Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I can’t for the life of me remember where the woods were that we visited for our rather tame rudies or who Timothy was. His name wasn’t Timothy of course, and if he is reading this book now he has probably forgotten the escapades entirely and is reciting it to his wife by the fireside as an example of how he was always right about that disgusting Stephen Fry chap.

I have no memories of early ‘sex-games’, as the Kinsey and Hite people like to call them, which involved the opposite sex. A girl did once show me her knickers and I remember finding the elastic and the colour unappealing. I can’t recall wanting to know or see more. A friend of mine at university, asked when he knew he was gay, said that he distinctly remembered at the moment of his birth looking back up there and saying, ‘Well! That’s the last time I’m ever going up one of those…’ I have since shamelessly used this as my own explanation of When I Knew.

I liked girls greatly, except when they bullied me or pursed their lips prissily and said, ‘Um! Telling on you…’

The inelegance of my italics, the shimmering beauty of Jonathan Cape and those occasional rudies with Timothy aside, my six-year-old life is hidden for the moment in an impenetrable mist. I know that I could read well at three and write accurately at four, and that I never ever learned my times table.

In Chesham we dwelt in a very Betjemanesque kind of road called Stanley Avenue. Sherwood House where we lived has since been pulled down and replaced by a housing estate that calls itself a Close. I suppose that means Sherwood House must have been large, but I only remember a few details: a stained glass entrance porch; a booth where a black telephone with a sliding drawer under it lived – the dial had the letters in red so that one could easily call PUTney 4234 and CENtral 5656. 1 loved to bang the hard bakelite cradle up and down and listen to the hollow, echoing clicks it sent down the line. Sounds are not as evocative as smells, but to anyone over the age of thirty-five the old dialling and hanging-up tones are as instant a transport to the past as the clunking of half-crowns and the thlop of the indicator flipping up on an old Austin motorcar.

I was intensely fascinated by the telephone. Not in the way of a teenage girl chattering for hours lying on her stomach with her thighs pressed together and ankles crossed in the air, but intrigued by how it changed people. In those days, when you were cut off you would rattle the cradle and shout, ‘Operator! Operator!’ Older people still do it. They don’t know that it’s as fruitless as pulling at a servant’s bell or asking for the Left Luggage office.

They don’t know that in the world today…

THERE’S NO ONE THERE

They don’t know that the Bible is a Customer Service Announcement and that purgatory is when St Peter puts you on hold and sends you into a self-contained menu-driven loop of tone button operated eternity to the sound of Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’.

The very word ‘Hello’ only earned its sense of a greeting after the American phone companies hunted about for a new word with which telephonic conversations could politely, unsuggestively and neutrally be initiated, much as the BBC in the 19305 threw open the debate as to what someone who watched television might be called. The wireless had listeners, should television have watchers? Viewer, of course, was the word decided upon. In the case of telephony, the aim was to stop people saying ‘Who is that?’ or ‘How do you do?’ or even ‘Howdy’. ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good day’ had a somewhat valedictory flavour, as well as being of doubtful use in a country divided up into so many time zones. Prior to the 1890s ‘hello!’ had simply been an exclamation of surprise and interest, with obvious venery overtones. By the turn of the century everyone was writing songs and newspaper articles about ‘Hello Girls’ and beginning to use the word in real life as salutation’s vanilla-flavoured, everyday, entry-level model.

My favourite telephone fact, for this was the time, as I approached seven, that I began to collect facts instead of butterflies, stamps or football cards, was that Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made the following entirely endearing remark soon after he had invented the telephone: ‘I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America.’

In those days, my father actually went out to work, so I suppose I associate the telephone with my mother and Chesham, its laurels and shrubs and nearby ticking Atco mowers and with a suburban idyll so soon to be replaced in Norfolk by spooky attics, rural isolation and permanent paternal presence. Sherwood House in my mind is where Just William’s William lived, it is where Raffles and Bunny went when they wanted to relieve aparvenue of her pearls, it is where Aunt Julia had her Wimbledon fastness in Wodehouse’s Ukridge stories. In Sherlock Holmes it is the house of the Norwood Builder and the mysterious Pondicherry Lodge. In fact, it is easier for me to remember Sherwood House by opening a page of any one of those books and allowing the flood of image to take over than it is for me to sit down and make a concentrated attempt at genuine recall.

My mother occasionally taught English to foreign students and history at nearby colleges and schools, but I think of her at a typewriter in the dining room, with myself curled under her feet staring into a gas fire and listening to Mrs Dale’s Diary. Twenty Questions and The Archers. Or hearing her voice rise in pitch and volume and decrease in speed and sense when the telephone had rung and she had hurried through to the booth in the hall to answer it. I swear it is less than five years since I last heard her say down the line in her kindest clear-and-slow-for-foreigners voice:

‘If you are in a call-box, press button B…’

Buttons A and B must have vanished from payphones twenty years ago.

That is my image of infancy. Just me, glowing in the combined warmth of the gas fire, my big-bellied mother and her Ferguson wireless. If it felt in a sociable mood, our Siamese cat would join us, but in my memory we are alone. Sometimes we will get up, my mother stretching, hands on hips and, after she has found a headscarf and a raincoat, we will leave the house. We visit the hairdresser’s, the Home and Colonial Stores, the Post Office, and finally Quell’s where I noisily hoover up a raspberry milkshake while my mother closes her eyes in bliss as she spoons in a melon or tomato sorbet. On the way back we feed stale crusts to the ducks in the park. All the way there and back, she will talk to me. Tell me things. What words mean. Why cars have number-plates. How she met Daddy. Why she must go into hospital soon to have a baby. She makes up stories about a koala called Bananas. In one adventure Bananas comes to England to visit relations at Whipsnade for Christmas and suffers terribly because of the cold, the foolish animal. having packed only his shorts, swimming trunks and sandals in the expectation that Buckinghamshire would be boiling hot in December. I giggle, as we children do, at the stupidity of those who don’t know things that we have only just been taught ourselves.

Life has been downhill ever since. Or do I mean uphill?

As we reach Stanley Avenue, we race for the house and, pregnant as she is, Mother always nearly wins. She was athletic at school and kept goal for the England schoolgirls’ hockey team.

There were au pair girls at Chesham, German or Scandiwegian usually, there was Mrs Worrell who scrubbed, there was Roger and in the evenings, there was the terrifying prospect of Father. But in my memory there is Mother at the typewriter (once she loudly said ‘fuck’ forgetting I was under her chair) and there is me, gazing into the blue and orange flames.