Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Privately, the music school was my favourite place. There were double-doored practice rooms where one could sit at the piano and hammer furiously away like Beethoven in his last years of deafness. For hours I used to stamp out the descending chords and rising arpeggios that opened Grieg’s piano concerto fancying myself on the stage of the Wigmore Hall. There was a record library there too, where I locked myself in, screaming and roaring with pleasure as I wildly and doubtless unrhythmically conducted Beethoven’s Egmont and the overtures of Rossim -which to this day I still secretly place above the deeper artistic claims of Bach and Bruckner. I am still unable to smell the peculiar smell of vinyl records, dusty amplifiers and anti-static cleaning cloths without being transported back to that room, with its blackboard of ruled staves and its stacked jumble of music stands and chairs; back to that overwhelming surge of rapturous, tumultuous joy and the inexpressibly passionate deluge of excitement that flooded though me when the music bellowed from that one single Leak speaker. I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fl in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.

Amongst the boys of Fircroft there were the cool and the uncool. This was not, after all Edwardian England, not a world of ‘May God forgive you, Blandford-Cresswell, for I’m sure I shan’t,’ or ‘I say, that’s beastly talk, Devenish,’ or ‘Cave, you fellows, here comes old Chiggers.’ This was 1970 and hippiedom and folk rock were making their sluggish, druggy moves.

In my first week Rick Carmichael (way cool) stopped me in the corridor and said, ‘You’re Roger Fry’s brother aren’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Well, could you take a message for me?’

I nodded again.

‘See that bloke over there?’ Carmichael pointed down the corridor towards a boy with dangerously long hair, hair that nearly reached his collar, hair at which this boy pulled, stroked and twiddled, thoughtfully, lovingly and dreamily as he leaned against a wall.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see him.’

‘Well, his name is Guy Caswell and I want you to say this to him. “Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.” Got that?’

‘Sorry?’ I had heard Captain Beefheart as Captain ‘Bee-fart’ and thought this might be some terrible trick to get me into trouble.

‘It’s not difficult. “Captain Beef heart is better than Edgar Broughton.” Okay?’

‘All right, Carmichael.’ I gulped slightly and moved down the corridor, repeating the strange mantra to myself over and over again under my breath. ‘Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.’ It was utterly meaningless to me. May as well have been Polish.

I reached the boy with the long hair and coughed tentatively.

‘Excuse me…

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you Caswell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Er, Captain Beef heart is better than Edgar Broughton.’

‘What?’ Caswell let his left hand fall from its ministrations to the glossy locks.

Oh Christ, surely I hadn’t got it wrong? Maybe he had misheard.

‘Captain Beefheart,’ I said with slow and deliberate emphasis, ‘is better than Edgar Broughton.’

‘Oh yeah? And what the fuck do you know about it?’ snarled Caswell, straightening himself up and starting towards me.

I hared off down the corridor as fast as I could go, past Carmichael, who was doubled up with laughter, and out into the quad, not stopping until I reached the back of the fives courts, panting and terrified.

After tea, as I was making my way towards the study I shared with Whitwell, a new boy in my intake, there came a tap on my shoulder.

‘Hey, Fry…’ It was Caswell. ‘No, no. It’s okay,’ he said as he saw the fear leap into my eyes. ‘It was Rick, right? It was Carmichael. He told you to say that.’

I nodded.

‘Okay, here’s the deal. Go to Carmichael’s study and tell him that The Incredible String Band is better than Jethro Tull.’

Oh Lord, what had I got myself into here?

‘The Amazing String Band is…’

‘Incredible, yeah? The Incredible String Band is better than Jethro Tull.’

‘Jethro Tull?’

‘That’s it. Jethro Tull.’

‘As in the drill?’ My factoid-rich, Guinness Book of Records mind knew that Jethro Tull was the name of the man who had invented the seed-planting drill in 1701, though why this rendered him inferior to an incredible string band, I couldn’t begin to guess.

‘The Drill?’ said Caswell. ‘Never heard of them. Just say what I said, ‘kay?’

There was enough friendliness of manner for me to know that there was no danger for me in this, and the idea of running messages appealed to the frustrated cub scout in me. I liked being thought of as useful.

Carmichael had a study to himself in another corridor. I knocked on the door, only slightly nervously. Loud music was playing inside, so I knocked again. A voice rose from within.

‘C’min…’

I opened the door.

Every boy decorated his study differently, but most went to some lengths to make them as groovy as their incomes would allow. Fabrics were hung on walls and depended from ceilings, which gave the impression of Bedouin tents or hippy dens. These fabrics were known as tapestries, or tapos. Joss-sticks were sometimes burned, to hide the smell of tobacco or just because they were far-out and right-on. Carmichael’s study was highly impressive, a psychedelic tapo here, a low wattage amber light bulb there. It was nowhere near as impressive as his older brother Andy’s study, however. Andy Carmichael was something of an engineer and had constructed out of wood elaborate levels and ladders within the study, turning it into a cross between an adventure playground and Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. At the moment, the House was abuzz with the rumour that Andy Carmichael had nearly completed a hovercraft he had been building and that it was going to get its trial run on the Middle very soon. He did finish it eventually, I remember, and it worked too: every bit as noisy, useless and disgusting as the commercial hovercrafts that ply the channel today.

I believe there was a yet older Carmichael called Michael, but he had already left the school. I liked the idea of his being told to get into the family car and used to repeat endlessly to myself, ‘Get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael… get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael.’

What stunned me about Rick Carmichael’s study however, was the sight of the books on his bookshelf. Six Penguin copies of P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves stones. On the frontmost, Jeeves in the Offing, I could see a photograph from a BBC series of thee or four years earlier which had starred Dennis Price as Jeeves and, as Bertie Wooster… Ian Carmichael.

Rick looked up and followed the direction of my eyes.

‘Are you… is he? I mean…‘ I stammered. ‘You know, on the telly…?’

‘He’s my uncle,’ said Rick, turning down the volume on his record-player, which had been pushing out a rather appealing song about tigers and India, of which more later.

‘I love P. G. Wodehouse,’ I said solemnly. ‘I adore him.’

‘Yeah? Do you want to borrow one?’

I had read them all, all the Jeeves stories, ever since Margaret Popplewell, a friend of my mother’s from her schooldays, had given me a copy of Very Good, Jeeves for my birthday. I had been collecting him in all editions for some time and had a massive collection. The great man wrote nearly a hundred books, so there was still a long way to go.