by John Cleese
‘. . . So . . . the river Congo is in the Belgian Congo . . . isn’t it?’
Smith wasn’t sure.
‘They’ve both got the word “Congo”, haven’t they?’
Smith was cudgelling his brains but there was still something not right about this.
‘See? River Congo . . . Belgian Congo? . . . ? . . . ? . . . ?’
What was I getting wrong? Was I not being clear enough? Had I not articulated properly? So . . . very slowly . . .
‘River . . . Congo . . . Belgian . . . Congo! You see, they both have “Congo” in them!’
But no, the penny wouldn’t drop. Smith gave me a brave smile. He was game to go on.
‘Smith,’ I said. ‘Let’s start again. We are talking about two different rivers in two different countries in Africa. One river is called the Niger, and it flows through the country called Nigeria. Niger . . . ia? OK, now we move to the second of the two rivers, which is not called Niger, but instead is called the Congo, and the river called the river Congo . . . is found . . . in the Belgian . . . CONGO! Now . . . which river, the Congo or the Niger, is found in . . . Niger . . . ia?’
Smith looked at me and made the ‘I am really thinking this one out’ face, which involves screwing up your eyes and puckering the mouth and staring intently about a foot above the teacher’s head, and which means that you don’t even know what the question means.
My heart sank.
‘Smith,’ I said, ‘I promise you this is not a trick question.’
‘The Congo!’ he announced.
At this moment, I was paralysed by the realisation that I was never, never going to find a way of transferring this piece of information from my mind into his. I would have been more gainfully employed explaining the concept of antimatter to a hamster. Never before had I comprehended that however obvious a thought may be, to understand . . . that always requires a tiny little jump of the intellect, a minute hop that connects one thing to another, and that there exist humans who cannot achieve this transit no matter how microscopically small it is made for them.
To ‘get’ a joke requires a similar mental skip, and the tricky part of constructing one is judging the width of the jump needed for the joke to be ‘got’. If you spoonfeed an intelligent audience and make the joke too obvious, they will not find it very funny. But the opposite danger is to make the jump too long, so that the connection is not made, and they don’t laugh at all.
So, anyway . . . there was one other puzzling experience, also involving a geography class. To make the lessons fun, all the boys were expected to have their atlases open in front of them when I entered the classroom, and I would shout ‘China!’ or ‘Poland!’ and they had to point to it, and I would run round the class, pretending to rough them up if they had their finger on the wrong country, and they would laugh and shriek, and a good time was had by all for about five minutes, during which they learned some basic geography. At the end of term I gave them an outline map of the world with the frontiers of the countries marked on it, but no names, and then I gave them a list of thirty countries and they had to write the countries’ names on the map in the right places. Ten were easy, like Australia and China; ten harder, like Switzerland and Chile; and ten difficult, like Laos and Bolivia.
At the beginning of one term a new boy joined us. He was a little introverted, so out of fellow feeling I let him settle in very gently. He became quite comfortable in class, and seemed rather thoughtful. At the end of term he took the world-map-outline test and I was surprised, and pleased, to find that he had written the name ‘Bolivia’ in exactly the right space.
However, that was the only one he got correct. He marked the continent of Australia as France, Sweden and Norway as Brazil, and he placed the British Isles right in the middle of the South Pacific. I was drawn inexorably to the saddening conclusion . . . that Bolivia was almost certainly a fluke.
But what perplexed me was this: what had been going on between his ears during the twenty-odd lessons when the rest of the form had been learning Basic World Geography? He had looked passably interested; he had manifested no anxiety; he had never asked for help, even though I encouraged it, and always praised boys when they did.
So, if he felt he did not need help, what did he think he was trying to accomplish? For what purpose did he imagine he was sitting there? To practise circulating his blood?
I should have asked him, because it was keeping me awake at night. At last I found consolation in the thought that he had succeeded in writing the names of the thirty countries on the right planet. And I pinned up his exam paper on the noticeboard in the masters’ common room along with the comment ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’
When Mr Bartlett saw it, he stared for some time and then, with real feeling, remarked, ‘The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.’
* * *
fn1 Recent research shows that children respond much better to the Tolson approach, where effort and determination are praised, than to one where parents and teachers applaud them for their intelligence, or creativity, or other apparently permanent talent (which often leads to a fear of failing to live up to expectations, and to an unwillingness to slog on when difficulties arise). Of course, as I’ve already said, Mr Tolson went to Cambridge.
Chapter 6
I LEFT ST PETER’S in the July of 1960. I was quite sad, though I also knew it was time for me to move on . . .
In August my parents and I had our normal summer holiday: ten days at a hotel in Bournemouth called the Devon Towers – and yes, that is definitely where I got the ‘Towers’ for my fictional hotel. I loved the Devon Towers because there was a fine, full-sized snooker table downstairs which no one seemed to know about, and which I could therefore monopolise for hours at a time. I never yearned for an opponent, content with my own company, enjoying playing all the shots myself. That said, I was happy enough when Dad popped down to give me a game.
The other main sporting entertainment in Bournemouth was the Cleese family outing to the huge ice rink in the middle of town to laugh at the beginners.
Now there is something fascinating about the nameless panic that grabs people when they are trying, and failing, to keep their balance, even if they only have a short distance to fall. I accept that it was mean-spirited to take such pleasure in watching the antics of these terrified creatures, but we did at least have the good manners to sit some distance from them, and we tried to keep our volume down. Anyway, it wasn’t our fault that they were so funny. Falling over is always entertaining, but these proto-skaters were very special. Mother laughed more at them than at anything else I ever saw, and afterwards Dad and I would have to take her out to tea, to calm her down.
Back in Weston, I spent the rest of the holiday reading my way through various books that were alleged to prepare me for my legal studies. Cambridge had originally given me a place to read physics and chemistry, but I had very swiftly realised that I simply wasn’t interested enough to be able to compete with proper scientists. However, given my lack of other A levels, I had been left with a simple and stark choice between two subjects I could start from scratch: economics and law. I decided to opt for the latter. (My father had once told me there was a tradition of law in our family; I subsequently discovered he was referring to his father’s position as a solicitor’s clerk.) So I now sat down to pore over the reading list provided by the Cambridge Law School. Why Grant and Temperley’s Europe in the Nineteenth Century: 1789–1905 was considered useful preparation for the study of trusts and settlements or Roman law I don’t know, but I dutifully ploughed through it without getting any real grasp of the reality behind the words. This is a good example of one of my worst characteristics, which is, when faced by something unfamiliar, to do exactly what I am told without applying my common sense.
So here I was, about to enter one of the world’s finest universities, and these were the sum of my academic accomplishments:
• An ability t
o speak and write grammatical English, and to spell well; some knowledge of maths and science, rapidly fading.
• An acquaintance with the dates of the kings and queens of England; a little Latin; a thin patina of geographical facts; a working knowledge of Henry V and Macbeth and some twenty poems.
• No biology, psychology, economics, philosophy, political science, statistics, music, electronics, world history, art, engineering, geology, archaeology, architecture, Greek, etc., etc., etc.
In a way, I was too unsophisticated to realise just how unsophisticated I was, which is why I was not consciously very anxious about leaving my life in Weston and setting off into the unknown. Nevertheless, the day I was due to take the train to Cambridge, I suffered a dreadful stomach upset and was unable to travel. What a strange coincidence! Of course, the idea of psychosomatic illness was unknown in the lower-middle-class culture I inhabited (if it was known at all in the England of that time). Cartesianism ruled, on moral grounds. It was quite acceptable to have a physical illness; what was not allowed was any form of mental abnormality. This would have been seen as a sign of weakness, lack of moral fibre, and degeneracy. Ailments needed to be kept physical.
The next day I felt better, and so dear old Dad drove me all the way to Cambridge, with Mum helping from the back seat. I have a clear memory of kissing them both goodbye outside Downing College, and then of turning away and walking through the gates. I knew it meant we were finally separating, and while I was apprehensive I also felt a sense of relief, of having finally escaped from a mould.
Writing this now, though, I feel a deep sadness for Dad. I had been the focus of his life for so long – perhaps the main source of meaning for him – that it must have been a very painful moment for him to watch me disappear like that. Much less painful for my mother, who, after all, still had herself to think of. But then, if Dad suffered from my absence, Mum had suffered from my presence. I think their relationship had been quite a close one until I came along, but that as the rapport and warmth between Dad and me began to develop, she may have felt increasingly excluded from our intimacy, and therefore from her own relationship with him.
So, anyway . . . once inside the gates, my first impressions of Downing College were very positive. It was a friendly place, and as a first-year student I was fortunate enough to have a room in college – a large ground-floor one near the Porter’s Lodge. It also seemed easy to find out what one was supposed to do. The only shock came when I arrived rather late for dinner in Hall that first evening. Grace was about to be said, and so I slipped into the only vacant space I could see along the many long benches. A few words of Latin, and I sat down to find myself surrounded by chemists.
‘So I tried chlorobenzylacetate!’
‘No!’
Hoots of laughter from everyone around me.
‘What about sodium pentathalamide!’ Giggles.
‘You’re not serious?’
‘If I wanted a precipitate, I would have used zinc polychlosterate!’
Howls of mirth, slapping of thighs, wiping of eyes, and a couple of sly glances at the tall bearded guy in their midst who clearly had no sense of humour. At that moment I felt very alone. I knew Downing was the science college, but I certainly hadn’t expected anything like this. I mimed that I had a hearing problem, and ate my dinner quickly.
The next evening proved to be momentous. Setting out early for Hall, to give myself a better chance of spotting chemists before it was too late, I half-recognised someone who turned out to have been a fellow pupil at Clifton. Martin Davies-Jones was two years younger than me, so at school we had only a nodding acquaintance (more than that and the police would have intervened) but we were soon chatting away and he in turn introduced me to his new friends, Alan Hutchison and Tony Robinson, and we sat down to dinner together: four ‘nice’ public school boys (they were more middle-middle class than me) in sports jackets, speaking standard middle-class English – and none of us chemists. We got on so well that the four of us finished up sharing digs for our last two years. And this transformation in my social fortunes occurred on my second day!
In the interests of historical balance I feel I should mention that Alan remembers this quite differently. He is sure that the first time he set eyes on me was when Martin brought him over to my room to introduce us, and that as they looked in through my ground-floor window, they saw me trying to wriggle under my bed. They thought this weird as they had no idea that I had a pet hamster. Since I had been at Cambridge at least two weeks before I purchased the hamster in the street market, and I had certainly met Alan by then, I discount his version.
Now I settled down to study the five subjects that made up my law degree. Two of them concerned Roman law, the idea being that we would broaden our understanding if we gained a bird’s eye view of an entire legal system. And I have to say that some of what I discovered about the Romans reflected impressively on them: it struck me, for example, that putting people guilty of parricide into a sack with a viper, a cockerel and a dog, and then throwing them into the Tiber, seemed very likely to deter others, and was certainly less expensive than imprisonment. English constitutional law I found fascinating. I was intrigued to learn how the rules for running the country had developed over the centuries, and it occurs to me now that earlier parliamentarians understood conflict of interest, and the concept of checks and balances, better than they do these days. International law seemed to promise a glamorous jet-set existence, especially to someone who had not yet been outside England. And finally, there was English criminal law, which was great fun, even without the vipers. Altogether there were about ten lectures each week and a tutorial every fortnight in each subject when we had to hand in an essay – so maybe twenty essays a term in all, just over a couple a week.
This was quite manageable. The trouble was . . . I was conscientious. I could have arranged, around my studies, an interesting and even slightly adventurous life, but I didn’t. I kick myself now when I think how other undergraduates took their Cambridge life by the scruff of its neck and spent their time doing what really mattered to them. (Stephen Fry, for example, never went to a lecture; he just read, and appeared in thirty-six plays.) But I trudged off every day to attend every required lecture, at least half of which were deeply uninspiring. And I sat there dutifully taking notes, trying not to miss anything.
One of our professors described a lecture as ‘a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either’. It would certainly have been so much more efficient and absorbing if our lecturers had provided full notes for us, and had then discussed them. There could have been real interaction, question and answer, even argument, instead of dictation. But this never happened, and my ingrained meekness meant that it took me two terms before I dared to drop even the ghastly Whalley-Tooker, whose ramblings reminded me of King Lear on Valium. I also took essays far too seriously, and wasted a lot of time on polishing them, though they didn’t teach me much. All in all, my diligence gave me a false sense of not having much time spare to explore Cambridge life.
But before I fell into this pattern of thinking I did at least go to the Societies Fair, which was held at the Corn Market on the first weekend of term. I was astonished at the variety of activities on offer: there was a multitude of stands manned by keen young undergraduates all trying to persuade you to sign up for potholing, bridge, bell ringing, drama, the Young Christians, sky diving, brass rubbing, water sports, paranormal studies, martial arts, the Union, photography, the Marxists-Leninists, taxidermy . . .
As I drifted around, feeling slightly overwhelmed and not at all bold, I had at the back of my mind (and really quite a long way back) the word ‘Footlights’. Not that I had any real idea of what that meant. It was just that when I had done various entertainments at Clifton, a couple of masters had said, ‘So, when you get to Cambridge, you will be joining the Footlights, then.’ I knew therefore that it must all be somethi
ng to do with humour.
Nevertheless, when I spotted the Footlights stand and a couple of friendly fellows sitting there, smiling invitingly, it took me some time to wrestle down a strong sense of impending embarrassment. That done, I pretended I had suddenly seen the stand, strolled over, smiled as best I could, and said, ‘Ah! Hello! The Footlights! I was wondering if I . . . might . . . possibly be . . . interested in . . .’
‘Of course!’ one of them cried, handing me a leaflet. ‘Do you sing?’
‘Sing?’ I thought. ‘What are they talking about? Sing? No, I don’t sing. I am the worst singer in the world. Mr Hickley had me removed from singing classes at school because I was so bloody terrible. There is nothing that I do worse. Why, in the bowels of Christ, are they asking me if I sing? What on earth has that got to do with being funny?’
‘Not really,’ I responded.
‘Never mind,’ said the other Footlights representative. ‘Do you dance?’
‘Dance?’ My head began to swim.
‘Yes, dance,’ he repeated.
‘No,’ I said. ‘If I wanted to dance, I would probably be standing at the Classical Ballet stand, or the Modern Dance stand, or the Ballroom Dancing stand, or the Tap Dancing stand, or the Morris Dancing stand, or the Dancing for Chemists stand.’
Well, all right, I didn’t say this. What I actually said was, ‘No, I am not very good at dancing. Sorry!’
They nodded kindly. ‘So . . . what do you do?’
Embarrassment, confusion, humiliation, indignation, all welled up.
‘I try to make people laugh!’ I blurted out, and I ran for it.
And that was the end of my show-business career.
