Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, ‘only…’

‘You can tell me, young man. If it’s a secret it won t go any further. A boy told me the most amazing secret twenty years ago. Do you know what it was?’

‘No,’ I asked, perking up. There was nothing I loved better than a secret. ‘What was it?’

‘I shan’t tell you,’ said Mr Kett. ‘It’s a secret. See? That’s how good I am at keeping them.’

‘Oh. Well, you see, the thing is…’

And out spilled some kind of confused description of the disappointment, frustration, rage and despair that burned within me at being trumped by Mary Hench and her double-damned donkey.

‘It was a such a good mole, you see… so perfect. Its paws were perfect, its snout was perfect, its fur was perfect. It was the best mole ever. Even though it was dead. Any other week it would have won a star. And it’s not that stars are so important, it’s just that I’ve never won one for the nature table. Not once. Ever.’

‘You’ve had plenty of stars for spelling though, haven’t you? So Miss Meddlar tells me.’

‘Oh, spelling …’

‘I had a look at your mole. It was a fine mole, there’s no question about it. You should be very proud of him.’

That afternoon, as class ended, I went to the nature table, took the creature, now slightly corrupted by time, and wrapped it in a handkerchief.

‘Is our mole leaving us?’ Miss Meddlar asked, with what seemed to be a gleam of hope in her voice.

‘I thought perhaps so,’ I sighed. ‘I mean, he is getting a bit…, you know.’

Halfway back home I leaned my bike against a hedge and opened the handkerchief, setting myself scientifically to examine the nature of decay. The body of the mole, once so plush and fine, now matted and patched, appeared to be alive with shiny white ticks. From out of the weeping centre of the carcass, a black insect that had been feasting deep in the wet ooze, seemed suddenly to see me, or at least to see daylight and its chance for freedom. Taking fierce wing with a fluttering clockwork buzz, it launched itself into my eye. I gave a scream and dropped the whole bundle. The flying creature, whatever it was, spun upwards into the air and across the fields.

I felt a wetness around my ankles and looked down. The mole had fallen on to my sandals and exploded there, spreading itself all around my socks and feet. Squealing and shrieking in fright and revulsion, I hopped about flicking with the handkerchief at my shins as though they were on fire.

It was too horrible, nature was too horrible. Nature stank and squelched and vomited with slime, maggots and bursting guts.

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself – simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

Pieces of the mole lined the foot of the hedge. I rubbed a little at my legs with the once fine, crisp linen handkerchief and then I held it up to the sky. They were the same, the handkerchief and the evening sky. Both spattered with ink and blood. The alien malevolence of a certain kind of late afternoon sunset has frightened me ever since.

‘Good heavens, darling,’ my mother said. ‘Whatever is that smell?’

‘Dead mole, what do you think?’ I said crossly as I stamped up the back stairs.

‘Well, you’d better go straight up and have a bath then.’

‘What did you think I was doing? Going upstairs to… to… play croquet?’

Not the best put-down ever, but as tart as I could manage.

I didn’t think once about the nature table over the weekend. It had rained, which gave me a fine opportunity to stay indoors and ignore nature entirely.

It was only as I bicycled in to school on Monday morning that I realised I had nothing at all for the weekly show and tell.

A stick, I thought. I’ll jolly well take in a stick. If they don’t want moles, they can make do with a stick. Sticks can be interesting too. Nature isn’t all donkeys and otter spraints and tern’s eggs and coypu skulls and rotten crawling living things. I’ll bring in a dead stick.

So I picked up the first stick I biked past. A very ordinary stick. Dead, but neutral and uncorrupted in its death. And useful too, which is more than you can say for a rotting mole dropping to bits all over your ankles.

I brought the stick into the classroom and dumped it defiantly on the nature table.

Well now,’ said Miss Meddlar, after she had exam-med the week’s crop with the irritating care and slowness of a pensioner paying at a checkout counter. ‘Now then, well. Another wonderful effort from you all. I have to say I half expected to see an elephant in the playground, Mary, but that is a lovely jay’s feather you’ve brought in for us, really lovely. But do you know what? The star this week is going to go to… Stephen Fry.’

‘Hurrh?’

A dozen pairs of disbelieving eyes swivelled between me, Miss Meddlar and the very ordinary dead stick that lay on the nature table like a very ordinary dead stick.

‘Come you on forward, Stephen Fry.’

I came me on forward, bewildered.

‘This star is not for your stick, although I’m sure it is ever such a fine stick. This star is for you taking away your mole Friday…’

‘Excuse me, Miss?’

'… because I have to say that the dratted thing was stinking out my classroom. He was stinking out the whole corridor, was your mole. I’ve never been so glad to see anything go in all my born days.’

The class erupted into noisy laughter and, since I was always, and have always been, determined that merriment should never be seen to be at my expense, I joined in and accepted my star with as much pleased dignity as I could muster.

How strange then, how more than passing strange, to discover a quarter of a century later that it was this trivial episode that the school remembered me for, and not for my cold lies and sly evasions.

John Kett was, still is I hope, a lay preacher and a better advertisement for Christianity than St Paul himself. Then again, in my unqualified opinion, Judas Iscariot, Nero and Count Dracula are all better advertisements for Christianity than St Paul… but that’s a whole other candle for a whole other cake. You aren’t here to listen to my ignorant ramblings on the subject of theology.

The awful thing is this.

Until this day came twenty-five years on, with John Kett and others and their beaming mentions, I had entirely forgotten the mole and everything to do with it.

At the start of the fete, every time moles had been knowingly alluded to as I Prince Michael of Kented my way from stall to stall, I had pretended that I knew what it was all about, but I was dissembling furiously. I imagined that people might be referring to some television sketch that I had been in and since forgotten all about.

This often happens. I remember a few years ago being angrily yelled at from across the street by a complete stranger. Simply purple with fury this man was, shaking his fist and calling me a bastard pigging murderer. I assumed he was someone who didn’t like my politics, my television appearances, my sexual preferences, my manner, my voice, my face – me. It hardly mattered. He could call me a fat ugly unfunny lefty queer and I would see his point of view. But murderer? Maybe it was because I was wearing leather shoes… it is impossible to tell in these days of serial single issue fanatics. I wheeled round the corner and away. Such people are best avoided. One reads things, you know.

You can imagine my consternation when I realised that this lunatic was dashing round the corner after me in hot pursuit.