Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Later, at public school in particular, I became adept at using my asthma as an excuse for avoiding undesirable activities. I could induce attacks easily by burying my head inside dusty desks or in bushes and shrubs which I knew to be dangerous. I became intensely proud of my asthma, just as I was to become proud of my jewishness and proud of my sexuality. Taking an aggressively defiant stance on qualities in myself that others might judge to be weaknesses became one of my most distinctive character traits. Still is, I suppose.

Seesawing with a friend one afternoon, I fractured the humerus bone of my left arm and went about in a sling for the rest of the term. Two days later my brother broke his arm in exactly the same place, a genuine coincidence. He had broken it in the field of battle, at rugger. I was the fool who could have avoided it, he was the brave soldier. As it later turned out, Roger had actually broken his arm by trying to pinch some food from the kitchen under the eye of Abiel, who had hurled him up some steps. In those days, things like that were hushed up. Poor Abiel hadn’t meant any harm, and a rugger injury looked better all round.

I can’t separate out the connections, the causes and effects, but by my third year at Stouts Hill, after the onset of asthma and the breaking of my arm, I began to dread physical activity of almost any kind. I became prey to an acute sense of physical self-consciousness.

This has sexual connections which we will come to later. In a prep school set in the country, in love with the country, inspired by the country and dedicated to the country, the boy who fears the country, fears it in all its manifestations, naturally becomes something of a loner: if his home-life is also spent in even deeper country he has a problem. The terror of the rotting mole and of the insects that gorge on dead flesh had never left me. I was scared to distraction by the mere thought of silverfish and lice, maggots and blow-flies, puff-balls and exploding fungi. The malignancy and stench of death that hung over the forests, copses and lakeside woods at Stouts Hill expunged any pleasure I derived from the lively quickness of squirrels and badgers, from the gentle dignity of alders, larches, elms and oaks and from the delicate beauty of the herb robert, the campion, the harebell and the shepherd’s purse.

More than that, the fearlessness of the other boys became itself something new to fear. That they could not see what was amiss with the world showed them to be strong and me to be weak.

I was at the time, I think, unaware of all this at any conscious level worth bothering with. Other boys, after all, were what we would call today wimps. Some were wimpier than me by far. Some wore absurd spectacles with lenses an inch thick, others had spazzy walks and possessed eye-hand co-ordination that made me feel positively athletic. One boy was so afraid of horses that he would break out into a sweat if he came within twenty yards of the smallest pony.

Two defects of mine did haunt me consciously however, and I cannot claim ever to have entirely exorcised myself of them.

Natation first. The school had an excellent lake, in which some supervised swimming was allowed. There was a swimming-pool too, a most extraordinary white oval affair which might have been designed by Gropius, with an elaborate gravel filter for the water, which showed itself in the form of an endlessly playing fountain beside the pool. At either end was a bowl filled with a deep purple liquid into which one had to dip one’s feet before entry – something to do with verrucas I believe.

If a boy had been officially witnessed to have swum two full unassisted lengths of the pool he was a Swimmer and entitled to wear blue swimming trunks and enjoy access to the deep end and the diving board. Non Swimmers wore red trunks and had to paddle in the shallow end holding preposterous polystyrene swimming aids sculpted into the shape of tombstones or, worse still, have inflatable water-wings sealed about their skinny arms.

I was a non swimmer until my very last year.

All my life I have never since bought a pair of red swimming trunks.

At night, as others slept, I projected films in my head, films in which I swam like Johnny Weissmuller, Esther Williams and Captain Webb. Dipping, rolling and diving, head facing down into the surface of the water, I powered myself with easy, rhythmically pumping feet. I launched myself backwards and forwards, up and down the pool, head rising up to take one lungful of air for each length, while boys crowded round the pool, their mouths rounded in wonderment and admiration, watching me, praising me, cheering me on…

I could do it, I knew I could do it then. It was clear to me that the achievement was all in the knowing.

The only reason I couldn’t swim was that I had been told that I was a non swimmer. But there, on my hard-sprung Vono bed, while the others slept, I knew that I was an otter, a sea-lion, a leaping dolphin, Poseidon’s child, Marine Boy, the friend of Thetis and Triton, at one with water.

If only they would let me wear blue trunks, then I would show them.

The loud collision of detail, noise and hurry in the daytime confused everything and threw me off balance.

‘Aren’t you changed, Fry?’

‘Right, in you get.’

‘Come on, boy!’

‘It’s not cold, for God’s sake…’

‘Legs! Legs, legs, legs! Get those legs working!’

‘Get your head down. It’s water, it’s not going to bite you…'

‘What a spazz…’

The explosions of other boys laughing and bombing and belly flopping at the deep end turned into a distant mocking echo as the blood and fear flooded into me.

‘But I could do it last night!’ I wanted to shout. ‘You should have seen me last night. Like a salmon, I was… like a leaping salmon!’

Blue and shivering, I would push the polystyrene tombstone out before me, eyes screwed shut, head up so far that my neck bent backwards, thrashing myself forwards, my legs kicking up and down, panting and whooping with exertion and panic. Then I would rise, gasping and choking like a new born baby, twisted strings of snot streaming from my nose, chlorine burning my throat and eyes, sure that this time, this time, I had covered at least half the length of the pool.

‘Congratulations, Fry. One and a half yards.’

Hurrying across the grass, I would wrap myself in a towel, shivering and gulping with shame and exhaustion.

The aching and the longing in me as I watched Laing silently glide underwater from end to end like a silver eel. He would break the surface without a ripple or a gasp, and then, laughing like a lord, backstroke, side-stroke and butterfly to the other end, rolling over and over as he swam, the water seeming to encase him in a silver envelope that glistened and pulsed like the birth sac of a gigantic insect.

With my towel Balinese tight about my waist, I would, in Adam’s primal pudeur, perform the awkward ballet of swapping trunks for underpants, so absolutely, unconditionally and helplessly cast into black misery that nothing, not money, hugging, sweets, understanding, friendship or love, could have offered me the smallest sliver of joy or hope. The fierce knot of admiration, resentment, shame and fury that tightened in the pit of my stomach is one of those background sensations of childhood, like the taste of lemon sherbet or tomatoes on fried bread, flavours that can be blown back on the wind of memory or association to torture and now, of course, to amuse.

Swimming was for me the closest a human being could come to flight. The freedom of it, the ease, the elegance, the delirious escape. Every living creature but Fry could swim. The tiniest tadpole, the most reluctant cat, the most primitive amoeba and the simplest daphnia.