Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects. The problem of my bent nose comes to mind when I have regular arguments with a friend on political subjects. He is firmly of the opinion that the existence of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the House of Lords is absurd, unjust and outdated. It would be hard to disagree with that. He believes, however, that in the name of liberty and social justice they should be abolished. This is where we part company. I think of the monarchy and aristocracy as Britain’s bent nose. Foreigners find our ancient nonsenses distinguished, while we think them ridiculous and are determined to do something about them one day. I fear that when we do get rid of them, as I suppose we shall, we are going to let ourselves in for the psychic shock of discovering that the process has not made us one jot freer or one ounce more socially equitable a country than France, say, or the United States of America. We will remain just as we are, about as free as those countries. We are probably not quite as free at the moment (whatever free might mean) or as socially just (ditto) as the Benelux countries or Scandinavia, and as it happens, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries have monarchs. There will be great psychological damage done to us if we take the step of constitutional cosmetic alteration. The world would stare at us and whisper and giggle about us excitedly, as people always do when friends have had some sort of plastic surgery. We would unwind our bandages, present our new, straight-nosed constitution to the international community and await the fawning compliments and gasps of admiration. How hurt we will be when we see that the international community is actually yawning and, far from being dazzled by the blaze of justice and freedom and beauty that radiates from our features, they are rather indignant that instead of dining in splendour and pageantry with a crowned monarch, their heads of state will in future be lunching at President Hattersley’s Residence or sipping tea with Lady Thatcher in some converted People’s Palace. Britain would suddenly have no absurd minor blemish to blame for its failures, which are of course no more than the defects of being human. If we concentrated on our real defects; if we blamed our weakness of political will for impeding the achievement of greater social justice rather than pretending that it is all the fault of harmless warts and daft mannerisms, then we might indeed be better off. The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing and horrific. But of course, I am a sentimentalist, and sentimentalists will hunt for any excuse to maintain the more harmless fripperies of the status quo.

  Hey, we are straying far from our sheep, as they say in France. I was at Chesham Prep, six years old with a budding bent nose and I was going to tell you all about the boy from the Cape.

  At Chesham Prep, my form mistress Mrs. Edwards gave us all italic pencils which we were allowed to sharpen with knives. She wrote with flat-sided chalk on the blackboard and italic lettering was ever her theme, her message, her purpose and her passion. We were not allowed to write so much as our own names with italic pencils until we had covered page after page of our rough books, first with wavy lines going up and down, up and down, up and down, next with all the letters of the alphabet unjoined, and finally with all the letters of the alphabet joined up in approved style. To this day, every six months or so, at a stationer’s, I will buy an Osmiroid calligraphic writing set and practise my italic shapes, thick thin, thick thin, thick thin. I will rule constraining lines and write the alphabet within them, and then I will write the same favourite words from those days: I have always especially loved the way italic tools will render the dots on the letters “i” and “j,” thus—

  i j

  —so I take great pleasure in the look of words like—

  jiving ~ skiing ~ Hawaii ~ jiujitsu

  —and most especially—

  Fiji ~ Fijian

  After a few days of this kind of arseing about, I will leave the lids off the pens, the nibs will go dry and the special ink will harden into a gummy resin. A week or so later I throw the whole kit away and wonder what the hell I have been playing at.

  In the middle of my last term in Mrs. Edwards’s class a very pretty boy with fair hair and a wide smile arrived. He had come from Cape Town and Mrs. Edwards adored him. His italic lettering was as gorgeous as he was and I found myself torn between resentment and infatuation. The boys I fell for subsequently were usually very neat and very well behaved. Far too well behaved for my liking.

  Every action and gesture of the boy from Cape Town (who might have been called Jonathan, although perhaps that’s a trick of affinity—something to do with the publishers Jonathan Cape) reminded me of my clumsiness of line. My upstrokes were bulky and badly proportioned, his were graceful and pure; my fingers were always inky while his were always clean, finished off with perfect nails. He had outturned lips that were most luscious then, but are today probably of that strangely opened-out, overmoist quality as common to ex-colonials of the southern hemisphere as sandy eyelashes and wide hips. I expect now he looks like Ernie Els. Shame.

  Perhaps the boy from Cape Town set the pattern for all the love that lay in store for me. Strange thought. I haven’t ever recalled him to mind before this minute. I hope this book isn’t to become regression therapy. How unpleasant for you. I do wonder though if he still writes in italics as he did when we were infants, thirty-four years ago.

  Sex, of course, meant nothing to me. Bottoms and willies featured greatly in life at Chesham from the age of three onwards and they gave perpetual amusement, suffused with intense, muffled delight. There was a boy called Timothy who sat next to me in Mrs. Edwards’s class. We would pull the backs of our shorts and underpants down as we sat at our desks, so that we could feel our bare bottoms against the wooden seats. From the front, to Mrs. Edwards’s eye, everything would look normal. This excited me hugely: both the bareness of bottom and the secrecy were inexplicably delicious. Not to the point of erection you understand, at least not so far as I remember. Timothy and I would sometimes go into the woods together to play what we called Rudies. Rudies involved peeing up against a tree in as high an arc as we could manage or watching each other poo. All very mysterious. I can’t pretend that I find anything appealing in that sexual arena today, although I know that many august personages are highly pleased by the idea. One is always hearing about those who pay prostitutes to empty their bowels on to glass-topped coffee tables under which the client lies in a frenzy of excitement, pressing his face up against the excremental outpush. We think this all very English, but as a matter of fact a trawl through the grosser areas of Internet Usenet postings will show that Americans, as in all things outré, win the palm with ease. I haven’t looked in on the newsgroup alt.binaries.tasteless for a year or so now but it’s quite clear there’s a big world of scatological weirdness out there. The French come next: I don’t suppose anyone who has done so will forget the experience of reading de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and those elegantly disengaged descriptions of the bishop’s way with coffee. Then there was that French intellectual and structuralist hero who liked to lie in a trough in gay bars and be pissed on by strangers. No, it may come as a disappointment to you, but the fact is we British are no weirder than anyone else when it comes to sexual oddity, we just think we are, which is the basis of our weirdness. Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, so it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

  I can’t for the life of me remember where the woods were that we visited for our rather tame Rudies or who Timothy was. His name wasn’t Timothy of course, and if he is reading this book now he has probably forgotten the escapades entirely and is reciting it to his wife by the fireside as an example of how he was always right about that disgusting Stephen Fry chap.

  I have no memories of early “sex games,” as the Kinsey and Hite people like to call them, which involved the opposite sex. A girl did once show me her knickers and I remember find
ing the elastic and the colour unappealing. I can’t recall wanting to know or see more. A friend of mine at university, asked when he knew he was gay, said that he distinctly remembered at the moment of his birth looking back up there and saying, “Well! That’s the last time I’m ever going up one of those …” I have since shamelessly used this as my own explanation of When I Knew.

  I liked girls greatly, except when they bullied me or pursed their lips prissily and said, “Um! Telling on you …”

  The inelegance of my italics, the shimmering beauty of Jonathan Cape and those occasional Rudies with Timothy aside, my six-year-old life is hidden for the moment in an impenetrable mist. I know that I could read well at three and write accurately at four, and that I never ever learned my times table.

  In Chesham we dwelt in a very Betjemanesque kind of road called Stanley Avenue. Sherwood House, where we lived, has since been pulled down and replaced by a housing estate that calls itself a Close. I suppose that means Sherwood House must have been large, but I only remember a few details: a stained glass entrance porch; a booth where a black telephone with a sliding drawer under it lived—the dial had the letters in red so that one could easily call PUTney 4234 and CENtral 5656. I loved to bang the hard Bakelite cradle up and down and listen to the hollow, echoing clicks it sent down the line. Sounds are not as evocative as smells, but to anyone over the age of thirty-five the old dialling and hanging-up tones are as instant a transport to the past as the clunking of half-crowns and the thlop of the indicator flipping up on an old Austin motorcar.

  I was intensely fascinated by the telephone. Not in the way of a teenage girl chattering for hours lying on her stomach with her thighs pressed together and ankles crossed in the air, but intrigued by how it changed people. In those days, when you were cut off you would rattle the cradle and shout, “Operator! Operator!” Older people still do it. They don’t know that it’s as fruitless as pulling at a servant’s bell or asking for the Left Luggage office.

  They don’t know that in the world today …

  THERE’S NO ONE THERE

  They don’t know that the Bible is a Customer Service Announcement and that purgatory is when St. Peter puts you on hold and sends you into a self-contained menu-driven loop of tone-button-operated eternity to the sound of Vivaldi’s “Spring.”

  The very word “hello” only earned its sense of a greeting after the American phone companies hunted about for a new word with which telephonic conversations could politely, unsuggestively and neutrally be initiated, much as the BBC in the 1930s threw open the debate as to what someone who watched television might be called. The wireless had listeners, should television have watchers? Viewer, of course, was the word decided upon. In the case of telephony, the aim was to stop people saying “Who is that?” or “How do you do?” or even “Howdy.” “Good morning” and “Good day” had a somewhat valedictory flavour, as well as being of doubtful use in a country divided up into so many time zones. Prior to the 1890s “Hello!” had simply been an exclamation of surprise and interest, with obvious venery overtones. By the turn of the century everyone was writing songs and newspaper articles about “Hello Girls” and beginning to use the word in real life as salutation’s vanilla-flavoured, everyday, entry-level model.

  My favourite telephone fact, for this was the time, as I approached seven, that I began to collect facts instead of butterflies, stamps or football cards, was that Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made the following entirely endearing remark soon after he had invented the telephone: “I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention,” he said, “when I tell you that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America.”

  In those days, my father actually went out to work, so I suppose I associate the telephone with my mother and Chesham, its laurels and shrubs and nearby ticking Atco mowers and with a suburban idyll so soon to be replaced in Norfolk by spooky attics, rural isolation and permanent paternal presence. Sherwood House in my mind is where Just William’s William lived, it is where Raffles and Bunny went when they wanted to relieve a parvenue of her pearls, it is where Aunt Julia had her Wimbledon fastness in Wodehouse’s Ukridge stories. In Sherlock Holmes it is the house of the Norwood Builder and the mysterious Pondicherry Lodge. In fact, it is easier for me to remember Sherwood House by opening a page of any one of those books and allowing the flood of images to take over than it is for me to sit down and make a concentrated attempt at genuine recall.

  My mother occasionally taught English to foreign students and history at nearby colleges and schools, but I think of her at a typewriter in the dining room, with myself curled under her feet staring into a gas fire and listening to Mrs. Dale’s Diary, Twenty Questions and The Archers. Or hearing her voice rise in pitch and volume and decrease in speed and sense when the telephone had rung and she had hurried through to the booth in the hall to answer it. I swear it is less than five years since I last heard her say down the line in her kindest clear-and-slow-for-foreigners voice:

  “If you are in a call box, press button B …”

  Buttons A and B must have vanished from pay phones twenty years ago.

  That is my image of infancy. Just me, glowing in the combined warmth of the gas fire, my big-bellied mother and her Ferguson wireless. If it felt in a sociable mood, our Siamese cat would join us, but in my memory we are alone. Sometimes we will get up, my mother stretching, hands on hips and, after she has found a headscarf and a raincoat, we will leave the house. We visit the hairdresser’s, the Home and Colonial Stores, the Post Office, and finally Quell’s, where I noisily hoover up a raspberry milkshake while my mother closes her eyes in bliss as she spoons in a melon or tomato sorbet. On the way back we feed stale crusts to the ducks in the park. All the way there and back, she will talk to me. Tell me things. What words mean. Why cars have number plates. How she met Daddy. Why she must go into hospital soon to have a baby. She makes up stories about a koala called Bananas. In one adventure Bananas comes to England to visit relations at Whipsnade for Christmas and suffers terribly because of the cold, the foolish animal having packed only his shorts, swimming trunks and sandals in the expectation that Buckinghamshire would be boiling hot in December. I giggle, as we children do, at the stupidity of those who don’t know things that we have only just been taught ourselves.

  Life has been downhill ever since. Or do I mean uphill?

  As we reach Stanley Avenue, we race for the house and, pregnant as she is, Mother always nearly wins. She was athletic at school and kept goal for the England schoolgirls’ hockey team.

  There were au pair girls at Chesham, German or Scandiwegian usually, there was Mrs. Worrell who scrubbed, there was Roger and in the evenings, there was the terrifying prospect of Father. But in my memory there is Mother at the typewriter (once she loudly said “fuck” forgetting I was under her chair) and there is me, gazing into the blue and orange flames.

  One morning I was off school, whether shamming or genuinely sick I can’t remember. Mother came into my bedroom, hands wearily pressed against hips, and told me that the time had come for her to go into hospital. Roger had once attempted to tell me how pregnancy came about. One or both of us became a little confused and the picture in my head was that of my father as a kind of gardener, dropping a small seed into my mother’s tummy button and watering it with his pee. A peculiar image I suppose, but to a race of Martians no stranger than the unwieldy truth.

  The upshot of all this was a baby girl, Joanna. Her middle name, Roselle, came from my mother’s own Viennese mother. It became my particular joy to help feed and dress this new sister and my most burning ambition to be the first person she smiled at.

  I was now officially a middle child.

  The next week we left Chesham and headed for Norfolk.

  2

  It is January 1965. Roger, who is eight, has returned to Stouts Hill for his second term. I am considered a spot too young. I am due to follow him in the summer so i
n the meantime I attend for one time-marking term a Church of England primary school in the village of Cawston, a mile from our new house in Booton.

  Cawston Primary School was run by John Kett, descended from Kett of Kett’s Rebellion, the Kett who ended his days hanging from chains on the ramparts of Norwich Castle. The twentieth-century descendant is a kindly figure who writes books on Norfolk dialect and is much loved and looked up to by everyone for miles around. Whether he shares his noisome ancestor’s belief in eastern independence I could not say, but I am certain that were today’s fashion for devolution to be continued into the ancient kingdoms of England, he would be a very natural candidate for King of Anglia—perhaps with Delia Smith as his consort.

  “I need a volunteer,” Miss Meddlar said one day.

  My hand shot up. “Oh, Miss, me, Miss! Please, Miss!”

  “Very well, Stephen Fry.” Miss Meddlar always called me by both names. It is one of my chief memories of primary school, that of being Stephen Fry all the time. I suppose Miss Meddlar felt first names were too informal and surnames too cold and too affected for a decent, Christian village school. “Take this to Mr. Kett’s class please, Stephen Fry.”

  “This” was a sheet of paper bearing test results. Spelling and Adding Up. I had annoyed myself by getting one answer wrong in the spelling round. I had spelled the word “many” with two “n”s. Everyone else had made the same mistake but compounded the error by using an “e,” so Miss Meddlar had given me half a point for knowing about the “a.” I took the sheet of paper from her knowing that my name headed the list with nineteen and a half out of twenty.