Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I heard the grand sounds of approaching seniors.

‘Okay then, Mum,’ someone said.

‘Don’t say “okay”, darling. And you will write this time, won’t you?’

‘Okay, Mum.’

My bro and I never called our parents Mum and Dad. It was always Mummy and Daddy until years later when Mother and Father were officially sanctioned. Towards adulthood we allowed ourselves to use, with self-conscious mock-Pooterism, Ma and Pa.

Last term, I had put my hand up in an art lesson and said, ‘Mummy, can I have another piece of charcoal?’ The form had howled with laughter.

There again, during the first weeks of summer holidays I often called my mother ‘Sir’ or ‘Matron’.

Bunce buried himself in the Trigan Empire, but I knew that he was listening to the sounds too and I could tell that the confidence and loudness of the other boys’ voices terrified him. He clutched the sides of the comic so hard that little rips appeared on the outer pages.

On the way to Paddington after lunch I had felt more dread, infinitely more terror and despair at the prospect of school than I had the term before. During the long summer holiday Roger had told me to expect this. Homesickness was much worse the second and third terms than it was the first. Bunce had come as a godsend therefore, something to take my mind off my own fears.

The door to our carriage slid open with a loud bang. ‘Oh God, it’s Fry’s Turkish Delight. And what the hell are you doing by the window?’

‘Hello, Mason,’ I said.

‘Come on, shove over.

Bunce started to rise like a courteous old commuter offering his seat to a heavily-packaged woman. ‘Would you like…?‘ he began huskily.

‘No, I want Fry’s seat, if he hasn’t stunk it out yet.’ Well there it was. I felt my face flush scarlet as I got up mumbling something inaudible, and removed myself to the corner seat farthest from the window.

For five minutes I had enjoyed the sensation of someone looking up to and admiring me. Bunce had respected me. Believed in me. Trusted me. Now the little puppy would see that the rest of the school treated me as if I was no one. Just another tiresome squit. I sat in my new seat, trying to look unconcerned and stared down at my bare knees and the grazes and indentations of gravel still there from a bicycle fall. Only yesterday afternoon I had been riding along the lanes listening to skylarks high in the huge Norfolk skies and watching partridges tread stubble in the fields. Three weeks ago I had had my eighth birthday party and been taken to see The Great Race at the Gaumont in Norwich.

Mason settled himself into his conquered seat and looked across at Bunce with great curiosity and an air of faint repugnance, as if Bunce might be of a breed he had never run into before and hoped never to encounter again.

‘You,’ said Mason, kicking across at him. ‘Have you got a name then?’

The reply came as something of a shock.

‘I have got a name,’ said Bunce, rising, ‘but it’s none of your bloody business.’

Mason looked stupefied. There was nothing in the least bad about him. In taking my seat and remarking on my smell he had meant no particular insult, he was merely exercising the natural privilege of seniority. Seniority is pay-back time. He had been treated like a worm when he was small, now it was his turn to treat those under him like worms. He was ten, for heaven’s sake. He was allowed to wear long trousers. At prep school, ten is to eight what forty is to twenty in adult life.

‘I’m going over there,’ said Bunce, pointing to the seat next to mine. ‘It smells better over there.’ He threw himself down beside me with a determined bounce on the springs and then ruined everything by bursting into tears.

Mason was denied the chance of any response to this astonishing eruption by the entrance into the compartment of Kaloutsis and his parents. It was not at all done for Family to board the train, but Kaloutsis was Greek and his parents serenely above the finer points of English protocol.

‘Ah, and here’s a little one,’ cried Mrs Kaloutsis, swooping down on Bunce. ‘And no one looking after you?’

‘Thank you,’ Bunce snivelled, ‘but Fry S. J. is looking after me very well indeed. Very well. Very well indeed. I had a smut in my eye and he lent me his handkerchief.’

Train boys were generally the sons of military or colonial parents, and had flown in to London Airport to be picked up by uncles, aunts or godparents who would take them on to Paddington. Most other boys at Stouts Hill were driven to school by their parents.

The reserved compartments filled up over the next quarter-hour with deeply tanned boys returning from hot weeks in places like Northern Rhodesia, Nigeria, India, Aden, the West Indies and Ceylon. One boy, Robert Dale, whom I liked, sat opposite me and Bunce and told us about India. Dale’s father edited an English language newspaper in Bombay and

Dale always shouted ‘Aiee!’ when he was in pain. It had amazed me greatly when I first heard him stubbing his toe against the foot of the bed in the dormitory, since I had never imagined that expressions of pain could vary. I had thought ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Ow!’ were the same all over the world. I had suffered a hot and bothered exchange in my first French lesson, for example, when I was told that the French for ‘Oh!’ was ‘Ah!’

‘Then how do they say “Oh”, sir?’

‘They say “Ah.”’

‘Well then, how do they say “Ah”?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Fry.’

I had sulked for the rest of the lesson.

Dale took off his shoes and socks and leaned back. He had the most splendidly fine feet, with a perfect, even spread of toes. At the beginning of every autumn term boys like him who spent their school holidays in Africa, Asia or the West Indies would show off by running across gravel barefoot without any pain. By the end of the term, with winter set in, their feet would have lost their natural tough layers of callused skin and they would be just the same as the rest of us.

A guard looked in and performed a brief headcount. He gazed into the middle distance and told us that the last boy who had rested his foot on a seat had been arrested by the police at Didcot and put in prison, where he still languished on a diet of bread and water.

‘Sounds better than school food,’ said Dale.

The guard grunted at our giggles and left. Boaters were thrown on to luggage-racks, feet put up on seats and talk turned to soccer, what had been done in the hols, who was going to be made prefect and the whole Edwardian schoolboy novel nonsense. Mason seemed to have forgotten all about Bunce’s strange outburst and was delighting the boy opposite with underarm farts.

After one of those squealing, juddering, stomach-dropping false starts with which trains so tactlessly articulate human emotion, we pulled ourselves out of the great shed of Paddington and steamed west.

The Gloucestershire town of Stroud, sanctified by the memory and to the memory of Laurie Lee, produces -or used to produce – almost all the baize that Britain and her dominions ever thought to use. Baize for the doors into servants’ quarters, baize for billiards, snooker and pool, baize for card tables, baize for casinos, auction-rooms and baize to drape over the cages of songbirds to fool them into thinking it night. Some miles to the south of Stroud stands the Bury, a great green hill over whose shoulders one might believe the weavers of the Slad Valley once threw a huge bolt of their baize as a giant billboard to show off their product to the world. The small village of Uley snuggles itself into the thicker nap at the base of this fuzzy-felt hill and sleeps there contentedly, unaware of triple-thick shakes, pay-per-view Fight Nights, Lottery Winsday and driver’s side air bags. The village of Uley still believes in Gestemered parish magazines, dividend tea, sherbet dips, Heinz salad cream and half-timbered Morris vans. The village of Uley grows lobelias and alyssum on the front fringes of lawn that bank up to warm ham-stone cottages out of which rumble the deep tones of Long Wave wireless. The village pub of Uley radiates a warm vapour in which are mingled the vanilla richness of pipe tobacco and the malty hum of Usher’s Ales. The village church of Uley has its fragrance too, a compound of Esso Blue, Mansion furniture wax and hymn books in a state of permanently suspended decay.