Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

One morning I was off school, whether shamming or genuinely sick I can’t remember. Mother came into my bedroom, hands wearily pressed against hips, and told me that the time had come for her to go into hospital. Roger had once attempted to tell me how pregnancy came about. One or both of us became a little confused and the picture in my head was that of my father as a kind of gardener, dropping a small seed into my mother’s tummy-button and watering it with his pee. A peculiar image I suppose, but to a race of Martians no stranger than the unwieldy truth.

The upshot of all this was a baby girl, Joanna. Her middle name Roselle came from my mother’s own Viennese mother. It became my particular joy to help feed and dress this new sister and my most burning ambition to be the first person she smiled at.

I was now officially a middle child.

The next week we left Chesham and headed for Norfolk.

It is January 1965. Roger, who is eight, has returned to Stouts Hill for his second term. I am considered a spot too young. I am due to follow him in the summer so in the meantime I attend for one time-marking term a Church of England primary school in the village of Cawston, a mile from our new house in Booton.

Cawston Primary School was run by John Kett, descended from Kett of Kett’s Rebellion, the Kett who ended his days hanging from chains on the ramparts of Norwich Castle. The twentieth-century descendant is a kindly figure who writes books on Norfolk dialect and is much loved and looked up to by everyone for miles around. Whether he shares his noisome ancestor’s belief in eastern independence I could not say, but I am certain that were today’s fashion for devolution to be continued into the ancient kingdoms of England, he would be a very natural candidate for King of Anglia – perhaps with Delia Smith as his consort.

‘I need a volunteer,’ Miss Meddlar said one day.

My hand shot up. ‘Oh, Miss, me Miss! Please Miss!’

‘Very well, Stephen Fry.’ Miss Meddlar always called me by both names. It is one of my chief memories of primary school, that of being Stephen Fry all the time. I suppose Miss Meddlar felt first names were too informal and surnames too cold and too affected for a decent, Christian village school.

‘Take this to Mr Kett’s class please, Stephen Fry.’

‘This’ was a sheet of paper bearing test results. Spelling and Adding Up. I had annoyed myself by getting one answer wrong in the spelling round. I had spelled the word ‘many’ with two ‘n’s. Everyone else had made the same mistake but compounded the error by using an ‘e’, so Miss Meddlar had given me half a point for knowing about the ‘a’. I took the sheet of paper from her knowing that my name headed the list with nineteen and a half out of twenty.

Out in the corridor I walked towards Mr Kett’s classroom door. I stood there ready to knock when I heard laughter coming from inside.

No one in life, not the wartiest old dame in Arles, not the wrinkledest, stoopingest Cossack, not the pony-tailedest, venerablest old Mandarin in China, not Methuselah himself, will ever be older than a group of seniors at school. They are like Victorian photographs of sporting teams. No matter how much more advanced in years you are now than the age of those in the photograph, they will always look a world older, always seem more capable of growing a bigger moustache and holding more alcohol. The sophistication with which they sit and the air of maturity they give off is unmatchable by you. Ever.

The laughter from inside Mr Kett’s room came from nine- and ten-year-olds, but they were nine- and ten-year-olds whose age I will never reach, whose maturity and seniority I can never hope to emulate. There was something in the way their laughter seemed to share a mystery with Mr Kett, a mystery of olderness, that turned my knees to water. I pulled back my hand from the door just in time to stop it from knocking, and fled to the changing room.

I sat panting on a bench by the lockers staring miserably at Miss Meddlar’s sheet of paper. I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t walk into that senior classroom.

I knew what would happen if I did, and I rehearsed the scene in my head, rehearsed it in such detail that I believed that I actually had done it, just as a scared diver on the high board finds his stomach whoomping with the shock of a jump he has made only in his mind.

I shivered at the thought of how the scene would go.

I would knock.

‘Come in,’ Mr Kett would say.

I would open the door and stand at the threshold, knees wobbling, eyes downcast.

‘Ah. Stephen Fry. And what can I do for you, young man?’

‘Please, Mr Kett. Miss Meddlar told me to give you this.’

The seniors would start to laugh. A sort of contemptuous, almost annoyed laughter. What is this squidge, this fly, this nothing doing in our mature room, where we were maturely sharing a mature joke with Mr Kett? Look at him… his shorts are all ruckled up and… my God… are those StartRite sandals, he’s wearing? Jesus…

My name being first on the list would only make it worse.

‘Well, Master Fry. Nineteen and a half out of twenty! A bit of a brain box, by the look of things!’

Almost audible sneers at this and a more muttered, angry kind of laughter. Spelling! Adding up for Christ’s sake…

No, it was intolerable. Unthinkable. I couldn’t go in there.

I wanted to run away. Not home. Just away. To run and run and run and run. Yet I was too frightened to do that either. Oh dear. Oh double dear. Such terrible, terrible misery. And all because I had done well. All because I had stretched up my hand so high and squealed ‘Oh, Miss, me Miss! Please Miss’ so loudly and so insistently.

It was all wrong, the world was all wrong. I was Stephen Fry in a changing room in a small -school in Norfolk and I wanted to be someone else. Someone else in another country in another age in another world.

I looked down at Miss Meddlar’s piece of paper. My name at the top was running saltily into the name of Darren Wright below. Darren Wright had fourteen marks out of twenty. Fourteen was a much more sensible mark. Not at all embarrassing. Why couldn’t I have scored fourteen?

I screwed the paper into a ball and stuffed it into a wellington boot. It was Mary Hench’s wellington boot. It said so in clear black writing on Elastoplast stuck to the inside. Mary Hench and I were friends, so maybe she wouldn’t tell if she found it.

I stood up and wiped my nose. Oh dear.

Over the next ten years I was to find myself alone in changing rooms many, many times more, the longest ten years of my life. This occasion was innocent and infantile, those future visits guiltier and more wicked by far. To this day institutional changing rooms make my heart beat with a very heavy hammerblow of guilt. The feeling of wanting not to be Stephen Fry, wanting to be someone else in another country in another age, that was to return to me many times too.

I left this ur-changing room, this primal prototype of all the changing rooms that were to be, and had no sooner sunk tremblingly back into my seat in Miss Meddlar’s classroom than the bell went for morning break.

As was my habit I joined Mary Hench and the other girls at the edge of the playground, hard by the painted hopscotch lines. She was a large girl, Mary Hench, with gentle brown eyes and a pleasant lisp. We liked to bounce tennis balls against the wall and talk about how stupid boys were while we watched them playing football and fighting in the middle of the playground. Soft, she called them. Boys were soft. Sometimes I was soft, but usually I was daft, which was a little better. With Mary Hench was Mabel Tucker, the girl I sat next to in Miss Meddlar’s. Mabel Tucker wore National Health spectacles and I of course called her Table Mucker which she hated. She would shout out loudly in class when I farted, which I did not believe to be playing the game.