Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘While on the subject of intelligence, I have to say that I have never found it an appealing quality in anyone and therefore have never expected anyone to find it appealing in me. It grieves me deeply that many people who think me intelligent or believe that I fancy myself intelligent or have read somewhere that some journalist has described me as such, expect me to judge others by intelligence. The number of times strangers have opened conversations with me in this manner…

‘Of course, I’m no brain box like you…’

‘I know I’monly stupid, but…’

Or worse still, ‘Don’t you find it rather dull being surrounded by actors for so much of the time? I mean let’s face it, most of them are thick as two short planks.’

I just don’t know where to begin with this kind of talk.

Even if it were true that most actors are stupid, and it isn’t, the idea that I might project myself as the kind of person who looks for intelligence in others as an index of value sends the creepiest of shivers down my spine. I might use long words from time to time and talk rapidly or name-drop culturally here and there and display any number of other silly donnish affectations, but if this gives the impression that I might admire a similar manner or nature in others, then it makes me just want to go ‘bibbly-bobbly-bubbly-snibbly wib-wib floppit’ for the rest of my life, read nothing but Georgette Heyer, watch nothing but Emmerdale, do nothing but play snooker, take coke and get drunk and use no words longer than ‘wanker’ and ‘cunt’.

I don’t know many people who can do the Times crossword more quickly than me. There again I do know dozens and dozens of people vastly more intelligent than me for whom the simplest cryptic clue is a mystery – and one they are not in the least interested in penetrating.

Also, it must be said, I don’t know many people as capable of my kinds of supreme dumbness.

I’m the last person on earth to bear with equanimity that kind of Bernard Inghamy, Fred Truemany Yorkshireman who blathers on about nous, gumption, common sense and the University of Life -‘you see, they’re all very well these Oxbridge educated so-called intellectuals but have you ever seen them trying to boil a tyre or change an egg…?‘ and all that pompous bum-wash, but, awful as such attitudes are they are no worse than the eugenic snobbery of those who believe that the ability to see the word ‘carthorse’ scrambled in the word ‘orchestra’ or to name every American state in alphabetical order raises them above the level of the average twitcher, trainspotter or Gyles Brandreth style word-game funster.

The discovery of Cromie’s scrawled ‘Well that bloody explains everything …‘ next to my name determined me to investigate his study on every available occasion. I did not like the idea that things were being written about me without my knowing it.

So, back to our main time-line again. I’m in the study alone. This time I’m looking for stamps.

Cromie had one of those elegant polished desks, with lots of knobs and sliders and fluted volutes and secret drawers – the kind of desk a sly fox like me loved to play with.

I succeeded in pressing a wooden stud under the desk: a section flew back on a spring and what did I see?

Sweets.

Bags and bags of sweets.

Confiscated sweets. Foam shrimps, fruit salads, blackjacks, flying-saucers, red-liquorice bootlaces, every desirable item of Uley village shop bounty that could be imagined.

In that lips-parted, heart-pounding, face-flushed state that can signify sexual ecstasy or the thrill of guilt and fear, I grabbed from each bag four, five, six or seven sweets, stuffing them into my pockets, unable to believe that such good fortune could have come my way. You set out to steal a few postage stamps and there before you is a drawer filled with all the treasure you have ever dreamed of.

Granddaddy was watching, that I knew. It was the one great worm in every delicious apple I ever stole. My mother’s father had only recently died and he had become my figura rerum, my familiar. I knew whenever I stalked about my bedroom naked, sitting on mirrors, sticking a finger up my bum or doing any of those other mad, guilty childish things that constitute infantile sexual play to the psychologist, that Granddaddy Was Watching. Whenever I did truly bad things too, like stealing, lying and cheating, Granddaddy Was Watching then. I had learned to ignore him, of course, and the disappointed look in his eyes as he turned away in disgust. He expected so much better of his grandson than this. But then I had learned to ignore the sad, sweet expectations of the soft-eyed Jesus who also watched me whenever I was bad. At that time I never thought of myself as Jewish, which is perhaps as well, or those two Jews, one recently dead, the other fluttering like a dove over the altar every morning at chapel, might have driven me to a wilder state of madness and self-loathing than I was already in.

Just as I crammed a few final penny chews into my last spare pocket I heard, not too far distant, the creak of a footstep upon a wooden plank.

I pushed the secret drawer shut and peered through the study door.

I could see no one there, just the deserted hallway and the birdcages. Perhaps the mynah bird had been practising new sounds.

I edged myself out of the study, closed the door quietly and turned, just in time to see Mr Dealey, the school butler, emerge from the dining room, bearing silver candlesticks and a vast epergne.

‘Ah, now then, Master Fry,’ he said in his Jack-Warner-I’ve-been-about-the-world-a-bit-and-have-got-your-number kind of a way.

I was sure that he had no idea that I had been inside the study. Surely he had seen me at the door and thought I was waiting outside?

‘You won’t find the Headmaster inside on a fine afternoon like this, young Fry,’ he said, confirming the thought. ‘You shouldn’t be inside yourself. Young lad. Sunny day. It’s not healthy.’

I started to pant a little, and pointed to my chest. ‘Off games,’ I said with a brave, shoulder-heaving wheeze.

‘Ho,’ said Dealey. ‘Then perhaps you should come with me and learn how to polish silver.’

‘No fear!’ I said and scuttled away.

Close calls of that nature always charged me up into a state of mania. My passion at the time for the prison-of-war genre in books and films derived, I suppose, from an identification with the POWs and the edge of discovery and detection on which they permanently lived… replacing the stove over the tunnel’s hiding-place just before the entrance of the Commandant, popping their heads down seconds before the searchlight revealed them. Books like The Wooden Horse and Reach for the Sky were full of these moments and I consumed them with a passionate fever.

This time, I was away and free, a whole pocketful of sweets to the good, not a Jerry in sight and the Swiss border only a few miles hence.

I slipped out into the garden and made my way towards the lake. The boathouse there was a good place to sit and eat sweets.

On the way however, I encountered Donaldson, who was also off games and he had a new game to show me.

An electric fence had just been erected around a section of one of the fields. This area was to be turned into a fourth eleven cricket pitch or something similar, and the fence was needed to stop the ponies from going near. An announcement had been made about it and how we were not to touch it.

‘But how about this,’ said Donaldson, taking me towards the fence.

I followed him in some trepidation, he was no particular friend of mine, Donaldson. He was big and beefy, only off games because he was injured, not because he was cowardly or a weed. He had never bullied me, nor ever tried to, but I feared some practical joke which would end with me being pushed against the electric fence and being given an electric shock. Growing up in a house with Victorian wiring, I had got to know enough about electric shocks to dread their sullen thumping kicks.