Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

As the house had been untouched since it was built, its offices and amenities were (and still are) Victorian, a series of larders, game larders, sculleries, outer sculleries and something called a china pantry surrounded the kitchen. The lavatories were gigantic wooden affairs with chains that said ‘pull’ on them and wash-basins that you tipped on a swivel to empty. The ironing was done by a gigantic electric linen press, all levers topped with bakelite knobs. A great box made by Mann Egerton’s of Norwich, before they decided there was more money in selling Rolls Royce’s I suppose, high on a wall in the back passage shook a tin star to indicate in which room a bell had been rung, and next to it hung the thickened blue and red sally of a bell-rope, to be pulled to summon us children from the garden for lunch or tea, or for a ticking off.

In the afternoons, after the silent lunch (Father frowning at my inability to hold a fork properly or at the inanity of some Guinness Record I had solemnly announced), Nanny Riseborough would take Jo for a walk, first in her pram, then by pushchair, until finally they went on foot together. Sometimes Jemina the Siamese cat and I would accompany; according to season we would return with punnet upon punnet of blackberries or trug upon trug of daffodils, to which it transpired, after one afternoon’s heavy picking, I was allergic. I had to be rushed to the nearby town of Aylsham (nearby being seven miles away) to receive an adrenalin shot from the doctor. Only champagne and a beer brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium have ever given me worse attacks.

The stable-block, where my father worked, was called Over The Way. ‘Is Daddy over the way?’ became the most urgent question of the day. If he was, then it meant we could muck about inside, slide down banisters, play games, relax and even, if we were daring, watch television.

If Daddy was not over the way, it meant he was in his study, in which case we trod gingerly about the house as though on eggshells. The most terrible thing was to believe he was over the way and then discover that you had not heard him returning. In the middle of some game we would hear the tell-tale sound of his pipe being banged down into an ashtray to dislodge the plug and dottle and realise that, horror of horrors, Daddy was In. Instantly, fun, freedom and relaxation turned into terrified silence. The best answer was to steal from the house and find something to do in the garden.

Sometimes there were magical days when he had to leave Booton entirely and drive to Norwich or even as far away as Yorkshire. If it was a weekday, this meant we could visit the Men over the way, the men who worked for Father in the stable-block. They would look up from their soldering irons, wink and give a cheerful, ‘Hello there, young man’ when we came in and we would twiddle with the knobs on the oscilloscopes and press the inviting green buttons on the machines.

At various times my father manufactured a whole range of different items. He had invented an object called an Arc Rule which was actually demonstrated to my enormous excitement on Tom-Tom, the BBC’s predecessor to Tomorrow’s World. At one stage most of the stable-block was given over to the manufacture of electric Sellotape dispensers, cheerfully assembled by women from the surrounding villages who listened to Radio 2 when the Boss wasn’t about. On another occasion Father helped the Ford motor company with electronic governing systems for their automatic transmissions and the place was littered with bits of Capri. There were objects made throughout the 19705 called ‘thyristor controls’ and I have no idea what they did, but they were cleverly sealed in Araldite so that no one who bought them could find out how they worked without smashing them to pieces.

Later, Father designed and built the most entertaining contraption the world has ever seen, a machine for chugging out Tack-Strip, something the furniture industry liked to have about the place. The machinery resembled the mongrel love-child of a cinema projector, a steam-hammer and a Toblerone production line, all put together on a day when Heath Robinson had thought it might be fun to try hallucinogenic mushrooms for breakfast. I could watch Tacky going for hours and hours; I would follow, in a trance, the thousands and thousands of little metallic blue tacks as they shuffled around in a great vibrating bowl and then scuttled like soldier ants down a chute that blasted them with an air-compressed hammer at a rate of six or seven a second into a moving strip of thick cardboard that then folded itself over and continued its journey towards the packing box. The boxes were stacked on to pallets and a small electric fork-lift truck hummed about tidying up. The fights between my brother and me, when Father was away, to be the one to drive the forklift truck were harrowing to behold.

My father was inevitably thought of in terms of awe by some local people who referred to him as the Mad Inventor. When strange noises came from the stable-block at three in the morning, I half expected to see a stolid posse of villagers surround the house, flaming torches in hand, demanding to know with what strange forces he be meddling. Years would pass without the villagers ever seeing him, which only added to his mystique. If my mother was not around to order the last detail of his life, as a result of a bout of flu for example, my father might be forced to drive two miles into the village of Reepham to stock up on tins of pipe tobacco. The sight of him helplessly proffering a palmful of coins to the tobacconist like a frightened foreigner was most extraordinary. I don’t suppose to this day he could describe a twenty-pence piece or tell you which British heroes were on the back of which currency notes. I mustn’t exaggerate: he managed to attend British Legion and Conservative Party meetings (in the 1960s and 1970s before the Conservative Party went mad), sail every now and then across the North Sea to Holland with a nautical friend and more recently he served as an exceptionally committed and hard-working governor of Reepham High School. He was never entirely Professor Caractacus Potts, but then he was never the beaming fellow from the Daddy’s Sauce label either.

The most pleasing objects by far to emerge from his stable-block laboratories were a line of objects known as Things. Thing was a vast steel cabinet covered with more knobs and switches than you can imagine. It took weeks and weeks for Father and the men to make a single Thing, which was usually destined for a subsidiary of ICI in Mexico, Israel or Turkey where it sat there, Thing-like and Controlled. What it controlled and how it controlled, I have no idea, but Project Thing had taken Father months in the study with slide rules and paper to dream up and then even more months in the drawing office, designing the scores of circuit boards which slotted into Thing like honeycomb frames into a hive.

While Thing was being made it was all guts: wrapped in miles and miles of cabling and bulging with power supply objects tightly coiled in copper wire that looked like solenoids, Thing had a very vulnerable and naked look to it. When all the wiring was done and the circuit boards had been soldered and inserted down to the last one, Thing’s metal cowling was stove-enamelled a wonderful 1930s green and the switches, dials and knobs were added. The last thing to go on was the plate which had Alan Fry Controls Ltd., Booton, Norfolk, England printed upon it and the company logo, which took the form of the letters f-r-y, designed by my father to resemble the trace of some pulse of power as shown up on an oscilloscope.

Meanwhile my mother would have been typing and telephoning away to arrange all the bills-of-lading, export documents and God knows what other administrative and bureaucratic nightmares that the despatch of a Thing entailed. Sheets and sheets of documentation seemed to be entailed and the sweetest-tempered woman in the world would become, for a week or so, a tiny bit of an old snapdragon. Only the packing of the trunk for school occasioned more drama and crossness from a woman otherwise more cheerful than Pickwick, Pollyanna and Mrs Tiggywinkle on a sunny day in Happyville.