by Stephen Fry
An enormously fat man with gigantic drooping bosoms and a vast overhanging belly was crossing the room. I checked, turned back and stared in horror and disbelief. There he was again, filling the wardrobe mirror, a comically overweight middle-aged man, as grotesquely obese as anyone I had seen since I had filmed in the American midwest the year before. I inspected the bulk of this disgusting mountain of blubber from tip to toe and began to weep.
I had spent the last quarter-century seeing myself on large and small screens and photographed in newspapers and had never been under any illusions concerning my physical appearance. But for some reason on that evening in that room I saw myself as I was. I did not shudder, cover myself up and move on. I did not pretend that everything was fine. I did not say to myself that I was tall enough to carry a little extra weight. I cried at the terrible thing I had become.
There were scales in the bathroom. One hundred and thirty-nine kilograms. What was that in old-fashioned English? I had an app for that on my phone. Twenty-one stone and twelve pounds. Holy imperial hell. Twenty-two stone. Three hundred and six pounds.
I remembered that rehearsal room in 1982. I had managed to give up sugar in tea and coffee. Now it was time to give it up in all its manifestations: puddings, chocolates, toffee, fudge, mints, ice-cream, doughnuts, cakes, buns, tarts, flans, flapjacks, jelly and jam. I would have to exercise too. It could not be a diet, it could only be a complete change in the way I ate and lived.
I won't claim that not a single grain of sugar has passed my lips since that moment of epiphanic horror in Madagascar, but I have managed to avoid such tempting patisserie, puddings, candied fruits, chocolates, ices, petits fours and friandises as waiters present to one at the sort of restaurants in which me and my spoilt kind hang out. Combined with a regime of daily walks, thrice-weekly gym visits and the general avoidance of starchy and fatty foods, this steadfast forbearance has allowed my weight to drop to something below sixteen stone.
I have not the slightest doubt that I could easily balloon again and find myself hurtling back up past the twenty-first, twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth floors like a cartoon character in an express lift. Constant vigilance is the watchword. It is no part of my business with you to maintain that I now fully know myself, but I think I can profess convincingly that I do at least know myself well enough to be nothing but doubtful and distrustful when it comes to any claims of solutions, cures and arrivals at final destinations.
Take smoking, for instance ...
C is for Cigarettes
... for Convict
... for Cundall
... for Corporal Punishment
... for Common Pursuit
... for Cessation
All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools
Christopher Marlowe
Given that I was so disruptive, disobliging and disobedient as a schoolboy it is perhaps surprising that I didn't smoke my first cigarette until I was fifteen. As if to compensate for being an early bloomer in matters of the mind I had always been a late developer in matters of the body. My first orgasm and my first cigarette came later to me than they did to most of my contemporaries, and, looking back, it is as though I spent decades trying to make up for lost time. I think I have always linked smoking and sex. Maybe this is where I have been going wrong all my life.
In 1979, towards the end of my first year at Cambridge, I wrote a play called Latin! or Tobacco and Boys. Dominic Clarke, the hero, if such a title can used of so warped a character, delivers a speech in the second act in which he describes and conflates his first sexual and smoking experience.
One of those painful steps towards manhood was my first smoke. It was behind the fives courts of my house at school, with a boy called Prestwick-Agutter. I can remember it as if it were five minutes ago. Prestwick-Agutter opened his packet of Carlton Premium and drew out a short, thin ... cigarette. As my lips rounded about the tip I began to feel panic. I could hear my boyhood being strangled inside me and a new fire awakening. Prestwick-Agutter lit the end, and I sucked and inhaled. The ears buzzed, the blood caught fire and somewhere in the distance my boyhood moaned. I ignored it and sucked again. But this time my body rejected it, and I coughed and expectorated. My boy's lungs couldn't take the filthy whirl of smuts I was so keen to introduce to them and so I coughed and kept on coughing. Despite my inner excitement and my great coughing fit, I managed to maintain a cool, unruffled exterior, with which to impress Prestwick-Agutter, who was amused by my coolness and pluck. British Phlegm and British Spunk flowed freely in me and out of me, and the Public School Spirit was born. After about an hour, it began to rain, so we dashed into the nearest fives court and leant against the buttress. It was an afternoon of rare agony. It was later that evening, when a horde of uncouth Philistines was raiding my study, Prestwick-Agutter amongst them, that my voice broke. Really quite suddenly. I was nearly seventeen, rather embarrassing really.
While that speech was not (I assure you) autobiographical on my part, Dominic's response to sex and cigarettes does correspond largely to my own. I coughed and vomited rather badly. Not after sex, I should say, but after my first smoke. And after my second and third. Nature was giving me powerful hints that I chose to ignore.
I was at home, fifteen years old, disgraced and expelled+ when I started to smoke. My parents had chosen for me the Paston School in North Walsham, Norfolk, a direct-grant grammar whose major claim to fame was having had Horatio Nelson as an unhappy pupil. To get there every morning required a ride on a motor coach that passed, on its way to the school, through the market town of Aylsham. After a few weeks of the Paston I found myself getting off the bus at Aylsham and spending the day in a small cafe, where I could smoke, drink frothy coffee and play pinball until the coach came back through on its return journey. This chronic truancy resulted, of course, in another expulsion. Next I was sent to NORCAT, the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King's Lynn. Whatever money I could beg, borrow or steal from my mother's handbag went on cigarettes. As an addiction it was more expensive than Sugar Puffs or sweets and almost as disastrous to teeth, yet wholly more acceptable socially.
The average tuck shop ciggie brands for poor students were Players Number Six, Embassy, Carlton and Sovereign. If I had enjoyed a win at three-card brag I might lash out on Rothmans, Dunhill or Benson and Hedges, but when I was truly in the funds the tobacco equivalent of the Uley village shop beckoned. My obsession with Oscar Wilde, Baron Corvo and the appealingly poisonous world of late nineteenth-century decadence resulted in a pretentious preference for exotic brands. Sobranie Cocktails, Passing Cloud, Sweet Afton, Carroll's Major, Fribourg & Treyer and Sullivan Powell Private Stock were the most desirable, especially the last two, which could only be bought from one specialist tobacconist's shop in all of Norfolk or from their very own premises in London's Haymarket and Burlington Arcade.
It was to London that I went when at last I ran away from King's Lynn. The threatening approach of exams and the probability that I would fail them had combined with a tiresome adolescent 'I don't need no education' attitude, all of which resulted in a cutting and running. Like Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story, I found myself drawn to Piccadilly, 'that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained'. Now I had someone else's credit cards+ to keep me in the very choicest brands of cigarette. Perched on a barstool in the American Bar of the Ritz Hotel, I would sip cocktails, puff Sobranies and think myself urbane. Somewhere along the way I had snaffled and kept my grandfather's old collars and the leather box shaped like a horseshoe in which they were kept. Not only was I a seventeen-year-old trying to look like a compound of Wilde, Coward, Fitzgerald and Firbank, I was a seventeen-year-old in a Gatsby-style suit and starched wing collar smoking coloured cigarettes through an amber cigarette holder. It is extraordinary that I escaped a violent beating.
What I did not escape was arrest. The police caught up with me in Swindon, and after a
night in the cells I found myself banged up in a young offenders institution with the endearingly quaint Cotswold name of Pucklechurch.
Tobacco, as is well known, is the major currency on the inside. Relative peace, control and stability are achieved within prison walls through structured jobs, but no convict could ever be relied upon to work were it not that the wages of his labour are the only means by which he can buy his snout, his burn, his baccy. He who has the most tobacco has the most status, influence, respect and contentment. This was certainly true in my day, it may all have changed since then.
You might think that the really smart gaolbird would therefore be a non-smoker or at least have the sense to become one. There are almost none that smart, of course. There are plenty of clever gaolbirds, but very few clever in quite that way. You can almost define a convict as one who lacks precisely the kind of wisdom and self-control necessary to derive long-term advantage from short-term discomfort. This deficiency is what will have turned them to crime in the first place and what will have caused them to be inept enough at it to get caught and captured in the second. To expect a convict to have the strength to give up smoking is to expect a leopard to change his spots, become vegetarian and learn to knit, all on the same day.
I was a natural criminal because I lacked just that ability to resist temptation or to defer pleasure for one single second. Whatever guard there is on duty in the minds and moral make-ups of the majority had always been absent from his post in my mental barracks. I am thinking of the sentry who mans the barrier between excess and plenty, between right and wrong. 'That's enough Sugar Puffs for now, we don't need another bowl,' he would say in my friends' heads or, 'One chocolate bar would be ample.' Or 'Gosh, look, there's some money. Tempting, but it isn't ours.' I never had such a guard on duty.
Actually that isn't quite true. Where Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket I had my Hungarian grandfather. He had died when I was ten, and ever since the day of his going I had been uncomfortably aware that he was looking down and grieving over what the Book of Common Prayer would call my manifold sins and wickedness. I had erred and strayed from my ways like a lost sheep, and there was no health in me. Grand-daddy watched me steal, lie and cheat; he caught me looking at illicit pictures in magazines and he saw me play with myself; he witnessed all my greed and lust and shame; but for all his heedful presence he could not prevent me from going to hell in my own way. If I had been psychopathic enough to feel no remorse or religious enough to believe in redemption through a divine outside agency, perhaps I should have been happier; as it was I had neither the consolation that I was free of guilt, nor the conviction that I could ever be forgiven.
Grandpapa.
In gaol, everyone inside rolled their own cigarettes. A week's wages could buy nearly enough Old Holborn or Golden Virginia tobacco to last the seven days until next payday. The cigarette papers, for no good reason that I could understand, were the usual Rizla+ brand, but presented in a buff-coloured pack with the words 'H M Prisons Only' printed at an angle across the flap. I hoarded as many of these as I could and contrived to smuggle them out on my release. For years afterwards I would refill these from the standard red, blue and green Rizla+ packs commercially available on the outside and enjoy the bragging rights of being seen with prison-issue rolling papers. Pathetic. I want so much to go back and slap myself sometimes. Not that I would pay the slightest attention.
As the prison week ended and the less careful inmates began to run out of burn they went through a peculiar begging ritual that I, never one to husband resources either, was quick to learn. You would spot someone smoking and slide ingratiatingly up to them. 'Twos up, mate,' you would wheedle and if you were the first to have got the request in you would be rewarded with their fag-end once they had done with it. These soggy second-hand butts, whose few remaining strands of precious tobacco were all bitter and tarred by the smoke that had passed through them, were as a date palm in the desert, and I would smoke them right down until they burnt and blistered my lips. We all know the indignities to which enslaved humans will submit themselves in order to satisfy their addictions, whether for narcotics, alcohol, tobacco, sugar or sex. The desperation, savagery and degradation they publicly display make truffling pigs seem placid and composed by comparison. That image of myself scorching my mouth and fingertips as I hungrily hissed in a last hit of smoke should have been enough to tell me all I needed to know about myself. It wasn't of course. I had decided at school, when it had been borne in on me how hopeless I was at sport, that I was a useful brain on top of a useless body. I was mind and spirit, while those around me were mud and blood. The truth that I was more a victim of physical need than they were I would angrily have repudiated. Which just goes to show how complete an arse I was.
Tragic hair. Tragic times. Taken some time between school and prison.
After a month or so of remand in Pucklechurch I was at last sentenced by the court to two years' probation and released back to my parents. This time around I managed to enrol myself at a college and to sit for A levels and the Cambridge entrance paper.+
Prison appeared to have marked the lowest point of my life. The suicide attempts,+ tantrums and madness of my mid-teens seemed to be over. Back home in Norfolk I concentrated on academic work, achieved A grades and won a scholarship to read English at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Now that I had the good news of my acceptance, I faced the problem of what to do with the months leading up to the first term. Unlike today's intrepid, elephant-hair-braceleted student adventurers and gap-year eco-warriors who hike the Inca trail, work with lepers in Bangladesh and dive and ski and surf and hang-glide and Facebook their way around the world having sex and wearing baggy shorts, I chose the already hideously old-fashioned challenge of teaching in a private school. I always believed that I was born to teach, and the world of the English prep school was one whose codes and manners I thoroughly understood. All the more reason for a stylish person to avoid such a place and seek new worlds and fresh challenges, one might suppose, but the systole and diastole of my disowning and belonging, rejecting and needing, escaping and returning was well established. I resist and scorn the England that bore me with the same degree of intensity with which I embrace and revere it. Perhaps too I felt that I owed it to myself to put right the failures of my own schooling by helping with the schooling of others. There was also the example of two of my literary heroes, Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, who had each trodden this path. Waugh had even got material for his first novel out of the experience. Perhaps I would too.
I had added my name to the roll of would-be schoolmasters, a roll that resided somewhere in a copperplate hand amongst the roll-top desks, deckled ledgers and Eastlight boxfiles in the cosy, womblike offices of the scholastic agency Gabbitas-Thring, in Sackville Street, Piccadilly. Just two days after registering, a thin, piping voice called me up in Norfolk.
'We have a vacancy at a very nice prepper in North Yorkshire. Cundall Manor. Latin, Greek, French and a little light rugger and soccer refereeing. As well as the usual duties, of course. Does that appeal?'
'Gosh. That's great. Do I have to go up for an interview?'
'Well now, the happy fact is that Mr Valentine, the father of Cundall's headmaster Jeremy Valentine, lives not far from you in Norfolk. He will see you.'
Mr Valentine was kind and cardiganned and very interested in my views on cricket. He poured me a generous schooner of amontillado and conceded that, while this young Botham chap could certainly swing the ball, his line and length were surely too erratic to trouble any technically correct batsman. Of Latin and Greek there was no discussion. Nor, thankfully, of rugger or soccer. I was commended on my choice of college.
'Queens' used to have a pretty decent Cuppers side in my day. Oliver Popplewell kept wicket. First class.'
I forbore to mention that this same Oliver Popplewell, a friend of the family and now a distinguished QC, had just a few months earlier stood up in his wig and gown and spoken on my behalf at a cri
minal hearing in Swindon.+ It didn't seem like the right moment.
Valentine Senior stood up and shook my hand.
'I expect they'll want you as soon as possible,' he said. 'You can catch the fast train to York at Peterborough.'
'So I've ... you're ...'
'Heavens yes. Just the sort of chap Jeremy will be delighted to have on the staff.'
I caught the train and arrived at Cundall a teacher and 'just the sort of chap'.
Was I now so very different a figure from the thieving, deceitful little shit who had been such a torment to his family for the past ten years? Was all the fury, dishonesty and desire gone? All passion spent, all greed sated? I certainly didn't believe that I was likely to steal again. I had grown up enough to know how to focus and work and take responsibility for myself. All the adult voices that had shouted in my ear (Think, Stephen. Use your common sense. Work. Concentrate. Consider other people. Think. Think, think, think!) seemed finally to have got through. I had an honest, ordered, respectable and unexciting life to look forward to. I had sown my wild oats and it was time to grow sage.
Or so I imagined.
I was still a smoker. In fact, to suit my new role of schoolmaster I had moved from hand-rolled cigarettes to a pipe. My father had smoked pipes throughout my childhood. Sherlock Holmes, veneration of whom had been the direct cause of my expulsion from Uppingham,+ was the most celebrated pipe smoker of them all. A pipe was to me a symbol of work, thought, reason, self-control, concentration ('It is quite a three pipe problem, Watson'), maturity, insight, intellectual strength, manliness and moral integrity. My father and Holmes had all those qualities, and I wanted to reassure myself and those around me that I did too. Another reason for choosing a pipe, I suppose, was that at Cundall Manor, the Yorkshire prep school at which I had been offered a post as an assistant master, I was closer in age to the boys than to the other members of staff and I felt therefore that I required a look that would mark me out as an adult; a briar pipe and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows seemed to answer the case perfectly. The fact that a lanky late-adolescent smoking a pipe looks the worst kind of pompous and pretentious twazzock did not cross my mind, and those around me were too kind to point it out. The boys called me the Towering Inferno, but, perhaps because the headmaster was also a pipe smoker, the habit itself went unchallenged.