Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Maybe Ronnie saw, that was the other thing. Maybe it was written all over me, this agony of love that I was enduring.

We’re in the second term of the year now. I’ve got to know Matthew a little better, partly by getting to know Nick better, partly by following the promptings of unrequited love, which train you exquisitely well in the art of accidental meetings.

When you love you plan your day entirely according to the movements of your loved one. I knew Matthew’s timetable by heart. I knew the places he was likely to visit. I knew the matches he played in – he was already in the Colts First XI – I knew the clubs and societies he had joined and I joined them too. I knew what sort of music he liked, when he was likely to be visiting the Thing Centre and when he was likely to be in his House.

And every day he grew more and more beautiful. He was still climbing the gentle slope to his peak of perfection. He never succumbed to acne, greasy hair or gawkiness. Every day he grew and grew in grace towards the completion of his beauty.

I was subtle, Christ Jesus, was I subtle. He could never have imagined for ten seconds that I had any interest in him at all, not from the accident of our endless meetings, nor from the coincidence of our mutual interests. I never looked unpleased to see him, but neither did I show any pleasure. I took a kindly interest and…

I entertained.

For the joy of it was…

He found me funny

and, like Elizabeth Bennett, Matthew was one who dearly loved a laugh. He was talented. He played the piano like an angel, his athleticism was outstanding and he was academically competent. I don’t remember what degree he later took at Cambridge, but it was either a First or a 2: 1 as well as an inevitable triple haul of sporting Blues. Verbally however, he was ordinary. He had no rhetoric, no style, no wit nor any easy companionship with words. Since I seemed to him to have all these things, he looked on me as extraordinary and would roll and roll about with laughter whenever I wanted him to, which was often, a kitten on the end of my verbal balls of wool. Never too far… I learned early on that like a kitten he could suddenly bore of a game, suddenly appear to think it all rather facile and beneath his dignity. Often then, just when I sensed that moment might come, I would stop the joking at its still pleasurable height, shake my head and express some deep thought of frustration, anger at the political injustices and criminal stupidity of ‘this place’ as the school was mutteringly called by all.

Once, I remember, I was in the Thring Centre, typing out the whole of a P. C. Wodehouse novel on one of the big IBM electric typewriters. Frozen Assets, the book was, I recall. I did this sort of thing a great deal, I adored the feel of typing, watching the keys leap and smack the paper, making words appear with such clean magical clarity; I loved too the way I could monitor my noticeable improvement in accuracy and speed and God how I gloried in the admiration when boys clustered around gasping in amazement at the rapidity with which my fingers could fly over the keys without my even looking down. Today’s qwerty generation would think me abominably slow, of course, but in those days typing proficiency was a most eccentric and enviable attainment.

I was alone however in the typing and Gestetner room, that February evening, just clacking away at the keyboard.

I didn’t hear him come in, but a fraction of a second before he cleared his throat to speak I felt a presence in the room, a presence that I later convinced myself I had known was his even before I heard his voice.

‘What are you doing?’

A great surge went through me that tingled my cheeks (still does, you know, to remember it) as I heard that voice. Something else there was too. Something that alerted me to the possibility that all was not well with him.

‘That you, Matteo?’

I called him Matteo: it was my nickname for him. I scorned the ‘Ozzie Two’ that had become ‘Ozziter’ as far as the rest of the school was concerned. To be given a private nickname, even if it is carelessly, almost disdainfully given, is a massive compliment; successful nicknaming is an absolutely essential weapon in the armoury of any romantic seducer. I had discovered that his middle initial (unlike his brother he turned out to have just the one) was A for Anthony, which made him M. A. O. I had experimented with the idea of calling him the Chairman, as in Mao, but that seemed obvious. Then it struck me that Matt. A. O. sounded like the Italian for Matthew, so Matteo it was, from me and me alone. I once walked on air for a week when I overheard him ticking off a contemporary, Madeley-Orne, who had dared to call him that.

‘Matteo is not my name,’ he had said hotly.

‘I’ve heard Fry call you that.’

‘Yes, well Fry calls everybody weird things, but that doesn’t give you the right. He calls you Makes-Me-Yawn, if it comes to that.’

The real reason I came on Monday evenings to the Thing Centre was because I knew that Monday was Matthew’s pottery day. This was one activity 1 had not tried to join him in, since I had queered my pitch with the pottery department my very first term by contriving to burn out the motor that drove one of the throwing wheels and then, the very next week, breaking one of the pug-mill dyes. A pug-mill, in case you haven’t been introduced, is a sort of potter’s mince-making machine. You shove all the spare off cuts of slip and old clay into a hopper at the top, squeeze them down with a lever and pure, consistent clay comes out the other end, either in one great thick sausage, or – if you fix a template or dye over the exit hole – in smaller little wriggly snakes that can be used to make those coil-ware mugs, vases and pots that are still produced in woundingly huge quantities to this day, much to the distress and embarrassment of all. Fearing that during the third week I might do even more damage I was pronounced persona non grata by the staff, the pot-it-buro, as I liked to call them, and so filled my Mondays, while Matthew was there, in the Thring Centre too, by typing or playing with the gerbils that scuttled about in transparent perspex conduits and pipes all round the building, citizens of their own Fritz Lang Rodent Metropolis. The system was designed – like almost everything else in Uppingham from the theatre up the road that was even now rising from the skeleton of the old Victorian gymnasium, to the chairs and light fixtures of the Thring Centre – by the remarkable master in charge, Chris Richardson, who is today supremo of the Pleasance Theatre, the organisation which seems ever more to dominate the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and which now has permanent habitation in London too. Richardson was known, for no reason I can tell, as Trog – perhaps because his Hogarthian features resembled the work of the Punch cartoonist Trog. He carried the smell of pipe tobacco about with him and tolerated my arsiness, frivolity and absolute incompetence and lack of common sense in those fields of endeavour which came so naturally to him, draughtsmanship, planning and construction, because ‘at least I made use of the bloody place’ even if my idea of making use of such a ‘resource’, as it would be called today, was pointlessly to tip-tap away like a temp in a typing-pool.

So there I am, doing just that, and I hear behind me the voice that is my reason for being.

‘That you, Matteo?’ As if I didn’t know. And said as if I didn’t really care too much, so absorbed was I in my Important Typing.

‘Mm… You writing something?’

‘No just typing practice really. Bored of the potting-shed?’

‘Got something in the kiln.’