Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Intuiting, and finally knowing for sure that Forster was somehow, like me – Not As Other Boys -allowed me to form a more natural bond with him as a writer than I might otherwise have done. Certainly ‘Notes on the English Character’ and later Howard’s End became sacred texts for me at Uppingham, together with Cyril Connolly’s perfect Enemies of Promise and its Theory of Permanent Adolescence:

It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

It was difficult for me to know quite how to handle that. On the one hand I believed that I was made homosexual the day I was born, on the other I loved the idea that it was School’s Fault and that I was the victim of a wicked and corrupt system. Connolly, one sees now, meant socially as much as erotically homosexual, hence ‘the last analysis’ – but there were days when, unhappy with my sexual lot, I liked to blame my education for my nature. Ihab Hassan, as so often, is right on the money when he says in The Anti-Hero:

The ambivalences of a bourgeois hero in an overwhelmingly middle-class society raise for him problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence… The sad history of the anti-hero is nothing more than the history of man’s changing awareness of himself. It is the record of his recoil… Man, meanwhile, goes clowning his sentimental way into eternity.

It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one’s own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.

I am sorry to borrow from others so much, but to do it one last time, I bring Montaigne to my defence:

I quote others only the better to express myself.

Just in case you get the impression that from the age of thirteen onwards I spent all my time sitting in libraries reading Cyril Connolly, Michel de Montaigne (the fabulous edition translated by the fabulously named M. A. Screech was not available then), E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and Ihab Hassan, I should say that I have conflated and compressed time here.

None of this reading, none of this connecting or identifying with literature or the lives of others took place until the great event happened – the great event of my falling in love. Until that time I read a huge amount of Sherlock Holmes and P. G. Wodehouse, Talbot Baines Reed and G. Henty, Alastair Maclean and Agatha Christie, Biggles and Buchan, Hammond Innes and Len Deighton, Dornford Yates and Dorothy Sayers. What is more, I still do.

I believe Stouts Hill wanted me to leave them as early as possible. I had sat for the Uppingham scholarship examination aged twelve and failed to receive an award. I came close enough to an exhibition for Uppingham to recommend me to try for the exam again at a later date. I suspect, however, that Stouts Hill had Had Enough: the idea of me hanging around for another year did not please Cromie at all and it was agreed that I should leave as soon as possible, retaking the scholarship examination internally once installed in Uppingham. I bade goodbye to Stouts Hill then, aged twelve, without ever having been made a prefect, selected for a single athletic team, or achieving any distinction whatsoever save a record number of canings and a handful of academic prizes.

What am I saying? I won Third Prize (a grand certificate and a two pound book token) in the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools’ National Art Competition for my portrait entitled An Unforgettable Character. I had misread a pot in the art room which I had thought announced itself to be ‘Vanishing Fluid’ and, in attempting to correct a defect around the eyes of my Unforgettable Character, varnished his features so thoroughly that the work more than lived up to its title. Indeed it is probable that the judges even to this day are unable to forget the lustrous, glittering eyes and glossily menacing brows, beard and spectacles of my subject and that he gleams still in their nightmares like a lacquered Rolf Harris.

Now I come to think of it, there was such a thing as a ‘sub-prefect’ at Stouts Hill whose duties were unclear and privileges non-existent. It sounds splendidly Casablanca - ‘An exit visa may be obtained from the office of the sub-prefect for the usual fee’ -but the position I believe came into being merely to offer an opportunity for hopeless cases like myself to put something down on their entrance forms for later life. I think I was also entitled to claim myself to have been 3rd XI Scorer, a role I filled once or twice, but only for Home Matches – Stouts Hill wasn’t going to let me loose on other schools for a minute.

Not quite expelled then, I lived out the summer holidays, turned thirteen halfway through them, and arrived at Uppingham in the September of 1970. Roger had already had a year at Uppingham and was bracing himself with his usual good humour for the arrival, yet again, of his troublesome younger bro.

In those summer holidays he and I were inseparable, at school we did not expect to be. We had arguments, of course, as brothers will (I remember throwing a dart at him on one occasion: the image-memory of it sticking out of his knee sickens me still) but it is extraordinary, looking back, how creatively we managed to fill the holidays in a place so far distant from urban excitements. We were in the same predicament as the Reverend Sydney Smith who, finding himself stuck in the country, wrote to a friend that he could best describe his situation as being ‘simply miles from the nearest lemon’. Sydney Smith, in case you don’t know him, is well worth discovering, he had a unique brand of at once sophisticated, surreal and good-natured wit: he said, for example, of meeting Daniel Webster that he struck him as ‘much like a steam engine in trousers’ and was overheard telling a woman at a dinner party ‘Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’. Well, Roger and I were not only simply miles from the nearest lemon, we were simply miles too from the nearest café, the nearest cinema, the nearest toyshop, the nearest bowling-alley and the nearest friend. So we had each other. By this time too, we had our sister Jo, who was six that summer of 1970 and who adored and trusted me implicitly. I told her gravely that I knew how to fly and that when she was seven I would teach her the trick of it. Shortly after her seventh birthday, returned from my first term at Uppingham, she reminded me of this promise. I took her upstairs, sat her high on a window-ledge and told her that all she had to do was jump and that my magic would do the rest. After a little thought, she decided not to take me up on the offer. I am glad to say that she never gave the slightest outward show of disappointment or disillusionment in her brother.

To thirteen- and fifteen-year-old boys however, six-year-old girls are not very much more than toys and Jo spent most of her time in the company of the great Nanny Riseborough who had served in our house, for the previous owners, since she was a small girl.

Lest the reader run away with too Bridesheady a picture of my childhood, I had better describe life in Norfolk just a little. The house where I grew up, and where my parents live to this day is big certainly, but then it had to be big for my father had needed somewhere with space ever since he had settled against an academic career, discovered that life in mainstream industry did not suit him and decided to set up on his own. While we had lived in Chesham we had spent many days meandering around England looking for suitable properties with plenty of outhousery. I recall endless drives to huge, unsaleable houses with overgrown gardens. My mother would gulp at the kitchens and public rooms, my father frown and shake his head at the inadequacy of the outhouses. Roger and I would romp about in the unweeded kitchen gardens, bored to distraction.