Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

There was a butler called Mr Dealey, of whom I was greatly in awe. He wore trousers of the kind known as spongebag and seemed to have no other thing to say to me whenever we encountered each other than, ‘Now then, Master Fry, now then.’ I hear his almost spivvy tones again whenever I watch films like Hue and Cry and Laughter in Paradise, lying as they do somewhere between Jack Warner and Guy Middleton. He in turn had a brylcreemed son called Cohn with hair arranged in what I guess now was known as a rockabilly quiff. Colin helped about the place, could blow smoke-rings and whistle through his teeth to make a sound like a kazoo. He also held the tuck-shop key which made him greatly important. The school barber, John Owen, visited once a week and found my name amusing since it put him in mind of a famous auctioneer (famous auctioneer? Well, apparently so) called Frederick Fry. As he snipped away at my hair, Owen would repeat, again and again, ‘Frederick Fry FAT, Frederick Fry FAT. Fellow of the Auctioneers’ Institute, Frederick Fry, FAT.’

The Angus love of animals was reflected out of doors by a profusion of ponies and horses and an aviary which housed, amongst other exotic bird life, a most exquisite golden pheasant. Within doors there were birdcages too: these were actually built into the walls near the headmaster’s study. They contained a pair of amiable parrots and my most particular friend, a mynah bird. This was a very prodigious animal which could imitate the school bell, Dealey mumbling to himself as he polished the candlesticks in the grand dining room the other side of the cages, the dull bang of the cane being thwacked on to tight trouser seats in the headmaster’s study and the voices of most of the staff; the bird was even capable of rendering exactly the sound of four crates of third-pint milk bottles being banged on to a Formica-topped trestle table, a sound it heard every day at morning break. It sounds an unlikely feat but I assure you I do not exaggerate. As a matter of fact I heard the broadcaster and naturalist Johnny Morris on the radio not so long ago talking about his mynah bird who could precisely mimic three pints being placed on a doorstep. The aural replication of milk delivery is clearly a common (if evolutionarily bewildering) gift amongst the domesticated mynahs of the West Country and a phenomenon into which more research cries out to be done.

The Angus family owned dogs too of course. There was a large number of perpetually furious Boston terriers, a boxer called Brutus, something fluffy and loud called Caesar and a squadron of others, all belonging to old Mrs Angus who was warm and powdery and of whom I find it impossible to think without there coming into my head the image of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. It was into her presence that my brother and I were ushered to be told of the death of our step-grandmother. I shall never forget the precise intonation she used when she told us.

My grandfather’s third wife was Viennese and Jewish, like my real grandmother whom I never knew. She had been a friend of Stefan Zweig and Gustav Klimt and Arnold Schoenberg and all those grand Viennese café intellectuals. She used to let me use her typewriter whenever I visited her, which to me was the greatest joy in the world. I have been able to type proficiently since I was ten. Her maiden name was Grabscheidt, pronounced, I fear, grab-shite. There is still a huge cabin trunk somewhere in my parents' house on which is painted that wonderful name in great white letters. My brother and I had been to visit her in hospital when she was ill and she had been kind and told us not to be frightened by the tubes running into her nose.

Later on, back at school, we had been summoned to see Mrs Angus.

‘You knew that your step-grandmother had been very ill,’ she said, stroking one of her dogs.

My brother and I nodded.

‘I’m afraid I have just heard from your mother that she diddie…’

I don’t know why the emphasis of that intonation is with me still. Whenever I think of Auntie Claire, as we called her, (although I suppose her name must have been Klara or Klara or something similar) I remember that she did die.

In the Easter holidays which fell between the end of my term at Cawston and the start of life away at what I thought of as Roger’s School, I had read from cover to cover, over and over again, the Stouts Hill School Magazine, which included a section entitled:

LETTERS OF ENCOURAGEMENT TO A POSSIBLE NEW BOY

I have that magazine in front of me now and reproduce the articles without amendment of any kind. Some of them I found I still knew almost by heart.

Tim Sangster

We play cars down a little sort of dip.

Jimmy King

We have lots of fun playing cricket, tennis, rounders and swimming in the summer. In the winter we play football and rugger. On Sundays we usually watch television. We go to bed at six o’clock. You have lots of free time – the work is not to difficult. You can get gardens to grow things if you want to. You can sail too, if you want to join the sailing club.

Anthony Macwhirter

If you are in fourth game you sometimes go boating on the lake and swim every day in the summer if it is warm. On Sundays you may have three swims if you don’t go out.

Edmund Wilkins

It is very nice here because if you are in the country you have no one to play with, though at Stouts Hill there are lots of boys. In the summer we have swimming and boating and there is a half term holiday after the sports. If you are quite young you will go into the small form where you have potty work. We played Latin Football on Saturday which is great fun.

Richard Coley

There is a tuck shop only you are not allowed to bring tuck back. There are lots of butterflies to catch. There is a big lake with boats and oysters that clamp down on your fingers.

Charles Matthews

We have Cubs on Fridays, you wear your games clothes, its very hilly so we can do all sorts of things. When there is enough snow in winter we can go tobagganing which is super fun.

Malcolm Black

You can catch fish and row a boat if you want. Some boys like playing games like ‘Man Hunt’ or ‘Tip and Run.’ Most boys have a garden. In the summer baby frogs jump about. Sometimes there are Treasure Hunts up on the Bury. The Cubs go up into the woods and round about. They have their dens up in the woods.

Donald Laing

We have a museum and a model club as well. We have cellars, a changing room and three dining rooms. In the school we have five dormitories and two dormitories not in the school.

The sentence in Edmund Wilkins’s article, ‘If you are quite young you will go into the small form where you have potty work’, haunted me for weeks before my arrival. The idea that I might be considered, willy nilly, in need of ‘potty work’ simply terrified me. It is true that from time to time I wetted the bed at home -‘It’s not that I mind, darling. If only you would tell me. But when you pretend it never happened it just makes me so cross …’ – it was just that, in my fevered imagination ‘potty work’ meant grimmer, darker business than preventing piddling in the bed and I spent much of the holidays begging my mother to write letters to the school excusing me from this humiliation, which I saw as taking place on a grand daïs in front of the whole school.

Nor was the next section in the magazine, some of which was the work of the same hands, calculated to set my mind entirely at ease.

OUR FIRST DAYS AT STOUTS HILL

J. Wynn

When we got into the car to go to Stouts Hill for the first time I was very excited. They dropped me and drove away I was not homesick. The very first day I felt rather lost. We had our first ice-cream day and I thought we had to have the money on us. I bought two and put one in the waste-paper basket. I did not realise that I could have given it to someone else.