machine. There was no swiping and instant computer connection. I took some self-justifying comfort in the thought that as soon as the loss of the card was reported Mr. Brooke’s account would not be debited, only that of Diner’s Club, Inc. But what does that mean? I had stolen from a pensioner’s handbag and from anyone who had money, I can’t claim that the smallest scrap of decency, altruism or respect lay behind any of my actions.

  The next few weeks passed in a kind of cacophoric, if there is such a word, buzz—which is to say a state of joylessly euphoric wildness, what a psychiatrist would call the upswing of manic depression or bipolar cyclothymia or however they choose to designate it now. The functional opposite, in other words, of the listless misery that had caused me to scoop up a suicidal bowlful of pills a few months earlier. I know that I went to London and transferred my possessions, such as they were (books mostly), from my rolled up sleeping bag to a brand-new suitcase. I stayed for a while in the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, applied for a job as a reader of talking books for the blind and made regular visits to the American Bar of the Ritz Hotel where I had become friends with the barman, Ron, whose passion was renaissance painting. He could remember P. G. Wodehouse sipping a cocktail in the corner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald leaping over the bar, drunk as a skunk, snatching up a bottle of whisky that he brandished like a woodman’s axe, all kinds of juicy and wondrous moments. But these were as nothing to Ron when compared to a Duccio or a Donatello. He would show me slides of Mantegnas and Correggios and of Masaccio and Giotto fresco cycles that he kept under the bar, light-box and all, and speak to me of the great book in his life, the greatest book about art ever written he told me, Reitlinger’s The Economics of Taste. He fed me free peanuts, olives and cornichons as he talked, enthused and displayed and I listened. I drank glasses of tomato juice and smoked Edward VII cigars in my new blue suit and felt for a while that this is where I belonged. The American Bar of the Ritz is now a casino club to which, strangely enough, I do belong. Sometimes Hugh Laurie and I will go in there and lose fifty pounds at the minimum stake blackjack table. I once went in with Peter Cook who was solemnly handed a pair of shoes to replace the white trainers he was wearing.

  “What,” said Cook, “take off my lucky Reeboks! Are you mad?” and we had gone to Crockford’s instead.

  London palled however. A rather unsavoury man of fifty with a perpetual giggle had tried very hard to pick me up in a pinball arcade in Piccadilly and I had hated the experience, hated, that is, how close I had come to accepting his offer of accompanying him home. We had walked together towards a taxi rank in Regent Street and I suddenly ran off, streaking up Sherwood Street and deep into unknown Soho, convinced he was following me all the way and that every sex-shop owner was a friend who would lay hands on me and return me to him. He probably, poor soul, rattled home in the taxi in a fever of terror, quite as convinced that I had marched straight into West End Central and was even at that moment furnishing the police with a detailed description.

  I decided that really my destiny lay in a visit to Uley. Maybe that is where I would find some kind of something, any kind of anything. A clue. An opportunity to lay an unknown ghost.

  What I believed I was looking for I cannot say. I can only assert that, as in a novel, the locations with which this story climaxes are the same as the locations with which it begins. Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

  So I arrived in Uley and saw those members of staff who chose to remain there during the summer holidays, staying a few nights with Sister Pinder in her little cottage and drinking pints of beer in the pub with Paddy and Ian Scott-Clarke. There was nothing for me in Uley of course. They must have known that I had been expelled from Uppingham and they must have wondered what I thought I was up to now. The crushing humiliation engendered by such unquestioningly, such unconditionally kind treatment sent me on the move again, this time towards the Cotswold villages of Boughton-on-the-Water and Moreton-in-the-Marsh.

  It was in a bed and breakfast hotel in Moreton-in-the-Marsh that I happened upon my second piece of plastic; it lay snugly in the
inside pocket of a casually hung jacket in the hallway, just sitting there for anyone, anyone like me, to steal. It was an Access card this time, much simpler to use, and with a signature that I could more easily reproduce than that of Patrick Brooke.

  I had a suitcase, a suit I had bought in London, a few other clothes, some books and unlimited spending power. It was time now to head for the Reading Festival and the thrillingly shocking possibility of a meeting with Matthew.

  My journey to Reading was broken in a town whose name I cannot even remember. I stayed overnight in as dreary a Post House Hotel as you have ever seen, even in your worst nightmare. Your worst nightmare, of course, is the precise inspiration for designers of this species of hotel. They steal your sleeping fears like a succubus and drop them down beside the ring roads of dying towns.

  It was only as I was finishing my dinner of steak and salad and beer in the dining room of this soulless assembly of melamine and Artex that I realised that the date that day was the twenty-fourth of August 1975. My eighteenth birthday.

  It was my eighteenth birthday. I had come of age here, in this place. I was eighteen years old. Not a fifteen-year-old discovering poetry, the beauty of algebra and the treachery and terror of growing up. Not a tormented fourteen-year-old whose life has exploded into love. Not a naughty twelve-year-old who broke school bounds to visit sweet shops. Not a grown-up eight-year-old who put a new boy at his ease on a train. Not a funny little boy who cried when his mole was upstaged by a donkey and didn’t dare go into the headmaster’s classroom because he was frightened of the big boys. Not a wicked little imp who pulled down his trousers and played rudies with a boy called Tim. An eighteen-year-old youth on the run. A somewhat less than juvenile delinquent. A petty thief who ruined people’s lives with theft, betrayal, cowardice and contempt. A man. A man wholly responsible for all his actions.

  Alone in my room, I ordered a half bottle of whisky from room service and for the first time in my life I made myself completely drunk. Drunk in the most dismal, appalling and lonely conditions conceivable. A concrete and smoked glass travelling salesman’s shakedown, an apocalypse of orange cushions, brown curtains and elastic-cornered nylon sheets. Hardly had the whisky gone down my throat in heavily watered gulps than I added to the bathroom sink heave after heave of sour sick.

  My sister told me later that this was the worst day, the very worst day of all at Booton, this day of my eighteenth birthday. My first ever birthday away from home and, at that, my eighteenth. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing. Since I had left the Brookes’ house they had had no news of me from anybody. I had been filed as a missing person, but they knew in this England of Johnny Go Home and fresh waves of missing teenagers reported every hour, they knew that they may as well not have bothered. When August the twenty-fourth came round however, when it was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday, so Jo tells me, my mother was inconsolable all day, weeping and sobbing like a lost child, which is, I am afraid, how I am weeping as I type this. I am weeping for the shame, for the loss, the cruelty, the madness and again the shame and the shame and the shame. Weeping too for mothers everywhere, yesterday, today and tomorrow, who sit alone on the day of their child’s birth not knowing where their beloved boy or their darling girl might be, who might be with them or what they might be doing. I am weeping too for grown-up children so lost to themselves and to hope that they squat in doorways, lie on beds, stare in stupors high or wired, or sit alone all eaten up with self-hate on their eighteenth birthday. I am weeping too for the death of adolescence, the death of childhood and the death of hope: there are never enough tears to mourn their passing.

  The whisky had done its work with me, as whisky will. It blanked my mind enough to stop it wandering to the raspberry canes at Booton, banned it from conjuring a picture of Jo and Mother stripping clean the gooseberry bushes and denied me the image of the raw red hands of Mrs. Riseborough rolling dough, stewing pears and shredding suet. Scenes from a childhood that I loathed and which sent me mad with longing, as did the tattered photograph of the loathed familial prison that still I carried with me everywhere I went—the oval loveliness of Matthew pasted on the obverse side. Without the numb wall of whisky between my head and my heart, all these would have buffeted me with such howling waves of grief that I and all the concrete foulness about me would split apart.

  The following day this eighteen-year-old arose and took his headache and his suitcase and his credit cards to Reading. The festival was too vast and frightening to penetrate, but there was a rumour of something happening on Salisbury Plain later, a rumour that Steeleye Span might be performing in the shadows of Stonehenge. If Matthew went anywhere he would go where Steeleye Span and Maddy Prior were.

  I see from irrefutable documentary evidence that it was a full two weeks later before I arrived in Swindon on my way to Salisbury. It seems in my memory to have been only a day or so later, perhaps those two weeks were whiskied into one long stupor.

  There was a grand-looking hotel in Swindon, calling itself, I think, the Wiltshire, or the Wiltshire County. Four stars I counted on its marquee: four stars was no more than I expected as my due from life.

  I checked in, that sunny morning of the ninth of September, well used to the procedure by now.

  “Edward Bridges,” I said to the receptionist, “would you have a room for the night?” Edward Bridges was, let us imagine, the name of the man whose Access card I had stolen: the real Edward Bridges, innocent victim as he was, does not need to have his name dragged into this sordid tale.

  The usual procedure was gone through: the signing in, the flexible friend slapping into the bracket beneath the roller, the keys handed over with a beaming smile.

  “Charming,” I said to the porter who came up with my suitcase, as I surveyed the room. “Quite charming.” I slipped him fifty pence and laid down on the bed.

  Tomorrow Stonehenge. Somehow I knew, because the god of love is capricious and insolent, that this time I would bump into Matthew there. A Matthew with sideburns no doubt, a Matthew thick with muscles, but Matthew none the less. I would probably get stoned with him and, at some propitiously giggling moment, let him know, in a bubble of hilarity, that I had mooned after him this four years or more.

  “Crazy man, or what?” I would drawl, and we would laugh and joke and laugh again.

  Yes, that is how I would play it tomorrow.

  I frowned as I crossed and uncrossed my feet.

  Those shoes. Really, those shoes! The one little luxury I had not been able to obtain with all my stolen money and all my stolen credit was a decent pair of shoes. Being size twelve and a half it had never been easy. Perhaps Swindon might provide where others had denied. One never knew. I hauled myself up to my feet, straightened my smart blue suit, winked to myself in the mirror and left the room.

  “There you go!” I said in that silly, cheerful, English way as I dropped my key on the reception desk.

  And would you believe it, the first thing I come across is a damned good shoe shop where they have, as if awaiting my arrival, a pair of thunderingly sound black semi-brogues in a perfect twelve and a half? Excellent. Capital.

  I walked up and down and inspected them in the angled mirror.

  “Do you know,” I said, handing over my Access card, and casting a rueful glance at the cracked old pair that lay on the carpet looking for all the world as if they were waiting for Godot, “these fit so well I think I’ll wear them home!”

  I passed a little jeweller’s shop next and the idea struck me that the wristwatch I wore was commonplace and ill-favoured.

  The assistant was most helpful and showed me first a smart young Ingersoll, charming in its way but worth less than ten pounds.

  “Maybe you have something a little more stylish?” I ventured. The little man dipped down below the counter to find a tray and I ran from the shop with the Ingersoll clutched to me.

  A very satisfactory morning’s shopping, I thought to myself as I flew from the shoppin
g centre, but trying on the nerves. Time now, I think, to return to the hotel for a spot of television and a plate of club sandwiches.

  I picked up my key from the reception desk and bounced cheerfully up the stairs. I may be eighteen, I conceded, but that did not mean I was in need of electric lifts. There was spring in me yet.

  I unlatched the door and was surprised to see that there was a man in my room.

  “It’s all right,” I said as I entered. “If you can come back and clean later? I’ll leave the room free for you in about an hour.”

  Another man appeared, stepping sideways out of the bathroom. Two men in my room. Both wearing grey suits.

  “Mr. Bridges?” said the first.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Edward Bridges?”

  “That’s right …”

  God how stupid can a man be? It never for a minute crossed my mind, until they revealed themselves, that they were anything other than strangely dressed and gendered chambermaids.

  “We are police officers, sir. We have reason to believe that you may be using a stolen credit card, the property of a Mr. Edward Bridges of Solihull.”

  “Ah,” I said and smiled.