Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

One of my grandfather’s employees, a sugar worker, happened one day upon a house for sale in the tiny Norfolk village of Booton. It was an imposing Victorian mansion, with an enormous stable-block and an absurd quantity of other outhouses, as well as an attached cottage the size of a substantial townhouse. It boasted, inexplicably, five outside lavatories as well as a splendid kitchen garden that offered asparagus beds, an apple orchard, a tennis court, a badminton lawn, a pigsty, a paddock, hen-coops, sinister rhubarb patches and a summer house. It was the size and condition of the stable-block that clinched the deal. This could be Father’s laboratory. There was room for as many lathes, oscilloscopes and things that go beep, tweet, whoop and boing as the maddest boffin could hope for.

In those days it was well serviced too. Mrs Riseborough cooked and nannied Jo. She had sisters-in-law and friends from the village of Cawston who scrubbed and cleaned and lit the fires in winter. The Tubby brothers gardened, but they eventually left to be replaced by Mr Godfrey who ran the garden for many years and who delighted my brother and me by talking to himself a great deal in an endless stream of complaint about how the soil was ‘a bitch’ whenever it was cold. Given that he was an old man who consumed a large quantity of roll-ups every day, no doubt the frosty earth was indeed a bitch and I hate the picture of us giggling at him. It was quite a garden to run, fully Victorian and designed to provide a large household with fruit and vegetables the year round. The outhouses could store apples, pears and potatoes throughout the winter and Mrs Riseborough made jams, pickles and jellies from the plums, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, damsons, gooseberries, blackberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants that the garden bore. Always providing my mother didn’t get to them first, that is. My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.

I am not so very old you know, but this does seem another life: a life that moved with the rhythm of the seasons, a life that had essentially remained unaltered for decades. Everything was delivered: fish came on Wednesdays (not being Catholics we had no interest in reserving it for Fridays), delivered by horse and cart. It is ridiculous but true, I am really not that old, but to the house the fishman came, every week, his horse clopping along like Steptoe’s Hercules. Bread was delivered too, three times a week I think. On Wednesday mornings my mother would call up Riches of Reepham and order the groceries which were delivered in a van by Mr Neale, who greeted me, as all Norfolk people greet young boys, with a ‘Hello there, young man!’ and a squeeze to the cheeks. Milk came from a local dairy in waxed cartons which, after use, made good fire kindling that hissed, spat and crackled. The yellowest sweatingest butter we had too, neatly patterned on all sides with the marks left by the patting paddles. Meat came by van from Tuddenhams’s of Cawston, it being understood somehow in the community that the Cawston butcher was superior to the Reepham. The coal merchant came every month or so and a mobile library stopped by the house once a week.

Fruit and vegetables (oranges, lemons and bananas excepted) came from the garden.

‘Never eat asparagus after Ascot,’ was one of my mother’s rules.

An asparagus bed needs to go to seed in late June, so this seems a sensible idea. Somewhat inconsistently however, my mother was forever raiding the beds for their exquisite ferns which look very well in flower arrangements. I remember that asparagus also needed huge quantities of salt in the autumn. Mr Godfrey (helped by me sometimes) would empty sack after sack of ICI salt on each raised bed until they twinkled and glittered as if struck by an early rime frost.

The kitchen garden itself had been divided up by its Victorian makers using row upon row of little gravel pathways, lined with box hedging, ‘a bitch to keep tidy’ as poor Mr Godfrey liked to remind me, my brother or any rabbits or jackdaws that might be listening.

Mr Godfrey lodged with a certain Mrs Blake and from time to time he would ask permission to take excess vegetables from our garden for their supper table. One day he startled Cawston by making an honest woman of her, but even after their marriage he continued to refer to her as Mrs Blake. Norfolk people are slow to change. I remember an old couple who used to live in a small cottage with an outside lavatory. They moved, many years ago, to a smart new council house in which all modern conveniences were installed. Even today however, if you visit them and one of them wants to go to the loo they will startle onlookers by saying, as they climb the stairs, ‘I’m just going down the garden…’

At the back of our garden was a red wooden pigsty, sadly unused in our day, and behind that a paddock where for a time we kept a huge flock of geese, which were insupportably bad-tempered, loud and greedy, eating everything but stinging nettles, which gave the paddock a rather scrappy and tattered look.

Mrs Riseborough cooked lunch every day and cooked in a way that few people are capable of now. I don’t suppose she had ever seen or looked at a cookery book, a food-mixer or a freezer cabinet in her life. She made egg custards, apple pies, rhubarb crumbles, steak and kidney puddings, marrow stuffed with mincemeat, cauliflower and macaroni cheeses and all manner of good English pies, tarts and flans. Roger liked treacle tart with cornflakes on top, I liked them without, so each Thursday we would alternate. Mrs Riseborough taught me how to make a rose for the centre of a pie by taking a layer of pastry and laying it on my thumb and then adding another layer at forty-five degrees to the first and so on, and then cutting them over the thumb gently with a knife. In August or September she made her mincemeat and the Christmas puddings, five or six of them in huge bowls. The pudding mixture included carrots and Mackeson Cream Stout. The mincemeat would then be steeped in brandy and stored for the mince-pies which were made later.

Mrs Riseborough’s idea of a salad would be laughed at now, with its English kitchen garden produce of beetroot, radishes, Tom Thumb and butterheart lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber, topped with hardboiled egg and a sprig of parsley, not a rocket, radiccio, frisée lettuce or coriander leaf in sight: I could never get enough of it, so long as there was enough Heinz Salad to go around.

She did have some strange ideas, however. She was firmly convinced that the addition of a lump of coal to a bowlful of lettuce in water would keep the lettuce crisp, and from time to time she believed that she had too much blood and needed a nosebleed. Again, who knows? I understand leeches have made a comeback in some hospitals, maybe cupping will return too.

She worked in the kitchen, which had no sink and one very low tap, hardly a foot from floor level. We were not on the water mains in Booton, each day the procedure of ‘pumping up’ had to be gone through. There were two wells, one with hard drinking water from the water table, the other a rainwater collection cistern providing water for washing and bathing. The low tap in the kitchen was the only drinking water tap in the house. Guests, especially Londoners, always commented on the beautiful softness of the water when they bathed – it lathered beautifully and never left the scumline that lime-loaded London water does – but most of them wondered how we could go through the nonsense of daily pumping every day and why, in winter it was always colder inside the house than outside.

The pump house had been fitted with an electrically driven motor, I wouldn’t want you to picture Roger and me labouring away like medieval parishioners on the village green. The motor drove enormous wheels which were connected by great belts that slapped away as the pump worked. When we had first arrived at Booton a health inspector had taken a sample of water for analysis (the bottom of the holding tank had been alive with bright red nematodes). Some months later a report came back saying that the-water could be consumed, but not by infants under a year old. Since Jo had been drinking nothing else for months, it was decided to ignore such nonsense.