Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Well, young man, I expect everything seems to have shrunk since last you were here.’

I agreed and he turned the subject to moles.

Moles?

Other people at the fete had mentioned moles too, with twinkles or with amused, nose-tapping suggestiveness on my arrival and as I made the traditional preliminary inspection of cake-stand and bottle-stall.

My parents’ gardeners were a pair of brothers called Alec and Ivan Tubby who battled to keep the tennis court – as well as the improbable pride of our garden, the badminton lawn – free of moles. Was there some connection there?

Mole-catching is a great art and most practitioners (the fluorescent jacketed Rentokil variety always excepted) stand silently for great lengths of time staring at lawns and fresh molehills. After perhaps half an hour of this agonising inactivity they will at last make a move and pad softly towards apparently random places in the grass where they insert a number of traps. Over the next couple of days three or four dead moles will be pulled out. I suppose while they were standing doing nothing the mole-catchers were in fact reading tiny trembles in the earth, or patches of darker or lighter grass that gave them some suggestion as to where the moles were headed. The mole-hills themselves are not much of a clue of course once they’ve dug them, the gentlemen in black velvet move themselves off. The trick is to guess in which direction they have gone.

Back in 1965, during the first weeks of my term at Cawston Primary School I had become more and more depressed about my inability to win a star for the Nature Table.

Every week, we pupils in Miss Meddlar’s class would have to bring something in for a classroom display of biological objets trouvés. The prize exhibit would win a star. One week Mary Hench brought in a sandwich tern’s egg, taken from a nest on the coast at Brancaster. After Miss Meddlar had established in her own mind the truthfulness of Mary Hench’s assertion that the nest had been abandoned and the egg cold when happened upon (I didn’t believe Mary Hench for a second, I remain convinced to this day that the wicked girl had simply clapped her enormous hands and shooed away a sitting mother, so insane and diabolical was her ambition to win more stars than anyone else and the Junior Achievement Cup and five shilling book token that went with them) a star was awarded. I had entertained high hopes that week for my badger’s skull, boiled, vigorously scrubbed clean with Colgate toothpaste for a whiteness you can believe in and total fresh breath confidence, and attractively presented in a Queen’s Velvet envelope box packed with shredded red cellophane. I was to do the same dental cosmetic job on a less easily identifiable bone (I was sure that it was human) some years later, and win my third Blue Peter Badge – and a third Blue Peter Badge, as the world knows, is instantly converted into a Silver Blue Peter Badge. But all these happy achievements lay a long way ahead. For the moment, I was starless. But my blood was up. I was going to win a star and make Mary Hench howl with envy if I had to commit murder to do it.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

Grim weeks of effort and nature-trailing followed. I tried a starfish, a thrush egg, a collection of pressed campions and harebells and a boxful of shards of that willow pattern ironstone china that the Victorians buried in the earth for the sole purpose of disappointing twentieth-century treasure seekers. None of these met with the least success. By the eighth week of term I knew that Nature Table Star List by heart.

Mary Hench

Mary Hench

Jacqueline Wright

Ian Adams

Jimmy Speed

Mary Hench

Mary Hench

One Sunday evening, as I was wheeling round and round the stable block at home on my bicycle, racking my brains for an idea of what to offer up the next morning, Ivan Tubby approached me with something small and soft and dark cupped in his hands.

‘Found a mole,’ he said.

This was not a mole that had been squashed and spiked in a gin-trap, it was a mole that seemed to have died very recently of natural causes. Perhaps its mother and father had been trapped and it had popped up to see what was going on and where dinner was and then discovered with a shock that it couldn’t see at all and in any case wasn’t supposed to be above the ground with the Up There people and the Seeing Animals. In whatever manner it met its end, this was a young mole in the most excellent condition, its pink snout and spreading shovel paws still warm and quite perfectly shaped.

I begged to be allowed to keep him and Ivan generously consented, although as it happened he had marked him down as a treat for his cat.

The next morning I bicycled down the mile-long lane to Cawston in a fever of excitement, the mole packed in straw in my saddlebag. This was to be my day of triumph.

‘Here we have a common European mole,’ I would tell the class, Pear’s Family Cyclopaedia having been thoroughly exhausted on the subject of moles the night before. ‘Moles eat their own weight every day and can actually starve to death within twelve hours if they don’t have enough food. A mole is capable of burrowing up to eighteen feet in one hour. Thank you.'

I imagined executing a small bow and receiving delighted applause from all but a frustrated, white-lipped Mary Hench, whose feeble puss-moth caterpillar or pathetic arrangement of barn owl pellets would go unnoticed.

I parked the bicycle and rushed to Miss Meddlar’s, slowing down as I arrived in the doorway, so as to look cool and casual.

‘Well now, you’re very early this morning, Stephen Fry.’

‘Am I, Miss? Yes, Miss.’

‘And what’s that you have there? Something for the nature table?’

‘Yes, Miss. It’s a -‘ I started, excitedly.

‘Don’t tell me now, child. Wait until class. Put it on the table and…, well now whatever is going on?’

A violent explosion of giggles and screams could be heard coming from the playground. Miss Meddlar and I went to the window and tried to crane round and look towards the source of the uproar. Just then, Jimmy Speed, a chaotic, ink-stained boy, the kind who grins all the time as though he believes everyone to be quite mad, burst into the room.

‘Oh, Miss, Miss. You’ll never guess! You’ll never ever guess!’

‘Guess what, Jimmy Speed?’

‘That’s Mary Hench, Miss! She’s brought a donkey in for the nature table. A real live donkey! Come out and see. That’s ever so beautiful, though how he will fit on the table, that I do not know.’

‘A donkey!’ Miss Meddlar went pink with excitement, straightened her skirt and headed for the door. ‘A donkey. Good heavens!’

I looked down at my little mole and burst into tears.

It was at the end of the week, just as everyone in the school was beginning to talk of things other than Mary Hench and her donkey, that Mr Kett came up to me in the playground and drew me aside.

‘Hello there, young man,’ he said. ‘You look a little down in the dumps if I might say so.’

‘Do I, sir?’

‘You do, sir,’ he said. ‘I remember a joke I heard as a boy in the pantomime. Cinderella. that was. In Dereham, years before the war. One of the ugly sisters, she said, “‘Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I buy myself a new hat.” And the other ugly sister replied, “So that’s where you get them from then.” I remember that as if it were yesterday.’

Only, said in his light Norfolk accent it came out as, '… I remember that as if it were yisty.’

‘So,’ he went on, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘What have you been getting down in those dumps?’