Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  I was immensely put out, incidentally, when a few years later Monty Python used the name Vince Snetterton in one of their sketches. Snetterton is a village in Norfolk, and I felt that they had stolen it from me. From that day forward, Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton ceased to be.

  Language was something more than power then, it was more than my only resource in a world of tribal shouts and athleticism and them, the swimmers and singers, it was also a private gem collection, a sweet shop, a treasure chest.

  But in a culture like ours, language is exclusive, not inclusive. Those on easy terms with words are distrusted. I was always encouraged to believe that cleverness and elegance with words obscured and twisted decent truth: Britain’s idea of a golden mean was (and still is) healthy inarticulacy. Mean, certainly—but golden? Leaden, I think. To the healthy English mind (a phenomenon we will dwell on later) there is something intellectually spivvy, something flash, something Jewy about verbal facility. George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, Frederic Raphael, Will Self, Ben Elton even … how often that damning word clever is attached to them, hurled at them like an inky dart by the snowy-haired, lobster-faced Garrick Club buffoons of the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator.

  As usual, I scamper ahead of myself.

  4

  When I was a prep-school master at Cundall Manor School in North Yorkshire, eleven or twelve years after arriving at Stouts Hill (note the dashing blazer in the photograph and wonder that this man was allowed to live) the boys at my breakfast table liked me to tell them over and over again the story of Bunce and the Village Shop. I think it gave them a kick to know that a teacher could once have been Bad—not just naughty, but Bad, really Bad.

  Discipline at Stouts Hill, for all that I have correctly described the place as familial, friendly and warm, was tough, or what would be called tough today. It centred more or less entirely around the cane: the whack, as it was called by masters, matrons and boys.

  “You get caught doing that, you’ll get the whack …” a friend might say with lip-smacking relish.

  “Right, Fry, if you’re not in bed in ten seconds flat, it’ll be the whack for you,” the master-on-duty would warn.

  “How many times have you had the whack this week, Fry?” I would be asked in wonderment.

  The headmaster when I arrived at Stouts Hill was still the school’s founder, Robert Angus. He kept a collection of whippy bamboo canes behind the shutters of his study and they were used with great regularity, most especially during the feared Health Week, a time when he made it plain that his arms and shoulders craved exercise and would look for the slenderest excuses to find it. During Health Week an infraction of the rules that would usually have resulted in lines or detention would be upgraded to the whack. A crime ordinarily punishable by three strokes would be dealt with by six, and so on.

  If Health Week was to be feared, far more terrifying were those occasions when Angus was unwell or away and the deputy headmaster, Mid Kemp, took over the running of the school and the administration of physical punishment.

  Mid, I was disconsolate to find out while researching for this book, was short for Middleton. I had spent the whole of my life up until now convinced that it was an abbreviation for Midfred, which would have suited the man better.

  In my memory Mid Kemp’s hands, his patched tweed jackets, his moustache and his hair were all yellowed with nicotine. I don’t know what it is about modern cigarettes, but no longer does one see the great stained smoking fingers and egg-yolk streaked white hair of old. Mid Kemp looked and talked like C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers. His favourite word, one for which I have a great deal of time myself as a matter of fact, was “arse.” Everyone was more or less an arse most of the time, but I was arsier than just about everyone else in the school. In fact, in my case he would often go further—I was on many occasions a bumptious arse. Before I learned what bumptious actually meant I assumed that it derived from “bum” and believed therefore with great pride that as a bumptious arse I was doubly arsey—twice the arse of ordinary arses.

  When umpiring cricket matches, Mid Kemp treated his own arse to the bracing leather comforts of a shooting stick and would perch at square leg in a yellow haze of nicotine that spread from short midwicket to deep fine leg.

  Mid Kemp treated boys’ arses, on those occasions when Angus was away, to the most ferocious cuts of the cane. Instead of the straightforward thwack, his speciality was the bacon slicer, a vertical downwards slash requiring far less effort and inflicting infinitely more pain than the conventional horizontal swat.

  Early in my time at Stouts Hill he was replaced as deputy headmaster by Angus’s son-in-law, A. J. Cromie, an alumnus of Trinity College Dublin who bore a ferocious moustache and terrified me more than he could ever have known. Cromie drove a spectacularly beautiful blue Rolls Royce, wore (in my memory at least) green Irish thornproof tweeds and taught me French in an accent which, young as I may have been, I suspected to be far from authentically Gallic.

  Angus in his day beat me many times, always with gentle sorrow. Mid Kemp sliced me from time to time with a rather mad, rather frightening glazed boredom. Cromie beat me more than anyone since his reign as proper headmaster coincided with my rise from infancy to boyhood, from naughtiness to wickedness. When he beat me it was always with a glum resignation.

  “Oh God, it’s you again …” he would bark when he arrived at his study to find me waiting outside the door, the approved station for those who had been sent for a thrashing. “And what is it this time?”

  Did it do me any harm being beaten? Did it do me any good? I really don’t know. Autres temps, autres moeurs—it is now considered barbaric, sadistic, harmful, disgraceful, perverted and unpardonable. As far as I was concerned it had at least the virtue of being over quickly, unlike detention, lines or the wearisome cleaning and sweeping errands that stood as lesser penalties. Often, in fact, one was given a choice of punishments and I always chose the cane.

  I never got any pleasure out of it, mind you. My sexual fantasies are, I trust, as weird, frightening and grotesque as yours and the next person’s and the person next to him, but flagellation, spanking, birching and the infliction of even the mildest pain have never been anything for me other than absolute turn offs.

  There was pleasure in going straight to the school lavs after a beating, pulling down one’s shorts and pants and flushing the loo, to the accompaniment of a great hissing sigh—like Tom sitting himself in a bucket of water after Jerry has set light to his tail—that I did enjoy. There was too the talismanic pride of showing one’s stripes to the dormitory, like a Prussian Junker displaying his duelling scars.

  “Wow, that one bit …”

  “Nice grouping …”

  “Actually, Fry, if it breaks the skin and you bleed you can complain to the government and he’ll go to prison, that’s what I heard.”

  “Apparently, if he raises his arm above shoulder height, it’s illegal …”

  Maybe some of you reading this will think that men who can beat children like that are swine.

  I feel terrible about that because the men who beat me were not swine.

  Maybe now you’ll think people like me who can forgive their childhood beatings—or claim even that there is nothing to forgive—are victims of some sort of “cycle of abuse.” Maybe you think I should be angry, that I should damn the schoolmasters who beat me and damn my parents and damn the men and women who allowed it.

  Maybe you think there is nothing more pathetic, nothing that more perfectly illustrates all the vices and impediments of Old England than the spectacle of the Old Boy trying to defend the system that chastised him with strokes of the cane.

  Maybe you are right. Maybe I am a woeful and pathetic specimen. Maybe I do suffer without knowing it the disastrous consequences of a barbaric and outdated education. Maybe it has disturbed the balance of my mind. Maybe it has warped and thwarted me. Fuck knows. I don’t and, without wishing to be rude, you most certainly can’t know either. We
are living in a statistically rare and improbable period of British life. The last twenty years are the only twenty years of our history in which children have not been beaten for misbehaviour. Every Briton you can think of, from Chaucer to Churchill, from Shakespeare to Shilton, was beaten as a child. If you are under thirty, then you are the exception. Maybe we are on the threshold of a brave new world of balanced and beautiful Britons. I hope so.

  You won’t find me offering the opinion that beating is a good thing or recommending the return of the birch. I frankly regard corporal punishment as of no greater significance in the life of most human beings than bustles, hula hoops, flared trousers, side whiskers or any other fad. Until, that is, one says that it isn’t. Which is to say, the moment mankind decides that a practice like beating is of significance then it becomes of significance. I should imagine that were I a child now and found myself being beaten by schoolmasters I would be highly traumatised by the experience, for every cultural signal would tell me that beating is, to use the American description, a “cruel and unusual punishment” and I would feel singled out for injustice and smart and wail accordingly.

  Let’s try—and God knows it’s hard—to be logical about this. If we object to corporal punishment, and I assume we do, on what grounds is this objection based? On the grounds that it is wrong to cause a child pain? Well, I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles—I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might, and still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.

  I have paused on this subject of corporal punishment because the issue is so culturally loaded today as to be almost impossible to inspect. It comes in so many people’s minds very close to the idea of “abuse,” a word which when used within ten spaces of the word “child” causes hysteria, madness and stupidity in almost everybody.

  I know that had I dispassionately described to you the use of the cane without any comment, without summoning counsel for a conference in chambers, then many of you would have wondered what I was up to and whether I was entirely balanced. You will have to form your own judgements, but try to understand that when I think about being caned for repeatedly talking after lights out, or for Mobbing About in the Malt Queue, and other such mad prep-schooly infractions, I feel far less passion and distress than I do when I think about the times I was put into detention for crimes of which I was innocent. If it should so happen that you could prove to me that one of the masters who beat me may have derived sexual gratification from the practice, I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Poor old soul, at least he never harmed me.” Abuse is exploitation of trust and exploitation of authority and I was lucky enough never to suffer from that or from any violation or cruelty, real or imagined.

  It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.

  Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper. Kirk drawing attention to my singing, that was abuse, and he was just a silly child who knew no better. Mid Kemp and his mad bacon slicers, that was the Game and it amuses me.

  Sidebar over.

  Of all the school rules I liked most to flout, the breaking of bounds gave me the greatest pleasure. Perhaps there’s a metaphor there, I do hope not, all this psychology grows wearisome.

  The school grounds were extensive. I’ve made glancing mention of the lake, woods and pony paddocks. Uley itself lay out of bounds and beyond legal reach. We crocodiled to the church there on special Sundays—the Christmas Carol service, for example, when Easter Day fell in term time, or when the school play was performed in the village hall (“Stephen Fry’s Mrs. Higgins would grace any drawing room,” my first review)—but at all other times Uley was verboten, off limits, here be dragons, don’t you bloody dare.

  Uley had a village shop-cum-post-office crammed with Sherbet Fountains, Everlasting Strips and two types of penny chew—Fruit Salads and Blackjacks. I don’t know why they were called penny chews, they should really have been called farthing chews because you could buy four of these little wrapped squares of deliciously sticky tooth-decay for just one penny. The village shop also sold a brown, shredded confection that was packaged to look like rolling tobacco and tasted, I think, of coconut. It came wrapped in waxed paper and had a picture of a Spanish Galleon on the front. That and the endless varieties of other pretend smoking materials—candied cigarettes with red dyed ends, chocolate cigarettes wrapped in real paper and liquorice pipes—must now seem almost as wicked to the modern puritan sensibility as child beating and fox hunting. The most important thing about these sweets however is that they could not be bought at the school tuck shop. The tuck shop had its Fry’s Turkish Delight (bane of my life, that and all the other nicknaming possibilities around it), Crunchie and Picnic bars, but only the village shop had rice-paper flying saucers filled with sherbet, pink foamy shrimps, rubbery little milk bottles and chocolate buttons sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

  The ownership and sly proffering of paper bags filled with those forbidden fruits became almost as great a totem of heroism as the possession of pubic hair, and was shared with friends in just the same shifty but giggling, shy but boastful manner. Since no amount of pinching, teasing, soaping, threatening and cajoling could cause even the blondest silken millimetre of pubic hair to sprout from me, sweets became my testament of manliness.

  Aside from all that, the very act of slipping and sliding around the lake’s edge, cutting down past the boathouse, across the gymkhana field with its dressage poles and tatty jumps, over the second games field, across the lane and into Out of Bounds territory had its own thrill. At this time too, nature’s best side, the side that didn’t creep and crawl and ooze, was beginning to open itself up to me. Cider with Rosie, in literary terms, was just about an item of school uniform to us; many of the boys knew Laurie Lee as a friend, he sometimes drank his beer in Uley’s pub and on special occasions came to read to us. A killer Cyborg from Vark would fall in love with the countryside if he heard Laurie Lee reading about it.

  The walk from the school to the shop was, I reckon, a little over a country mile, but I liked to linger. I picture myself, eyes streaming and face blotched with hayfever, sitting under elm trees, firing plantain buds, blowing grassblade fanfares through my thumbs and rubbing nettled shins with dock. The overpowering breath of watermint from the skirting of the lake margin would stay with me until one of my sandals had broken the crisp leathery surface of a cowpat and from then on I would carry with me the decent tang of sun-cured dung. There was a curious pleasure to be gained too, perhaps a hangover from playing rudies with Timothy in Chesham, from pulling down my shorts and crapping in the grass unseen by all but cattle. Maybe that’s a primal thing, maybe it’s just that I am weird.

  I never liked to be accompanied on these trips. I once tried going with someone else, but it felt wrong. He was too scared to dwell on the journey itself, too keen to eat all the sweets before getting back to school, too frightened, in short, of getting caught. Getting caught, I think now, is what it was all about to me.

  People sometimes say to me these days, “You know, I was just as bad as you at school, Stephen. Thing is, I never got found out.”

  Well, where’s the fun in that? I always want to reply. That’s a boast? “I never got found out, clever, clever me.”

  I am quite aware, by the way, that I am the exception and they are the rule. I’m the freak in this equation, I know that. Not that I actively, consciously knew that I wanted to be caught.

  I did love sweets, God how I loved them. The mouthful of fillings today and th
e gaps where grinders should be show that I loved sweets long past the proper age.

  One afternoon, perhaps I was eleven years old and moving towards a kind of seniority within the school, I came across a joke shop catalogue lying about in one of the dormitories. I suppose the rest of the school was playing cricket and I had managed as usual to get myself off games by inducing an asthma attack. I loved the feeling of having the school to myself, the distant shouts and echoes without and the absolute stillness within. My heart always sank when the final whistles went, the school noises drew closer and I knew that I was no longer the master of the lost domain.

  A voice is whispering in my ear that this joke shop catalogue belonged to a boy called Nick Charles-Jones, but this is of minor importance. For a half-crown postal order, it seemed, a fellow could have dispatched to him:

  • chattering false teeth

  • a small round membrane of cloth and tin which allowed one to throstle, warble and apparently throw one’s voice like a ventriloquist

  • a bar of soap that turned the user soot black

  • itching powder

  • a sugar cube that melted and left a realistic looking spider floating on the surface of the victim’s teacup

  • a finger-ring buzzer

  • a lookalike chewing gum pack that snapped like a mouse trap.

  Trouble was, I had no postal order, nor any access to such a thing. Unlike Billy Bunter, the Winslow Boy and other famous school children, I didn’t even really know what a postal order was. To be perfectly frank with you I’m still not that sure today.

  However. It occurred to me that if I mustered up two shillings and sixpence in loose change and then stuck all the coins together with sticky tape and sent them off for “The most hilarious collection of jokes and gags EVER assembled” with a note of apology accompanying, then only the flintiest-hearted mail-order joke shop would refuse to honour my order.