by John Cleese
Worst of all was scripture. Scripture actually frightened me. To start with, it had all the random pointlessness of history. OK, there was a man called Ahab who, the Bible says, ‘walked delicately’, and someone called John who ‘rode furiously’, and probably someone called Ezekiel who ‘drew badly’. But . . . this was thousands of years ago! Why was I expected to memorise this stuff? True, there was a vague assumption that doing so would bring me closer to God, but then who was God when he was at home? And why did he keep losing it with his chosen people, when he could easily have changed his mind, and picked a more co-operative bunch?
Nothing was ever explained properly. Just as it was always taken for granted that you knew why it was important to study Latin, or to churn out papier mâché puppets, or to know where flax was grown, so my teachers also unanimously assumed that I knew how Catholics differed from Protestants, or that I understood what ‘eternal life’ was, as though I had seen it on a shelf in the grocery shops. But the reason that scripture alarmed me the most was that it was clearly supposed to be important, because it was read out by the headmaster at prayers every single morning. Yet I could not grasp what any of it was about, despite the fact that it appeared to be in English. If he’d read it out in Flemish I would have relaxed, knowing it was not supposed to be comprehensible to me, but obviously I was expected to take it in: ‘Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.’ Come again? ‘Blessed are the meek.’ Oh, yeah? Well, it doesn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ox.’ Are you joking? Any of this could have been interesting if the teacher had chatted about it with us, and in terms of our experiences. So why didn’t they?
The neurologist and psychiatrist Maurice Nicoll told how he had once asked his headmaster about a passage in the Bible, and after he had listened to the answer for some time, he realised that the man had no idea what he was talking about. What I admire about Nicoll is that he made this discovery when he was only ten. It took me another forty-five years before the penny dropped: very, very few people have any idea what they are talking about. Imagine if just one of St Peter’s schoolmasters had told me in 1949, ‘You must always remember that ninety per cent of what you’re told is purest bullshit.’ Imagine what an intellectual kick-start that would have been!
When I went for my regular Sunday evening walk with Dad, during which I would carefully discuss all my worries about the approaching week and he would reassure me and give me the courage to go over the top on Monday morning, a lot of my anxiety was about trying to understand just what the hell was going on, and what it meant.
However, the single most surprising (and indeed disorientating) event in my early St Peter’s life took place one afternoon, during ‘Rest’ when we all sat at our own desks, reading Biggles and Billy Bunter and digesting lunch. I glanced up from my book, and there, about fifteen feet to my right, was one of my classmates. He had stopped reading, and was carefully stroking something in his lap. I was curious. What was it that he had there, that he was caressing with such loving kindness? You, gentle reader, are some three lines ahead of the nine-year-old Cleese, who was tossing out hypothesis after hypothesis in his search for understanding. Finally, it was granted. Rather like those early Pacific islanders, who were unable to see a big boat that had arrived on their shores, because it was entirely beyond their experience that such a large boat could exist, I took a very long time to drink in the reality of what I was definitely observing. But then the scales fell from my eyes, and I consciously acknowledged that this classmate of mine was attending to his penis. In my own defence, I have to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that the calm, unruffled ease with which he did so, rather as though he was unhurriedly sharpening a favourite pencil, put me off the scent: it was not possible that a private part could be publicised in this matter-of-fact, quotidian manner. There must be some other explanation. As I sat there, frantically grasping for an alternative interpretation, a boy from my left, keeping low as he ran (so as not to be spotted by the master-on-duty, himself reading at the far end of the room) passed in front of me, over to the penis-boy, and crouched down beside him to obtain a ringside view of the proceedings. I could not have been more astonished at what I was spectating if the two of them had quietly levitated, morphed into pterodactyls and flown out of the window.
From this moment my mind remains a blank. My next memory is sitting at home, telling all to Dad. Next day, he had a chat with the headmaster, Mr Tolson; the following day I was allowed to stay home, while the headmaster addressed the entire school on the subject of private parts. It was typically decent of Mr Tolson to see that had I been there to hear his address, my facial colour would have identified the Fifth Columnist in the school’s midst. (And I should explain that what I had beheld was not, for me, what adults would think of as sexual; it was simply that my understanding was that a penis was intended to be kept private.)
But in other areas I was becoming less diffident – or, in St Peter’s parlance, less ‘wet’. Indeed, on one occasion, I actually got into a fight with a boy who was teasing me. There I was, lying on the floor, grappling with him, like a proper schoolboy; I even banged his head on the floor, at which point I thought, ‘Oh my God! If I start losing, he’ll do this to me,’ and then, of course, started losing. Fortunately my form master, Mr Howdle, arrived and broke the fight up. Funnily enough, it was about then that the bullying stopped. This first fight also proved to be my last. I had thought so, anyway, until I read in the Sunday Times recently that I had a fight with Terry Gilliam in the 80s. I think this unlikely: owing to the relatively rare occurrence of fisticuffs in the Cleese life it must be statistically probable that I would remember such uncommon events; they would tend to stand out sharply from the rather less pugilistic tone of the rest of my life. And I definitely don’t recall having a fight with Terry Gilliam. May I also point out that if I had, I would almost certainly have killed him. I think the only possible explanation for the Sunday Times article – if it is true – was that Terry attacked me, but that I failed to notice he was doing so. Terry is very short, due to his bandy legs, so when he scuttles around, he stays so close to the floor that it can be difficult to see what he is up to down there.
But I digress . . .
Another reason for my decline in diffidence was that I was playing a lot of games with other boys which served to loosen me up a bit: not just those activities which required neither courage nor strength, like table tennis, chess and snooker, but also (because my hand–eye coordination was good) a few team games – except obviously for rugby, which was invented for large nasty, rough boys. I never actually understood many of the rules of the games I was playing, but then that doesn’t matter much to small boys; I once watched two boys playing a chess match and, noticing that one of the kings had actually been taken, pointed this fact out to them, only to be informed, ‘We know.’ Anyway, what happens is that every now and again you learn another rule until eventually you know enough to play properly. (Except for rugby, where even at international level only the referee understands all the rules, and has to explain them to the players (especially the very large ones) every time he makes a decision.)
It was about now that I encountered the teacher who made the greatest impression on me: Mr Bartlett. He became my maths master, and during the first term he taught me, I have to confess that I understood next to nothing. But when he taught me the same things next term, I grasped them instantly: they had become self-evident. So I was moved up a form, where Mr Bartlett introduced me to new mathematical ideas, all of them incomprehensible – until the following term when they became blindingly obvious, and I assimilated them effortlessly. Promotion, in other words, was followed by bewilderment, and the next term, by full comprehension. Mr Bartlett was a very good teacher.
But Mr Bartlett’s ultimate significance – to every single one of us – lay in the psychological spell that he cast over us. It became astonishingly important to please him, not just individually, but as
a form, too. So we attended to his every word, and when we had prep to do for him in the evening, we tried desperately hard to do good work. I can recall one evening, when we were all sitting in the Big Room, solving some geometry problems that Mr Bartlett had set us, that a boy called David Rogers was experiencing technical problems with his pair of compasses – that gadget with a sharp metal point, which you stick in a sheet of paper while you revolve the rest of the apparatus around it to produce a perfectly drawn circle. I slowly became aware of Rogers’ growing distress at the next desk: it seemed that every time he was on the verge of completing a nice, neat circle, the point of his compass slipped, and the pencil slid with it, producing a nasty blur on the page, and ruining his almost completed circle. At which moment Rogers would emit a tiny half-strangled cry of rage, seize his India rubber and savagely rub out his oh-so-near circle, then grab the compass and stab its point into the page – which after the first four or five attempts was beginning to resemble a lightly ploughed field – and start rotating the compass incredibly painstakingly until the pencil had described an arc of 350 degrees, at which moment the compass point would skid again, spoiling all his fine work up to that instant, and forcing from Rogers another muffled howl of despair, and sending him into a renewed frenzy of rubbing-out that began to resemble an act of pure revenge. But revenge on what? On life itself it seemed . . .
What was so funny, I decided later, was not the anger itself, but the fear that underlay it, the sheer terror of losing Bartlett’s favour, of being cast into the outer darkness for the rest of term. That was the extraordinary power of the force with which he controlled us. It was not fear of his rage, it was fear of the withdrawal of his approval. Years later I realised it was just like a lover’s sulk. And we all know the strangely powerful effect of that . . .
Now Rogers did something that was, up to that point in my life, the funniest thing I had ever seen. He went and borrowed a penknife, walked determinedly over to a waste-paper basket, and in a rigidly controlled, but slightly quivering mother of all cold furies, began savagely sharpening his compass point with it. The idea that the metal compass could be made pointier by whetting it with an ordinary penknife, compounded by the icy, maniacally restrained way in which he was attempting it, while all the time just, just stifling the seething, roiling bloodlust motivating him; all of this masking the sickening dread of Bartlett’s impending withdrawal of affection: such a perfect comic storm utterly wrecked me. The more I cried with laughter, though, the steelier became Rogers’ determination to make the compass point more efficient!
Rogers’ emotional state was, in fact, almost identical to the one Connie Booth and I tried to create for Basil as each episode of Fawlty Towers progressed. And since so much has been written about Basil’s anger, and so much of it is simplistic or just plain wrong, it’s perhaps worth trying to set the record straight. Though I suspect such an attempt is doomed to failure.
Basil’s anger is almost always underpinned by fear: fear of a hotel inspector’s bad report; fear of having poisoned a guest; fear of a health inspector seeing a rat; fear of upsetting important guests, like visiting psychiatrists or a lord; fear of offending German guests; fear of revealing that the chef is unfit to cook on Gourmet Night; fear of making a fool of himself in front of the friends invited to his wedding anniversary; fear of American guests discovering that the chef is not actually in the kitchen; fear of his wife catching him in compromising situations with an Australian blonde or an attractive French woman; fear of his wife discovering he’s been betting on horses, or trying to save money by employing incompetent builders . . . need I go on?
Then, because of the stress caused by his fear, he starts, at the beginning of each episode, by making small mistakes. As his efforts to correct the fearful situation misfire, he becomes increasingly panicky and desperate and consequently his decision-making becomes worse and worse, until he has dug a hole, or several holes, for himself from which there is no real escape.
It’s just good, old-fashioned farce: 1) the protagonist has done something he has to cover up; 2) he makes increasingly poor choices due to his building panic; 3) he finishes up in ridiculous situations; 4) his sins are finally revealed (or he just escapes detection) and all’s well that ends well.
(Incidentally, please forgive the ‘he’ in the paragraph above, but I do not know of a classic farce where the protagonist is female.)
I should point out one other parallel between Basil Fawlty and David Rogers. It is suppressed anger that is funny. If Basil ever fully lost his temper, and started screaming at people, the audience wouldn’t laugh. It’s when he tries to control it, but shows tell-tale signs that he is failing (profitless sarcasm, smacking his own bottom, flogging a car, speaking in an exaggeratedly deliberate way, suddenly slamming down a phone), that he is funny, in the same way that David Rogers was when his measured compass-sharpening betrayed the dreadful fury underlying it. Another way of looking at this: real anger can work in real life; it won’t work as comedy. Funny anger is ineffectual anger.
So, anyway . . .
Mr Bartlett was impressive not just because of his teaching skills and the control that he exercised over us; he was also the first example I’d ever seen of a really impressive human being. This manifested itself in two ways. First, he seemed to know everything about everything. The slow realisation of this, along with my growing sense of awe, suggested to me that if only I could acquire enough information about all aspects of the world, I too could be in total control of my life, and invulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: specifically, put-downs and sarcasm and teasing. So I began to be obsessed with the feeling that I ought to know everything about everything. I may have lacked the brain and willpower to move this project forward, but that never shook my conviction that omniscience would solve all possible problems.
The second aspect of Mr Bartlett’s character that influenced me, and several generations of St Peter’s boys, was his fastidious demeanour: his life appeared to be a continuous one-gentleman crusade against all things vulgar. I’m not referring to what in Britain in 2014 would be called vulgar: crude talk about bottoms and breasts and genitalia, cursing, aggressive and insulting behaviour, body piercing, tacky clothing, drunkenness, bling, shaven heads, tattoos, reality television, marketing and all the other vibrant forms of conduct that make our great country what it is today. No, Mr Bartlett was appalled (his favourite word) by much subtler stuff: for example, by the slightest hint of ‘showing off’, or drawing attention to oneself – what he called ‘self-advertisement’. What would he have made of our celebrity culture? This was the Edwardian gentleman’s approach to life: courtesy, grace, restraint, the careful avoidance of embarrassing others, non-intrusiveness, considerateness, kindness, modesty – nay, more than modesty, self-effacement; the very things that would disqualify one for ever from employment by the Daily Mail. But the charm of it all was that there was humour and, indeed, a hint of playfulness about his constant state of ‘being appalled’; and he was not often deeply appalled; sometimes he was only slightly appalled, for example at our stupidity, of which there was a lot about. There was a wonderful deadpan look of bemused astonishment to the way in which he greeted our latest imbecility; and if we pleased him, an almost coy twinkle. We craved that, and some boys – his favourites – received it now and again. He was our tall, long-faced, highbrow God, and we loved and feared him. If we’d handed in bad work, he would walk into the classroom looking as though his mother had just been fed into a mincer, and announce, ‘So . . . it’s war.’ Then he would stalk slowly over to the window and stare vacantly out of it, and we would all want to kill ourselves, and would pray for the moment when he would smile at one of us again. He didn’t care for me at all, but I could always hope. Meanwhile I loved him for his jokes: when he called one boy ‘a waste of space’ I thought it was the most brilliantly witty line that could ever have been said since the world began. (I still believe this, though I now know that it wasn’t ori
ginal.)
There was one master who quite liked me, no doubt in part because I quite liked him. Nobody else liked him, though – perhaps because he was physically unattractive. Actually that’s not true. I was being polite. He was ugly. God, was he ugly. He could have won competitions without taking his teeth out. Rather surprisingly – and endearingly – he was also a bit vain: always fussing about his hair and glancing in the mirror. It was strangely touching to see him battle on in this way against insuperable odds – rather like Quasimodo using eyeliner, or the Elephant Man wearing a toupee.
His name was the Reverend A. H. Dolman and he was German. That’s all we knew, although we had a pretty good idea what the A stood for. He was equally repellent in a variety of other ways, too. He was very fat (sorry! Obese . . .) and he waddled around, bumping people and blocking doorways, and his breath was not good, so we tried not to stand too close, and he told laboured pointless jokes which he then explained, and he had a rather guttural (surprise!) accent and spoke an unfamiliar dialect of English, peppered with certain pet phrases like ‘actually speaking’ and ‘really speaking’ and ‘generally speaking’ and ‘normally speaking’ and, especially, ‘in actual fact’, which popped up every twenty seconds or so. So, naturally speaking, we started counting the number of times he said them all. He took over responsibility for teaching us Latin from Captain Lancaster; quite how I managed to learn from him is a mystery, but I did, because I liked Latin and that’s the main reason, I think, why we finished up almost liking each other.
Which was just as well because when Mr Tolson asked Mr Bartlett if I should compete for a maths scholarship to Clifton College in 1953, and Bartlett killed the idea, dear Reverend Dolman insisted that I should be put up for a Latin scholarship. I failed to get that, but for some reason the enterprise yielded me the maths one (worth £35 a year). So put that in your pipe and smoke it, God.
