Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

The only other jargon to offload at this stage is the name for the prefects, who at Uppingham, as at some other public schools, were called ‘praepostors’, which happily preposterous name is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘Syncopated form of præpositor’. The OED then cites the following as an example of the word’s usage:

1887 Athenœum 29 Oct. 569/3 He [Rev. E. Thring] strongly encouraged self-government among the boys, and threw great responsibilities upon the præpostors.

It is good to know that Thring of the enormous side-whiskers, or Dundreary Weepers (buggers’ grips my mother calls them) was a master of the modern art of delegation.

Eighty-three years after that Athenzum article, a great deal of responsibility was still being thrown upon the præpostors, who were known universally as pollies. There were the House Pollies, who had authority only within their Houses, and the School Pollies, who had authority everywhere. A School Polly could carry an umbrella and wear a boater. With that embarrassingly faux anger that middle-class rebels have made a speciality, pollies were called, out of their hearing, ‘pigs’, as in: ‘He’s only a House pig, he can’t tell you what to do,’ or ‘Did you hear that Barrington has been made a School Pig? Tchuh!’ This sort of remark was usually made with the kind of muttered Worker’s Revolutionary Party snarl that public-school boys are very good at reproducing, but which ill-suits their minor grievances.

But there again, whose grievances are ever minor? I am fully aware that my grievances, such as they are, are minor. The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well-cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else’s. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

The first problem to dominate me at Uppingham was that of the fag test. Every new boy had to pass this blend of initiation rite and familiarisation exam in his first fortnight. He was instructed in this by a Fag Teacher, a second year boy, in my case an athletic fellow called Peter Pattrick.

The fagging system was in the process of winding down when I arrived. Personal fags, of the kind found in public school fiction, had become more or less extinct. Fags still had to run errands for pollies, but there was none of the toast-making, shoe-shining, study-tidying, bog-seat-warming, head-patting, thigh-stroking, buttock-fondling drudgery, slavery or abuse that I had dreaded. Fagging consisted essentially of communal chores, the most notable roles in which were to be Morning Fag, who had to wake the House (more on this later) and the unpleasantly named Lay Fag who only had to sweep the corridors, and so far as I can remember, had nothing to do with lavatories at all. The Paper Fag was obliged to go into town early in the morning, before breakfast, pick up the House’s order of newspapers and deliver them to the studies. Another job was to go down twice a day and clear the school pigeonholes for senior boys, bringing up their messages to the House, that sort of thing. I can’t remember what this duty was called – Pigeonhole Fag, I suppose, but again it is madness to expect logic, he might well have been called Kitten Fag, Balloon Fag or Ethics Fag for all I know.

When I use the word ‘House’, it must be understood that I am referring to the boarding-houses into which the school was divided, miniature versions of an Oxbridge college I suppose, in as much as one lived, ate and slept in the House, and went into the school itself for lessons, much as an Oxbridge undergraduate lives, eats and sleeps in college and goes to university faculty buildings for lectures. There again, the collegiate system is not very easy to explain either, so it seems rather pointless my attempting to explain one mysterious system by reference to another equally baffling.

Essentially, Uppingham was six hundred boys strong, and had twelve Houses of fifty boys each, give or take. Each House had a housemaster, who was most directly responsible for one’s discipline, direction and well-being, he was the man ultimately in loco parentis. Each House had a matron too, and a small number of staff. When I began at my House, Fircroft, there was a female kitchen staff, referred to by the boys, I am sorry to say, as skivvies. All I can offer in our defence is that we did not mean the word in any derogatory sense, it was simply the word used, we knew no other. The skivvies waited on the boys: if one wanted more water in one’s jug or more tea in one s cup, one would, talking to one’s neighbour all the while, simply hold up the hand containing the empty jug or mug and wave it about a bit. If service did not come quickly, one would shout ‘Water!’ or ‘Tea here!’ and eventually the jug or cup would be taken away, filled and returned. Now of course, everything is organised along cafeteria lines and involves serving-hatches and, probably, wide ranges of camomile tea, isotonic NRG drinks and vegetarian falafel. What I can’t understand is why there wasn’t bloody revolution in the town of Uppingham in my day. I suppose waiting hand and foot on loud public-school boys is marginally better than being unemployed, but I shouldn’t wonder if some of the ruder, less considerate boys didn’t get a fair amount of spittle in their teacups and bogeys in their baked beans.

Fircroft had a garden, a croquet lawn, a copse with a hammock, disused outside lavatories (the ‘House rears’ in local argot, later to prove the unromantic scene of my deflowering) and, being one of the Houses furthest from the school, two fives courts. Fives is a game much like squash, except that the ball is struck with a gloved hand instead of a racket. It comes in two flavours, Eton and Rugby. We played Eton Fives, a better game, all snobbery aside, because it involved a buttress projecting from one side of the court, presumably deriving from the buttresses of Eton College’s great Perpendicular Gothic chapel, against which boys once sacrilegiously bounced balls. Fives was still played enthusiastically by some, but Eton’s rival Harrow had its own old game which was rapidly becoming fashionable, not just in schools, but in the world of sweaty businessmen and newly emerging health clubs. Squash was already more popular than Fives at Uppingham by the time I arrived and the Fives Courts were really just places where bikes were parked and behind which one smoked, masturbated or sipped cider with, or without, companions.

My housemaster was a man called Geoffrey Frowde, an old friend of my parents. He had been up at Merton, Oxford, as an undergraduate, but his wife Elizabeth had been at Westfield with my mother. The Frowdes and my parents had camped out in the Mall together that rainy, rainy night before Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation and waved together at Queen Salote of Tonga as she rode by with her famous lunch sitting beside her. These experiences no doubt form a bond and it was on account of Geoffrey Frowde being at Uppingham that Roger and I had been marked down for it from an early age. All this made my subsequent impossibility as a pupil all the more embarrassing of course. To be endlessly frustrated by the uncontrollable wickedness of the son of friends must put a man in a very difficult position.