Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I had not been staring up at le Poidevin and Winship and Mallett for long before I saw, reflected in the glass case of the ships, the study door open at the end of the corridor. I turned.

Cromie stood in the doorway and beckoned with a single curling finger. I walked down the corridor jauntily.

Somehow, I knew the game was up. I think too that I knew that it was right that it was up. Like a scared mutt darting out from between his master’s legs, Bunce shot from the study and rocketed down the corridor towards me. I caught the rolling whites of his eyes as he passed and thought I heard a panted word, which may have been ‘Sorry’.

As I approached Cromie and the open study door he turned to the six or seven boys who were hanging around, pretending to talk to the parrots and examine the pictures on the walls.

‘What are you lot doing here?’ he yelled. ‘Nothing better to do? Want some extra work?’

They fled in instant silent panic.

Now there was only me in the corridor, walking towards Cromie who was framed against the doorway, his outline dark against the window at the back of his study. The corridor seemed to be getting longer and longer, as in some truth-drug induced hallucination scene in The Avengers or Man in a Suitcase. Still his finger seemed to beckon, still every step that I took seemed to take me further from him.

When the door did close behind us the room was deadly quiet and the sounds of the school could not be heard. Even the parrots and the mynah bird had fallen into silence.

Cromie turned towards the window where the shutters were. The shutters that housed the canes.

‘Of course you know,’ said Cromie with a sigh, ‘that I am going to beat you, don’t you, Fry?’

I nodded and licked my lips.

‘I would just like to believe,’ he went on, ‘that you know why.’

I nodded again.

‘To go to the village shop is one thing. To send a boy like Bunce to go in your place is quite another. Let us not fool ourselves. Bunce would never have gone unless at your bidding. If you can see how cowardly that is, how vile and low and cowardly, then perhaps there is a scintilla of hope for you.’

That was the first time, I remember, that I ever heard the word ‘scintilla’. It is funny how the exact meaning of a new word can be so precisely understood in all its connotations, just from its first hearing.

‘Eight strokes, I think,’ said Cromie. ‘The most I have ever given. I hope never to have to give so many again.’

Bunce never forgave himself, in all the time I knew him, for letting me down. He remained convinced that somehow he could have played it better. He should have swaggered, acted the part of the real, wicked, dyed-in-the-wool village-shopper. I wanted to hug him for his sweetness. Just a great hug to reward such goodness of nature.

I wanted to hug myself too.

I wanted to hug myself for fooling Cromie.

He still didn’t get it. Still didn’t know the real truth. I had stolen his sweets, stolen money from his pupils and verbally tortured a fine child into lying for me. And all I had been beaten for was the schoolmasterly crime of being a ‘bad influence’.

The boys of Cundall Manor School loved me to tell them that story when I was a schoolmaster in the late 1970s. I didn’t paint myself in quite the terrible colours I should have done, I left out the parts involving real theft, but otherwise I told it as it was and they loved it.

‘Tell it again, sir. The story of you and Bunce… go on, sir!’

And I would light my pipe and tell them.

I look back now at Stouts Hill, closed during my first term at Cambridge, and I shake my head at the person I was. The child was more malevolent, I think, than the adolescent, because at least the adolescent had love as an excuse. All the child wanted was to tear at sweets with his teeth.

It never quite managed to move with the times, Stouts Hill. Ant Cromie was ambitious and built a fine theatre. But he never liked the idea of too many day boys. The fees were high, the uniform remained fabulously classy and meanwhile the parents became less interested in ponies and Greek and more interested in Common Entrance results and money. They had voted Mrs Thatcher in and they voted out Cloud the pony and the boathouse and the lake and the old Majors and Commanders. On my bookshelf I still have a copy of Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches, lent to me by Paddy Angus’s husband, Ian. I really must send it back to him some time. Fitzroy Maclean is dead now and so is Stouts Hill.

I wonder what those who have used it as a Time Share Facility make of the place. I wonder if I left any guilt and shame in the air? I wonder if Bunce’s grief at his own goodness is soaked into the walls?

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

UPPINGHAM SCHOOL was founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, but like most public schools did nothing but doze lazily where it was, in the cute little county of Rutland, deep in prime hunting country, until the nineteenth century when a great pioneering headmaster, as great pioneering headmasters will, kicked it up the backside and into a brief blaze of glory.

Uppingham’s great pioneering headmaster was Edward Thing and one must suppose he had some connection with Gabbitas and Thring, the scholastic agency. Certainly Edward Thring founded the Head-masters’ Conference, the public schools’ defining body. Even today, if you are not a member of the HMC you are not a public school, merely an Independent.

Thring believed, like all Victorian pioneering headmasters, in simply enormous side-whiskers and in the Whole Boy. Uppingham School, under his command, was the first public school in Britain to build a swimming pool. Thring encouraged the development of carpentry, woodwork, pottery, printing and crafts. He believed that every child had a talent and that it was the duty of the school to find it. If a boy was a duffer at Latin, Greek or the Mathematics, Thring argued, then something else must be found at which he could excel, for Every Boy Is Good At Something. Edward Thing had wider and more substantial sideburns by far than Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, but Uppingham had no Webb Ellis to invent a new field game and no Thomas Hughes to invent a new literary genre, and thus, despite the staggering impressiveness of Thring’s whiskers, that flew from his cheeks like banners of flame, Uppingham never quite attained Rugby’s heights of fame and glory and throughout the passage of the twentieth century it slowly floated down to its current middle level of middle-class, middle-brow, middle-England middledom.

The English have a positive mania for attaching the word ‘philosophy’ to the most rudimentary and banal platitudes: ‘Our philosophy is to please the customer’, ‘do as you would be done by, that’s my philosophy,’ ‘a blend of traditional comfort and modern convenience is very much the Thistle Hotel’s philosophy,’ that kind of nonsense. The word gets its most savage mistreatment in the mouths of that peculiarly pompous animal, the public school headmaster, that creature so ruthlessly and brilliantly slaughtered, stuffed, mounted and put on permanent display by Peter Jeffrey in Lindsay Anderson’s film masterpiece If …

The public school headmaster and the public school prospectus use the word ‘philosophy’ much as Californian Valley Girls use the word ‘like’, ceaselessly and senselessly.

It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy, for example, to apply the precepts and principles of Edward Thring to the modern world.