Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Young Mr Thring – or it may have been old Mr Gabbitas – recommended Stouts Hill Preparatory School, Uley, Near Dursley, Glos. Something in my mother’s manner had told them that a friendly, warm place was required and few schools came friendlier than Stouts Hill: friendliness was its most notable feature. The school glowed with a kindly familial warmth that enfolded even the most sensitive, apron-clutching child. Founded and headmastered by one Robert Angus, it was effectively run by his four daughters, Carol, Sue, Paddy and Jane. These four Angus girls, young Mr Gabbitas said – and old Mr Thring signified his agreement by giving the desk a mighty thump – were considerate, charming, enthusiastic, sweet-natured and fun. The pupils all rode (for Miss Jane loved ponies and horses to distraction); there were fishing, boating and ice-skating on the lake; traipsing, nutting and blackberrying in the abundant outlying copses and woods; sailing and bird-spotting at Slimbridge and as much running, jumping, cricketing, ruggering, soccering, Latining, Greeking and Common Entrance preparing as the most doting parent could hope for. The diet was well balanced and nutritious, the school uniform amusing and stylish and the fees as frighteningly expensive as any parent could scream at. Every single Gabbitas and each several Thing was united in his commendation of Stouts Hill, Uley, Glos. and they were not afraid who knew it. My parents and Roger too, after a visit of inspection later in the year, approved warmly.

When my brother began his first term there the Fry family lived in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. When my turn came to follow him in the summer term of the year 1965, we had moved to Norfolk, the other side of England, two hundred British miles distant from Gloucestershire.

When people today hear that I was sent away to board at a school two hundred miles from home at the age of seven they often raise a disapproving eyebrow, snort a contemptuous snort or fling up a despairing hand at the coldness, cruelty and neglect of parents who could do such a thing to a child of such tender years: the words ‘bosom’ and ‘snatching’ and phrases like ‘how could any…?‘ and ‘at such an age’ and ‘no wonder the British are so…’ are often used.

There is great stupidity in this reaction, or at least minimal imagination, which is more or less the same thing, but morally worse. What is forgotten by those who dislike the idea of children being sent away at an early (or any) age is the matter of expectation and custom. The rightness or wrongness of private boarding education is a separate issue and I change my opinion about it as regularly as I change my socks, the desktop pattern on my computer screen and my views on God.

When I was seven years old every child that I knew of my own age went away to boarding school. Again the rightness or wrongness of being friendly only with children from similar backgrounds is a separate issue. ‘The point is that my father had been to boarding school, my mother had been to boarding school, all the friends I had in the world went away to boarding school. It was what one did. It was Life as I knew it. A ‘child of seven does not question such a circumstance: it is the way of the world. If I had not been sent away I should have wondered what was wrong with me. I should have felt neglected and left out. At a local day school I most emphatically should not have felt more loved or more cared for, far from it. Going round to play with friends in the school holidays and listening to their stories of boarding school would have left me feeling miserably excluded and inexplicably singled out for strange and unusual punishment. I know this for a fact, for I did spend a term at a primary school and, sweet and friendly as the place was, I couldn’t wait to leave and join my brother.

Had we lived in Central London I dare say it might have been different. As it was we were hidden in the mysterious interior of rural East Anglia, where the nearest shop was a twenty-minute bicycle ride away and the nearest friends many miles farther. There was no door-bell ringing and can-Stephen-come-out-to-play-ing in Booton, Norfolk: no cool friends called Zak and Barnaby and Luke, no parks, no Saturday morning cinema clubs, no milk-shake parlours, no buses, no visiting ice-cream vans, no roller-skating rinks. When city-bred friends saw the house I lived in, they cooed with envy and delight at the idea of so much space with so much nature all around. I used to coo with envy when I stayed in a terraced house in suburban London and saw fitted carpets, central heating and drawing-rooms that were called sitting-rooms and had televisions in them.

It is also true that the ineptly hidden distress of my mother at the end of the school holidays gave me more direct, clear testament of absolute love than most children are ever lucky enough to receive at such an early age. That I was fucked up as a child and then as a youth, I cannot deny. That my fucked-up-edness sprang from a sense of betrayal, desertion or withheld love I will not allow.

Roger, my adorable brother, was and is far from fucked up after all, and he was the first to be sent away and might reasonably be expected to have felt the greater sense of abandonment, there being no elder in whose footsteps he might follow. Jo, my adorable sister, wasn’t sent away at all, as girls weren’t by then. She was fairly fucked up as a teenager but arguably because of the very fact that she didn’t go to boarding school. Private education may be a divisive abomination, it may leave its product weird and ridiculous in all kinds of insanitary and peculiar ways, it may have held back the social development of this country, it may be responsible for all kinds of disasters and unpleasantnesses, but in my case it never left me feeling starved of parental love and attention. I think it safe to say that I would have been a fucked up youth had I been given a secondary modern, comprehensive or grammar school education. Whether at boarding school, day school or at home with governesses and private tutors, I would always have been as screwed up as an unwanted letter from the Reader’s Digest. Wherever I had been, whatever I had done, I should have experienced an adolescence of sturm, drang, disaster and embarrassment.

This is all speculation. The facts are that my brother went to Stouts Hill, my sister was born and then the family moved to Norfolk.

Leaving Buckinghamshire meant leaving Chesham ‘Prep, a day school where I had been having my preprep education. The town of Chesham perches itself between London Underground’s Metropolitan Line and the Chiltern Hills embarrassedly unsure as to its status: country town or Metroland banlieu? Chesham Prep had four Houses – a House being a nominal administrative subdivision or gau, that is, not a physical building. I was in Christopher Columbus, and sported its blue badge with great pride. It took me many years to understand or truly believe that Columbus was actually Italian. Even to this day I can’t fully accept it. Why would a school in the heart of England choose a foreign hero? Perhaps they were unaware of his nationality themselves. It was common knowledge that the British discovered everything -trains, democracy, television, printing, jets, hover-crafts, the telephone, penicillin, the flush lavatory and Australia, so it was reasonable to assume Christopher Columbus must have been a Briton. Francis Drake boys – or was the other House Nelson… or Walter Raleigh perhaps? I can’t quite remember – wore badges of flaming vermilion. Chesham Prep was a coeducational school and my girlfriend, the object of my warm six-year-old affection, was Amanda Brooke, from whose soft charcoal lambswool V-neck glowed Florence Nightingale’s proud primrose yellow. Her sister Victoria’s jersey flashed with the lime green of Gladys Aylward, Innkeeper of the Sixth Happiness. Victoria was Roger’s girlfriend, which kept things neat and in the family, so to speak.