Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure you haven’t. And what have we got here then?’

If the memory weren’t so absurdly anachronistic, I could almost swear that Pollock ripped open one of the flying saucers and put his tongue to the sherbet like a Hollywood cop tasting white powder.

‘But it’s not from the village shop! It’s not, it’s not!’

There was no getting through to this idiot.

‘Christ, you’re for the high jump this time,’ said Pollock, turning away with all my spoils.

As he spoke we both heard the bell ring for tea. He looked up towards the main school buildings.

‘By the ships straight after tea,’ he grunted and stumped up the hill.

How strange that the phrase ‘by the ships’ has only just come back to me.

At one end of a corridor, the other end of which led to the headmaster’s study, there were two model battleships mounted in glass cases. A prefect who sent you to see the headmaster always said ‘By the ships, after lunch…‘ or ‘One more squeak from you, and you’ll be outside the ships’. Odd that I didn’t remember those ships earlier on in the telling of the story. I think one of them may have been HMS Hood, but maybe I’m wrong. I am certain too that they had red paint on the funnel which seems unlikely in a royal naval vessel. Perhaps they were cruise liners. Whatever they were, they spelled disaster.

With rising panic I stumbled up after Pollock screaming at him that I hadn’t, I hadn’t, I hadn’t been to the village shop. I heard only answering echoes of laughter as he disappeared into the school.

I heard a small voice at my elbow.

‘What’s the matter, Fry? Whatever is the matter?’

I looked down to see the anxious brown eyes of Bunce blinking up at me.

I wiped a sleeve across my snot-running nose and tear-stained cheeks. I could not bear it that one who so admired me should see me in such a state.

As I was wiping that sleeve the idea came into my head fully born and fully armed. The speed of its conception, birth and growth almost took my breath away. I had followed Evans earlier in the afternoon all the way from the electric fence to Cromie’s study without being able to think of any defence to any accusation and now – in deeper trouble by far – a rescue plan had emerged in a second. It was complete in my mind before I had even removed the sleeve from my face.

As Biggles never tired of telling his comrades, there is always a way. Always. No matter how tight the squeak, and remember chums, we’ve been in tighter squeaks than this, there is always a way out. Algy, look lively and pass me that rope…

‘Pollock’s just caught me with a load of tuck from the village shop,’ I said in a low voice, laden with doom.

Bunce’s eyes rounded still further. I could tell that the glamour and exoticism of village shop tuck frightened and fascinated him. This was by now at least his second year, I suppose, but somehow, like little Arthur in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he was always functionally the youngest boy in the school. I remember that earlier on this summer term, a master had casually pointed out to him that he had turned up to a PE lesson in white plimsolls instead of black and he had gone redder than a geranium and wept and wobbled for days afterwards. His sixth term at the school, he hadn’t even been close to punishment or the gentlest chastisement, but it was his first ever deviation from the letter of school law and it had upset him deeply.

‘Golly,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get the whack last week for…?‘

‘Exactly,’ I said, interrupting. The thing was to keep the little chap off balance. ‘And Gromie said if I was caught again I would be expelled.’

‘Expelled?’ Bunce breathed the word in a terrified whisper as though it were nitro-glycerine that might explode if handled too roughly.

I nodded tragically. ‘I don’t know what my mother and father would do if I were expelled,’ I said, sniffing a little sniff.

‘But why?’

‘Why? Because it would upset them so much, of course!’ I said, nettled by such denseness.

‘No, I mean why did you go to the village shop again if you knew you would get expelled?’

Well, I mean really. Some people.

‘It’s… it’s hard to explain,’ I said. ‘The thing is, never mind why, there’s just no way out, that’s the point. Pollock’s confiscated the evidence and he’s going to…‘ My voice trailed off in sudden wonderment as an idea seemed to catch hold. ‘Unless, that is, unless..

‘Unless what?’

‘No, no… it’s asking too much,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Unless what?’ squeaked Bunce again.

‘It’s no good, I’d better face it. I’m done for.’

‘Unless what?’ Bunce almost stamped the ground in his desperation to be told.

‘Well… I was thinking that if I could say that I hadn’t been to the village shop but that I had got the tuck from someone else…’

I let the thought hang in the air.

‘You mean,’ said Bunce, ‘that if a boy said that he was the one who had been to the village shop not you then you wouldn’t be the one who had been and you wouldn’t be expelled?’

I didn’t bother to follow the literal meaning of that peculiar sentence but assumed he was along the right lines and nodded vigorously. ‘Trouble is,’ I said grimly, ‘who on earth would do that for me?’

I watched, with the detached and curious interest of the truly evil, as Bunce blinked, bit his lip, swallowed, bit his lip and blinked again.

‘I would,’ he said at long last.

‘Oh, no!’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t possibly ask you. I mean you’re far too…’

‘Far too what?’

‘Well… I mean, everyone knows, you’re a bit of a… you know…

I allowed myself to stumble, too tactful to finish the thought.

Bunce’s face grew dark. ‘A bit of a what?’ he said, in something close to a growl.

‘Well,’ I said gently, ‘a bit of a goody-goody.’ He flushed and looked at the ground. I may just as well have charged him with complicity in the holocaust.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m the idiot. I don’t know what it is with me. I just can’t help being bad.’

He looked up at me, suddenly and for the first time annoyed with himself because he just couldn’t help being good. Which is what I had wanted him to feel.

Christ, I’m smart, I said to myself. Perhaps this is what is meant by ‘approaching genius’. Do I know how to play a person like a fish, or do I not…

I could see that Bunce was coming to an independent decision, or rather that he believed he was coming to an independent decision.

‘What’s got to happen,’ Bunce said, in a voice firm with resolution, ‘is that you’ve got to tell Mr Gromie that it was me who went to the village shop. Me not you.'

‘Oh but, Bunce…’

‘No. That’s what you’ve got to do. Now come on, or we’ll be punished for being late for tea as well.’

‘Good Christ, Fry!’ Cromie yelled, pacing up and down the study like a caged Tasmanian devil. ‘Not an hour after I congratulate you on your nerve than you’re back here proving to me that it’s not nerve, it’s cheek, it’s rudeness, it’s bloody insolence!’

I stood on the carpet, biding my time.

‘Did I, or did I not, boy, warn you last time that if you dared so much as to smell that blasted shop again I would have your guts for garters? Well?’

‘But, sir…’

‘Answer me, damn you! Did I, or did I not?’

‘But sir, I haven’t been to the village shop.’