Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

It shames me to remember that eleven years and a couple of expulsions later, at seventeen and on the run from home, I was to return to Chesham, stay as a guest of the Brooke girls and steal a Diner’s Club card from their father before running off on a wild nationwide spending spree that ended in prison and disgrace.

It was in the playground of Chesham Prep that I tripped and fell on my face one morning and broke my nose. At the time my nose was a cute little button – if any part of me has ever been cute – and the accident, although bloody and loud, was unremarkable in the life of a small child. Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent’ by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight. From time to time through my teens and beyond I would say, ‘I must get this damned nose straightened one day…’ to which a gushing chorus would always reply, ‘Oh no, Stephen, you mustn’t… it’s so distinguished.’ There is of course nothing distinguished about a bent nose. A duelling scar may rightly be’ called distinguished, as might a slightly cleft chin or a glamorously imperceptible limp, but a bent nose is idiotic and unpleasant. I suppose people were trying to be kind and protect me from the humiliation of discovering that, even after an operation to straighten my ridiculous nose, I would still look a mess. The trauma of finding out that a straight-nosed Stephen looked every bit as unappetising as a bent-nosed Stephen might have tipped me completely over the edge.

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects. The problem of my bent nose comes to mind when I have regular arguments with a friend on political subjects. He is firmly of the opinion that the existence of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the House of Lords is absurd, unjust and outdated. It would be hard to disagree with that. He believes, however, that in the name of liberty and social justice they should be abolished.

This is where we part company. I think of the monarchy and aristocracy as Britain’s bent nose.

Foreigners find our ancient nonsenses distinguished, while we think them ridiculous and are determined to do something about them one day. I fear that when we do get rid of them, as I suppose we shall, we are going to let ourselves in for the psychic shock of discovering that the process has not made us one jot freer or one ounce more socially equitable a country than France, say, or the United States of America. We will remain just as we are, about as free as those countries. We are probably not quite as free at the moment (whatever free might mean) or as socially just (ditto) as the Benelux countries or Scandinavia, and as it happens, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries have monarchs. There will be great psychological damage done to us if we take the step of constitutional cosmetic alteration. The world would stare at us and whisper and giggle about us excitedly, as people always do when friends have had some sort of plastic surgery. We would unwind our bandages, present our new, straight-nosed constitution to the international community and await the fawning compliments and gasps of admiration. How hurt we will be when we see that the international community is actually yawning and, far from being dazzled by the blaze of justice and freedom and beauty that radiates from our features, they are rather indignant that instead of dining in splendour and pageantry with a crowned. monarch, their heads of state will in future be lunching at President Hattersley’s Residence or sipping tea with Lady Thatcher in some converted People’s Palace. Britain would suddenly have no absurd minor blemish to blame for its failures, which are of course no more than the defects of being human. If we concentrated on our real defects; if we blamed our weakness of political will for impeding the achievement of greater social justice rather than pretending that it is all the fault of harmless warts and daft mannerisms, then we might indeed be better off. The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich

American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing and horrific. But of course, I am a sentimentalist, and sentimentalists will hunt for any excuse to maintain the more harmless fripperies of the status quo.

Hey, we are straying far from our sheep, as they say in France. I was at Chesham Prep, six years old with a budding bent nose and I was going to tell you all about the boy from the Gape.

At Chesham Prep, my form mistress Mrs Edwards gave us all italic pencils which we were allowed to sharpen with knives. She wrote with flat-sided chalk on the blackboard and italic lettering was ever her theme, her message, her purpose and her passion. We were not allowed to write so much as our own names with italic pencils until we had covered page after page of our rough books, first with wavy lines going up and down, up and down, up and down, next with all the letters of the alphabet unjoined, and finally with all the letters of the alphabet joined up in approved style. To this day, every six months or so, at a stationer’s, I will buy an Osmiroid calligraphic writing set and practise my italic shapes, thick thin, thick thin, thick thin. I will rule constraining lines and write the alphabet within them, and then I will write the same favourite words from those days: I have always especially loved the way italic tools will render the dots on the letters ‘i’ and ‘j’, thus -

i j

– so I take great pleasure in the look of words like -

jiving skiving Hawaii jiu-jitsu

– and most especially -

Fiji Fijian

After a few days of this kind of arseing about, I will leave the lids off the pens, the nibs will go dry and the special ink will harden into a gummy resin. A week or so later I throw the whole kit away and wonder what the hell I have been playing at.

In the middle of my last term in Mrs Edwards’ class a very pretty boy with fair hair and a wide smile arrived. He had come from Cape Town and Mrs Edwards adored him. His italic lettering was as gorgeous as he was and I found myself torn between resentment and infatuation. The boys I fell for subsequently were usually very neat and very well behaved. Far too well behaved for my liking.

Every action and gesture of the boy from Cape Town (who might have been called Jonathan, although perhaps that’s a trick of affinity – something to do with the publishers Jonathan Cape) reminded me of my clumsiness of line. My upstrokes were bulky and badly proportioned, his were graceful and pure; my fingers were always inky while his were always clean, finished off with perfect nails. He had out-turned lips that were most luscious then, but are today probably of that strangely opened out, overmoist quality as common to ex-colonials of the southern hemisphere as sandy eyelashes and wide hips. I expect now he looks like Ernie Els or Kerry Packer. Shame.

Perhaps the boy from Cape Town set the pattern for all the love that lay in store for me. Strange thought. I haven’t ever recalled him to mind before this minute. I hope this book isn’t to become regression therapy. How unpleasant for you. I do wonder though if he still writes in italics as he did when we were infants, thirty-four years ago.

Sex of course, meant nothing to me. Bottoms and willies featured greatly in life at Chesham from the age of three onwards and they gave perpetual amusement, suffused with intense, muffled delight. There was a boy called Timothy who sat next to me in Mrs Edwards’ class. We would pull the back of our shorts and underpants down as we sat at our desks, so that we could feel our bare bottoms against the wooden seats. From the front, to Mrs Edwards’ eye, everything would look normal. This excited me hugely: both the bareness of bottom and the secrecy were inexplicably delicious. Not to the point of erection you understand, at least not so far as I remember. Timothy and I would sometimes go into the woods together to play what we called Rudies. Rudies involved peeing up against a tree in as high an arc as we could manage or watching each other poo. All very mysterious. I can’t pretend that I find anything appealing in that sexual arena today, although I know that many august personages are highly pleased by the idea. One is always hearing about those who pay prostitutes to empty their bowels on to glass-topped coffee-tables under which the client lies in a frenzy of excitement, pressing his face up against the excremental outpush. We think this all very English, but as a matter of fact a trawl through the grosser areas of Internet Usenet postings will show that Americans, as in all things outré, win the palm with ease. I haven’t looked in on the newsgroup alt.binaries.tasteless for a year or so now but it’s quite clear there’s a big world of scatological weirdness out there. The French come next: I don’t suppose anyone who has done so will forget the experience of reading de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and those elegantly disengaged descriptions of the bishop’s way with coffee. Then there was that French intellectual and structuralist hero who liked to lie in a trough in gay bars and be pissed on by strangers. No, it may come as a disappointment to you, but the fact is we British are no weirder than anyone else when it comes to sexual oddity, we just think we are, which is the basis of our weirdness. Just as it is the love of money that it is the root of all evil, so it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.