Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

That isn’t what I was trying to say, however you’ve got me off the point again. The very act of my father’s teaching inspired in me a love of the act of teaching in and of itself, that’s the point. I don’t suppose he had ever taught anyone anything before, but he taught me how to teach far more than he taught me how to ‘do maths’. I was so fascinated by my own progress that I became more excited by that than by what I was progressing in. Part of it may have been connected again (of course it was) to Matthew. I fantasised awakening his mind to something in the same way. Not in order to be admired, not in order to win affection, but for the sheer pleasure of the thing, the sheer love of Matthew and the sheer love, the gardener’s love, of watching an idea germinate and blossom. I must suppose that my father, for all his apparently cold, Holmesian practicality, was motivated by love too, love of ideas and love of me. Self-love too, but self-love is fundamental to any other kind. Amour propre can also mean proper love, after all.

My father had believed that I did not know how to think and he had tried to show me how. Showing, again, not telling, had proved efficacious. He knew that I was a natural mimic, intellectually as well as vocally and comically, but he knew that Mimesis is not the same as Reason.

I had had good teachers. At prep school an English master called Chris Coley had awoken my first love of poetry with lessons on Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Charles Causley and Seamus Heaney. His predecessor, Burchall, was more a Kipling-and-none-of-this-damned-poofery sort of chap, indeed he actually straight-facedly taught U and Non-U pronunciation and usage as part of lessons: ‘A gentleman does not pronounce Monday as Monday, but as Mundy. Yesterday is yesterdi. The first ‘e’ of interesting is not sounded,’ and so on.

I remember boys would get terrible tongue lashings if he ever overheard them using words like ‘toilet’ or ‘serviette’. Even ‘radio’ and ‘mirror’ were not to be borne. It had to be ‘wireless’ and ‘glass’ or ‘looking-glass’. Similarly we learned to say formidable, not formidable, primarily not primarily and circumstance not circumstance and never, for a second would such horrors as cirumstahntial or substahntial be countenanced. I remember the monumentally amusing games that would go on when a temporary matron called Mrs Amos kept trying to tell boys to say ‘pardon’ or ‘pardon me’ after they had burped.

The same spin upper-middle-class families get into to this very day when Nanny teaches the children words that Mummy doesn’t think are quite the thing.

‘Manners! Say “pardon me

‘But we’re not allowed to, Matron.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’

It came to a head one breakfast. Naturally it was I who engineered the moment. Burchall was sitting at the head of our table, Mrs Amos just happened to be passing.

‘Bre-e-eughk!’ I belched.

‘Say “pardon me", Fry.’

‘You dare to use that disgusting phrase, Fry and I’ll thrash you to within an inch of your life,’ said Burchall, not even looking up from his Telegraph -pronounced, naturally, Tellygraff.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Burchall?’

‘You can beg what you like, woman.’

‘I am trying to instil,’ said Mrs Amos, (and if you’re an Archers listener you will be able to use Linda Snell’s voice here for the proper effect, it saves me having to write ‘A am traying to instil’ and all that), ‘some manners into these boys. Manners maketh man, you know.’

Burchall, who looked just like the 30s and 40s actor Roland Young – same moustache, same eyes – put down his Tellygraff, glared at Mrs Amos and then addressed the room in a booming voice. ‘If any boy here is ever told to say “Pardon me”, “I beg your pardon”, or heaven forfend, “I beg pardon”, they are to say to the idiot who told them to say it, “I refuse to lower myself to such depths, madam.” Is that understood?’

We nodded vigorously. Matron flounced out with a ‘Well, reelly !’ and Burchall resumed his study of the racing column.

I can’t call such a teacher an inspiration, but there was certainly something of him in the mad general I played in Blackadder, and any teaching that drew attention to diversity in language, even the most absurd snobbish elements of it, was a delight to me.

At Uppingham Stokes inspired in me a love of Jonathan Swift, William Morris, George Orwell and those two great Victorians, Tennyson and Browning. In fact my mother had already given me a great reverence for Browning. She, like my father and myself, has a prodigious memory. Hers is especially remarkable when it comes to people and to poetry. She used to reel off a lot of Browning when I was small. No one, sadly, has ever inculcated in me the slightest admiration for the novels of Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, although I adore the poetry of both, the first being quite magisterially great, the second being charming and often very funny.

So although, as I say, I have been lucky enough to have had some good teachers at the various schools I’ve inflicted myself upon, none of them came close to my parents. Someone once said that all autobiography is a form of revenge. It can also be a form of thank-you letter.

I returned to Uppingham for the summer term of 1972, better at sums, more fired up by ideas and the idea of ideas, but not fundamentally chastened. I was chastened by the shame and disgrace of having been found and proved a thief, but boys, as Frowde had told me they would be, are limitlessly generous, and they were inclined to treat the subject with immense tact, as if I had been the victim of an unfortunate illness, just as the citizens of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon treated their criminals. I was probably in my greatest period of physical growth too, shooting up an inch a fortnight it seemed to me. Pubescence was kicking in strong, making up for lost time. I never, thank God, was prey to spots, as acne was called, but my hair became a little lank, and my eyes took on that strange adolescent brightness that lives under a film of sullenness. They were eyes that looked out, but never want to be looked into.

Summer term was Matthew’s term because it was cricket term. I had always disliked summer, a hot, sticky, asthma-inducing time. It looked pretty, but it bit and it stung. I had a terror of insects, moths in particular, horrible scaly moths which flew through open bedroom windows and fluttered about the light bulb as I tried to read. I could not rest or relax in any room which contained a moth. Butterflies were fine during the day, but moths disgusted and terrified me.

For Matthew’s sake, I tried to become good at cricket. Just so that I might occasionally find myself in the same nets as him, or be able to talk about Brian Close or Hampshire’s prospects for the Gillette Cup and other such crickety arcana.

It is impossible for me to separate Matthew and cricket, so my current passion for the game must have much to do with him. As I write, it looks as if Australia will at least retain the Ashes at Trent Bridge (today is the Saturday of the 5thTest) and you have no idea what it is costing me to keep away from the television and radio – wireless I do beg Mr Burchall’s pardon.

There is only one story to tell of this summer term and it is the story of the small act of physical consummation that took place between me and Matthew. Consummation is perhaps not the right word: it did not endorse or set the seal on our relationship, it did not fructify or sanctify it. It was a quick and sweet sexual act between two (from Matthew’s point of view) friends. At least I can say that it did not ruin the relationship or change my feelings for Matthew. It did not fortify them, for sex was never, as I have said, the point. Come to think of it I don’t know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.