Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  White came through like a good ‘un and said that he saw no reason, especially in view of the long custodial remand period I had served, for any sentence to be handed down other than an order for two years’ probation.

  “He has somewhere to live?”

  Popplewell rose. “With his parents, your worships, who will undertake to see that he obeys any order the court sees fit to make.”

  More head knocking and babbling before the beak in the middle cleared his throat and glared at me.

  “Stand up, please. You have led a very privileged life, young man. You have been expensively educated and you have repaid the patience and devotion of all those around you with dishonesty and deceit. Let us be clear, the crimes you have committed have not been schoolboy japes. They have been very serious offences indeed. In the light of the probation officer’s report, however, and various other representations it is the sentence of this court that you be placed on probation for a period of two years, during which time you are to reside …”

  I don’t remember the rest. It wasn’t Big Nick, Detention Centre or Borstal, that was all that mattered to me, I was to all intents and purposes a free man.

  I turned slightly in the dock and caught my mother’s eyes which were bright with tears. What was I going to do now? I wondered.

  And for how long was I going to ask myself what I was going to do, as if I were someone else, a stranger observing myself with curiosity and puzzlement.

  The long drive back to Norfolk was friendly and unstrained. I don’t know what either of my parents thought would happen next. I think they only knew for certain that there was nothing that they could make happen. My mother, always more optimistic, believed, I am certain, that things could only get better.

  I fell into my sister’s arms. She had been furious with me, furious for the grief I had caused Mother and furious for the atmosphere that had dwelt at Booton while I was away, but she hugged me and forgave me and wept. Roger, crisply short-back-and-sided, shook his head with a smile and said that I was a clot.

  The first thing I had to do was await the visit of the local probation officer appointed to take over my case. His name was Boyce and he had a snowy white beard. I had to visit him initially once a week, I think, and chat. He encouraged me to write while I was thinking what to do, so I wrote a strange updating of the old Greek myth of Theseus and Procrustes. I will not even begin to lower my hands into the steaming pile of psychological implications lying there, but just leave it at that. I gave it to Boyce to read and he passed it back professing himself completely unable to make head or tail of it. Reading it now, nor can I.

  More urgently, I had discovered that Norwich City College was having its final enrolment day. They offered a one-year course of A levels in most of the major subjects. I rushed to join the queue and found myself in the office of a twinkly little man who was head of arts admissions.

  “I would like to apply to do English, French and History of Art A levels,” I said.

  He shook his head sorrowfully as he read my application form. Next to the question, Attainments? I had written “Prep-school sub-prefect and 3rd XI scorer.”

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “that English and History of Art are both full up. If you had come on the first day of enrolment …”

  The first day of enrolment had been the day of my sentencing.

  “I must tell you this,” I said, more urgency and concentration and power in my voice than had ever been there before. “If you admit me on to those courses I will get A grades in each subject. I will take S levels in all subjects and get Grade Ones. I will take Cambridge Entrance …”

  “We don’t do Cambridge Entrance here …”

  “Nevertheless,” I said. “I will go to the library, take out past papers and, if I have to, take a job in the evening to be able to pay one of your staff to invigilate while I sit the Cambridge Entrance. I will be given a place to read English at Queens’ College. If you take me on, this is what will happen.”

  He looked at me with his blue twinkly eyes.

  I looked back. My entire destiny was in the hands of this man. What had he had for breakfast? What were his views on failed public school boys screaming for the assistance of state-funded city colleges? Did he have children? Were they difficult or good? Had he been to Cambridge or did he loathe Oxbridge and everything it stood for?

  His blue unreadable eyes just twinkled back, as inscrutable and potent as a Siamese cat’s.

  “I must be mad,” he said, scribbling his signature on my form with a sigh. “Take that to the office next door. Term starts on Monday. I’ll be taking you for Chaucer.”

  CATCHING UP

  I was down in the basement rooms of Norwich’s Bohemian hang out, Just John’s Delicatique. On what dark night of the soul the word Delicatique was born no one knew and John refused to say, but his coffee shop was the place in Norwich to talk art, music and politics.

  I had not been able that morning to bear the suspense any more of waiting for the postman and news from Cambridge. The promised A levels and S levels had been achieved in the summer, that glorious summer of ’76, and the following November, alone but for a single invigilator in a huge hall at City College, I had sat the Cambridge Entrance exam. After two weeks of scaring the postman off his bike, I told my mother that I had had enough.

  “I can’t take this any more. I’m going into Norwich. If there’s anything in the post, feel free to open it. I’ll be at Just John’s at lunchtime.”

  The post in Booton didn’t arrive until at least ten in the morning and the only bus into Norwich left the corner of the lane at seven forty on the dot, so the choice was postman or Norwich.

  It was good to be back in Just John’s. The usual crowd were there: Jem, impossibly, Byronically handsome worshipper of Blake and Jim Morrison; Nicky, Rugby School expulsee and amiable conversationalist; Greg and Jonathan, two twinkly and amusing brothers, and the small gang of other cafe society regulars. We sat, drank coffee, nibbled carrot cake and sipped at communally paid for shared glasses of frighteningly expensive Urquell Pilsner, talking of this, that and everything in between.

  “You look nervous,” said Greg.

  He pointed out that every twenty seconds I had been looking at my watch and that my right leg had been bouncing up and down on the ball of its foot—a mannerism Hugh Laurie to this day constantly upbraids me for. He used to believe that I did it to put him off when we played chess together at Cambridge (see photograph): in fact I am never aware that I do it. Hugh’s way of putting me off was to checkmate me, which is a great deal less sporting.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just that … no, there can’t be anything. It’s ten past one. If there was a letter my mother would have called straight away.”

  Just then Just John himself appeared halfway down the stairs: “Stephen!” he yelled across the buzz of frothy talk and frothing cappuccino. “Telephone for you!”

  I jumped to my feet and streaked towards him, sending my chair backwards on to the floor.

  Somehow I managed to overtake John on the narrow stairway and I leaped for the dangling receiver.

  “Mother! Did a letter come?”

  “No, darling. No letter.”

  “Oh …”

  Bless her, but damn her too, why did she have to call if there was no letter? She must have known my heart had been in my throat all morning. She wants me to buy some bloody salami or something …

  “No letter at all, I’m afraid,” she said again. “Just a telegram.”

  “A what?”

  “A telegram.”

  Who on earth could be sending me telegrams? Christ, maybe it had something to do with the court case. A new charge? A discrepancy in my statement? It was a whole year ago now, but these things could happen.

  “I’ll read it to you,” said my mother, and then in her best and clearest for-foreigners-and-the-deaf voice, she enunciated: “Congratulations stop Awarded Scholarship Queens’ College stop Senior Tutor.”
r />   “Read that again! Read that again!”

  “Oh darling …” she said with a sniff. “I’m so proud. I’m so proud!”

  What did Paul Pennyfeather do? What did W. H. Auden do? It was the only thing to do.

  I emerged from London’s Green Park tube station two days later and strolled past the Ritz Hotel. Perhaps I should go in and say hello to Ron, tell him how useful his beloved Reitlinger had been in preparing me for the History of Art paper. Maybe later. My appointment was for eleven o’clock and it would not do to be even a second late. I passed Albany Court and peeped up, thinking of Jack and Ernest, Raffles and Bunny.

  Turning left into Sackville Street I searched the doorways until I saw the brass plaque I had been looking for:

  GABBITAS & THRING

  SCHOLASTIC AGENCY

  They wouldn’t spurn a good public school fellow, a Cambridge Scholar Elect. There must be a prep school out there somewhere in need of extra staff. In need of someone who knew the system and was prepared to step in at a moment’s notice to teach a little Latin, a little Greek, a little French, English and History. Someone who would muck in, referee a rugby match, help mount a play. A typical Uppingham product: a good, solid, all-round chap.

  I rang the bell.

  “Thrrrrring!”

  I thought of the great whiskers and the chapel. I thought of hurrying past those great whiskers to see where he might leave his briefcase in the colonnade. Had I really been caught in such a net of madness for so long? And was that stab I felt inside still a stab of longing? No, no. Surely not.

  My whole life spread out gloriously behind me.

  I knew how to work now. Preparing for the Cambridge Entrance exam I had read every Shakespeare play and written pages and pages of notes on each: scene breakdowns, character lists, cross references, everything. I knew how to concentrate. No need for Lentizol and constipation to keep me attentive.

  Was I exuberant? Was the spring back in the step? When I arrived at Cambridge I would be older than the others in my year. I would be twenty and they would be eighteen. Jo Wood, Matthew, all of those Uppingham friends, they had already left. I would be out of place amongst a milling crowd of youths who, pace Churchill, wanted to sow wild oats while all I wanted to do was grow sage.

  “Thrrrrring! Thrrrrring!”

  “Wizzit?”

  “Um, I have an appointment for eleven o’clock. To see a Mr. Howard?”

  “Gabbitas!” The electric door latch snapped open with a triple clunk and I bounded up the stairs.

  No. I was Stephen. I was always going to be Stephen. I would always be that same maddening, monstrous mixture of pedantry, egoism, politeness, selfishness, kindliness, sneakiness, larkiness, sociability, loneliness, ambition, ordered calm and hidden intensity. I would cover my life with words. I would spray the whole bloody world with words. They were still all that I had but at last they were getting me places.

  Go and sin no more? I’m sorry, Mr. Cromie, but there are sins out there I haven’t even heard of yet—not even me: clever-clogs, smart-arse, read-it-all, know-it-all, done-it-all, seen-it-all me.

  You bet I was fucking exuberant.

  AFTERWORD

  Most humans manage their path from cradle to crematorium without seeping their lives and the lives of their families all over perfect strangers. I suspect that everybody who ever does come to write an autobiography wants to borrow David Copperfield’s opening words.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that situation will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

  I suppose I am, according to Ihab Hassan’s definition, the anti-hero of my own life, with those “problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence … clowning his sentimental way …”

  If I am lucky I may be yet just halfway through the passage of my time on this earth. I shall be forty years old this very next weekend. Perhaps I shall be ready one day to write down some memories of the twenty years that have passed since I stood outside the offices of Gabbitas and Thring and asked for employment as a prep-school master.

  I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the human stuff of fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives are, but that it is only given to a few of us to luxuriate in the bath of self-revelation, self-curiosity, apology, revenge, bafflement, vanity and egoism that goes under the name Autobiography. You have seen me at my washpot scrubbing at the grime of years: to wallow in a washpot may not be the same thing as to be purified and cleansed, but I have come away from this very draining, highly bewildering and passionately intense few months feeling slightly less dirty. Less dirty about the first twenty years of my life, at least. The second twenty, now that is another story …

  Stephen Fry

  Norfolk, August 1997

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A problem that bedevils the autobiographer is that he cannot guess with any confidence whom he will offend by inclusion in his book and whom by exclusion. Some who have figured and continue to figure in my life may have felt greatly put out to see their names written down here, others will have been affronted by my negligence, ingratitude and forgetfulness in leaving them out. I must beg all who know me, or have known me, to believe that the foregoing unravelling of reminiscence is bound to contain inaccuracies, omissions and conflations: memory is a most inaccurate and unstable entity, and autobiography can never be the same thing as history. My own memory, often praised, is good for trivia games and for learning dramatic roles quickly, hopelessly unreliable with the dates and facts of my own life but, I think, dependable and honest when it comes to the recall of emotional states and atmospheres.

  I owe a great debt to Anthony Cromie, who was kind enough to write a letter that answered many of my questions about the lives and proper names of some of the Stouts Hill staff; any errors in those passages in the book are my own. That one piece of assistance and days of endless rummaging through my old scrapbooks and letters aside, I have allowed my memory and my memory alone to dictate every scene and situation. I have explained already within the book that some names have been changed: sometimes to protect the guilty and sometimes to protect the innocent.

  As always, Sue Freestone at Hutchinson’s was angelically patient as she awaited the final, overdue outchug from my printer; Lisa Osborne (no relation …) and her calm, cheerful, brilliant, literate and knowledgeable copy-editing under the highest pressure were of indispensable assistance; Anthony Goff my literary agent remained a model of calm, kindly understanding, and my sister, Jo, who runs my life more efficiently and more sweetly than is credible, knows that were she not there I would be as a balsa twig in a tornado. She was no older than eleven at the time of my return from Pucklechurch so she does not feature here in much detail. In fact, my life could neither have been led nor written without her.

  My parents and my brother, Roger, may flinch at this book, this further example of the Stephenesque, as it used to be called within the family. They always taught me to be polite so, exhausted of further words, I can only say.

  Sorry

  and

  Thank you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEPHEN FRY no longer steals, cheats or lies nearly as much as he used to. He still talks too much, and he still has an annoying flop of schoolboy hair that seventeen of London’s most expensive and absurd hairdressers have been able to do nothing about.

  Fry has written three novels, The Liar, The Hippopotamus and Making History; played Peter in the film Peter’s Friends, Wilde in the film Wilde, Jeeves in the television series Jeeves & Wooster and (a closely guarded show-business secret, this) Laurie in the TV series A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

  Much of his past life is contained between the covers of this book you are now holding; much of his present life is spent trying to be good. He rarely succeeds, yet still he tries. He divides his time between New York and his English homes in London
and Norfolk.