Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

And I would never be able to do it, never. Never be able to join in, splashing and laughing and ducking and grabbing and roaring with the others. Never. Save in my mind.

We talk of the callousness of the young. ‘Children can be so cruel,’ we say. But only those who are concerned with others can be cruel. Children are both careless and carefree in their connections with others. For one nine-year-old to think passingly about the non-swimming agonies of another would be ridiculous.

There were contemporaries of mine at prep school who laboured and tortured themselves over their absolute failure to understand the rudiments of sentence structure: the nominative and accusative in Latin and Greek, the concept of an indirect object, the ablative absolute and the sequence of tenses – these things kept them awake at night. There were others who tossed in insomniac misery because of their fatness, freckledness or squintedness. I don’t remember, I don’t remember because I didn’t care. Only my own agony mattered.

Nothing prayed for – it is life’s strictest and least graceful rule – comes to you at the time of praying. Good things always come too late. I can swim now.

I cannot recall how and when I passed my test and won those blue trunks. I know it did happen. I know that somehow I learned to doggy-paddle without the tombstone and the water-wings and that I completed my two compulsory lengths. I know too that I discovered how swimming was never going to be that fine, free soaring expansion of joy I had dreamt it would be.

The pain of the red trunks, however, was as a minor aggravation, a teasing itch when compared to the blistering agony of Cong Prac.

Stouts Hill never gave off an atmosphere of being any more or less religious than other schools I have known. It was with some surprise that I discovered not long ago that Robert Angus, the headmaster, had been a writer of deeply spiritual Christian poetry. Today, with the foul miasma of evangelism rising up to engulf us from every corner of God’s poor earth it is hard to remember that good Christian lives were once lived without words like ‘outreach’ and ‘salvation’ being dragged into general conversation. God was a dignified, generous, father and Christ his beautiful, liquid-eyed son: they loved you even when they saw you on the lavatory or caught you stealing sweets. That was Christianity, something quite unconnected to hymns, psalms, anthems and the liturgy of the church.

In the 1960s Britain was just beginning to slither about in the horrid mess made by sacred music written especially for children – ‘Jonah’, ‘The Lord of the Dance’, ‘Morning Has Broken’ and all that preposterous rubbish. New tunes for ‘0 Jesus I have Promised’ were being composed, as music masters and idle, fatuous composers the length and breadth of the land were bothering us all with new carols and new settings for the Te Deum and Nunc Dimittis, some of them even ransacking the rhetoric of negro spirituals and American gospel songs, with results so nauseatingly embarrassing that I still blush to recall them. White, well-nourished British children who holidayed with their parents in old plantation houses in the Bahamas and Jamaica, clapping their hands, thumping tambourines and striking triangles to the lisped words of ‘Let my people go’ and ‘Nobody knows the trouble I see’, to a clash of cymbals and symbols that still harrows the imagination.

But there, the very thought of music masters clapping their hands in rhythm and calling out ‘And one and two and three and ta-ta-ta-tab!!’ will always send the blood simmering to my head, never mind ethnic guilt and other associations.

Every morning after breakfast at Stouts Hill, a bell rang for chapel, a service which involved no more than a perfunctory clutch of prayers, a lesson read by a prefect (hitting hard, in time honoured British fashion, the italicised words of the text of the Authorised Version as if they had been put there for emphasis) and a known hymn, but on Sundays there was held a proper service, with collects, psalms, canticles, versides, responses, anthems and a sermon. The choir dressed up in blue surplices and starched ruffs and processed with candles, the masters added the appropriate ermine or scarlet hoods to their gowns and we boys turned out in our best suits and tidiest hair, all checked up in the dormitories by Sister Pinder, Matron and a squad of sergeant-majorly prefects. Each Sunday service, according to litany and season, had its own psalm, and Mr Hemuss, the music master, liked also to use Sundays as an opportunity to introduce us to hymns we had never sung before. This meant they had to be learned. After morning prayers on Saturday therefore we stayed behind in the’ chapel (actually a gymnasium with an altar) and Cong Prac was held – an abbreviation, though it never ever crossed my mind as such at the time, for Congregational Practice. Here the setting for the morrow s psalm and the tunes for the morrow’s unfamiliar hymns would be gone through, bar by bar. Saturday’s breakfast was always boiled eggs, and there is nothing so unpleasant in all this world as a roomful of human beings who have just eaten boiled eggs. Every fart and burp sulphurises the room with the most odious humming guff, a smell I can never smell to this day without returning to the hell of Gong Prac.

I have just leaked all over you the feelings of longing and self-reproach that tortured me over my inability to swim. These feelings were as nothing, are as nothing, to what I felt and still feel about God’s cruelty, God’s malice, God’s unforgivable cruelty in denying me the gift of music.

Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. So E. M. Forster wrote somewhere. If swimming suggested to me the idea of physical flight, then music suggested something much more. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry ‘Wow!’ all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

Other arts do this too, but other arts are for ever confined and anchored by reference. Sculptures are either figuratively representative or physically limited words by their material, which is actual and palpable. The words in poems are referential, they breathe with denotation and connotation, suggestion and semantics, coding and signing. Paint is real stuff and the matter of painting contains itself in a frame. Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy ‘music-making’, all that grain of human performance, so messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-conscious painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fl speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.