Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Picnic bars, but only the village shop had rice-paper flying saucers filled with sherbet, pink foamy shrimps, rubbery little milk bottles and chocolate buttons sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

The ownership and sly proffering of paper bags filled with those forbidden fruits became almost as great a totem of heroism as the possession of pubic hair, and was shared with friends in just the same shifty but giggling, shy but boastful manner. Since no amount of pinching, teasing, soaping, threatening and cajoling could cause even the blondest silken millimetre of pubic hair to sprout from me, sweets became my testament of manliness.

Aside from all that, the very act of slipping and sliding around the lake’s edge, cutting down past the boathouse, across the gymkhana field with its dressage poles and tatty jumps, over the second games field, across the lane and into Out of Bounds territory had its own thrill. At this time too, nature’s best side, the side that didn’t creep and crawl and ooze, was beginning to open itself up to me. Cider With Rosie, in literary terms, was just about an item of school uniform to us; many of the boys knew Laurie Lee as a friend, he sometimes drank his beer in Uley’s pub and on special occasions came to read to us. A killer Cyborg from Vark would fall in love with the countryside if he heard Laurie Lee reading about it.

The walk from the school to the shop was, I reckon, a little over a country mile, but I liked to linger. I picture myself, eyes streaming and face blotched with hay fever, sitting under elm trees, firing plantain buds, blowing grassblade fanfares through my thumbs and rubbing nettled shins with dock. The overpowering breath of watermint from the skirting of the lake margin would stay with me until one of my sandals had broken the crisp leathery surface of a cowpat and from then on I would carry with me the decent tang of sun-cured dung. There was a curious pleasure to be gained too, perhaps a hangover from playing rudies with Timothy in Chesham, from pulling down my shorts and crapping in the grass unseen by all but cattle. Maybe that’s a primal thing, maybe it’s just that I am weird.

I never liked to be accompanied on these trips. I once tried going with someone else, but it felt wrong. He was too scared to dwell on the journey itself, too keen to eat all the sweets before getting back to school, too frightened, in short, of getting caught. Getting caught, I think now, is what it was all about to me.

People sometimes say to me these days, ‘You know, I was just as bad as you at school, Stephen. Thing is, I never got found out.’

Well, where’s the fun in that? I always want to reply. That’s a boast? ‘I never got found out, clever, clever me.

I am quite aware, by the way, that I am the exception and they are the rule. I’m the freak in this equation, I know that. Not that I actively, consciously knew that I wanted to be caught.

I did love sweets, God how I loved them. The mouthful of fillings today and the gaps where grinders should be show that I loved sweets long past the proper age.

One afternoon, perhaps I was eleven years old and moving towards a kind of seniority within the school, I came across a joke shop catalogue lying about in one of the dormitories. I suppose the rest of the school was playing cricket and I had managed as usual to get myself Off Games by inducing an asthma attack. I loved the feeling of having the school to myself, the distant shouts and echoes without and the absolute stillness within. My heart always sank when the final whistles went, the school noises drew closer and I knew that I was no longer the master of the lost domain.

A voice is whispering in my ear that this joke shop catalogue belonged to a boy called Nick Charles-Jones, but this is of minor importance. For a half-crown postal order, it seemed, a fellow could have dispatched to him:

· chattering false teeth

· a small round membrane of cloth and tin which allowed one to throstle, warble and apparently throw one’s voice like a ventriloquist

· a bar of soap that turned the user soot black

· itching powder

· a sugar cube that melted and left a realistic looking spider floating on the surface of the victim s tea-cup

· a finger-ring buzzer

· a look-alike chewing gum pack that snapped like a mouse-trap.

Trouble was, I had no postal order, nor any access to such a thing. Unlike Billy Bunter, the Winslow Boy and other famous schoolchildren, I didn’t even really know what a postal order was. To be perfectly frank with you I’m still not that sure today.

However. It occurred to me that if I mustered up two shillings and sixpence in loose change and then stuck all the coins together with sticky tape and sent them off for ‘The most hilarious collection of jokes and gags EVER assembled’ with a note of apology accompanying, then only the flintiest-hearted mail-order joke shop would refuse to honour my order.

I had about a shilling on me, which left one and sixpence to go. One and six (seven and a half pence in today’s currency) was not a great deal of money, but any sum that you do not have when you are eleven years old seems a fortune. I expect today schoolchildren get sent four credit card application forms every day through the post like everybody else, but things were different then. The sand gold and navy blue of a Barclaycard had only just been introduced and was at first taken up by rather dodgy characters -the sort of people who smoked Rothmans, drove E-Types and swanked about the place with BEA bags over their shoulders and were best played by Leslie Phillips or Guy Middleton.

Stealing had become second nature to me by this time and the boys’ changing room was the place to start. Up and down the pegs I would go, lightly tapping the trousers and blazers until I heard the chink of coins.

You can steal from the school, you can steal from a shop, you can steal from a bank. Stealing money from the clothing of friends is… what is it? It is not naughty or unstable or unmanageable or difficult: it is as bad as bad can be. It is wicked, it is evil. It makes you a…

THIEF

… and nobody loves a thief.

I still blush and shiver when I hear the word used aggressively. It crops up in films on television.

Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that we appear to have a thief among us.

Stop thief’

You thieving little rat…

Why, you’re nothing but a cheating, lying thief…

It’s still doing it to me, that word.

The changing rooms. The clink of money. Breathing hard. Mouth parted. Heart hammering. They are all outside playing games. Coast is clear.

I am trying hard, even now, to forgive myself for these years of stealing. The shoplifting, the more glamorous insanity with credit cards later on, all that can be laughed or shrugged off. Perhaps.

But this, this was nasty, this was sly.

‘There always was something sly about you, Fry.’

There was a way some masters and prefects had of pronouncing my surname that seemed to me, in my guilt, to mean cunning and unclean and ratty and foxy and devious and unhealthy and deceitful and duplicitous and sly. Sly Fry.

I could argue in my defence that I spread the load that afternoon. I could say that I needed (needed?) one and sixpence, so I took just small quantities of three-penny bits and pennies to make up the sum, rather than cleaning out and impoverishing one particular victim.

But that’s not right.

I took small amounts from several people to lessen the chance of there being a fuss.

‘Bloody hell. I had a bob here at lunchtime…‘ would have been the cry of any boy robbed of a whole shilling.