Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

My father was already on his way. In the meantime I was to go upstairs and wait once more in my tish.

The drive home was monumentally quiet, but I knew that words would come. My father’s analytical mind would not be content to know that I had erred and strayed from my ways like a lost sheep, nor would he simply forgive, forget, judge, punish or exhort. It would be far worse than that. He would need to understand. I did not want him to understand, no adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time, and most passionately of all I did not want him to know about Matthew.

I am not sure that I thought then that Matthew was the root of the thieving. I am not sure that I know it now. I am sure, however, that he was at the root of the recklessness. He was at the root of all my emotions and I was not going to share them with anyone, least of all my parents, lest they somehow lead back to the truth.

There was the inevitable analysis in the study, like the scenes that came on the mornings of the school report’s arrival, but more intense. Father at the desk in a dense fog of tobacco smoke, Mother on a sofa, alternately hopeful and tearful. I would become transfixed by the amount of smoke Father could inhale: after puffing and puffing at the pipe and ejecting the clouds from the side of his mouth, each cloud thicker than its predecessor, he would finally give one enormous puff and in one huge inhalation the thickest cloud of all would disappear, fractions of it emerging from his mouth and nostrils over the next minutes as he spoke. Sometimes a full ten minutes after this one massive inhalation he might laugh or snort, bringing up from the very bottom of the lungs one last wisp of smoke that had lingered there all that while.

How he coped with the sullen ‘Don’t know’, ‘Don’t know’ that answered every question asked I cannot guess.

He had perception enough to see that there was something there lodged deep within me that he could not reach with reason, cajolement or threat. He continued to analyse and theorise like. Holmes, of course, but like Holmes he knew that it was a cardinal error to theorise without sufficient data.

One of his hypotheses was that he and I were very alike, an idea which I rejected as monstrous, nonsensical, absurd, unthinkable, insane and intolerable. I see the similarities now. His brain is better, his standards are higher and his capacity for work is far greater: he is, as a John Buchan hero might say, in almost all respects, the better man, but we do share characteristics. A particular colour of pride, a particular need to analyse. From my mother I have inherited qualities he lacks: an optimism, a desire to please, to cheer up and to gratify others, to make them feel good, and an ability to glide superficially, both where superficial gliding is actually a more efficient means of going forward than thrashing through murky waters and where superficial gliding is a kind of moral cowardice. I lack my mother’s goodness and ability to subsume her ego and I lack too her capacity to make everyone feel warmed by the radiancy of good nature. I think with my parents the old irony obtains: my mother is the practical one, my father the sentimentalist. I can far more easily imagine my mother coping with life on her own than my father. I don’t ever underestimate my father’s capacity to surprise and to solve problems, but nor do I forget that his very capacity to solve problems has burdened him with the propensity to find problems where none exists. We all know the ancient story of the Gordian knot, a tangle so complex that it was said he who could untie it would rule the known world: Alexander simply slashed it open with his sword. My father could never, never cut a Gordian knot – he might complicate it further and eventually solve it, but by the time he did so the known world would have moved on. Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury during my childhood and during my religious phase a hero and profound influence, was once accused by an interviewer of being wise.

‘Am I?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think so really. I think it is probably just the impression given by the absurd fecundity of my eyebrows.’

‘Well, your Grace,’ the interviewer persisted, ‘how would you define wisdom?’

‘Wisdom?’ Ramsay chewed the word around in his mouth. ‘Oh, I should say that wisdom is the ability to cope.’

On that definition, one with which I wholeheartedly concur, I should say my mother is the wiser of my parents.

One inherits or absorbs just so much: my sneakiness, slyness and my wit, in its senses of funniness and of native wit, are all my own. My parents have wit in both those senses too, but it is not the same wit as mine, and best of all for them, each fits the other like teeth into a cog-wheel. From an early age I would watch them do The Times crossword each night. There was and is a type of clue that my father would always get and a type that my mother would always get, and between them they would, as it were, lick the platter clean. Occasionally they can complete a puzzle on their own, but I think they get infinitely more pleasure from doing it together. I could finish it by myself from a fairly early age and hated sharing it with anyone else, stiffening into cardboard if someone looked over my shoulder or asked for a clue. This is indicative of my need for independence, I suppose, proof that I didn’t need anyone in the way my parents needed each other, more than that, proof that I positively needed not to need, proof in other words, of fear.

My father also feared the kind of mind I possessed. He knew I was a clever clogs. A smart-arse. He saw a Look amp; Learn kind of a mind, eagerly competitive with a pastichey, short-cutting brain and a frantic desire to see its name in print, its knowledge praised. It won’t surprise you to learn that I had once begged my parents to apply to be on Robert Robinson’s television quiz programme, Ask the Family. Yes, I really was that dreadful, that insupportably, toweringly, imponderably, unpardonably naff. By good fortune and sense my father would rather have sawn off his legs with the sharp edge of a piece of paper than gone anywhere near such a repulsive proceeding and he made that clear from the outset with a great snorting cloud of pipesmoke. My mother, God love her, may well have been prepared to bite the bullet on my behalf and go through with the horrid thing, but I suspect that even she, loyal to me ever, cheerfully relied on the blank certainty of my father’s absolute and categorical refusal.

We know the type, and he knew the type, that’s the point. Blue Peter, Look amp; Learn, The Guinness Book of Records: facts, facts, facts. I exploded with facts much as contemporaries exploded with blackheads and Black Sabbath. Dates, capitals, inventors, authors, rivers, lakes and composers. I begged to be asked questions, begged to show off how much I knew, begged, like that little robot in the Short Circuit films, for Input… Input… Input…

There’s nothing so desperately strange about this. It was perhaps rather more suburban a style than one might expect from a boy of my upbringing: my brother preferred to dream of farming and flying and other pursuits more usual amongst the country-bred, but none the less I was one of the millions and millions of fact-collecting, did-you-know-ing, apparently-ing, it-is-a-little-known-f act-ing little shits that the world has put up with since Gutenberg first carved a moveable letter ‘a’, which, as every schoolboy tick like me knows, he did in Strasbourg round about 1436.

Such a brain was not consonant with my father’s idea of intellect, work and the mind. The first and most urgent problem to be tackled however, was this incessant thieving.