Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it was the funniest thing…’

It turned out that the previous night in the study my father had started to hunt about on his desk for a file that he needed.

‘Bloody hell, you put something down for a second and it completely disappears… I mean what is going on?’

My mother could see from her position on the sofa that he was actually sitting on this file, and for ten minutes my father continued to sit on it, all unaware, throwing papers around, pulling open drawers and getting more and more Basil Fawlty in his ungovernable fury at the thing’s disappearance while my mother became more and more overcome by greater and greater transports of laughter.

That was what we had heard.

Not the greatest story in the world I know, but its point lies in the extreme oddity (as I now know it to be) of a married couple who never shouted at each other or had any kind of row – at least never within the hearing of their children. They adore one another, worship and value one another entirely. I’m sure they have been frustrated by each other sometimes, it would only be natural, and I know it upset my mother that for years my relationship with my father was a mess. She would have to bear my sulking adolescent grunts of ‘I hate Father. I hate him,’ just as she would have to hear him telling me how arrogant, shiftless and incapable of thought or application I was.

When I first heard other children’s parents shouting at each other I wanted to die with embarrassment. I just did not believe such things could be, or that if they were, that they could be tolerated. I still find any sort of confrontation, shouting or facing off unbearable.

It is possible that the closeness, interdependence and unconditional love each bears for the other may have contributed to whatever fear it was that kept me from partnering anyone for so many years. It always seemed impossible to me that I would ever find anyone with whom I could have a relationship that would live up to that of my parents.

They fell in love at first sight and knew instantly when they met that they would marry. They had both been students at London University, my mother a history scholar at Westfield College, my father reading physics and running the music society at Imperial. My father was pleased with my mother’s jewishness, her father adored this brilliant young man and was, I think, especially delighted that my father could speak German, which he had learned in order to read papers on physics, so many of which were published in that language. My grandfather himself was ridiculously multilingual, speaking Hungarian, German, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, Rumanian and English. I have a picture of him as a young man, splendid in his Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer’s uniform, taken just before he went off to face the Serbian guns at the very start of the First World War. He came to England in the 1930s to teach British farmers how to grow sugarbeet, so my mother, the youngest of three girls, was born in London and grew up in Bury St Edmunds and Salisbury, attending Malvern Girl’s College from a very young age, to all intents and purposes a very English little girl – for the Nazis were about to arrive in Britain at any moment, and my grandfather knew something of what Nazis did to Jews. His name was Neumann, which he changed in England to Newman. His father, my great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew also of course, had lived for a time in Vienna, and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to give you the coat off his back. You can imagine how my blood ran cold when I read this in Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, while reading about the early life of Hitler for my last novel, Making History:

After their quarrel Hanisch lost sight of Hitler, but he gives a description of Hitler as he knew him in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. He wore an ancient black overcoat, which had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees… Neumann… who had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-Semitism.

I suppose there were many Hungarian Jews in Vienna in 1910, and I suppose many of them were called Neumann, but one can’t help wondering if it really might be true that one’s great-grandfather might have befriended and kept warm a man who would later decimate a large part of his family and some six millions of his people.

My parents wed secretly: my mother’s scholarship would, for some odd reason, have been forfeit had it been known that she was married while still an undergraduate. Now, after forty-two years together, it still warms my heart when I hear them in another room, this remarkable couple, chattering away as if they’ve just met.

The house has hardly changed at all. The pumping up process for water is now simpler than it was, but the kitchen still has only one low tap – all the washing up goes out to a scullery. The Aga has to be riddled every night to shake the ash down and there is still no central heating. People who visit it show wonder at its time-capsule dignity and might even express envy at my good fortune in growing up in such a place.

I used to think I hated living there, but throughout all my years of rebellion, ostracism and madness I always carried a photograph of the house with me: I have it still, tattered and torn, but the only copy left in the world of an aerial picture taken, I think, around the very time of my life between prep and public school. Maybe I had just started my first term at Uppingham, maybe it was taken just before I left Stouts Hill for the last time, for my brother and I are nowhere to be seen in the picture, unless we were cantering about on the badminton lawn which is hidden from view. I wouldn’t have kept this picture all those years if the house didn’t mean something to me, and I wouldn’t be gulping down tears now, looking at it, if the memories it invoked were impotent and sterile and incapable of touching me deeply.

It was the house where I grew up.

It contains my brother’s bedroom, with its peeling William Morris wallpaper; it contains the bedroom I spent most of my life in, lying awake for hours and hours and hours with the self-induced insomnia of adolescence, peeing out of the window into the night air and killing the honeysuckle below because I was too lazy, slobby and sluttish to go downstairs to the lavatory; it contains the bedroom of my sister, with posters of the cricketer Derek Randall still hanging on the wall. It contains the study on whose carpet I stood so many times, facing my father over some new school report, some new disaster, some new affront to authority, some new outrage that might send my mother from the room clutching a handkerchief to her mouth in grief and upset. It contains the same objects and the same memories, and it contains the same two parents who made me from their flesh and whom I adore so much. It is home.

In the book of Uppingham school rules the first rule is this:-

A boy’s study is his castle

The only other fortress of privacy afforded a boy at Uppingham came in the shape of the tish, a dormitory cubicle that housed his bed, a small table and such private items as might be fitted into the table or under the bed and vice versa. A curtain could be pulled across and then a tish, too, became a boy’s castle. One assumes that the word tish descends, not from the German for table, but from a contraction of the word ‘partition’, but applying logic to English slang is never a sound idea. I think we can be fairly sure however, that ‘ekker’ the word used at Uppingham for games, derived from ‘exercise’. ‘Wagger’, or ‘wagger-paggerbagger’, which was used to denote ‘waste-paper basket’, is an example of that strange argot prevalent in the 1920s and 1930S that caused the Prince of Wales to be known as the Pragger-Wagger. Even today, in the giddy world of High Anglicanism in such temples of bells, smells and cotters as St Mary’s, Bourne Street, 5W3, I have heard with my own two ears Holy Communion referred to by pert, campy priests as ‘haggers-commaggers’ and my mother still describes the agony and torture of anything from toothache to an annoying traffic jam as ‘aggers and torters’.