Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘What?’ Gromie stopped mid-stride. ‘Are you trying to tell me…’ he gestured towards the bags of confiscated sweets on his desk. It simply amazed me that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind to check his own stash in the secret drawer. Maybe he had forgotten all about it.

‘No, sir. I was eating those, but…’

‘But what? You picked them off a tree? You fished

them out of the lake? I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’

I wasn’t born yesterday. Pull the other one. Have your guts for garters. Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Pull your socks up. Buck up your ideas.

I wonder if schoolmasters still talk like that.

‘No, sir, it’s just that I didn’t go to the village shop.’

‘What do you mean?’ Cromie almost clawed the air in his frustration. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well, sir, what I say, sir.’

‘Are you trying to tell me that someone else gave you those sweets?’

I nodded. At last he understood.

‘And who, may I ask, is this charitable person, this extraordinary philanthropist, who visits the village shop just so that he might bestow sweets on his friends like some benevolent lord of the manor distributing largess to his villeins? Hm? Who might this person be?’

‘I… I don’t like to sneak, sir…’

‘Ho, no. Ho no you don’t,’ Gromie wasn’t buying that one. ‘If you don’t want your promised six strokes, then you had better tell me and tell me this minute.’

My lower lip wobbled as the betrayal was wrung from me. ‘Well, sir. It was Bunce, sir.’

I do not believe I have ever seen a man more surprised. Gromie’s eyebrows shot up to the ceiling and his lips went instantly white.

‘Did you just say Bunce?’ he asked in a hoarse whisper of disbelief.

‘Sir, yes, sir.

‘Bunce as in Bunce?’

I nodded.

Cromie stared at me, eyeball to eyeball for about five seconds as if trying to pierce through to the very back of my soul. He shook his head, strode past me, flung open the door and yelled in a voice that thundered like Krakatoa, ‘Bunce! Bunce! Somebody find me Bunce!’

‘Oh dear,’ one of the parrots remarked, kicking the husk of a nut out of its cage. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’

I waited, standing my ground as I listened to the cries for Bunce echo around the school like calls for courtroom witnesses.

During tea I had looked across at Bunce’s table from time to time. He had been listlessly pushing fried bread into his mouth like a condemned man who has chosen the wrong last breakfast. When he had looked up and happened to catch my eye, his cheeks had blazed scarlet but his head had nodded emphatically up and down and his mouth had formed the word ‘Yes’. I had no doubts about my Bunce. Bunce was brave and Bunce was true.

Within three minutes Bunce was beside me on the carpet in Cromie’s study, his hands behind his back, his mouth set in a firm line, but his legs wobbling hopelessly in their shorts.

‘Bunce,’ said Cromie, sweetly, ‘Fry tells me that…

This was as far as he managed to get.

The dam burst and the torrent filled the room.

‘Sir, it’s true, sir. I went to the village shop, sir. I went. I did. I did go there. Fry went. I didn’t. I mean, I went, Fry didn’t. I went to the village shop, not Fry. I got the sweets for him. He didn’t buy any. It was me. I bought them all. I went to the village shop. I went to the village shop. I did…’ All this came at a pace that made Cromie blink with astonishment. It ended in a howling cyclone of weeping that embarrassed us all.

‘Fry, get out,’ said Cromie. ‘Sir, does that mean…?’

‘Just go. Wait outside. I shall call for you later.’

As I closed the door I heard Bunce’s voice squeaking out the words, ‘It is true, sir. Every word. I went to the village shop and I’m so sorry, sir, I shan’t ever again…’

There were too many people milling about to allow me to stay near and eavesdrop. The great cry for Bunce had fascinated the school.

‘What’s up, Fry?’ everyone wanted to know.

I shrugged my shoulders as if I didn’t care and walked to the end of the corridor down towards the ships.

Higher up the wall, above the Hood and the Dreadnought, or the Invincible and the Repulse or whatever they were, were wooden panels where the gilt names of scholars and other great achievers had been painted. I stood and looked at them. Le Poidevin, Winship, Mallett, de Vere, Hodge, Martineau and Hazell. I wondered for a brief second if my name would ever be up there, but dismissed the idea at once. I knew that it would never be. This was a list of the names of those who had joined in. They had gone on from being captains of rugger and captains of cricket to being captains of school and captains of industry. I wondered if, in a phrase that Major Dobson loved, they had also become Masters of their Fate and Captains of their Soul.

‘Are you a Major of your Soul then, sir, and is that better than being a Captain of your Soul?’ I remember I had asked him this once when he had read that Whitman poem to us and he had smiled cheerily at the question. I had loved Major Dobson because he had been a good teacher and because, in that strange and inappropriate way that children have, I had felt sorry for him. I think my mother had taken me to see a production of Rattigan’s Separate Tables at the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich when I was quite young, and since then I had always associated Majors with disappointment, regret and, that awful phrase, ‘passed over’.

‘Not bad for a passed-over Major…’ Colonel Ross says to Major Dolby in The Ipcress File.

In fact, I now know, Major Dobson had been captured by the Germans with the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. He then escaped and fought throughout the war right up through Sicily and Italy. True to the old cliché, he never talked about it. No more than did Mr Bruce who had spent the war years in a Japanese internment camp and taught History and Divinity with the panache and brio of an ancient fabulist. Being fiercely Scottish, the history he taught with such passion was of William Wallace, the Montrose Rebellion and the Jacobite Wars of 1715 and 1745. I have special reason to bless Jim Bruce as you will discover later.

I discovered these and other biographical details only two weeks ago when Ant Cromie kindly sent me a list of answers to a cartload of questions about Stouts Hill. Charles Knight, who taught me Latin and Greek and looked like Crippen the murderer but was the kindest and gentlest man who ever taught me, a man who loved to teach, had no interest in discipline or punishment whatsoever, and took immense pride in my taking the school’s Senior Greek Prize when I was twelve (I have it still, the collected works of John Keats) – he fought in the desert and in Italy too. I remember so clearly history lessons that involved the war, I remember its universal fascination to all of us, for all that it had ended twelve or thirteen years before we were born. Almost every boy in the school could identify the silhouette of a Dornier and a Heinkel and draw Hurricanes, Spitfires and Panzer tanks. Yet not once do I remember a single master refer to war as a personal experience. I would have bombarded, strafed and sniped them with questions, had I known. It puzzles me still, this silence of old soldiers.

Looking up at the names of the old boys always. made me think of the war. Although the school had only been founded in 1935, those names above the ships looked like the names of the war dead, they shared that same melancholy permanence. A contemporary school roll, however outré or grand the names, always sounds perky and chipper; the school roll of a generation ago has the sombre muffled note of a funeral bell.