Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

This is where language is so far behind music. The chord that Max Steiner brings in when Bogart catches sight of Bergman in his bar in Casablanca, how can I bring that into a book of black ink marks on white paper? The swell and surge of the Liebestod from Tristan, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor – even Alfred Brendel can’t conjure that up from this keyboard, this alphanumeric piano beneath my fingers. Maybe, because sometimes pop music can hit the mark as well as anything, I could write you out a playlist. We would start with the Monkees:

Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer

Naaah… it’s no use.

There’s nothing for it but old words and cold print.

Besides, you’ve been there yourself. You’ve been in love. Why am I getting so hysterical? Just about every film, every book, every poem, every song is a love story. This is not a genre with which you are unfamiliar even if by some fluke (whether a cursed fluke or a blessed one I would be the last to be able to decide) you have never been there yourself.

It was the first morning of the winter term, the beginning of my second year at Uppingham. After breakfast, as was usual, I went to my study, now newly shared with Jo Wood, and collected the textbooks and blocks I would need for the morning’s teaching. A block was a pad of paper, special Uppingham-sized paper, shorter and squarer than A 4, which could only be bought from the official school bookshop: essays, notes and everything else had to be written on paper from a block.

The routine at a school with boarding-houses goes like this, you see. The Morning Fag awakens you. You breakfast in your House, you walk into school for chapel and morning lessons and you don’t return to the House until lunchtime. All the form-rooms, science labs and sports halls, the Chapel, Hall and Library, they are grouped around the main school. Ekker (eugh!), then back to the House for showers (don’t get me started…) followed by afternoon lessons in school and another (sometimes the last of the day) return to the House for supper. After supper there’s a little free time before a bell will go, summoning you, if you are a junior, to hall where you do your prep (which means homework), supervised and kept silent by the praepostor on duty. If you’re a senior, your prep is done in the privacy of your study.

Then there’s some more free time in which, unless through some infraction of the rules you’ve been gated (no doubt they now use the Americanism ‘grounded’, as in ‘your ass is grounded, Mister’), you can go down to the Art School or the Thring Centre (named after the side-whiskers and containing electric typewriters, design studios, pottery shops and so forth: it has since been replaced by a splendid complex called, rather wetly in my opinion, The Leonardo Centre, designed by Old Uppinghamian architect Piers Gough and containing a TV studio, computers and all manner of larky toys) or you can see a play, listen to a concert, attend a lecture, go to play rehearsals, turn up for choir practice, or band practice or orchestra practice, or a meeting of the chess club, bridge club, judo club, poetry reading group, entomological society or whatever gathering of like minds suits your taste. Then it’s back to the House in time for evening prayers, which are taken by the housemaster or the House Tutor, a master who hasn’t got his own House yet and acts as a sort of locum to the housemaster proper from time to time. Then, essentially, it’s cocoa, buns, biscuits and bed – the whole cycle to repeat itself the following day. On Saturdays, evening prayers take the form of a more informal compline. On Sundays, there are no games and no lessons, just two compulsory hours in your study that go under the strange name of Sunday Qs, short for Sunday Questions and designed, no doubt, to inculcate religiosity, healthiness and inward spiritual cleanliness. Dotted throughout the day in House there is a series of call-overs, what they called appel in prisoner-of-war films. A list of all the boys in order of seniority downwards will be read out by the

House-captain, and each boy has to call ‘Here’ at the sound of his name. One thinks of Rowan Atkinson’s inspired Schoolmaster sketch, or that creepy play by Giles Cooper which was turned into a film with David Hemmings, the title of which came from the last three names of the roll… Unman, Wittering and Zigo.

There. If you require any more information and believe in Buddhism, I suggest you live your life wickedly and get reborn as a middle-class English boy in the mid-1950s: you’ll get the experience firsthand.

So, back to Day Two, Term Four.

I had stuffed what I needed for morning lessons into my briefcase and Jo Wood and I walked together out of our study and down the corridor that led to the path that led to the road that led to School.

Four Houses were up at our end of town, Brooklands and Highfield were two. Brooklands was further away from the centre of Uppingham, so far away indeed, that it had its own swimming-pool. Opposite my House, Fircroft, was the Middle, that huge playing field I told you about, and perched next to it was Highfield, so named because it was on top of a hill and by a field. The fourth House was a little further down the hill, towards the town and school, and we will call this House Redwood’s.

Redwood’s doesn’t exist.

There is no House between Highfields and the bottom of the hill.

I want nothing I write in this book to cause anyone needless pain, shame or embarrassment. Everything I write will be true according to the light of my own memory, but the truth will be told with tact and with due recognition of fiction’s often greater capacity to convey reality than can any bald recitation of fact. Some names and the setting, styling and structure of some scenes must be fictionalised. I do not believe you will always be able to tell which scenes and which settings, nor would I want you to try. You have stayed with me thus far and must trust me when I say that although there is rearrangement, there is no exaggeration or sensationalisation. If anything the contrary might be the case, for certain scenes and events of my school life, however heavily disguised, would enable any school contemporary of mine instantly to ascribe names and identities, and that would be grossly unfair. Two people, if they read this book, will recognise themselves but see that they have been well enough disguised for no one else to know but themselves who they really are.

Enough already, Stephen – cut to the chase.

It is a clear mid-September day, the kind of day that contains in exactly equal proportion a mix of summer and of autumn, the leaves are not yet in their October reds, golds and yellows, but their greenness is becoming just a little shagged by now, not as brightly, squeakily sappily green as it was in midsummer. To make up for it the light has lost its August haze and has a great softness, the rotten marshy smells of late summer have been dispelled too and there is a nutty, barky freshness in the air.

Naturally, academic hours are the same throughout the whole school, so as we Fircroftians walk out on to the road, we join a stream of Brooklanders walking towards school, and a crowd of boys from Highfield cross the road towards us, for there is no pavement on their side; as we move down the hill, boys from

Redwood’s will cross over too, so that the observer looking down the dip of the London road from the centre of Uppingham at the right time will see a third of the school swarming towards him, two hundred boys dressed in identical black jackets, black trousers, black ties, black waistcoats, black shoes and white shirts, lugging their briefcases and if, poor sods they are slated for PE that morning, their duffle bags as well. Pollies will bicycle alongside whistling or twang-humming Claptonian guitar-licks, their boaters tipped at what they hope is an angle that says, ‘Boaters are fucking square, man. I wear mine, like ironically … ‘Yes, but you still wear it. You don’t have to, you know.