The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  ‘Darling! Don’t be horrid.’

  ‘And I’ll only come and visit you to give you work to do. Shirts to iron and socks to darn.’

  ‘Ade, that’s an awful thing to say!’

  ‘And only then will you know what it’s like to be unloved by your own flesh and blood!’ said Adrian, drying his hands. ‘And don’t giggle woman, because it isn’t funny!’

  ‘No darling, of course it isn’t,’ his mother said with her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Oh I give up,’ he had said and put a tea-towel on her head. ‘I bloody give up.’

  Human spirit, or lack of it, is such that, foul as the work was, Adrian found himself so lulled by the routine that sometimes the hours would pass like minutes. He tried hard to concentrate on composing in his head his contribution for the magazine. But he was always being distracted by other thoughts. He found himself playing a drama in which he cast himself as God and the potatoes as humans. This one he hurled into outer darkness, that one he sent to be garnered home.

  ‘Well done, thou good and faithful spud, you may go to your reward.’

  ‘Sinner! Corrupted one. I pluck thee out, I pluck thee out. Look, with a spot I damn thee.’

  He wasn’t sure if it was better to be a rotten potato or a healthy one, whether he would rather be safely bunched up in a warm bag with the goody-goodies or be thrown over the side and ploughed back into the soil. One thing was certain, either of those fates was preferable to being God.

  The green potatoes were especially interesting. Donald Sutcliffe, the farmer, had explained them to him one lunchtime.

  ‘Spuds have to grow underground, see. If they poke up through the soil and catch the rays of the sun you’ll get photosynthesis and that gives you chlorophyll which’ll turn them green. A green potato is a relative of Woody Nightshade. Not as poisonous, but he won’t do you any good.’

  This immediately made Adrian think that he was a green potato and Cartwright was the sun.

  I have been kissed by the light and transformed, he thought. I am dangerous and God has rejected me.

  He was always doing that these days. Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window-pane. Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or a philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood on the sea-shore, didn’t see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn’t hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sigh of humanity fizzing into nothingness. But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker.

  On the last working day before Easter, Maundy Thursday, the four of them had been loading bags onto the trailer in thickening twilight when Adrian caught sight of a gathering of huge birds, as black as priests, pecking at rotten potatoes at the further end of the field.

  ‘Look at the size of those crows!’ he had cried.

  ‘Boy,’ said Mr Sutcliffe, tugging at a sack, ‘when you see a load of crows together, them’s rooks. And when you see a rook on its own, that’s a fucking crow.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Adrian. ‘Right. But supposing a rook gets lost or wanders off by itself. What would you call that?’

  Mr Sutcliffe roared with laughter.

  ‘Well I don’t know about you, lad, but I’d call it a crook!’

  II

  ‘A SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL’

  or

  ‘The Education of an English Gentleman’

  by

  Woody Nightshade

  The Daisy Chain Club is exclusive. Exclusive because you can only join if you sleep in a junior dormitory, one without cubicles. It isn’t hard to become a member. Membership is enforced. If one person refuses, the club cannot meet.

  The rules are simply learnt. After lights out you stretch out your right hand until it finds your neighbour’s membrum virile. The same is being done to you by the boy on your left. At a given signal from the President of the club (always the Prefect whose duty it is to have to sleep in a junior dormitory), it’s all hands to the pumps and last one home’s on the bathroom-cleaning roster for a week.

  It’s a calm, civilised and amiable club, The Daisy Chain. There are ones like it in every house in the school and in every public school in the land. An acquaintance from Ampleforth tells me of the Hot Cupboard Society, another from Rugby of the Milk-Shake Club, whose name speaks for itself. A Wykhamist friend told me of a pursuit at Winchester called the Biscuit Game. The players stand around in a circle tossing off onto a Wholemeal Digestive. The last one to spit his stuff on the biscuit eats it. A new kind of cream filling well in advance of anything McVitie’s have got round to thinking of. Packed with potassium and vitamins, too.

  From time to time news of these little entertainments leaks out. A careless word from Bletchley-Titherton to his older sister, a letter home from a young Savonarola and the whistle is blown. There follow tears, recriminations and hasty expulsions.

  This is strange. Let’s face it boys, most of our fathers went, if not to this school, at least to others like it. Most of the staff too. Milk-Shake Clubs and their like are as old as the chapel steps.

  But this is England, where the only crime is to be Found Out.

  ‘My dear old fellow, we all know what goes on but it really doesn’t do to shout about it. Upsets the apple-cart, muddies the water, what?’

  I can’t help thinking of the House of Commons. Six hundred or so men, most of them public school. They pronounce daily on the moral evils of the world, but just think my dears, just think of the things they have done and continue to do to their bodies and the bodies of others.

  We are being groomed for power. In twenty years’ time we will see fellow members of The Daisy Chain Club on television talking about oil prices, giving the Church’s viewpoint on the IRA, presenting Blue Peter, closing down factories, handing down severe sentences from the bench.

  Or will we?

  The world is changing. We grow our hair long, we take drugs. How many people reading this have not smoked cannabis on school premises? We are not very interested in power, we are very interested in putting the world right.

  Now that is really intolerable. No my-dear-old-fellowing for that kind of crime.

  The Daisy Chain Club may provoke tears, recriminations, hasty expulsions and even hastier cover-ups and laughings-off. But long hair, pot and real rebellion, they provoke anger, hatred and madness. When young people shag each other off in the dorms they are engaging in a charming old custom, a time-honoured ritual: the only reason that there are expulsions is that the tradition is hard to explain to tearful mothers and snide newspapers. But when boys say that they would rather be drummers than barristers, gardeners than businessmen, poets than soldiers, that they don’t think much of examinations and authority and marriage, that when they are of age they intend to remake the world to fit them, not remake themselves to fit the world, then there is Trouble.

  Someone once said that Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and Communism is the exact reverse. I expect most of us agree with that. I don’t know any schoolboy Communists, but I do know hundreds of schoolboy revolutionaries.

  In the 60s the ideal was to overthrow by force. I don’t know if you’ve seen the film ‘If …’ I doubt it, every year the cinema club tries to show it and every year Headman forbids it. The film ends with a band of schoolboys turning into guerillas and assassinating parents and staff. People said that although it was set in a school it was supposed to be a metaphor for real life. Well I don’t know about you, but for me school is real life. And probably will be for years. I have no interest in shooting any of the masters dead of course (well, no more than two or three, tops), but I have a lot of interest in challenging their authority. Not wresting it from them, necessarily, but challenging it. Asking where it comes from, how it is earned. If we are told that it is earnt on the basis of age and strength alone, then we know what kind of wo
rld we are living in and I hope we will know what to do about it. We are always being asked to show respect. Well, we can show respect with the best of them, what we find it hard to do is to feel respect.

  Our generation, the 70s Generation, is calling for a social revolution, not a pol –

  ‘Adrian!’

  ‘Oh, bollocks!’

  ‘We’re ready to go now, darling.’

  ‘Go? Go where?’ shouted Adrian.

  ‘To church, of course.’

  ‘But you said I didn’t have to!’

  ‘What?’

  Adrian came out of his room and looked down into the hall. His mother and father were standing by the door swathed in their dominical best.

  ‘I’m in the middle of my school project. You said I didn’t have to go to church.’

  His father snorted.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of course you do.’

  ‘But I was working …’

  ‘You’ll put on a tie and come down now!’

  III

  ‘You’re a fucking maniac,’ said Tom.

  ‘You’re a fucking maniac,’ said Adrian.

  ‘We’re all fucking maniacs,’ said Bullock.

  They were in Bullock and Sampson’s study leafing through copies of Bollocks!

  The trunk they sat on felt to them like a powder keg. It contained seven hundred copies ready for distribution.

  ‘Come on kids,’ Bullock had said when Adrian had suggested the title at the end of the previous term, ‘BUM is much better. Bullock’s Underground Magazine. Bollocks is my nickname for God’s sake. Everyone will know I had something to do with it.’

  ‘That’s the whole idea, my little love-noodle,’ Adrian had replied. ‘No one is going to believe that Brainy Bollocks himself would be so stupid as to name a subversive underground magazine after himself.’

  So Bollocks! it was. There was no artwork because only Sampson and Tom had much skill at drawing and their styles were too readily identifiable.

  The magazine they now looked through was a simple fifteen pages of gestetnered typescript on green paper. No handwriting, no illustrations or distinguishing characteristics of any kind. It could have been done by any person or persons in any House in the school. Bullock had had no trouble typing and reproducing the stencils in total secrecy at home.

  After many crossings-out and changes of direction, Adrian’s piece had been sent off to Bullock’s address in Highgate the Tuesday after Easter: reading it back now he found it rather tame and half-hearted next to the libretto of a rock opera on school life that Bullock had contributed and Tom’s frankly hairy analysis of the heroin counter-culture in The Naked Lunch. Sampson’s allegory of red and grey squirrels was simply incomprehensible.

  ‘Now,’ said Tom, ‘we face the problemette of distribution.’

  ‘More of a problemola than a problemette,’ said Bullock.

  ‘A problerama, even,’ said Sampson.

  ‘I’d go so far as to call it a problemellaroni,’ said Bullock.

  ‘It’s a real cunt,’ said Tom, ‘no question.’

  ‘I don’t know though,’ said Adrian, ‘we’ve all been on cube calls, haven’t we? We should know how to break into the Houses.’

  ‘I’ve never been on one actually,’ said Sampson.

  ‘Well, I’ve been on plenty,’ said Adrian. ‘In fact, I believe I hold the House record.’

  Discipline is a sensitive subject in public schools; the flogging of offenders, the toasting of small boys in front of fires, the forcing of uncomfortable objects up their bottoms, the hanging of them upside down by their ankles, all these cruel and unusual forms of punishment had died out at Adrian’s school by the time he arrived. Headman sometimes flicked a cane, masters gave lines, detentions or remissions of privilege and prefects gave cube calls, but imaginative violence and cunning torture were things of the past. It had been three years since a boy had been emptied upside down in a lavatory or had his dick slammed in a desk. With this kind of leniency and liberalism in sentencing in our premier educational establishments, many thought that it was no wonder the country was going to the dogs.

  When the cube call, whose violence was bureaucratic rather than physical, had been invented, no one could say. A single cube call was a small slip of paper given by a prefect to an offender. It contained the name of another prefect, always from another House. A double cube call contained two names of two different prefects, again from two different Houses. Adrian was the only boy in living memory who had been given a sextuple cube call.

  The recipient of the call had to get up early, change into games clothes, run to the House of the first prefect on the list, enter the prefect’s cubicle, wake him up and get him to sign next to his name. Then on to the next prefect on the list, who was usually in a House right at the other end of the town. When all the signatures had been collected, it was back to his own House and into uniform in time for breakfast at ten to eight. So that offenders couldn’t cheat by going round in the most convenient geographical order, or by getting up before seven o’clock, the official start time, the prefects on the list had to put down the exact time at which they were woken up next to their signatures.

  Adrian detested cube calls, though a psychologist might have tried to persuade him otherwise, considering how far out of his way to collect them he seemed to go. He thought it an illogical form of punishment, as irritating for the prefects who were shaken from their slumbers as for the offenders.

  The system was open to massive abuse. Prefects could settle scores with colleagues they disliked by sending them cube callers every day for a week. Tit-for-tat cube call wars between prefects could go on like this for whole terms. In Adrian’s House, Sargent had once had a feud with a prefect in Dashwood House called Purdy. On every day of one horrendous week Adrian had collected single cube calls from Sargent for absurd minor offences: whistling in his study during prep; having his hands in his pockets while watching a match; failing to cap a retired schoolmaster who had been walking down the High Street and whom Adrian had never even had pointed out to him before as a cappable entity. On each of Sargent’s cube calls that particular week Purdy’s had been the name listed. On the fifth day Adrian had sidled apologetically into Purdy’s cube to find it empty.

  ‘The bird had flown, my old love,’ he had tried to explain to Sargent when returning his unsigned chit. ‘But I did abstract Purdy’s sponge-bag from his bedside, just to prove that I was in his cube.’

  That afternoon Sargent and Purdy had fought each other on the Upper. After that Adrian was left alone.

  Of course prefects could do each other favours as well.

  ‘Oh Hancock, there’s a not-half scrummy scrum-half in your Colts Fifteen, what’s his name?’

  ‘What, Yelland you mean?’

  ‘That’s the one. Rather fabulous. You … er … couldn’t find your way clear to sending him over one morning, could you? As a little cubie?’

  ‘Oh all right. If you’ll send me Finlay.’

  ‘Done.’

  Adrian as a new boy had been startled to find, on his first ever cube call, that the prefect whose signature he needed slept naked with only one sheet to cover him and was extremely hard to wake up.

  ‘Excuse me, Hollis, Hollis!’ he had squeaked desperately in his ear.

  But Hollis had just groaned in his sleep, rolled an arm over him and pulled him into his bed.

  The only really enjoyable part of the cube call for Adrian was the burglary. Officially all the Houses were locked until seven, which was supposed to make it pointless to set off early on a cube call and take the thing at a leisurely pace. But there were larder, kitchen and changing-room windows that could be prised open and latches that could yield to a flexible sheet of mica. Once inside all you had to do was creep up to the dorm, tiptoe into the target prefect’s cube, adjust his alarm clock and wake him. That way you could start the call at half past five or six and save yourself all the flap and hurry of trying to complete it in forty mi
nutes.

  ‘Yup,’ Adrian told Bullock. ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. I reckon I know a way into every House.’

  *

  Two days later the whole school awoke to Bollocks!

  From three in the morning until half past six, Tom, Adrian, Bullock and Sampson, working from maps and instructions drawn up by Adrian, had invaded the Houses and left copies in studies, common rooms, libraries and in piles at the foot of staircases. They had seen no one and been seen by no one. They had come down to breakfast in their House as apparently amazed and excited by the appearance of the magazine as everyone else.

  In school, before morning chapel, they joined the knots of people under the noticeboards in the colonnade, twittering about its contents and trying to guess who the authors were.

  He had been wrong to worry that the sophistication of the others’ contributions would outshine his. His brand of salacious populism was far more interesting to the school than the recondite pedantry of Bullock and Sampson, and much less aggressive than Tom’s style of Open Field Beat. The most feverish speculation of the day centred around the identity of Woody Nightshade. Everywhere Adrian went he heard snatches of his article being quoted.

  ‘Hey there, Marchant. Fancy a quick round of the Biscuit Game?’

  ‘They can chop off your hair, my children, but they can’t chop off your spirit. We are winning and they know it.’

  ‘A school isn’t an ante-room for real life, it is real life.’

  ‘Passive resistance!’

  ‘Let’s set our own syllabus. Fail their exams, pass our own.’

  The school had never known anything like this. At the eleven o’clock break on the morning of its appearance there was no other topic of conversation in the Butteries.

  ‘Go on, admit it, Healey,’ Heydon-Bayley said to Adrian, his mouth full of cream-slice, ‘it was you wasn’t it? That’s what everyone’s saying.’

  ‘That’s odd, someone told me it was you,’ said Adrian.