Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

It was after a late ‘net’, as we cricketers call practice. Matthew had asked if he might bowl at me for a while. His chief glory was his batting, but he bowled too. He was left-handed for both batting and bowling and had just taken an interest in wrist spin, which meant that he was experimenting with that peculiar ball, the chinaman. I was by no means a good enough batsman to deal with any kind of spinning ball: anything bowled on a good length at any pace, in fact, had me in trouble, but I was- pleased to be asked (indeed had hung around casually all afternoon talking to others, his brother principally, occasionally to Matthew, being amusing and charming, simply in the hope that there might be such an outcome) and did my best.

After a while we stopped and looked around. We were almost the only two on the Middle by this time, the whole wide sward was deserted. Two or three late games of tennis were going on at the Fircroft end, otherwise we had the place to ourselves. Tennis was despised by Garth Wheatley, the master in charge of cricket and by the professional, an ex-Leicestershire player whose name, I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. They both called it, disdainfully, ‘woolly-balls’.

‘Too many promising cricketers are being lured away from the game by the effeminate glamour of woolly-balls,’ I heard Wheatley say once, with a disparaging sniff.

Matthew closed his cricket-bag and picked up his blazer. ‘Oh, I love summer,’ he sighed, looking around.

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Hang on, what am I talking about? I hate it.

‘What do you mean?’

We started to walk, aimlessly it seemed, in a direction that took us away from both our Houses, away from the school, towards nothing but fields.

I explained my hatred of insects, my asthma and my inability to cope with heat. ‘Let’s face it,’ I said. ‘I’m made for the winter. The more clothes I keep on the better I look. In shorts I’m a mess. And unlike you, I don’t look glamorous in cricket whites.’

‘Oh, that’s rubbish,’ he said and then after the briefest of pauses. ‘I quite fancy you, for a start.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said, and gave him a push. ‘Trying to seduce me are you?’

‘Yeah!’ he said, pushing back and knocking me over.

It was all that quick and that silly. Nothing more than rolling and tickling in the long grass that turned into rubbing and sliding and finally angrily rapid mutual masturbation. No kissing, but at least plenty of giggling and smiling. Sex without smiling is as sickly and base as vodka and tonic without ice.

He left me there, lying in the grass. I leaned up on one elbow and watched him go, until his shape, cricket cream-coloured against the grass, disappeared from view. He never once turned back.

I lay back, stared at the sky and fell asleep.

I passed Maths Q level, not with distinction, but I passed. The only exam I failed was Physics, a determined cock snooked at my father to remind him that I was still myself. He had not made me his creature, his good science boy. For physics, above all, was what father was about.

I did not just fail Physics, I ploughed it spectacularly. Such was my pride that I could not bear to be seen to fail anything unless it was quite deliberate.

There had been a question in the examination paper which asked about something called EMF. To many of you reading this, EMF probably means that Forest of Dean combo whose excellent single ‘Unbelievable’ had us all foot-tapping five or six years ago, to Mr Pattinson the poor sod whose job it was to try and get some physics into my head, EMF meant ElectroMagnetic Force, or Field or something vaguely similar, please don’t ask me to elaborate.

The question read:

Describe the EMF of a bicycle torch battery.

Well, I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were on about, so I spent the entire physics exam drawing a bicycle. I wasn’t bad at this, Object Drawing was the part of the Art ‘O’ level that I was best at, my painting had never again reached the heights of the IAPS award-winning Unforgettable Character, but copying, I could always copy.

The bicycle I drew had a crossbar, saddle bags (an open cross-section of which revealed the presence of a Tupperware box containing an apple, a Mars bar and some cheese and chutney sandwiches) and, naturally, torches front and rear.

My last act, at the end of the exam was to rule a line towards the front torch and write at the other end:

‘This is the torch that contains the battery that contains the EMF that the questioner seems so desperate to know about.’

O levels in those days came in Grades 1 to 6, which were passes, and then 7, 8 and which were fails. I achieved none of these. I achieved something far more magnificent. I was awarded an Unclassified, which included a letter to the school.

I don’t think my father was hugely surprised when the results came through in the summer holidays. At least I had passed Maths, that was the great thing.

I decided, as my third year began, my Sixth Form year, that I would do English, French and Ancient History for A level. My father tried, with half-hearted idealism to suggest that there would be more of a challenge to me intellectually if I chose Maths, but my choice prevailed.

Some two or three weeks after my fifteenth birthday, therefore, I was a member of Lower VIA. I was far too young to be a sixth former. Too young literally, and much too young if one believed Gerard Vaughan’s diagnosis of ‘developmental delay’.

I had the joy of Rory Stuart, a remarkable teacher. Actually a Cambridge classicist of distinction, his enthusiasm (and he was the living embodiment of that divine Greek quality) had turned to English Literature. He went on to become head of English at Westminster and then, on the death of a plantswoman aunt whose cottage and grounds he inherited, he altered direction once more, this time reinventing himself as a landscape gardener. He calls himself, with splendid impudence, RHS Gardens (using his genuine initials but infuriating the pompous arses of the Royal Horticultural Society in Wisley) and does a little teaching still at the nearby Cheltenham Ladies’ College. He co-wrote a book about making a garden with the novelist Susan Hill, a book I thoroughly recommend. His pupils are spread wide around the world and feel themselves to be part of a special club. Sometimes I will bump into someone in the street who’ll say, ‘Excuse me, weren’t you taught by Rory Stuart?’ and we will stand there together swapping stories about him and what he did for us. Like me, there was something immensely distant and aloof about him in private, he was very unknowable there, but once his metaphorical teaching cap was on, he was energetic, charged and boundlessly creative. Anything that was said he could open like a flower, examine as a geologist might examine a stone or a squirrel a nut: a stupid and flippant remark could be as excitedly chased down as serious. Every remark or thought from any boy came to him as if it was utterly new and vibrating with possibility.

Given what I have already said about my parents, Stuart was the teacher that some are lucky enough to have in their lives. Others will always blame the lack of such a being on their failure to progress. Maybe they are right to do so, but I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that – don’t you? – when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It’s too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then. There were pictures of Pol Pot last week, tremblingly enchained: again, too late one feels, too late. Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion. There were those who might have been able to save me from myself. It is possible that somewhere in the chain of events from Chesham Prep to prison I could look back and say, ‘He failed, she failed, they never tried,’ but where would that get me now? Off the hook? I don’t feel that I’m on one. ‘If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,’ said Rilke in sharp defiance of the future industry of TV and self-help-book exorcism.