Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I have diverted into this world of The Bonzos and comedy because I am coming soon, all too soon, to my second year at Uppingham, and I don’t want to create the impression of a lone mooncalf Fry, absorbed only in love and the pungent pain of his lonely pubescence. There was a context: there were fifty boys in the House, they had their own lives too and we were all touched by the outside world and its current fads and fantasies.

In my first year I had Fawcett as a friend, and later, a boy called Jo Wood, with whom I was to share a study in my second year. Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world.

But one day he said to me:

‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’

The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read. He taught me a lot about the human will, Jo Wood. But more than that, he was a kind patient friend who had much to put up with in our second year when he had to share a study with a boy whose life had suddenly exploded into a million pieces.

The only real fly in the ointment that first year, senseless brushes with authority aside, came in the form of Games. Ekker. Sports.

There is a fine Bonzo number called ‘Sport’ which follows a sensitive boy at school (called Stephen pleasingly enough) who prefers to lie in the long grass with his pocket edition of Mallarmé (another Stephen) while the big rough boys are at their football. The chorus calls out gruffly:

I laughed at that song, but I inwardly wept at it too. I hated sport, ekker, games, whatever they wanted to call it. And it was a fuck sight harder to get off ekker at Uppingham than it had been at prep school. ‘A fuck sight’ was the kind of language one used at Uppingham all the time, out of the hearing of staff. It was one of the first things I had noticed about the difference between Stouts Hill and Uppingham, the language, just as for Robert Graves in Goodbye To All That it had been the transition from Charterhouse to the Royal Welch Fusiliers that had marked a startling move up in the swearing stakes. From a world of ‘bloody heck’ and the occasional ‘balls’ I had been hurled into a society where it was ‘fuck’, ‘wank’, ‘bollocks’, ‘cunt’ and ‘shit’ every other word. To say that I was shocked would be ridiculous, but I was slightly scared. The swearing was part of the move up towards manliness, part of the healthiness. Study sales, butteries and shops, that kind of independence I could appreciate, but things that were manly frightened me. And nothing was more manly than Games.

Games mattered at Uppingham. If you had your First Fifteen colours, you were one hell of a blood. If you represented just your House, let alone the school in some sport, it gave you something, an air, a reason to feel good about yourself, a sense of easy superiority that no amount of mental suffering with irregular verbs could threaten. Work was ultimately poofy and to be bad at work was no cause for shame.

Games went on all the time. House ekker was a daily thing, except on Fridays. It was no good cheering when Fridays came around however, for Fridays were compulsory Corps days, when we had to march up and down in Second World War battle-dress as part of the school’s Combined Cadet Force. I was Army, poor bloody infantry; my brother wisely chose the Air Force. I must have looked as much like a military unit as Mike Tyson looks like a daffodil, shuffling about the parade ground in my badly blancoed webbing, clodding corps-boots, an overtight black beret that would never fold down and made me look more like a French onion seller than a soldier, writhing in an itchy khaki shirt, trying to march in step with a clunking Lee Enfield rifle over my shoulder and the school sergeant-major, RSM ‘Nobby’ Clarke yelling in my ear.

But you could fuck me with a pineapple and call me your suckpig, beat me with chains and march me up and down in uniform every day and I would thank you with tears in my eyes if it got me off games. Nothing approached the vileness of games, nothing.

Grotesque ‘Unders versus Overs’ matches would arise from time to time, in which under sixteens played over sixteens, and school matches that you had to watch and cheer at. PE lessons cropped up in the syllabus, in academic time: absurd Loughborough educated imbeciles calling everyone ‘lads’ and using Christian names as if they found the snobbery of public school inimical to their healthy, matey world of beer, bonhomie, split-times and quadriceps.

‘Good lad, Jamie!’

Oh, there was always a Jamie, a good-lad-Jamie, a neat, nippy, darty, agile scrum-halfy little Jamie. Jamie could swarm up ropes like an Arthur Ransom hero, he could fly up window frames, leap vaulting horses, flip elegant underwater turns at the end of each lap of the pool, somersault backwards and forwards off the trapeze and spring back up with his neat little buttocks twinkling and winking with fitness and firmness and cute little Jamieness. Cunt.

Then they had the nerve, these barely literate pithecanthopoids in their triple-A tee-shirts and navy blue tracksuit bottoms, with their pathetically function-rich stop-watches around their thick, thick necks, to write school reports citing ‘motor development percentiles’ and other such bee’s-wank as if their futile, piffling physical jerks were part of some recognised scientific discipline that mattered, that actually mattered in the world. Even a tragic management consultant bristling with statistics and psychological advice on the ‘art of people handling’ -art of the so-fucking-obvious-it-makes-your-nosebleed more like – has some right to look himself in the mirror every morning, but these baboons with their clip-boards and whistles and lactic acid burn statistics, running backwards with a medicine ball under each arm, shouting ‘Come on, Fry, shift yourself, let’s see some burn…’

Yeugh! The squeak of rubber soles on sports hall floors, the rank stench of newly leaking testosterone, the crunch of cinder racing tracks, the ugly, dead thump of a rugger ball taking a second later than the ugly, dead sight of it hitting the hard mud as you sullenly watched the match, the clatter of hockey sticks, the scrape of studded boots on pavilion floors, the puke-sweet smell of linseed oil, ‘Litesome’ jock-straps, shin-guards, disgusting leather caps worn in scrums, boots, shorts, socks, laces, the hiss and steam of the showers.

Fu-u-u-u-u-uck! I want to vomit it all out now, the whole healthy spew of it. It ate into my soul like acid and ate its way out again like cancer. I despised it so much… so much… so much. A depth and height and weight and scale of all consuming hatred that nearly sent me mad.

Games! How dared they use that grand and noble word to describe such low, mud-caked barbarian filth as rugby football and hockey? How dared they think that what they were doing was a game? It wasn’t ludic, it was ludicrous. It wasn’t gamesome, it was gamey, as a rotten partridge is gamey.

It was shit, it was a wallowing in shouting, roaring, brutal, tribal shit. And the shittiest shit of it all was the showers.