Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I once got out my old Stouts Hill boater and wore it to school. This enraged a School Pig I encountered on the way.

‘And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing wearing a boater?’

‘But this isn’t a boater, Merrick, it’s a sun-hat. I am highly susceptible to excess heat.’

‘You’ll be highly susceptible to a kick up the arse if you don’t take it off.’

This morning though, I’m thinking of nothing in particular. Still settling back into the rhythm and enjoying the fact that there is a whole crop of new boys who are now the lowest of the low. Indeed, I have to train one of them for the fag test.

I will be taking my 0 levels this year. Fourteen seems a young age for them, but in those days, if they reckoned you could do them, you did them. I would take my A levels two years later and leave school at sixteen, then university at seventeen, that was my future, all charted out before me. That was how things were done then. If they felt you needed an extra year to cope with 0 levels, you were put into a form called the Remove. At prep school there had been a Remove and a Shell. I had been in Shell and I never understood quite what it meant.

I know, I’ll look it up in the OED.

Well, bless my soul. Does one live and learn, or what?

15.The apsidal end of the schoolroom at Westminster School, so called from its conch-like shape. Hence, the name of the form (intermediate between the fifth and sixth) which originally tenanted the shell at Westminster School, and transf. of forms (intermediate between forms designated by numbers) in other public schools; see quots.

1736 Gend. Mag. VI. 679/2 Near these (forms] ye shell’s high concave walls appear.

1750Chesterfield Lett. ccxxviii, Observe., what the best scholars in the Form immediately above you do, and so on, till you get into the shell yourself.

1825Southey Life amp; Corr. (1849) I. 151 He was floated up to the Shell, beyond which the tide carried no one.

1857Hughes Tom Brown i. v, The lower fifth, shell, and all the junior forms in order [at Rugby].

1877W. P. Lennox Celebr. I have known I. 43 The noise grew louder and louder, until the birch was safely deposited in a small room behind the shell, as the upper end of the room was called from its shape [Westminster].

1884 Forshall Westm. Sch. 3 The Headmaster faced all the boys excepting the tenants of the Shell.

1903 Blackw. Mag. June 7 42/2 The third shell, a form within measurable distance of the lowest in the school [Harrow].

Well, there you go then.

There was no shell at Uppingham so far as I remember.

Actually, I am feeling rather pleased with myself as I walk along with Jo Wood this morning because the new form I have been put in this year is Upper IVA. This is more luck than a reflection of any academic brilliance from me during my first year: the school alternated annually between awarding the A status to the top English set and the top Maths set – all part of that good all-round chap ‘philosophy’. This year it is the turn of English, so I find myself in Upper IVA and all the brilliant mathematicians have to put up with the indignity of being grouped in Upper IVB.

You can be in the top form of your year, but be in lower sets according to subject. So I was in the top sets for English, History, French, Latin and so on, but in the bottom for Physics, Maths and Chemistry. Geography I had given up in favour of German.

My form-master and English teacher I find to be an:excellently civilised man called J. B. Stokes, housemaster of Meadhurst, given to a most peculiar use of what, if I have parsed this correctly, is an imperative interrogative form of a future conditional tense. In other words instead of saying ‘Shut up’ he would say, ‘You’ll be shutting up?’, ‘You’ll be sitting down?’

It is too early in the season to shuffle leaves along the pavement as we walk down the hill, but Jo and I have our heads bowed down towards the pavement none the less. As a child one gets to know every crack in every paving stone on every section of one’s walk to school. Are we looking down because we don’t want to see or because we don’t want to be seen?

I don’t know what it is that makes me look up. A vague awareness I suppose that the boys from Redwood’s opposite are crossing the road from their House to join the pavement, a little good-natured jostling might result, and the thick black line of boys will have swollen to its maximum size before the left turn, up the Chocolate Block, along the Magic Carpet and towards the Chapel, whose bell even now is ringing us to morning prayers.

His head isn’t even turned towards me but I know.

How is that possible? How can it be that just the gait of him, the stand of him, the shape and turn away of him, can be enough for me to know and to know at once?

Looking at it coolly one can say that anyone might be drawn to such a fine head of fair hair, seen from behind. One might say that anyone could see that this was a classy, peachy and supreme pair of buttocks confronting us.

One might add too, in cynical tones, ‘You say “you knew”, but just suppose he had turned his head and revealed the face of a pig with a harelip, a twisted nose and a squint, would you now be writing this?’

Did I really, really know?

Yes, reader, I did. I swear I did.

The moment I lifted my head from the pavement and glanced across the road I saw, amongst the Redwood’s boys crossing, one of their number looking the other way, as if to check that there was no traffic coming. And at that moment, before his face came into view, it happened. The world changed.

If he had turned out to be ugly, I think my heart would have sunk, but still the world would have been different, because that thing that stirred and roared in me would have been awakened anyway and nothing could ever have put it back to sleep.

As it is, he was not ugly.

He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

I stopped dead so suddenly that a boy behind walked straight into me.

‘Watch where you’re going, you dozy tosser…

‘Sorry.’

Jo turned patiently and gave me the sour, constipated look that was peculiarly his own and had caused his nickname to be ‘Woodeeeeee’ pronounced in the tones of one who groans on the lavatory, clutching the seat as he strains violently to disgorge a turd the size of Manchester.

‘What have you forgotten?’ he said.

He must have assumed that I had stopped because I had suddenly realised that I had left a vital textbook behind in the study. I knew from the heat in my cheeks that my face had turned the fieriest red imaginable. I somehow found the presence of mind to mumble, ‘Laces,’ and stoop to fiddle with my shoes. When I stood, the redness in my face, I hoped, might seem to be the result of my head having hung upside-down while I was lacing, a strategy that every human being uses to cover a blush and which fools no one.

I was up quickly though and immediately I started to walk forwards. I had to see that face again.

He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.

There are many in Norfolk for whom ‘big city’ means Norwich.