Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Each House had its own character, its own nature, its own flavour and atmosphere. Some were known for having more than the average number of the academically able, others provided a disproportionate number of athletes. One House might have a reputation for being messy and ill-disciplined, another for being a hotbed of queering and tarting. Fircroft lay somewhere in the middle. Frowde was not a martinet and did not beat or terrify the boys. The housemaster of West Bank (you don’t need much imagination to guess the nickname of that House) was as fearsome a man as I have ever met and was rumoured to thrash like an engine… he taught me Latin and his contribution to my school report one term read:

Feckless, fickle, flamboyant and evasive. A disappointment.

Which about summed me up. I rather admired and liked him, he was at least more or less consistent. Masters who inspired complete, abject terror were rather a relief to me. Had this man, Abbot, been my housemaster however, I think I should have run away by the end of my first week. He once, in the middle of a Latin lesson, fell silent in the middle of some talk about Horace. We all looked up from our slumbers and saw that he was staring at a pigeon that had landed on an open window-sill. For three minutes he stared at the pigeon, saying nothing. We began to look at each other and wonder what was up. At last the pigeon flapped its wings and flew away. Abbott turned to the form.

‘I am not paid,’ he said, ‘to teach pigeons.’

School House was the province of the headmaster, a most extraordinary man called John Royds, one time Indian Army colonel and ADC to Orde Wingate in Burma. He was physically short but had powerful presence and possessed all the techniques for inspiring awe that one looks for in a headmaster, the ability to swish a gown in an especially menacing way, for example, and a telegraphic, donnishly tart and lapidary way with words. His noticeboard in the colonnade fluttered with memos, smartly typed by an IBM golf ball:

Re: The wearing of lapel badges

I think not.

JCR

or

Re: The birthday of

Her Majesty the Queen

The occasion falls today. Hurrah etc. Let joy be unconfined.

JCR

or

Re: Litter in the Old School Room

We begin to weary of this nuisance. Be aware: our vigilance is ceaseless.

JCR

That sort of thing. Every morning he would step out of his House, walk with a firm tread and upright gait that concealed the most painful arthritis and snip a red rosebud from a bush in the garden which he would attach to the buttonhole of his charcoal grey suit. At one stage he developed shingles, causing him to wear the blackest and most impenetrable dark glasses at all times and in all situations, including the pulpit which, coupled with the sub fusc of his clothing, gave him the sinister look of Alan Badel in Arabesque or the menacing cool of a Tarantino hitman avant la lettre.

The application form to Uppingham required a recent photograph of the candidate to be affixed to it. By the first day of term Royds would have studied these and knew every single new boy in the school by sight.

All these things I would get to know later of course. For the time being I had passed my fag test and could find my way around. That was what mattered.

Peter Pattrick was pleased as punch, and punched me pleasedly and proudly on the arm to prove it. Being very well off (he was one of those boys I envied, who seemed endlessly to be in receipt of jaw-droppingly large cheques through the post connected with mysterious trust funds and shares, as if life for him were a continually successful game of Monopoly and the Community Chest eternally benign – I have a dim memory of getting myself, years later; hopelessly into debt with him) Pattrick could afford to stand me just about the biggest blow-out the Lower Buttery had ever seen. Unfortunately he ordered for me, amongst the eggs, bacon and sausages, a huge quantity of chips. Unlike almost everyone else I have ever known, I am not drawn by the appeal of chips and my heart sank as I saw that he was going to watch me eat my way through this heaping plateful down to the last greasy atom.

It is on occasions like this where years of dorkily studying books on magic come in really useful. From the earliest days of Booton’s visiting mobile library I had fallen hungrily on any magic book I could find on its shelves. My ‘chops’ as magicians call technique, are not of the first order, it takes the kind of practice a concert musician is prepared to put into his music to perform just the standard pass with a pack of cards, but I can misdirect very well. Every now and then, without his knowing it, I would get Pattrick to look in a particular direction, gesturing with my fork towards a boy who had come in and asking his name for example, while with my other hand I would secretly grab a handful of chips and drop them on to a napkin in my lap.

Magic, in the form of close up sleight of hand in particular, is an art-form I venerate, but it must be confessed that almost every technique in it was invented primarily for some venal purpose. Almost all of the palms, passes, jogs, steals, glides, culls, crimps, undercuts and fakes that form the repertory basis of playing-card magic, for example, were devised by riverboat gamblers in the nineteenth century in order, to put it baldly, to cheat, swindle and steal. These techniques can be found in the masterwork on the subject, Expert Card Technique, by Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue, published still, I hope, by Faber and Faber. I suppose those who do not like or approve of magic sense firstly that magicians are the kind of disreputable or vengefully nebbish outsiders who relish putting one over on others and secondly that they themselves, as the victims of a trick, are not quite confident enough in themselves to take it laughingly. They are the kind who tug violently at the magician s sleeves halfway though a performance or say, with snorting contempt, that it is, after all, only a bloody trick.

I suppose, and it grieves me to say it, that there was a connection between my love of magic and my stealing. I wouldn’t want you to argue backwards from that and say that any amateur of magic, from Orson Welles to David Mamet, is necessarily a potential thief, but in my case I fear it was true. The techniques of magic made me an excellent thief, I could sell a theft, I could patter a theft. Fortunately -in the last resort fortunately – the showman in me, as far as theft was concerned, always worked against the sly in me and I was usually found out, aces of spades raining from my grasped sleeve…

Pattrick, anyway, hadn’t the least clue what I was up to. I got though every forkful of my gigantic feast, having transferred the napkinfuls of chips to another table at an opportune moment.

I was in. I had passed the test and was now an entity.

The first year at Uppingham passed more or less uneventfully for me. I found the work easy. The maths and the science I simply didn’t attempt, which made it easier still. I had decided years ago that I had a ‘maths block’ and it infuriated me that this condition was not as properly recognised as dyslexia, for example, which was just beginning to be acknowledged as a syndrome or accepted condition. In fact I don’t have the numeral equivalent of dyslexia, if there really is such a thing, it was all, I fear, to do with my father. Anything at which he excelled I seemed to go out of my way to be not just bad at, but quite staggeringly and impressively awful at. Not just maths and science therefore, but music too. The combination of my singing hang-ups and my father’s talent made sure that music and I were never going to be public friends. Hemuss at Stouts Hill had written to my parents and begged to be excused the nerve-fraying task of teaching me the piano. At Uppingham I elected, Christ knows why, to learn the cello, which was taught by a rather sexy and stylish woman called Hillary Unna, whom I always think of whenever I see that impeccable screen goddess Patricia Neale. Hillary Unna liked me (I think) and I shall never forget that she said to me in a husky, vampy voice at our first meeting, ‘Well, here’s a lissom one…‘ At that time, and at that age, such a compliment to a boy so physically unsure made me glow for weeks. ‘Lissom’, what a kind word to give to a gangling youth. I was thin in those days of course, more than thin I was skinny and growing upwards at a frightening speed, but I believed myself to ‘be awkward- and physically uncoordinated, in fact the unpleasant word ‘unco’ was always hooted at me whenever I dropped a ball or tripped over. There’s no point beating about the bush, I had Lord Nelson’s hand-eye co-ordination and the grace of a Meccano giraffe.