Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Yes, I might have been tall, yes, I might have been growing almost visibly, yes, my voice might have broken, but what was happening down there? Fuck all, that was what was happening.

If I heard the word ‘immature’ used, even in the most innocent context, I would blush scarlet.

Immature meant me having no hair down there.

Immature meant me having a salted snail for a cock.

Immature meant shame, inadequacy, defeat and misery. They could peacock around without towels, they could jump up and down and giggle as bell-end slapped against belly-button, and heavy ball-sack bounced and swung, they could shampoo their shaggy pubes and sing their brainless rugby songs in the hiss of the shower-room, it was all right for them, the muddy, bloody, merciless, apemen cunts.

And you want to know the joke, the sick, repulsive joke?

I love sport.

I love ‘games’.

I a-fucking-dore them. All of them. From rugby league to indoor bowls. From darts to baseball. Can’t get enough. Cannot get e-fucking-nough.

Now I do, now.

Part of the reason for this book being a month and half late in delivery is that the England-Australia test matches and Wimbledon, and the British Lions Rugby Fifteen’s tour of South Africa have all been tumbling out of the screen at once. I had to watch every match. Then there were the golf majors, the Formula One season building to its climax and Goodwood too. And now the soccer season is about to begin, and it’ll be Ford Monday Night Football and more precious hours sat in front of the television lapping up sport, sport, sport, one of the great passions of my life. Those poor buggers in the gym trying to get my hopeless weedy body to do something healthy like climb a rope or spring over a vaulting horse, they did their best. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t mean. They would write witty reports on me: ‘The only exercise he takes is the gentle walk to the sports centre to present his off-games chit,’ that kind of thing. ‘Physical exertion and

Stephen Fry are strangers. I have tried to introduce them, but I feel they will never get on.’ Good men, trying to do a good job.

Talk about betrayal.

How am I ever going to apologise to that miserable, furious, wretched thirteen-year-old, huddled in a scared bony heap on the changing room bench trying to work out how to shuffle to the showers without being seen? All he has is his anger, his fury, his verbal arrogance, his pride. Without. that, he would shrivel into a social nothingness that would match his shrivelled physical nothingness. So forgive him the intemperance of his fury, forgive him his rage, his insolence and the laughing cockiness he is prey to: they are just a ragged towel. A towel to hide his shame, to cover up the laughable no-cockiness he is prey to.

Can so much be explained by (literally) so little?

Le nez de Cléopâtre: s’il eût plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé… didn’t Pascal write that? If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed. I’ve never quite understood why he said ‘shorter’, not ‘longer’ -maybe in Pascal’s day, or Mark Antony’s for that matter, a short nose was considered uglier than a long one. Maybe I’ve misunderstood the whole thrust of the thought. Anyway, when I first came upon that pensée, (a favourite with French masters in dictation on account of its silent, subjunctive circumflex) I remember thinking about the face of my world. Le nœud d’Éienne: s’il eût plus long…

But then, as Pascal also said, the heart has its reasons, which Reason knows nothing about. Your guess is almost certainly better than mine. The spectator sees more of the game.

So back to that sad little creature.

It’s an average weekday lunchtime halfway through his first term. As the meal has progressed, he has become quieter and quieter because he knows that after lunch he must face the House polly and the Ekker Book. He has to tick everyone off, this officious polly. He will want to see either a note from matron explaining why you are Off Ekker, or he will Put You Down for a game.

I wait in the queue, my stomach pumping out hot lead. The polly looks up briefly.

‘Fry. Unders Rugger. House pitch.’

‘Oh. No. I can’t.’

‘What?’

‘I’m fencing.’

‘Fencing?’

I had heard someone say this the other day and they seemed to have got away with it. The polly flips though his book. ‘You’re not on the list as a fencer.’

Bollocks, there’s a list. I hadn’t thought of that.

‘But Mr Tozer told me to turn up,’ I whine. Mr Tozer, known inevitably as Spermy Tozer, was big in the world of sports like fencing and badminton and archery. Uppingham’s Tony Gubba. ‘I had expressed an interest.

‘Oh. Okay. Fencing, then. Make sure you bring back a chit from him so I can put you in the book.’

Hurray!

One afternoon taken care of. One afternoon where, so long as that polly doesn’t see me, I can do what I like, roam where I like. He’ll forget about that chit from Spermy Tozer.

But there will be other afternoons, and new excuses needed. Every day is a fresh hell of invention and sometimes, just sometimes, I actually have to turn up and sometimes, I am caught skulking unhealthily, and I am punished.

Peck I think, was the last House-captain to have the right to beat boys without the housemaster’s permission. The most common form of punishment not corporal, was something called the Tish Call. Tishes, as I have already explained, were the cubicles that divided up the beds of the dormitory. Everyone, in every House in the school, slept in a tish.

A Single tish call was a small slip of paper given by a polly to an offender. On it was written the name of a polly from another House. A Double tish call contained two names of two different pollies, again from two different Houses. I was for ever getting Triple tish calls, three different pollies, thee different Houses.

The recipient of a tish call had to get up early, change into games clothes, run to the House of the first polly on the list, enter the polly’s tish, wake him up and get him to sign next to his name on the slip of paper. Then on to the next polly on the list, who was usually in a House right at the other end of the town. ‘When all the signatures had been collected, it was back to your own House and into uniform in time for breakfast at eight o’clock. So that offenders couldn’t cheat by going round in the most convenient geographical order, or by getting up before seven, the official start time, the pollies on the list had to write down, next to their signatures, the exact time at which they were woken up.

A stupid punishment really, as irritating for the pollies who were shaken awake as it was for the poor sod doing the running about. The system was open to massive abuse. Pollies could settle scores with colleagues they disliked by sending them tish callers every day for a week. Tit-f or-tat tish call wars between pollies could go on like this for whole terms.

Of course pollies could do each other favours too.

‘Oh Braddock, there’s a not half scrummy scrumhalf in your Colts Fifteen, what’s his name?’

‘What, Yelland you mean?’

‘That’s the one. Rather fabulous. You… er… couldn’t find your way clear to sending him over one morning, could you? As a little tishie?’

‘Oh, all right. If you’ll send me Finlay.’

‘Done.’

The only really enjoyable part of the tish call for me was the burglary. Officially all the Houses were locked until seven, which was supposed to make it pointless to set off early and take the thing at a leisurely pace. But there were larder, kitchen and changing room windows that could be prised open and latches that could yield to a flexible sheet of mica. Once inside all you had to do was creep up to the dorm, tiptoe into the target polly’s tish, adjust his alarm clock and wake him. That way you could start the call at half-past five or six, bicycle about at a gentle pace and save yourself all the flap and faff of trying to complete the whole run in forty minutes.