Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  I suppose some rat-faced weasel from New Malden will be interviewed at any minute to give the other side of the hunting debate.

  Bingo! I’m right. Though by the sound of him he’s from Romford rather than New Malden. And he’s just described foxhunting as “barbaric,” which is peculiar since he’s the one with the stutter. Forgive the pedantry of a frustrated classicist.

  They should have asked a fox instead.

  “Would you rather be hunted by hounds, gassed, trapped, poisoned or shot, old darling?”

  “Well, since you mention it, I’d rather be left alone.”

  “Ng … but given that that isn’t an option?”

  “No? Thought not. It never is, is it?”

  “Well, you know. Lambs. Chicken farms. Hysterical people hearing you rootling through their wheelie bins at night.”

  “I like a nice wheelie bin.”

  “Yes, that’s as may be, but which way would you rather be killed?”

  “Think I’ll stick to dogs if it’s all the same to you. A fox knows where he is with hounds. My direct ancestors have lived in the same place, hunted by hounds every winter, for three hundred years. Hounds are simply hopeless when you come down to it.”

  That’s enough about town and country. I was supposed to be telling you about John Kett and the Cawston School Fete. As it happens, there’s a story about a mole fast approaching, so animals won’t be left out.

  Opening the Cawston School Fete counted as both duty and pleasure. I was an Old Boy, I had a connection, something to do, other than wander about with my hands behind my back like minor royalty inspecting a dialysis machine. I could revisit the changing room for example, savour once more the poster-paint tang of the art cupboard and see if the hopscotch rink had been repainted since Table Mucker’s championship season.

  The Cawston Fete was not quite the miracle of yesterdecade, but—an alarming exhibition of tae kwan do given by local boys aside—there was enough of a smell of over-sugared sponge cake and faintly fermenting strawbails to remind me of when the world was young and guilty.

  I wandered from stall to stall in a sort of daze, interrupted now and then by the shy murmur of, “I don’t suppose you’ll remember me …”

  Table Mucker had grown an explosive pair of breasts and a large brood of daughters the eldest of whom looked ready to start production on her own. Mary Hench grinned at me from behind a downy moustache and a fierce girlfriend (clearly boys were still soft in her book) while John Kett himself seemed unchanged from the man whose puzzled eyes had lived with me in silent reproach for twenty-five years.

  “Well, young man, I expect everything seems to have shrunk since last you were here.”

  I agreed and he turned the subject to moles.

  Moles?

  Other people at the fete had mentioned moles too, with twinkles or with amused, nose-tapping suggestiveness on my arrival and as I made the traditional preliminary inspection of cake stand and bottle stall.

  My parents’ gardeners were a pair of brothers called Alec and Ivan Tubby who battled to keep the tennis court—as well as the improbable pride of our garden, the badminton lawn—free of moles. Was there some connection there?

  Mole catching is a great art and most practitioners (the fluorescent-jacketed Rentokil variety always excepted) stand silently for great lengths of time staring at lawns and fresh molehills. After perhaps half an hour of this agonising inactivity they will at last make a move and pad softly towards apparently random places in the grass where they insert a number of traps. Over the next couple of days three or four dead moles will be pulled out. I suppose while they were standing doing nothing the mole catchers were in fact reading tiny trembles in the earth, or patches of darker or lighter grass that gave them some suggestion as to where the moles were headed. The molehills themselves are not much of a clue of course: once they’ve dug them, the gentlemen in black velvet move themselves off. The trick is to guess in which direction they have gone.

  Back in 1965, during the first weeks of my term at Cawston Primary School I had become more and more depressed about my inability to win a star for the nature table.

  Every week, we pupils in Miss Meddlar’s class would have to bring something in for a classroom display of biological objets trouvés. The prize exhibit would win a star. One week Mary Hench brought in a sandwich tern’s egg, taken from a nest on the coast at Brancaster. After Miss Meddlar had established in her own mind the truthfulness of Mary Hench’s assertion that the nest had been abandoned and the egg cold when happened upon (I didn’t believe Mary Hench for a second, I remain convinced to this day that the wicked girl had simply clapped her enormous hands and shooed away a sitting mother, so insane and diabolical was her ambition to win more stars than anyone else and the Junior Achievement Cup and five shilling book token that went with them) a star was awarded. I had entertained high hopes that week for my badger’s skull, boiled, vigorously scrubbed clean with Colgate toothpaste for a whiteness you can believe in and total fresh breath confidence, and attractively presented in a Queen’s Velvet envelope box packed with shredded red cellophane. I was to do the same dental cosmetic job on a less easily identifiable bone (I was sure that it was human) some years later, and win my third Blue Peter Badge—and a third Blue Peter Badge, as the world knows, is instantly converted into a Silver Blue Peter Badge. But all these happy achievements lay a long way ahead. For the moment, I was starless. But my blood was up. I was going to win a star and make Mary Hench howl with envy if I had to commit murder to do it.

  Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

  Grim weeks of effort and nature trailing followed. I tried a starfish, a thrush egg, a collection of pressed campions and harebells and a boxful of shards of that willow pattern ironstone china that the Victorians buried in the earth for the sole purpose of disappointing twentieth-century treasure seekers. None of these met with the least success. By the eighth week of term I knew that Nature Table Star List by heart.

  Mary Hench

  Mary Hench

  Jacqueline Wright

  Ian Adams

  Jimmy Speed

  Mary Hench

  Mary Hench

  One Sunday evening, as I was wheeling round and round the stable block at home on my bicycle, racking my brains for an idea of what to offer up the next morning, Ivan Tubby approached me with something small and soft and dark cupped in his hands.

  “Found a mole,” he said.

  This was not a mole that had been squashed and spiked in a gintrap, it was a mole that seemed to have died very recently of natural causes. Perhaps its mother and father had been trapped and it had popped up to see what was going on and where dinner was and then discovered with a shock that it couldn’t see at all and in any case wasn’t supposed to be above the ground with the Up There people and the Seeing Animals. In whatever manner it met its end, this was a young mole in the most excellent condition, its pink snout and spreading shovel paws still warm and quite perfectly shaped.

  I begged to be allowed to keep him and Ivan generously consented, although as it happened he had marked him down as a treat for his cat.

  The next morning I bicycled down the mile-long lane to Cawston in a fever of excitement, the mole packed in straw in my saddlebag. This was to be my day of triumph.

  “Here we have a common European mole,” I would tell the class, Pear’s Family Cyclopaedia having been thoroughly exhausted on the subject of moles the night before. “Moles eat their own weight every day and can actually starve to death within twelve hours if they don’t have enough food. A mole is capable of burrowing up to eighteen feet in one hour. Thank you.”

  I imagined executing a small bow and receiving delighted applause from all but a frustrated, white-lipped Mary Hench, whose feeble puss-moth caterpillar or pathetic arrangement of barn owl pellets would go unnoticed.

  I parked the bicycle and rushed to Miss Meddl
ar’s, slowing down as I arrived in the doorway, so as to look cool and casual.

  “Well now, you’re very early this morning, Stephen Fry.”

  “Am I, Miss? Yes, Miss.”

  “And what’s that you have there? Something for the nature table?”

  “Yes, Miss. It’s a—” I started, excitedly.

  “Don’t tell me now, child. Wait until class. Put it on the table and … well now whatever is going on?”

  A violent explosion of giggles and screams could be heard coming from the playground. Miss Meddlar and I went to the window and tried to crane round and look towards the source of the uproar. Just then, Jimmy Speed, a chaotic, ink-stained boy, the kind who grins all the time as though he believes everyone to be quite mad, burst into the room.

  “Oh, Miss, Miss. You’ll never guess! You’ll never ever guess!”

  “Guess what, Jimmy Speed?”

  “That’s Mary Hench, Miss! She’s brought a donkey in for the nature table. A real live donkey! Come out and see. That’s ever so beautiful, though how he will fit on the table, that I do not know.”

  “A donkey!” Miss Meddlar went pink with excitement, straightened her skirt and headed for the door. “A donkey. Good heavens!”

  I looked down at my little mole and burst into tears.

  It was at the end of the week, just as everyone in the school was beginning to talk of things other than Mary Hench and her donkey, that Mr. Kett came up to me in the playground and drew me aside.

  “Hello there, young man,” he said. “You look a little down in the dumps if I might say so.”

  “Do I, sir?”

  “You do, sir,” he said. “I remember a joke I heard as a boy in the pantomime. Cinderella, that was. In Dereham, years before the war. One of the ugly sisters, she said, ‘Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I buy myself a new hat.’ And the other ugly sister replied, ‘So that’s where you get them from then.’ I remember that as if it were yesterday.”

  Only, said in his light Norfolk accent it came out as, “… I remember that as if it were yisty.”

  “So,” he went on, putting a hand on my shoulder. “What have you been getting down in those dumps?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, “only …”

  “You can tell me, young man. If it’s a secret it won’t go any further. A boy told me the most amazing secret twenty years ago. Do you know what it was?”

  “No,” I asked, perking up. There was nothing I loved better than a secret. “What was it?”

  “I shan’t tell you,” said Mr. Kett. “It’s a secret. See? That’s how good I am at keeping them.”

  “Oh. Well, you see, the thing is …”

  And out spilled some kind of confused description of the disappointment, frustration, rage and despair that burned within me at being trumped by Mary Hench and her double-damned donkey.

  “It was such a good mole, you see … so perfect. Its paws were perfect, its snout was perfect, its fur was perfect. It was the best mole ever. Even though it was dead. Any other week it would have won a star. And it’s not that stars are so important, it’s just that I’ve never won one for the nature table. Not once. Ever.”

  “You’ve had plenty of stars for spelling though, haven’t you? So Miss Meddlar tells me.”

  “Oh, spelling …”

  “I had a look at your mole. It was a fine mole, there’s no question about it. You should be very proud of him.”

  That afternoon, as class ended, I went to the nature table, took the creature, now slightly corrupted by time, and wrapped it in a handkerchief.

  “Is our mole leaving us?” Miss Meddlar asked, with what seemed to be a gleam of hope in her voice.

  “I thought perhaps so,” I sighed. “I mean, he is getting a bit … you know.”

  Halfway back home I leaned my bike against a hedge and opened the handkerchief, setting myself scientifically to examine the nature of decay. The body of the mole, once so plush and fine, now matted and patched, appeared to be alive with shiny white ticks. From out of the weeping centre of the carcass, a black insect that had been feasting deep in the wet ooze seemed suddenly to see me, or at least to see daylight and its chance for freedom. Taking fierce wing with a fluttering clockwork buzz, it launched itself into my eye. I gave a scream and dropped the whole bundle. The flying creature, whatever it was, spun upwards into the air and across the fields.

  I felt a wetness around my ankles and looked down. The mole had fallen on to my sandals and exploded there, spreading itself all around my socks and feet. Squealing and shrieking in fright and revulsion, I hopped about flicking with the handkerchief at my shins as though they were on fire.

  It was too horrible, nature was too horrible. Nature stank and squelched and vomited with slime, maggots and bursting guts.

  I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself—simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

  Pieces of the mole lined the foot of the hedge. I rubbed a little at my legs with the once fine, crisp linen handkerchief and then I held it up to the sky. They were the same, the handkerchief and the evening sky. Both spattered with ink and blood. The alien malevolence of a certain kind of late afternoon sunset has frightened me ever since.

  “Good heavens, darling,” my mother said. “Whatever is that smell?”

  “Dead mole, what do you think?” I said crossly as I stamped up the back stairs.

  “Well, you’d better go straight up and have a bath then.”

  “What did you think I was doing? Going upstairs to … to … play croquet?”

  Not the best put-down ever, but as tart as I could manage.

  I didn’t think once about the nature table over the weekend. It had rained, which gave me a fine opportunity to stay indoors and ignore nature entirely.

  It was only as I bicycled in to school on Monday morning that I realised I had nothing at all for the weekly show and tell.

  A stick, I thought. I’ll jolly well take in a stick. If they don’t want moles, they can make do with a stick. Sticks can be interesting too. Nature isn’t all donkeys and otter spraints and tern’s eggs and coypu skulls and rotten crawling living things. I’ll bring in a dead stick.

  So I picked up the first stick I biked past. A very ordinary stick. Dead, but neutral and uncorrupted in its death. And useful too, which is more than you can say for a rotting mole dropping to bits all over your ankles.

  I brought the stick into the classroom and dumped it defiantly on the nature table.

  “Well now,” said Miss Meddlar, after she had examined the week’s crop with the irritating care and slowness of a pensioner paying at a checkout counter. “Now then, well. Another wonderful effort from you all. I have to say I half expected to see an elephant in the playground, Mary, but that is a lovely jay’s feather you’ve brought in for us, really lovely. But do you know what? The star this week is going to go to … Stephen Fry.”

  “Hurrh?”

  A dozen pairs of disbelieving eyes swivelled between me, Miss Meddlar and the very ordinary dead stick that lay on the nature table like a very ordinary dead stick.

  “Come you on forward, Stephen Fry.”

  I came me on forward, bewildered.

  “This star is not for your stick, although I’m sure it is ever such a fine stick. This star is for you taking away your mole Friday …”

  “Excuse me, Miss?”

  “… because I have to say that the dratted thing was stinking out my classroom. He was stinking out the whole corridor, was your mole. I’ve never been so glad to see anything go in all my born days.”

  The class erupted into noisy laughter and, since I was always, and have always been, determined that merriment should never be seen to be at my expense, I joined in and accepted my star with as much pleased dignity as I could muster.

  How strange then, how more than
passing strange, to discover a quarter of a century later that it was this trivial episode that the school remembered me for, and not for my cold lies and sly evasions.

  John Kett was, still is I hope, a lay preacher and a better advertisement for Christianity than St. Paul himself. Then again, in my unqualified opinion, Judas Iscariot, Nero and Count Dracula are all better advertisements for Christianity than St. Paul … but that’s a whole other candle for a whole other cake. You aren’t here to listen to my ignorant ramblings on the subject of theology.

  The awful thing is this.

  Until this day came twenty-five years on, with John Kett and others and their beaming mentions, I had entirely forgotten the mole and everything to do with it.

  At the start of the fete, every time moles had been knowingly alluded to as I Prince Michael of Kented my way from stall to stall, I had pretended that I knew what it was all about, but I was dissembling furiously. I imagined that people might be referring to some television sketch that I had been in and since forgotten all about.

  This often happens. I remember a few years ago being angrily yelled at from across the street by a complete stranger. Simply purple with fury this man was, shaking his fist and calling me a bastard pigging murderer. I assumed he was someone who didn’t like my politics, my television appearances, my sexual preferences, my manner, my voice, my face—me. It hardly mattered. He could call me a fat ugly unfunny lefty queer and I would see his point of view. But murderer? Maybe it was because I was wearing leather shoes … it is impossible to tell in these days of serial single-issue fanatics. I wheeled round the corner and away. Such people are best avoided. One reads things, you know.

  You can imagine my consternation when I realised that this lunatic was dashing round the corner after me in hot pursuit.

  “Mr. Fry! Mr. Fry!”

  I turned with what I hoped was a disarming smile, in reality seeking witnesses, policemen or an escape route.

  The lunatic was holding up an apologetic hand.