Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  I had about a shilling on me, which left one and sixpence to go. One and six (seven and a half pence in today’s currency) was not a great deal of money, but any sum that you do not have when you are eleven years old seems a fortune. I expect today schoolchildren get sent four credit card application forms every day through the post like everybody else, but things were different then. The sand gold and navy blue of a Barclaycard had only just been introduced and was at first taken up by rather dodgy characters—the sort of people who smoked Rothmans, drove E-Types and swanked about the place with BEA bags over their shoulders and were best played by Leslie Phillips or Guy Middleton.

  Stealing had become second nature to me by this time and the boys’ changing room was the place to start. Up and down the pegs I would go, lightly tapping the trousers and blazers until I heard the chink of coins.

  You can steal from the school, you can steal from a shop, you can steal from a bank. Stealing money from the clothing of friends is … what is it? It is not naughty or unstable or unmanageable or difficult: it is as bad as bad can be. It is wicked, it is evil. It makes you a …

  THIEF

  … and nobody loves a thief.

  I still blush and shiver when I hear the word used aggressively. It crops up in films on television.

  Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that we appear to have a thief among us.

  Stop, thief!

  You thieving little rat …

  Why, you’re nothing but a cheating, lying thief …

  It’s still doing it to me, that word.

  The changing rooms. The clink of money. Breathing hard. Mouth parted. Heart hammering. They are all outside playing games. Coast is clear.

  I am trying hard, even now, to forgive myself for these years of stealing. The shoplifting, the more glamorous insanity with credit cards later on, all that can be laughed or shrugged off. Perhaps.

  But this, this was nasty, this was sly.

  “There always was something sly about you, Fry.”

  There was a way some masters and prefects had of pronouncing my surname that seemed to me, in my guilt, to mean cunning and unclean and ratty and foxy and devious and unhealthy and deceitful and duplicitous and sly. Sly Fry.

  I could argue in my defence that I spread the load that afternoon. I could say that I needed (needed?) one and sixpence, so I took just small quantities of threepenny bits and pennies to make up the sum, rather than cleaning out and impoverishing one particular victim.

  But that’s not right.

  I took small amounts from several people to lessen the chance of there being a fuss.

  “Bloody hell. I had a bob here at lunchtime …” would have been the cry of any boy robbed of a whole shilling.

  Whereas, “Tsh, I’m sure had tuppence somewhere …” was less likely to raise a hue and cry.

  Those changing rooms at Stouts Hill, then later at Uppingham. From Mary Hench’s boot to the regular, almost daily ransacking of boys’ pockets for cash, changing rooms have been my killing fields.

  I’m still trying to find excuses for myself. I’m wondering whether it was some kind of vengeance. I hated games so much, hated so much those who loved them and excelled at them. Was that why the preferred locus of theft for me was always the changing room, with its casually dropped jockstraps, muddy laces and stink of stale sweat?

  Did I hate games because I was so shite at them, or was I so shite at them because I hated them and did I hate them because of …

  THE BATHS

  &

  THE SHOWERS?

  Is that where it all begins? With the cock-shy terror of the showers?

  It did consume me, the thought of undressing in front of others. It ate at me like acid throughout my schooldays and beyond.

  There’s more on this theme coming later. Let’s just say for the time being that I was wicked. When I wanted money or sweets, I stole them and I didn’t care from whom. From my mother’s handbag at home or from the desks and hanging clothes of my fellow pupils. For the moment, we’ll call me a weasley cunt and have done with it.

  So, there we are. I’m back in the dormitory taping together nine or ten coins. With a neatly filled-in order form they are slipped into an envelope which I stuff with a handkerchief to make an innocent package—after all, perhaps the postman may be an awful thief and if he felt the coins he might just steal them, and wouldn’t that be too dreadful …

  It was Julian Mather’s handkerchief that did the stuffing as it happens, the name tape lovingly stitched by a sister, a nanny or an au pair perhaps. Myself, to the great aggravation of my mother, I could never keep a handkerchief for longer than a week.

  “What do you do with them, darling? Eat them?”

  And I would repeat the eternal schoolboy lie.

  “Oh, everybody loses their handkerchiefs, Mummy.”

  Or perhaps I would blame the school laundry. “Nobody’s handkerchief comes back. Everyone knows that …”

  So, down the stairs I crept, on the hunt now for postage stamps.

  I knew that Cromie was umpiring a cricket match and that his study was likely to be unlocked.

  It was an intensely exciting pleasure to be illicitly alone in the headmaster’s study. On one occasion when I had been there before, rifling through his papers, I had come across a report on myself. It concerned my Eleven Plus results.

  We had taken the Eleven Plus at Stouts Hill without ever knowing what it was or what it meant. My form master, Major Dobson, had simply come in one day with a pile of papers and said, “You’re all getting rather lazy, so I’ve decided you can keep yourselves busy with these.”

  He had handed out some strangely printed papers and told us we had half an hour or fifty minutes or whatever it was to answer all the questions.

  We were never told that this was the notorious Eleven Plus, the national compulsory test that separated the children of the land into Grammar School children and Secondary Modern children, dummies and smart-arses, failures and achievers, smarmy gits and sad no hopers, greasy clever clogses and rejected thickies. A stupider and more divisive nonsense has rarely been imposed upon a democratic nation. Many lives were trashed, many hopes blighted, many prides permanently dented on account of this foolish, fanatical and irrational attempt at social engineering.

  Since all of us at prep school were bound for independent public schools who took no notice of such drivel anyway, the whole thing was considered by the Stouts Hill staff to be a massive irrelevance, a tedious and impertinent piece of bureaucracy to be got through with as little fuss as possible and certainly without the boys needing to be told anything about it.

  The examination itself took the form of one of those fatuous Eynsecky IQ tests, mostly to do with shape recognition and seeing what new word could be slipped between two existing words to make two phrases, that sort of hum-dudgeon …

  BLOW … LOT

  … for example, to which the answer would be “JOB,” as in “blow job” and “job lot”—though I’ve a feeling that may not have been one of the actual questions set for us on the day. I remember questions like:

  “HEAR is to LISTEN as SEE is to …?” or

  “Complete this numerical sequence: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11 …”

  And so on.

  So, foraging through the headmaster’s desk one afternoon I had happened upon a list which called itself Eleven Plus results, listing Intelligence Quotient results or some such guff. I noticed it because my name was at the top with an asterisk typed next to it and the words “Approaching genius” added in brackets. Cromie, the headmaster, had underlined it in his blue-black ink and scrawled, “Well that bloody explains everything …”

  It will seem boasting wherever I go with this, but I was not in the least pleased to learn that I had a high IQ. For a start I didn’t like the “approaching” part of the phrase “approaching genius” (if you’re going to be a freak, be a complete freak, no point at all in going at it half-cock) and secondly I wriggled in discomfort at the idea of being s
ingled out for something over which I felt I had no control. They might as well have exclaimed at my height or hair colour for all that I felt it had anything to do with me as a person.

  Years later as an adolescent, when I fell into the error of confusing my brain with my self, I actually went so tragically far as to send off for and complete the Mensa application test and proved to myself that I was more than “approaching” genius and felt extremely self-satisfied. It was only when I realised that the kind of intelligence that wants to get into Mensa, succeeds in getting into Mensa and then runs Mensa and the kind of intelligence that I thought worth possessing were so astronomically distant from each other that the icing fell off the cake with a great squelch. It is on occasions like this that I praise God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my Jewishness and the loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and the respectable that these seem to have inculcated in me. I could so easily, given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my string of DNA, have turned into one of those asocial right-wing libertarian freaks who think their ability to find anagrams and solve Rubik’s Cubes is a serious index of mental value. Having said which, I was determined to solve Rubik’s Cube myself and pride myself on my ability to do the Times crossword quickly. I square this rather vile vanity with myself by claiming that I do these things to show that it is possible to have a knack with such games and not be a graceless Freedom Association beardie or a nebbishy loon. Also, if I’m honest, I submit myself to these forms of mental masturbation from time to time to prove to myself that my brain hasn’t yet been rotted away by drugs and alcohol. My great Cambridge friend, Kim Harris, the friend to whom I dedicated my second novel, The Hippopotamus, is a superb chess player, attaining a Master level at a young age: he takes a wicked delight in drinking at the chess board and being wholly unlike the scurfy, bottle-end-spectacled schlemiels whom he faces over the board. I think we are both honest enough to admit that we are each in our own way guilty of snobbery of a quite dreadful kind.

  While on the subject of intelligence, I have to say that I have never found it an appealing quality in anyone and therefore have never expected anyone to find it appealing in me. It grieves me deeply that many people who think me intelligent or believe that I fancy myself intelligent or have read somewhere that some journalist has described me as such, expect me to judge others by intelligence. The number of times strangers have opened conversations with me in this manner …

  “Of course, I’m no brain box like you …”

  “I know I’m only stupid, but …”

  Or worse still, “Don’t you find it rather dull being surrounded by actors for so much of the time? I mean let’s face it, most of them are thick as two short planks.”

  I just don’t know where to begin with this kind of talk.

  Even if it were true that most actors are stupid, and it isn’t, the idea that I might project myself as the kind of person who looks for intelligence in others as an index of value sends the creepiest of shivers down my spine. I might use long words from time to time and talk rapidly or name-drop culturally here and there and display any number of other silly donnish affectations, but if this gives the impression that I might admire a similar manner or nature in others, then it makes me just want to go “bibbly-bobbly-bubbly-snibbly wib-wib floppit” for the rest of my life, read nothing but romance fiction, watch nothing but The Young and the Restless, do nothing but play snooker, take coke and get drunk and use no words longer than “wanker” and “cunt.”

  I don’t know many people who can do the Times crossword more quickly than me. There again I do know dozens and dozens of people vastly more intelligent than me for whom the simplest cryptic clue is a mystery—and one they are not in the least interested in penetrating.

  Also, it must be said, I don’t know many people as capable of my kinds of supreme dumbness.

  I’m the last person on earth to bear with equanimity that kind of homespun anti-intellectual who blathers on about nous, gumption, common sense and the University of Life—” you see, they’re all very well these Oxbridge-educated so-called intellectuals but have you ever seen them trying to boil a tyre or change an egg …?”—and all that pompous bum wash, but, awful as such attitudes are they are no worse than the eugenic snobbery of those who believe that the ability to see the word “carthorse” scrambled in the word “orchestra” or to name every American state in alphabetical order raises them above the level of the average twitcher, trainspotter or drippy word-game funster.

  The discovery of Cromie’s scrawled “Well that bloody explains everything …” next to my name determined me to investigate his study on every available occasion. I did not like the idea that things were being written about me without my knowing it.

  So, back to our main time line again. I’m in the study alone. This time I’m looking for stamps.

  Cromie had one of those elegant polished desks, with lots of knobs and sliders and fluted volutes and secret drawers—the kind of desk a sly fox like me loved to play with.

  I succeeded in pressing a wooden stud under the desk: a section flew back on a spring and what did I see?

  Sweets.

  Bags and bags of sweets.

  Confiscated sweets. Foam shrimps, fruit salads, blackjacks, flying saucers, red-liquorice bootlaces, every desirable item of Uley village shop bounty that could be imagined.

  In that lips-parted, heart-pounding, face-flushed state that can signify sexual ecstasy or the thrill of guilt and fear, I grabbed from each bag four, five, six or seven sweets, stuffing them into my pockets, unable to believe that such good fortune could have come my way. You set out to steal a few postage stamps and there before you is a drawer filled with all the treasure you have ever dreamed of.

  Granddaddy was watching, that I knew. It was the one great worm in every delicious apple I ever stole. My mother’s father had only recently died and he had become my figura rerum, my familiar. I knew whenever I stalked about my bedroom naked, sitting on mirrors, sticking a finger up my bum or doing any of those other mad, guilty childish things that constitute infantile sexual play to the psychologist, that Granddaddy Was Watching. Whenever I did truly bad things too, like stealing, lying and cheating, Granddaddy Was Watching then. I had learned to ignore him, of course, and the disappointed look in his eyes as he turned away in disgust. He expected so much better of his grandson than this. But then I had learned to ignore the sad, sweet expectations of the soft-eyed Jesus who also watched me whenever I was bad. At that time I never thought of myself as Jewish, which is perhaps as well, or those two Jews, one recently dead, the other fluttering like a dove over the altar every morning at chapel, might have driven me to a wilder state of madness and self-loathing than I was already in.

  Just as I crammed a few final penny chews into my last spare pocket I heard, not too far distant, the creak of a footstep upon a wooden plank.

  I pushed the secret drawer shut and peered through the study door.

  I could see no one there, just the deserted hallway and the birdcages. Perhaps the mynah bird had been practising new sounds.

  I edged myself out of the study, closed the door quietly and turned, just in time to see Mr. Dealey, the school butler, emerge from the dining room, bearing silver candlesticks and a vast epergne.

  “Ah, now then, Master Fry,” he said in his Jack-Warner-I’ve-been-about-the-world-a-bit-and-have-got-your-number kind of a way.

  I was sure that he had no idea that I had been inside the study. Surely he had seen me at the door and thought I was waiting outside?

  “You won’t find the headmaster inside on a fine afternoon like this, young Fry,” he said, confirming the thought. “You shouldn’t be inside yourself. Young lad. Sunny day. It’s not healthy.”

  I started to pant a little, and pointed to my chest. “Off games,” I said with a brave, shoulder-heaving wheeze.

  “Ho,” said Dealey. “Then perhaps you should come with me and learn how to polish silver.”
>
  “No fear!” I said and scuttled away.

  Close calls of that nature always charged me up into a state of mania. My passion at the time for the prison-of-war genre in books and films derived, I suppose, from an identification with the POWs and the edge of discovery and detection on which they permanently lived … replacing the stove over the tunnel’s hiding place just before the entrance of the commandant, popping their heads down seconds before the searchlight revealed them. Books like The Wooden Horse and Reach for the Sky were full of these moments and I consumed them with a passionate fever.

  This time, I was away and free, a whole pocketful of sweets to the good, not a Jerry in sight and the Swiss border only a few miles hence.

  I slipped out into the garden and made my way towards the lake. The boathouse there was a good place to sit and eat sweets.

  On the way however, I encountered Donaldson, who was also off games and he had a new game to show me.

  An electric fence had just been erected around a section of one of the fields. This area was to be turned into a fourth eleven cricket pitch or something similar, and the fence was needed to stop the ponies from going near. An announcement had been made about it and how we were not to touch it.

  “But how about this,” said Donaldson, taking me towards the fence.

  I followed him in some trepidation. He was no particular friend of mine, Donaldson. He was big and beefy, only off games because he was injured, not because he was cowardly or a weed. He had never bullied me, nor ever tried to, but I feared some practical joke which would end with me being pushed against the electric fence and being given an electric shock. Growing up in a house with Victorian wiring, I had got to know enough about electric shocks to dread their sullen thumping kicks.

  Donaldson stood by the fence, motioned me to be quiet and then suddenly leaned out and grabbed the wire with one hand before letting go of it again just as suddenly. His body hadn’t jolted or jumped at all.