by Stephen Fry
As well as all these parties there were plays. Queens' College's drama club was called BATS, supposedly because of the flittermice that wheeled and squeaked in the sky above the Cloister Court during its end-of-term outdoor presentation, one of the most popular and distinctive regular features of May Week. This year's production was to be The Tempest, and the director, a Queens' second-year called Ian Softley, cast me as Alonso, King of Naples. Being tall and boomy I was nearly always given the role of a king or elderly authority figure. The young lovers, glamorous girls and handsome princes were played by students who looked their age. I never looked mine, but given that almost everyone was between eighteen and twenty-two, looking older was a distinct advantage so far as casting went.
Ian Softley now directs motion pictures - The Wings of the Dove, Backbeat, Hackers, Inkheart and so on - but then he was a student with black curly hair and an appealing way of wearing white trousers. The cast included Rob Wyke, a graduate who was to become a close friend and, playing Prospero, a most extraordinary actor and even more extraordinary man, Richard MacKenney. In the middle of writing his PhD thesis, 'Trade guilds and devotional confraternities in the state and society of Venice to 1620', he could already speak not only fluent Italian, but fluent Venetian, which is quite another thing. While waiting for the cast to turn up (he was always exactly punctual himself, as was I) he would pace up and down at high speed, humming every note of the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni. If we were still not quorate by the time that had been got through he would move on to Leporello's opening aria and keep at it until everyone was present, singing all the parts perfectly from memory. On one occasion Ariel was half an hour late owing to some confusion about time and venue (there was no way to text or call in those days), and when he at last arrived, red and gasping, Richard broke off from his singing and turned on him furiously.
'What time do you call this, then? The Commendatore's dead and Ottavio is swearing on his blood to be revenged.'
Richard was a magnificent actor, his King Lear was astonishing in one so young (a receding brow and faux-grumpy manner made him appear fifty although he can't have been much older than twenty-three or four) but he hid his artistry under an obsession with pace and volume. 'All you've got to do,' he said, 'is get down the front of the stage and have a good old shout.' He once gave the entire cast a bollocking for adding five minutes to the running time. 'Unforfuckinggivable! Every extra second is so much piss on Shakespeare's grave.'
I watched one afternoon as Ian Softley squatted in front of Barry Taylor, who was playing Caliban. 'Do you know the work of the punk poet John Cooper Clarke?' he whispered, sorrowful brown eyes gazing deeply into Barry's.
'Er, yes ...'
'I think, don't you, that we can afford something of that street anger in Caliban. Some of that rage?'
'Er ...'
'Oh forget about that,' said Richard, who had been pacing up and down, hands clasped firmly behind his back. 'Just get down the front of the stage and have a good old squeak and a gibber.' I don't suppose, with all due respect to Ian and John Cooper Clarke, that there has ever been better advice given to any actor playing Caliban in the 400 years since The Tempest's creation.
One morning I noticed a poster in the street for an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. They were going to bring out some of the Blake drawings, paintings, prints and letters that usually, due to their marked sensitivity to light, were kept hidden away in dark drawers. I mentioned this to Richard and asked if he was going.
'William Blake?' said Richard. 'Couldn't draw, couldn't colour in.'
MacKenney is now a history professor at Edinburgh University. I hope they value him properly.
Dave Huggins stopped me in Walnut Tree Court one afternoon.
'My mum's coming to see your play tonight.'
'Is she?' I was surprised. Dave wasn't in the drama world, and it seemed odd for a parent to come to a production that her child wasn't in.
'Yeah. She's an actress.'
I consulted my memory to see if it could offer any data on an actress called Huggins. It had no suggestions. 'Er ... well. That's nice.'
'Yeah. So's my dad.'
'Might I know them?'
'Dunno. They both use acting names. She's called Anna Massey and he calls himself Jeremy Brett.'
'B-but ... good God!'
Anna Massey, coming to see me in a play? Well not expressly to see me, but coming to a play that I was in.
'Your father won't be there as well, will he?'
'No, they're divorced. He's gay.'
'Is he? Is he? I didn't ... well, well. Goodness. Blimey. My word.'
I tottered off, numb with excitement.
We had our four or five performances under the fluttering bats; Ariel sprinted about, Caliban squeaked and gibbered, I boomed, Prospero got down the front and had a good old shout, Anna Massey graciously applauded.
In the meantime I had been helping prepare for the May Ball.
It so happens that the Patron or Visitor of Queens' College is, appropriately enough given the foundation's name, whoever might happen to be Queen at the time: a position she holds until her death. From the 1930s to the 1950s the queen was, of course, Elizabeth, wife of George VI. After George died, now styled the Queen Mother, she remained in place. There's a point to all this.
We are at a meeting of the May Ball Committee. Much of the time is taken up with the particular details that you might expect - how to run the roulette table without falling foul of the gaming acts, who will be in charge of escorting the Boomtown Rats to the tent set aside as their changing room, whether or not there will be enough ice in the champagne bar, the usual kind of administrative trivia. The President turns to me.
'Got your Magdelene and Trinity invitations yet?'
'Yup, and Clare.'
One of the perks of being on a May Ball committee was that you received free invitations to other May Balls. Aside from our own, I was going to the ball at Clare, one of the prettiest of the colleges, where my cousin Penny was also a fresher, and to the two grandest of all, Trinity and Magdalene. So grand were they that gossip columnists and photographers from the Tatler and Harper's & Queen attended. You could get away with a dinner jacket at Clare and Queens', but Trinity and Magdalene insisted on white tie and tails. The hire companies did a roaring trade. Only King's, a mixed college and proud of its radical and progressive ethos, refused to hold a May Ball. Their summer party was called instead, with dour literalism, the King's June Event.
'Good,' the President of the Committee says to me. 'Oh. One other little thing. Dr Walker sent me a note saying that if the Queen Mother dies the college has to go into mourning for a week, during which no entertainments or celebrations of any kind can be held, certainly not a May Ball. Perhaps you might look into insurance to cover that?'
'Insurance?' I try to sound casual and unconcerned, as if arranging insurance policies is something I have been doing since I was an infant. 'Ah ... right. Yes. Sure. Of course.'
The meeting ends, and I slip into the public phone box in the corner of Friar's Court and start ringing around insurance companies.
'Sun Life, can I help you?'
'Ah, yes. I'm calling up about getting a policy ...'
'Life, car, commercial or property?'
'Well, none of those really.'
'Marine, travel or medical?'
'Well, again. None. It's to insure against having to cancel an event.'
'Abandonment?'
'Er ... that's the term is it, abandonment? Well, yes, abandonment then ...'
'Hold please, caller ...'
I wait until a tired voice comes on the line.
'Special services, how can I help?'
'I'm ringing about getting a policy to insure an event ... I think you call it abandonment?'
'Oh yes? What sort of event?
'Well it's a party.'
'An outdoors event, is it?'
'Well, it's a ball. Mostly on lawns in tents, but some part
s are inside.'
'I see ... and you want rain cover. Partial or complete abandonment?'
'No, not rain cover so much as reign cover.'
'Excuse me?'
'Sorry, no. I mean ... well, it's to insure against the Queen Mother dying.'
The sound of a receiver being banged on the desk followed by a blowing down the earpiece. 'Something wrong with the line. Sounded like ... never mind. Could you repeat that please?'
Here in the twenty-first century there are probably only two insurance companies left in the world, called Axxentander or something equally foul, but in 1979 there were dozens. I tried the Royal, Swan, Prudential, Pearl, Norwich Union - all those I had heard of and a dozen that I hadn't. In each case, once I had succeeded in getting the agent to understand what was required, I was asked to call back. I imagine that they needed to consult higher up the chain of command. It might be said that they had abandonment issues.
This kind of insurance is, of course, nothing more nor less than gambling. You bet your stake (which insurance companies call a premium) and should your horse win (house catch fire, car get stolen, royal family member die) you collect your winnings. The relationship between the premium and the amount collected is determined by balancing the value of the insured thing (the indemnity) against the odds and statistical probability of its being threatened. Bookies use the form and stud books together with the market flow of betting to determine their prices; insurance companies use a similar mixture of market trends and their own history and precedent books, which they call actuarial tables. I can understand that. Had I wanted an abandonment policy against snow and ice, they would have looked at the value of the May Ball and seen that they would have to shell out PS40,000 if it was cancelled. They would also see that blizzards in early June are incredibly rare, even in Cambridge, so they would probably charge a fraction of a fraction of 1 per cent of the indemnity: PS20 would be ungenerous, but then only an idiot would bother to insure against so remote a contingency in the first place. With a rain policy the insurers might decide, after consulting forecasters and local records, that there was, say, a fifty-fifty chance of precipitation in which case the premium would be a whopping PS20,000. But then, what kind of an idiot would arrange a summer party in England which was so weather dependent that it would have to be abandoned if the heavens opened? Abandonment policies are not very common, that is the point, but there are nonetheless fairly obvious mechanisms in place for resolving the issue of price when it comes to natural disasters like weather, fire and earthquake. The death of the monarch's mother, on the other hand ... how could an actuary be expected to calculate the odds of that? She was seventy-nine years old.
I decided that I would give the companies three hours before calling back for a quote.
Did the insurance clerks go into her family history and check out the longevity of the entire Bowes-Lyon clan? Did they call up Clarence House and inquire into the Queen Mother's health, diet and exercise regime? Did they take into account her reputed fondness for gin and Dubonnet? I can only imagine the discussions they must have had in their offices.
In the case of each firm, when I called back, the actuaries appeared to be very gloomy about the old girl's hopes of making it through the next few months: 20, 25, 23 per cent chances of her surviving until the middle of June were implied by the gigantic premiums they proposed. The cheapest offer, 20 per cent of the indemnity, was way beyond our reach. I had been given a budget of PS50.
'I am afraid,' I tell the President of the Committee after returning from the last of the calls, 'that we are simply going to have to pray for Her Majesty's continued good health. If she does die I will undertake to keep the news from the Fellows if I have to steal every newspaper and radio in the college and lock them all in a cellar to do so.'
'I may hold you to that,' the President said, a worried look furrowing his youthful brow.
I do not suppose that a queen's life has been prayed for more assiduously since the days of Boudicca. Sadly, the Queen Mother did die, though happily for us, not for another twenty-three years. When she finally left the world in 2002, she was thoughtful enough to do so in March, meaning that the college's period of mourning would be well over by May Week. It was just such examples of kindness and consideration that endeared her to so many during a long, varied and vigorous life. Some time in the 1990s, sitting next to her at a dinner, I considered thanking her on behalf of the college for so thoughtfully delaying her death, but shyness and good sense got the better of me.
Another feature of the Cambridge Easter term (for so they call the third term of the academic year) is the Footlights May Week Revue. The Footlights Club is one of the university's best-known institutions, having sent generations of comic writers and performers into the world over the course of its 130-year history. Its May Week show at the Arts Theatre was an annual ritual. If you were cool it was an event to disdain. 'Apparently the Footlights are crap this year,' you would say to your companion as you wrinkled your nose at a poster for the event. There has never been a year in which this has not been said. The same phrase would have been heard when Jonathan Miller was running the Footlights, or Peter Cook and David Frost, through Cleese, Chapman and Idle and past Douglas Adams, Clive Anderson and Griff Rhys Jones, Dave Baddiel and Rob Newman, David Mitchell and Robert Webb all the way up to the current year. If you were normal, such cynicism did not occur to you, and the May Week Revue was another fun fixture on the Cambridge calendar. I was neither cool nor normal, but simply too busy with The Tempest and other things to be able to attend.
I heard that someone was putting together a production of Oedipus Rex for Edinburgh and decided that I might as well go and audition. I boomed and strutted and gestured and declaimed in front of the director, Peter Rumney, and left thinking that perhaps I had rather overdone it. The next day I found in my pigeonhole a note from Peter asking me to play Oedipus. I was bound for the Festival Fringe, and my excitement was almost impossible to contain. For the rest of the term I bounced and buzzed about Cambridge like a bee in a bottle.
At some point I believe I must have sat some exams. Prelims, I think they were called. I remember precisely nothing about them. Not where they took place, nor what kinds of questions we were given to answer. I suppose I must have passed them, for no trouble arose and no stern interviews were sought. My Cambridge proceeded pleasantly enough without the intrusion of academic study: a university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different. A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books. That was my theory at least, and I was living by it. Such serene and lofty views of education as against vocational training were beginning to madden the new political leadership. Thatcher was an industrial chemist and a lawyer, after all, both disciplines that need Gradgrindery and training and require no education whatsoever - as she demonstrated. Our kind of loose learning, as they would regard it, this cleaving to the elitist tradition of the Liberal Arts, this arrogant Athenian self-indulgence was an enemy, a noxious weed that required summary eradication. Its days were numbered.
The 1979 Queens' May Ball took place. I donned the tailcoat that I had rented for the week, all ready to ... well, to have myself a ball. We happy, flushed, proud and excited members of the committee met for champagne half an hour before the kick-off. Ten minutes later I was in an ambulance on my way to Addenbrooke's Hospital, an oxygen mask over my face, fighting for every breath. Bloody asthma. It would be another two years before I fully understood what had brought it on. I often succumbed to attacks at weddings, fetes, Hunt Balls or events of that kind. On such occasions there were usually flowers and summer pollen about, so it had never occurred to me that the cause of my face going blue and my lungs closing for business was actually champagne. A ridi
culous allergy, but one doesn't choose them.
At Addenbrooke's an injection of adrenaline had such an immediately restorative effect that I was out of the hospital, in a cab and on the way back to Queens' by ten, two fresh inhalers for emergencies spoiling the sweep and cut of my dress trousers. I was determined not to miss another minute.
May Balls traditionally end with a breakfast, and many party-goers like to welcome the dawn on the Cam. Even at that young age I was a sentimental and slushy fool, maudlin (pronounced Magdalene) to a dreadful fault. I am none the less so now and shall never find the sight of young men in degage evening wear punting their loved ones along the river on a summer's morning anything other than agonizingly romantic, piercingly lovely and heart-stoppingly adorable.
Caledonia 1
After the term ended, I took myself off as usual to North Yorkshire to teach a little Latin, umpire Cundall Manor's Second Eleven, prepare the games fields for Sports Day and, in such spare time as I had, learn the role of Oedipus as well as lines for my various parts in a production of Charles Marowitz's Artaud at Rodez which the Cambridge Mummers were presenting and in which I had also, perhaps foolishly, agreed to appear. Foolishly because, each day for a fortnight, the moment the curtain went down on Artaud I was going to have to hare off to the venue where Oedipus would be due to start half an hour later. Old Edinburgh hands said I would be cutting it fine, especially if I had complicated costume to doff and don or heavy make-up to remove and apply, but cutting it fine was one of the things I liked to do.
For three weeks in late summer Edinburgh is the world centre of student drama. I was to perform at the Fringe every year for the next five years at least. Most who go cannot fail to fall instantly in love with the city as much as with the event. Within a couple of days the muscles on your shins ache from the unaccustomed steep ascents and descents of the town, the numberless stone steps and narrow wynds surprise your muscles - if you were used to the easy, level streets of East Anglian towns and a sedentary life it did more than surprise them, it shocked and outraged them. The ancient towering grimness of Edinburgh's old tenements with their stone staircases and minatory blank gabling made me feel that at any moment Burke and Hare, Deacon Brodie or Mr Hyde were about to rise snarling from the steps of the Grassmarket. What did arise were, of course, nothing more terrifying than young drunks bearing polystyrene trays of Spudulike with cheese. In those days baked potato take-aways provided the cheapest form of filling nutrition a student could require. Scotland really was another country. The diet was different: aside from Spudulike the chicken carry-out shops offered the delicate specialite du pays - deep-fried Mars Bars, Wagon Wheels and Curly Wurlys. Scottish banknotes were different, the language, the weather, the light, even the Kensitas cigarettes were unfamiliar. A pint of heavy was the preferred drink, heavy being bitter or at least a gassy something that gestured towards the idea of it.