by Stephen Fry
Also by Stephen Fry
FICTION
The Liar
The Hippopotamus
Making History
The Stars' Tennis Balls
NON-FICTION
Paperweight
Moab is My Washpot
Rescuing the Spectacled Bear
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
Stephen Fry in America
with Hugh Laurie
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
A Bit More Fry and Laurie
Three Bits of Fry and Laurie
Fry and Laurie Bit No. 4
The Fry Chronicles
STEPHEN FRY
MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
MICHAEL JOSEPH
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2010
Copyright (c) Stephen Fry, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-196957-2
To M'Coll
Contents
Introduction
C is for C12H22O11 for Cereal, for Candy,
for Caries, for Cavities, for Carbohydrates, for Calories
C is for Cigarettes for Convict, for Cundall,
for Corporal Punishment, for Common Pursuit, for Cessation
1. College to Colleague
Cambridge
College and Class
Chess, Classics, Classical Composers, Curiosity and Cheating
Caledonia 1
Cherubs, Coming Out, Continent
Challenge 1
Corpus Christening
Chariots 1
Caledonia 2
Conveniences
Committees
Cycle
Comedy Colleague, Collaborator and Comrade
Continuity and Clubroom
Comedy Credits
Cooke
Chariots 2
Corpsing Chorus
Cellar Tapes and Celebration
Cheerio, Cambridge
Caledonia 3
2. Comedy
Carry on Capering
Clash of Cultures
Chelsea, Coleherne Clones and Conscience
Colonel and Coltrane
Computer 1
Commercial
Create!
Car
Challenge 2
Cinema
Church and Chekhov
Cockney Capers
Chichester 1
Crises of Confidence
Celebrity
Commercials, Covent Garden, Compact Discs, Cappuccinos and Croissants
Crystal Cube
Columnist
Cryptic in Connecticut
Contortionist
Critics and Couriers
Confirmed Celibate
Characters and the Corporation
Colonel and Mrs Chichester
Computer 2
Conspicuous Consumption
Country Cottages, Cheques, Credit Cards and Classic Cars
Carlton Club Crustiness
Courtly Comedy
Coral Christmas, Cassidy, C4, Clapless Clapham, Cheeky Chappies and Coltrane's Cock
Clipper Class, Cote Basque and Choreography
C
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Index
Work is more fun than fun
Noel Coward
I really must stop saying sorry; it doesn't make things any better or worse. If only I had it in me to be all fierce, fearless and forthright instead of forever sprinkling my discourse with pitiful retractions, apologies and prevarications. It is one of the reasons I could never have been an artist, either of a literary or any other kind. All the true artists I know are uninterested in the opinion of the world and wholly unconcerned with self-explanation. Self-revelation, yes, and often, but never self-explanation. Artists are strong, bloody-minded, difficult and dangerous. Fate, or laziness, or cowardice cast me long ago in the role of entertainer, and that is what I found myself, throughout my twenties, becoming, though at times a fatally over-earnest, over-appeasing one, which is no kind of entertainer at all, of course. Wanting to be liked is often a very unlikeable characteristic. Certainly I don't like it in myself. But then, there is a lot in myself that I don't like.
Twelve years ago I wrote a memoir of my childhood and adolescence called Moab is My Washpot, a title that confused no one, so clear, direct and obvious was its meaning and reference. Or perhaps not. The chronology took me up to the time I emerged from prison and managed somehow to get myself accepted into university, which is where this book takes up the story. For the sake of those who have read Moab I don't mean to go over the same ground. Where I mention events from my past that I covered there I shall append a superscribed obelus, thus: +.
This book picks up the threads and charts the next eight years of my life. Why so many pages for so few years? It was a late adolescence and early manhood crowded with incident, that is one answer. Another is that in every particular I fail Strunk's Elements of Style or any other manual of 'good writing'. If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to go back and ruthlessly prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words - strike that, I love words - and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too. After all, as you will already have noticed, I am the kind of person who writes things like 'I shall append a superscribed obelus, thus'. If my manner of writing is a self-indulgence that has you grinding your teeth then I am sorry, but I am too old a dog to be taught to bark new tunes.
Between Mama and Papa with a rather long-haired Roger on the right.
I hope you forgive the unedifying sight of my struggle to express some of the truths of my inner self and to measure the distance between the mask of security, ease, confidence and assurance I wear (so easily that its features often lift into a smirk that looks like complacency and smugness) and the r
eal condition of anxiety, self-doubt, self-disgust and fear in which much of my life then and now is lived. It is a life, I suppose, as interesting or as uninteresting as anyone else's. It is mine and I can do what I like with it, both in the world in the real plane of facts and objects and on the page in the even more real plane of words and subjects. It is not for me to be so cavalier with the lives of others, however. In much of my life from 1977 to 1987 people appear who are known in the public world and to whom I cannot give convincing pseudonyms. If I told you, for example, that at university I met a man called Lew Horrie and that we embarked on a comic career together it might not take great insight or too much Googling on your part to know that I was writing about a real person. It is not for me to go blabbing about his life and loves, personal habits, mannerisms and modes of behaviour, is it? On the other hand, were I simply to say that everyone I met in my journey through life was darling and gorgeous and super and lovely and talented and dazzling and sweet, you would soon enough be arcing streams of hot vomit all over the place and in every probability short-circuiting your eBook reader. I don't doubt for a minute that my publishers have already made it clear in the small print of the contract I signed with them that I, the author, am responsible for all lawsuits appertaining to, but not restricted to, emetic and bodily fluid damage to electronic reading devices in this and all territories. So I am sailing between the Scylla of protecting the wholly reasonable privacy of friends and colleagues and the Charybdis of causing you, the reader, to sick up. It is a narrow course, and I shall do my best to steer it safely.
These pages deal with some of the C-words that have dominated my life. Before the chronology of the chronicles commences, let me catalogue a couple more Cs. To put you, as it were, in the mood ...
C is for C12H22O11
... for Cereal
... for Candy
... for Caries
... for Cavities
... for Carbohydrates
... for Calories
Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy
William Wordsworth, 'Intimations of Mortality'
To care about my body would be to suggest that I had a body worth caring about. Since my earliest years I felt nothing but shame for the useless casing of flesh I inhabit. It couldn't bowl, bat or catch. It couldn't dance. It couldn't ski, dive or leap. When it walked into a bar or club it didn't attract lustful glares of desire or even faint glances of interest. It had nothing to recommend it beyond its function as a fuel cell for my brain and a dumping ground for toxins that might reward me with rushing highs and reasons to be cheerful. Perhaps it all comes down to breasts. Or the lack of them.
While it is true that I was once a babe I was never, I think, a suckling. I have no memories of being clamped to the nipple and believe myself to have been bottle-fed from the beginning. There are psychologists schooled in this tradition or that, whether Kleinian, Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian or Insertnamehereian I cannot say, who hold that the Tit or Teat issue has a significant, even crucial, bearing on human development. I can't recall whether the theory suggests it is the denial of mother's milk or the over-abundant supply of it that stores up problems for later life. Possibly both. A lot of bosom pressed into your face at a tender age and you could grow up with a Russ Meyer or Jonathan Ross breast fixation. Nothing but bottle to suck and you develop a horror of bosoms. Or a propensity towards drink in general. Or perhaps the other way around. All absolute poppywash, of course. False mammary syndrome. There are plenty of brothers and sisters, identical twins even, fed on the same infant diets, who have turned out different in every particular - except the irrelevant one of physical appearance. My brother and sister were treated just as I was in infancy, and we could not be, fortunately for them and the world, less alike. So let us suppose that the vices and weaknesses that I am going to tell you about now are peculiar to me and were bestowed upon me at birth along with the moles on the backs of my legs and the whorls on the pads of my fingers. Which is not to say that I am uniquely alone in the possession of these weaknesses. Far from it. They might almost be called the failings of my generation.
Sister Jo, self, brother Roger.
Once we get beyond milk, whether breast or formula, we move on to the hard stuff. Solid food. Pappy spoonfuls of apple sauce and beef casserole are pushed into us until we can wield cutlery for ourselves. One of the first and most forcible ways in which a child's character begins to express itself is through its attitude to food. In the late 1950s and early 1960s food meant breakfast cereal and sweets. I was one of the first wave of infants to be exposed to child-targeted advertising. Sugar Puffs were born, as was I, in 1957. That cereal, which no one could pretend had any ambition to be eaten by adults, was represented, a decade before the arrival of the Honey Monster, by a real live bear called Jeremy. He led a busy life being photographed for the carton and filmed for television commercials until he was finally retired into private life, ending up, after a short period at Cromer Zoo, in Campertown, Dundee, where he died peacefully in his sleep in 1990. I visited him at Cromer, the first celebrity I ever saw in the flesh, or in the fur, and believe me, what the A-listingest Hollywood babe or pop idol is to a child now, Jeremy the Bear was to me then. You have to understand the passion, the love, the greed and the need.
Sugar Puffs were pellets of wheat that had been puffed up under heat and coated in a syrupy and slightly sticky fructose and glucose glaze. All you had to do to enjoy their glory was to pour on cold milk. Hot milk was possible for winter days, but it created a soggy bowlful closer to soup than cereal. Besides, hot milk that approached boiling point could form a surface skin, and a skin on milk caused me to vomit. To this day the sight or smell of boiled milk makes me keck and puke. I am put in mind of the cock tales they tell of Cocteau's cocktail parties. They say that Jean Cocteau, to amuse his friends, could lie back naked on a table and bring himself to full ejaculatory orgasm without touching himself, through the power of imaginative thought alone. I have a similar gift. I can make myself vomit by picturing skin on hot milk, custard or coffee. We can both make hot fluids spit and spurt from our bodies. I can't but feel that Cocteau's party piece is always likely to be more in demand than mine.
The breakfast table was where the seeds of my sorrow were sown. I am sure that I am right in locating my first addiction here. Sugar Puffs were the starting link in a chain that would shackle me for most of my life. To begin with, as you might imagine, they were a breakfast habit. But soon I was snacking on them at any time of day until my mother began to sigh at the number of packets she was forced to buy. I would eat the sweet pellets loose from the box. One after the other, without stopping, into the mouth they would go. I was like an American at the cinema with popcorn: eyes glazed, hand rising and falling pack-to-mouth, pack-to-mouth, pack-to-mouth like a machine.
'Eyes glazed'. Is that important? A child at the breast or bottle has that look. There is a sexual element to such unfocused fixity. Until I was about eight or nine I sucked the first two fingers of my left hand. Almost all the time. While twiddling the hair on the crown of my head with the fingers of the right hand. And always with that glazed, faraway look, with parted lips and laboured breath. Was I giving myself the breast treat that I had been denied? These are dark waters, Watson.
Cereal-packet lists of ingredients and serving suggestions were my literature; thiamine, riboflavin and niacin my mysterious invisible friends. Sold by weight not volume. Contents may have settled during transport. Insert finger under flap and move from side to side. They're Gr-r-r-r-r-r-r-eat! We like Ricicles, they're twicicles as nicicles. And so they were. In fact, as I liked to say, they were thricicles as nicicles. Certainly much nicicler than their staid, unsweetened parent, Rice Krispies, the cereal that said, if you listened carefully, Snot, Pickle and Crap. To have Rice Krispies when you could have Ricicles, to have Cornflakes when you could have Frosties. Who could imagine such a dull life? It was like deliberately choosing to watch the news on television or preferri
ng to drink unsweetened tea. I lived for one thing and one thing only. C12H22O11. Perhaps this is why I should have been American, for they have sugar everywhere in the United States. In bread, in bottled water, in beef jerky, pickles, mayonnaise, mustard and salsa. Sugar, sugar, sugar.
My relationship with this beguiling and benighted substance is complicated. I should never have been born if it weren't for sugar, and yet it came close to killing me too.
I told elsewhere+ the story of the role of my mother's father in bringing sugar to Britain. I latterly found out more as a result of taking part in the BBC's genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? My grandfather Martin Neumann came to Bury St Edmunds (not to praise him) all the way from the land of his birth, which was originally Hungary, although the 1920 Treaty of Trianon later absorbed his home town of Nagysurany into the newly expanded Czechoslovakia. For the purposes of history, however, he was from Hungary. A Hungarian Jew, as he liked to observe, is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first.
He came to Britain at the invitation of the Ministry of Agriculture in Whitehall, whose more far-sighted functionaries realized that if there was, as seemed increasingly likely, to be another world war the Atlantic would almost certainly be cut off, as it so nearly had been at the height of the German U-boat threat of 1917. The West Indies and Australia would be out of reach, and there would be no sugar for the British cup of tea, a disaster too horrible to contemplate. Britain was entirely without native sugar capacity, its farmers never having grown a single beet, its industrialists never having refined a single ounce. Back in Nagysurany, now Surany, my grandfather had been the manager of what was then the largest sugar refinery in the world, so he seemed like a natural candidate for British recruitment. In 1925 he and his brother-in-law Robert Jorisch came to build Britain its first sugar beet refinery in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, where it stands to this day, emitting a rich and bitter pong faintly reminiscent of burnt peanut butter. Had Martin and his wife and family remained in Surany they would, being Jews, have been exterminated in the Nazi death camps, as were his mother, sister, parents-in-law and the dozens of other family members who stayed in Europe. I should never have been born, and the paper or digital display technology that has gone into the production of the book you are now reading with such unalloyed pleasure would have been put to other uses.