Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Maybe it’s my mother’s side in me that makes me one who would rather look to people to thank and praise than people to blame and damn. Don’t get me wrong, unlike my mother, I’ve a wicked tongue in my head and when it comes, for example, to that pallid, fraudulent, dangerous twentieth-century version of true mysticism, the charlatanism of runes, tarot, horoscopy, telepathy, rootless opinion, stale second-hand ‘open-mindedness’ and all that shite, I get blisteringly unforgiving and furious. I am capable of being horribly polemic and culpatory in many arenas, but in the arena of the past I see no point. Had I been palpably abused in any senses of that much (ha!) abused word, then maybe I would think differently -as it is and as I have never tired of restating, I am the one who did most of the abusing: I abused trust, love, kindness and myself.

As a sixth-former life was, technically, more relaxed. As a fifteen-year-old it was, naturally, growing more complex every day. My feeling for Matthew had not altered. We never repeated the allegro rapture of our one sexual experiment, and we never referred to it. I still don’t know why it happened. Maybe he had guessed the depth of my feeling for him and had thought it was founded in lust and had as a result wanted to get all that out of the way because he valued my friendship. Maybe he was being kind. Maybe he was just a healthy fourteen-year-old who fancied a quick bit of nookie. Maybe he felt for me what I felt for him. I’ll never know and that is as it should be. I’ll always have that memory at least… the heat of him, the heat of him from his day’s exercise, the heat that radiated from the base of his throat, the heat under his arms, the heat-of-the-moment heat of that moment. Oh dear, will these memories never lose their heat?

I acted in a play in Trog Richardson’s brand new Uppingham Theatre, being amongst the first three to step on its stage. Patrick Kinmonth, Adrian Corbin and I were the weird sisters (none weirder, believe me) in the theatre’s baptismal production of Macbeth. I had read David Magarshak’s translation of Stanislavsky’s Art of the Theatre and had decided that acting was my destiny.

The director, Gordon Braddy, wanted the witches to design their own costumes, a decision he came to regret, since I announced that I wanted my costume to hang with fresh livers, lungs, kidneys, hearts, spleens and other innards, all bound by intestines. And why not, I argued, produce real eyes of frog and genuine tongues of newt from the cauldron? This was considered too much, but my offal-trimmed costume was permitted. The costume itself was constructed of strips of PVC. Kinmonth, who is now a highly respected painter anyway so it wasn’t fair, designed something excellent. Corbin too managed to snip something out of plastic that was at least wearable. The Christine-Keeler-meets-the-little-red-murderer from-Don’t-Look-Now nightmare that I threw together haunts me still and, I swear to you, for I have returned many times, the smell of rotten guts still informs the under-stage dressing-rooms.

I returned to that Uppingham Theatre for the first time, as it happens, in 1981, just after leaving Cambridge, with Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery and the rest of our Footlights troupe, to perform prior to Edinburgh. Uppingham had become, because of Chris Richardson, a common stop-off place for comedians. It had started with Richardson designing the set for Rowan Atkinson’s original one-man-show. Rowan always tried out his new material at Uppingham and the Footlights followed.

I have since been back to give little talks and readings and so forth, Old Boy on the Telly, Sleb Speaker, all that, but every time I stand on that stage I see Richard Fawcett as Seyton and Third Murderer, Tim Montagnon as Banquo, David Game laying on as Macduff and above all Rory Stuart as Macbeth. Like most actors I forget the lines of any play a week or so after the run is over, but I have forgotten hardly a single word of Macbeth, from ‘When’ to ‘Scone’. It is too far distant to recall Rory’s performance in any detail, but I was thrilled, simply entranced, by the way he delivered the climax to the great ‘If it were done when ‘tis done’ soliloquy -

Hoo-werr… I still shudder at it. I may have felt guilt and fear of punishment in my day, but it was never quite that bad. A few people whispering in corners, the soul of my dead grandfather, the sad-eyed Christ, those things have bothered and shamed me, but I never imagined heaven’s cherubim blowing the horrid deed in every eye or Pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast. God where did he get it from, that man, that Shakespeare?

None the less, nemesis was drawing up her skirts ready to charge, and as always with that fell dame, I wasn’t looking for her in the right places.

My parents, with as much realism, I fear, as generosity, had made it plain that if ever I was short of money, I was to go to Mr Frowde and he would advance me enough to buy as many of Mrs Lanchberry’s lard-fried eggs and her husband’s cream slices as I could eat. It must have been something more than slightly sickening and slightly frightening for them to know that the most efficient way to stop me stealing was to let me have as much money as I wanted. It’s like proving Pythagoras by drawing and measuring as many different right-angled triangles as you can.

I had more or less stayed out of trouble for the first month or so of that sixth-form term. The work was fun: I liked Anouilh’s Antigone, the first French set text we had reached, and I liked Ancient History too, which was actually a cop-out: I should have chosen Latin and Greek, but I saw Ancient History as a good dossy compromise.

I developed around this time a mania for climbing around the roofs of the school buildings. Any psychologist who can interpret this convincingly for me will earn my thanks. The School Hall, a great Victorian building with onion domes at each corner and the Chapel itself, both yielded wonderful runs of leaded channels and strange platforms from which one could survey the school beneath. I knew where Biffo Bailey, the school porter kept the keys to everything and had become a master at the art of this particular form of non-theftual cat-burglary.

(‘Did he just say non-theftual?’

‘He did, you know.’

‘I thought so. Shall I, or will you?’

‘Best let it pass I think.’ ‘Really?’

‘Mm. Only encourage him otherwise.’

‘Well, if you say so. Personally I’ve half a mind to call the police.’)

Both the Chapel and the Hall also contained two enormous Walker organs, with gigantic thirty-two foot wood diapasons. If you stuck a piece of paper over the vent of one (I’m sure there’s a better name for it than ‘vent’, but I’ve lost Howard Goodall’s telephone number) a single one-second blast on a bottom A would break the paper in two. Best of all, the lectern could be raised to reveal a huge array of presets. Between each of the three keyboards, you see, were buttons numbered one to, I think, eight. The organist, instead of having to grab at and pull out a clutch of different stops while in mid-Toccata, could just press Button 3 say, which would automatically push out a preset combination of, for example, viol, tromba and clarion. I discovered, one Saturday afternoon while the rest of the school was thrilling to the excitements of the Oundle match or whatever frantic tourney was being enacted on the field of battle, that I could alter these presets, and I did so. All you needed, with the lectern lifted and balanced on your head, was to use the tip of a biro to flick a series of dip-switches, as I believe they’re called. I changed every preset which was loud and thunderous to a preset that used one feeble oboey wail and every preset which was dulcet and faint to a great combinatory blast of the very loudest, most thundering pipes.