Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Whereas, ‘Tsh, I’m sure had tuppence somewhere was less likely to raise a hue and cry.

Those changing rooms at Stouts Hill, then later at Uppingham. From Mary Hench’s boot to the regular, almost daily ransacking of boys’ pockets for cash, changing rooms have been my killing fields.

I’m still trying to find excuses for myself. I’m wondering whether it was some kind of vengeance. I hated games so much, hated so much those who loved them and excelled at them. Was that why the preferred locus of theft for me was always the changing room, with its casually dropped jock-straps, muddy laces and stink of stale sweat?

Did I hate games because I was so shite at them, or was I so shite at them because I hated them and did I hate them because of…

THE BATHS

amp;

THE SHOWERS?

Is that where it all begins? With the cock-shy terror of the showers?

It did consume me, the thought of undressing in front of others. It ate at me like acid throughout my schooldays and beyond.

There’s more on this theme coming later. Let’s just say for the time being that I was wicked. When I wanted money or sweets, I stole them and I didn’t care from whom. From my mother’s handbag at home or from the desks and hanging clothes of my fellow pupils. For the moment, we’ll call me a weasley cunt and have done with it.

So, there we are. I’m back in the dormitory sellotaping together nine or ten coins. With a neatly filled-in order-form they are slipped into an envelope which I stuff with a handkerchief to make an innocent package – after all, perhaps the postman may be an awful thief and if he felt the coins he might just steal them, and wouldn’t that be too dreadful…

It was Julian Mather’s handkerchief that did the stuffing as it happens, the nametape lovingly stitched by a sister, a nanny or an au pair perhaps. Myself, to the great aggravation of my mother, I could never keep a handkerchief for longer than a week.

‘What do you do with them, darling? Eat them?’

And I would repeat the eternal schoolboy lie.

‘Oh, everybody loses their handkerchiefs, Mummy.’

Or perhaps I would blame the school laundry. ‘Nobody’s handkerchief comes back. Everyone knows that…’

So, down the stairs I crept, on the hunt now for postage stamps.

I knew that Cromie was umpiring a cricket match and that his study was likely to be unlocked.

It was an intensely exciting pleasure to be illicitly alone in the headmaster’s study. On one occasion when I had been there before, rifling though his papers, I had come across a report on myself. It concerned my Eleven Plus results.

We had taken the Eleven Plus at Stouts Hill without ever knowing what it was or what it meant. My form master, Major Dobson, had simply come in one day with a pile of papers and said, ‘You’re all getting rather lazy, so I’ve decided you can keep yourselves busy with these.’

He had handed out some strangely printed papers and told us we had half an hour or fifty minutes or whatever it was to answer all the questions.

We were never told that this was the notorious Eleven Plus, the national compulsory test that separated the children of the land into Grammar School children and Secondary Modern children, dummies and smart-arses, failures and achievers, smarmy gits and sad no-hopers, greasy clever-clogses and rejected thickies. A stupider and more divisive nonsense has rarely been imposed upon a democratic nation. Many lives were trashed, many hopes blighted, many prides permanently dented on account of this foolish, fanatical and irrational attempt at social engineering.

Since all of us at prep school were bound for independent public schools who took no notice of such drivel anyway, the whole thing was considered by the Stouts Hill staff to be a massive irrelevance, a tedious and impertinent piece of bureaucracy to be got though with as little fuss as possible and certainly without the boys needing to be told anything about it.

The examination itself took the form of one of those fatuous Eynsecky IQ tests, mostly to do with shape-recognition and seeing what new word could be slipped between two existing words to make two phases, that sort of hum-dudgeon…

BLOW… LOT

… for example, to which the answer would be JOB, as in ‘blow job’ and ‘job lot’ – though I’ve a feeling that may not have been one of the actual questions set for us on the day. I remember questions like:

‘HEAR is to LISTEN as SEE is to…?‘ or

‘Complete this numerical sequence 1,3,5,7,11…?‘

And so on.

So, foraging through the headmaster’s desk one afternoon I had happened upon a list which called itself Eleven Plus results, listing Intelligence Quotient Results or some such guff. I noticed it because my name was at the top with an asterisk typed next to it and the words ‘Approaching genius’ added in brackets. Gromie, the headmaster had underlined it in his blue-black ink and scrawled, ‘Well that bloody explains everything…’

It will seem boasting wherever I go with this, but I was not in the least pleased to learn that I had a high IQ. For a start I didn’t like the ‘approaching’ part of the phase ‘approaching genius’ (if you’re going to be a freak, be a complete freak, no point at all in going at it half-cock) and secondly I wriggled in discomfort at the idea of being singled out for something over which I felt I had no control. They might as well have exclaimed at my height or hair colour for all that I felt it had anything to do with me as a person.

Years later as an adolescent, when I fell into the error of confusing my brain with my self, I actually went so tragically far as to send off for and complete the Mensa application test and proved to myself that I was more than ‘approaching’ genius and felt extremely self-satisfied. It was only when I realised that the kind of intelligence that wants to get into Mensa, succeeds in getting into Mensa and then runs Mensa and the kind of intelligence that I thought worth possessing were so astronomically distant from each other, that the icing fell off the cake with a great squelch. It is on occasions like this that I praise God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my jewishness and the loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and the respectable that these seem to have inculcated in me. I could so easily, given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my string of DNA, have turned into one of those awful McWhirterish ticks, one of those asocial right-wing libertarian freaks who think their ability to find anagrams and solve Rubik’s cubes is a serious index of mental value. Having said which, I was determined to solve Rubik’s Cube myself and pride myself on my ability to do the Times crossword quickly. I square this rather vile vanity with myself by claiming that I do these things to show that it is possible to have a knack with such games and not be a graceless Freedom Association beardie.or a Clive Sinclair style loon. Also, if I’m honest, I submit myself to these forms of mental masturbation from time to time to prove to myself that my brain hasn’t yet been rotted away by drugs and alcohol. My great Cambridge friend, Kim Harris, the friend to whom I dedicated my second novel, The Hippopotamus, is a superb chess player, attaining a Master level at a young age: he takes a wicked delight in drinking at the chess board and being wholly unlike the scurfy, bottle-end spectacled schlemiels whom he faces over the board. I think we are both honest enough to admit that we are each in our own way guilty of snobbery of a quite dreadful kind.