by Stephen Fry
Drama was taken care of at Norcat by a talented enthusiast called Robert Pols. He cast me as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Creon in a double bill of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. Somewhere inside of me, I was still certain that I was going to be an actor. My mother used to explain to me that really I wanted to be a barrister, which, as she pointed out, is much the same thing and I had played along with this idea. In my heart of hearts however, and in hers too I suspect, it was acting that mattered. My writing I considered infinitely more important, but so private as to be impossible to show or publish. I thought that acting was simple showing off and that writing was a private basin in which one could wash one’s sins away.
It is strange that although I spent two whole academic years at Norcat my memories of it are so much more vague than my memories of Uppingham at which I spent only a month or so longer.
By that second year at King’s Lynn I reached a terrible low. I was seventeen now, no longer anything like the youngest in my class, no longer the fast stream clever boy, no longer the complex but amusing rogue, no longer the sly yet fascinating villain, no longer in some people’s eyes excusable through adolescence. Seventeen is as good as grown up.
Everything and everyone I cared about was growing away from me. Jo Wood was bound for Cambridge, Matthew would be trying for there the following year. Richard Fawcett was going up to St. Andrews, my brother was going to an officer’s training course in the Army. I was a failure and I knew it.
Some argument with my father in the holidays between the fifth and sixth and final terms at Norcat resulted in an attempt at suicide. I cannot recall the reason for the argument, but I determined absolutely that it was the end of everything. I had nothing to get up for in the morning, nothing at all. Besides, what pleasure, what exquisite, shivering delight, to picture my father’s devastation when my body was discovered and he and everyone would know that it was his fault.
I took a huge selection of pills, principally Paracetamol but also Intal. Intal was an encapsulated powder that was supposed to be “spinhaled” into the lungs to help prevent asthma. I reckoned the devastating admixture of those two, with a little aspirin and codeine thrown in, would do the job. I can’t remember if I wrote a note or not, knowing me I must have done, a note filled with hatred and blame and self-righteous misery.
If ever I have been a total prick, a loveless, unlovable prick in my life, this was the time. I was horrid to look upon, to listen to, to know. I didn’t wash, I didn’t take interest in others, I was argumentative with the two people who were most unconditionally prepared to show me their love—my mother and my sister—crushing their every enthusiasm with cynicism, arrogance and pride; I was rude and insulting to my brother, to everyone around me. I was the cunt of the world, filled with self-loathing and world-loathing.
I missed Matthew, I wanted him and I knew he had gone. He had literally gone, that was the Pelion on Ossa, madness on madness that tipped me over the edge. My Matthew had disappeared, Matteo was no more.
I saw a photograph of him in a school magazine in Roger’s bedroom. Matthew’s face in a cricket photograph, a hockey photograph and a photograph taken from the school play. Three pieces of evidence to prove irrefutably that he had gone. The features had coarsened, he had grown in height and build and stockiness. He was now descending from the peak which, while I had known him, he had always still miraculously been making towards. Maybe that late afternoon in the field outside the Middle, in his cricket whites, rolling and panting and fiercely jerking with me. Maybe that had been the summit. For us both.
Now the only Matthew who really existed, existed in my mind. Which left me nothing, nothing but a burst wound of bitterness, disappointment and hatred and a deep, deep sickness with myself and the world.
Any argument on any subject with my father, therefore, could have caused me to make this geste fou. Anything from a refusal on my part to pump up the water when it was my turn, to a solemn talk about “attitude.”
Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.
“If they only knew!” I screamed inside. “If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!”
I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody’s mother believes in them. No one else believed in me.
Principally of course—oh how one sees that now—myself. Principally, I did not believe in me. I believed in ghosts more than I believed in me, and take my word for it, I never believed in ghosts, I’m far too spiritual and emotional and passionate to believe in the supernatural.
I did have a friend. One friend. He was the local rector: he looked, oddly enough, exactly like Karras in The Exorcist, but his own life was so emotionally difficult and his own struggles with faith, family and identity so intense that it was, in his case, a question of Physician, heal thyself. He did me good by asking me to teach his daughters maths, which was psychologically smart and very touching. He knew maths had come hard for me and he knew too that there was a teacher in me raging to get out. He nearly tipped me (certainly not by trying to, he was no evangelist) into religion and I had made a quiet visit to the bishop of Lynn, God’s representative in Norfolk of a mysterious body called ACM, the church’s vocational testing instrument, which accepted or declined applicants for ordination. We talked awhile, this bishop, Aubrey Aitken, and I and he had given it as his booming opinion that I should wait awhile until God’s Grace became clearer to me. He boomed because he had no larynx and spoke by means of one of those boxes that Jack Hawkins was forced to use towards the end of his life. The ceremony of “switching the bishop on” when Aitken came to preach was an accepted addition to local services within the diocese.
The bishop was right of course, I had no vocation at all, merely the kind of vanity of a Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, the vanity that made me think I would make a better preacher, a more stylish preacher than the kind of soggy, incoherent priest that was beginning to proliferate all over England. I knew I couldn’t believe in God because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook. That is the grand way of putting it, I was also absolutely convinced, if I want to put it more petulantly, that if there was a God his caprice, malice, arbitrariness and sheer lack of taste made him repulsive to me. There was a time when he had on his team people like Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Laud, Donne, Herbert, Swift and Wren: now he had awful, drippy wet smacks with no style, no wit, no articulacy and no majesty. There was as much glory in the average Anglican priest as you would find in a British Home Stores cardigan. Of course what I didn’t know was that—looked at in the right way—there is as much glory in a British Homes Stores cardigan as can be found in St. Peter’s, Rome, the Grand Canyon and the whole galaxy itself, but that is because I looked at nothing in the right way. When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in the past.
Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of paper.
My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me.
If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrot
e it fifty times. And believed it too. In a phrase from Dirty Harry, I had been flopped lower than whale shit. I was at the bottom with no way up. If Ronnie Rutter saw me now, what would he think? His school reports had been generous, but there had been a kernel of truth in that word, whatever my woes at Uppingham, that word he used, “exuberant.” Exuberance now was something gone from me forever, something I could never recapture.
Which brings us back to the heap of pills and capsules and the glass of water. With one last vile and violent curse against the world, the world that had turned back into a rotting mole, an uncaring cycle of meaningless, wearisome repetition and decay, I swallowed them all, turned out the light and fell asleep.
I awoke in a flickering strip-lit world of whiteness and to a grotesque pain in my throat and cheeks. A tube was being forced down me, while a nurse slapped my cheeks and repeated and repeated and repeated:
“Stephen! Stephen! Come on, Stephen! Come on. Stephen, Stephen! Stephen! Stephen! Come on now. Try! Come on. Come on. Stephen!”
It seems that at about midnight my brother had been awoken by the noise of my vomiting. When he entered the room he saw me arc a huge spray that he swears reached the ceiling. The ceding in my bedroom was very high. I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.
It seems that the very mixture that I had thought would truly put an end to me was what saved me. I have given up puzzling over whether I subconsciously knew that or not. I am just grateful to the luck, the subliminal judgement (if there was any), the care of the gods, the sharp ears of my dear brother and the skill and ceaseless implacability of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital nurses and doctors.
Little was said about it all at home. There was little to say. One of the men who worked for my father, who had worked for him since Chesham days, stopped me two days later and gave me the most vicious ticking off I had ever been given in my life. He was a frighteningly strong man called Tyler, who looked like a weather-beaten Malayan planter and whom I suspected of extreme right-wing politics (probably on account of his Mosley moustache): whether he thought he was doing psychologically the right thing or not I have no idea. The burden of his tirade was the worry that I caused my poor mother and my poor father. Had I any idea?
“Did I make them unhappy?” I asked.
“Of course you did, you young bastard,” he snapped.
“Unhappy enough to end their own lives?”
“No,” he called after me as I fled, “because they’ve got more guts.”
I think my father may have guessed that love was at the root of this, for I remember him coming up to my room (for almost the first time in his life) and telling me some complicated story about how he had consulted a tarot reader who had said that I was unhappy in love. I believe this was his way of indirectly indicating that he was ready to listen to anything I had to say. I had nothing to say of course. Maybe I’ve made this memory up. Tarot and my father don’t seem to go together.
I can’t think what all the stampings and yellings and sobbings must have done for my poor sister Jo. We don’t talk often about this time, except with rueful smiles and raised eyebrows. How grateful my parents must have been when it was time for me to go back to Lynn for my last term, my A-level term. Grateful that I was out of the way, for all that they knew it was a pointless exercise, my returning. They knew, they knew that I was all played out.
Between the three-card brag at the Woolpack, life and more pinball in the Students’ Union, the Paradox Parties, Kathleen and my own misery, I had given up any pretence of academic work. Towards the end of my second year it had become apparent to me and to everyone else that I would fail everything. I cannot recall my mental state, by “recall” I mean just that, I cannot summon it up into me, the way I can so exactly feel again the earlier emotions that led up to the pitiful suicide attempt. I have memories of Kathleen and the Corvo set, I have memories of Phil and Dale and cards, I have memories of organising films to show for the Film Society. I have memories of trying to dance to Slade and Elton John at Union discos. I remember the unknown band Judas Priest coming to give a concert. I remember the little acting I did.
The greatest educational stimulation at this time, oddly, seemed to come from History of Art. I became obsessed in particular with architecture, the Greek orders, the Gothic orders, Michelangelo, and then the English House, the Gothic revival and the Victorians. My bible was Bannister Fletcher and my God was Inigo Jones. I am ashamed to say I cannot even remember what texts were set for English or for French. Hold up … for French it was Anouilh’s Antigone again. That’s it, I fear, that’s the sum of my memories of King’s Lynn in my second year there.
I sat the A levels—most of them, ducking out of the final papers of French and English. Fear of failure again:
“Of course I failed! I didn’t even bloody turn up!”
And then, in the phoney period of awaiting results that we all knew would be disastrous, the stealing began again in greater earnest. My mother had been used to the raids on her handbag, God knows how she could bring herself to look at me sometimes, and I felt sick myself then, not as sick as I feel now, but sick all the same.
I was still stuck at home, knowing that by the end of August, my eighteenth birthday, I would be without A levels, without friends, without purpose, without anything but the prospect of a winding down into permanent failure and lost opportunity. I had started, in King’s Lynn, occasionally visiting the public lavatories, cottages as they are known in the gay world, and I saw a future for myself, at best, as an assistant librarian in a mouldy town somewhere, occasionally getting a blow job in a public bog. Arrested once or twice every four or five years and ending up with my head in an oven. Not so uncommon a fate in those days, or today. Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.
I remember an episode of Star Trek that ends with Jim turning to McCoy and saying, “Out there, Bones, someone is saying the three most beautiful words in the galaxy.” I fully expected the nauseous obviousness of “I love you.” But Kirk turned to the screen, gazed at the stars and whispered:
“Please, help me.”
Strange, the potency of cheap television.
I had no concept of such a thing as seeking help. I had successfully signed up on the dole, to the distressed resignation of my parents, and I headed, that July, with my Giro cheque to King’s Lynn, for one last Paradox Party, which would be followed by my meeting up with Jo Wood for a camping holiday in Devon.
When I next returned to Booton, it would be as a convicted felon.
2
One of the most shameful of many shameful acts that were to follow was the theft of pension money from the handbag of the grandmother of the young man who was hosting the Paradox Party. There are few crimes lower and nothing I write in this paragraph will mitigate, deaden or palliate the pain and fury it must have caused that family.
I caught a train to Devon, arranged some humiliating business to do with Giro cheque forwarding by telephone with my mother and wandered with Jo Wood around Chagford and other beauty spots until it was time for Jo to go home to Sutton Coldfield.
I accompanied him there. The next two months were to see me moving around the country searching for some element of my past that might give me a clue as to my future.
That is a very strange way to describe what happened.
A very strange way to describe it indeed.
But it is true, for over the next two months I found myself making my way towards Chesham, desperate to see a town again that I barely remembered, a town that I had not seen since I was seven years old, but which p
ulled me like a magnet. I went to Yorkshire and stayed with Richard Fawcett’s family. I went to Uley and saw Sister Pinder and the Angus girls and Cloud the pony, still alive, her grey milky belly now all but brushing the ground. I made my way to the Reading rock festival because I had heard a rumour that Matthew might be there. I knew Matthew wasn’t the same Matthew, the real Matthew, but I wanted to search for the traces and I wanted perhaps at last to tell him, to let it all go.
A less strange way to describe what happened is to report that I went about Britain stealing, stealing, stealing and stealing until the police caught up with me.
Jo’s place was in Sutton Coldfield where he lived with his mother, sister and two brothers. I stole some money from the hosts of a drinks party I had been invited along to and headed to Sheffield, where I stayed a while with Richard Fawcett and his parents. They were kind to me: Richard and I chatted and caught up with each other, but my feet were itching, the desire to return had gripped me, I wanted to go right back, right back to the beginning. I don’t believe that I stole from the Fawcetts, but maybe I did.
My next destination was Chesham and the Brookes and Popplewells. Amanda Brooke, Florence Nightingale yellow lambswool V-neck and straight brunette cut, had been my girlfriend when we were five and six. The Popplewells were a family of four boys, all of whom were horrifyingly good at cricket and everything else. At Christmas the Popplewells traditionally sent, instead of cards, general letters that delineated their sons’ enviable records of shining academic and athletic distinction—“Alexander has won a scholarship to Charterhouse, Andrew achieved Grade 7 in the viola, Nigel had a successful trial for Hampshire Seconds, Eddie-Jim’s prep-school composition ‘What I Did in the Holidays’ has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize …” that kind of thing. Our family, in moments of rare collective humour, would wryly compose the equivalents that the Fry family might send: “Stephen has been expelled from his third school and continues to lie and steal. Jo has defiantly smeared mascara all over her ten-year-old eyelashes and looks a mess, Roger’s CO describes him as too considerate and pleasant to make a successful career officer. The house temperature has now plummeted below anything an Eskimo would tolerate.” We knew that the Popplewell Christmas Letter was never designed to crow or gloat, but its effect on us was none the less that of lemon on a paper cut.
