Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

The following morning, Sunday, as we walked down to the Chapel I explained to Richard Fawcett, Jo Wood and a few others what I had done.

‘You wait,’ I said. ‘You just wait.’

The organ on Sundays was usually played by one of the music staff rather than a boy. It would either be Dr Peschek, whose son Dickson was at the school and a friend, or by Mr Holman who had wild dark curly hair and looked like Professor Calculus from the Tintin books.

As we reached the Magic Carpet, I saw Holman hurrying along with sheaves of music under his arms. Splendid, I thought. Splendid.

The result was indeed splendid.

The moment for the entry of the choir arrived and Holman, as he improvised the quiet preludey music that organists favour while congregations settle, was beginning to look a little rattled already. A huge blasting fart had emerged in the middle of one of his gentle, meandering doodles and blown back the hair of the first two rows of School House who were sitting in front of the diapason array and had directed at him the most indignant looks. This had unnerved him and we could see, between peeping fingers, that he was beginning to lose faith in his beloved presets. But there was no time for him to do anything about it, the chaplain and servers were there at the back with the choir and candle-bearers, it was time for action and the procession. Holman raised his two hands, a tiny knuckle crack was heard as he bent his fingers and -‘Neeeeeeeeee…’

Handel’s stirring anthem ‘Thine Be The Glory’, instead of roaring the faithful to their feet, peeped like a shy mouse from the wainscoting. Headman at the back of the procession, shot a look up at the organ loft, and Holman’s wild face, reflected in the mirror for us all to see, turned a bright shade of scarlet. The fingers of one hand flew around the stops, pulling frantically, while the other hand vamped ineffectually and the feet trod up and down the pedals which gave out tiny squeaking thirds and fifths, the kind of waily wheeze someone produces when they pick up a mouth-organ for the first time.

The school rose uncertainly to its feet, all save Jo Wood, Richard Fawcett and I, who were under the pew, biting hassocks and weeping with joy.

Further stabs of delight assailed us when we saw, during sermons and lessons, Holman furtively lifting the lectern and trying to make adjustments, looking for all the world like the form’s bad boy peeping at a porn-mag in his desk.

A few weeks later the school had the excitement to look forward to of a Day Off. The kingdom was to celebrate the excitements of the Silver Wedding of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and had declared a Monday Bank Holiday in its patriotic fervour. Jo Wood and I had even more to look forward to, for Geoff Frowde had given us permission to go to London.

I had a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to attend, and had invited Jo to come along as my guest.

For many years now I had been a member of this harmlessly dotty sodality. I had been the youngest member for a long while, though by now some snot-nosed little creep had limbo-danced under me to that distinction. The organisation was run by eccentric men like Lord Gore-Booth, the President, who dressed up as Holmes every year when the Society went to Switzerland to re-enact that final, fateful tussle between Moriarty and Holmes by the Reichenbach Falls. Gore-Booth’s wonderful daughter Celia who died way before her time, (I think she was his daughter, not niece) I got to know many years later when she was one of the many remarkable actors in the troupe known, slightly embarrassingly, as Théâtre de Complicité.

Another leading light was the editor of the Journal, the Marquess, or possibly Marquis (I have no Debrett’s to hand, I fear) of Donegal. The Journal ran fierce articles on hot Holmesian topics and ran a correspondence page calling itself ‘The Egg Spoon’, in honour of the item of cutlery that Watson wagged petulantly at Holmes one breakfast very early in their relationship, Watson using the splendid phrase, if I remember rightly, ‘Ineffable twaddle!’ to describe an article he was reading, which turned out of course, to have been written by Holmes himself.

The usual meeting room was the old Royal Commonwealth Club in Villiers Street, off the Strand (deemed propitious I suppose, since Holmes made his first appearance in The Strand Magazine).

Anyhoo, as Ned Ryerson likes to say in Groundhog Day, Frowde had consented to our attendance of a Saturday evening meeting of the Society. We had booked hotel rooms for ourselves in Russell Square and were due to return on Monday afternoon, which gave us almost three days of London.

Only it didn’t, because we had rushes of blood to the head and went to the cinema and watched A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and Cabaret, over and over and over and over and over again for four days in a row. Hell of a year for cinema, 1972. All the films were X-certificate of course, but both Jo and I looked as if we just might pass as eighteen.

I don’t know what it was that possessed us. It was as if we were gripped by some uncontrollable force. We simply could not move away from those films. I think we took in Fritz the Cat four or five times as well, but it was that trio that slammed us amidships like three gigantic icebergs. We could hardly have chosen better, I will say that for ourselves.

I don’t know if our respective parents thought the other child was to blame, or constituted a Bad Influence on the other (I’m not sure my parents ever quite got the point of Jo) but I think we would both agree that it was a simple case of compulsion. If either had left to go back to school, the other would probably have stayed. We were completely mesmerised by an utterly new world and all its possibilities. Art had gripped me, poetry, music, comedy, cricket and love had gripped me and have me in their grip still, but cinema. Films have a peculiar power all their own. Maybe we had found a rock and roll for ourselves, something that was neither solipsistic, tragic and sublime like music, nor egocentrically bullying like comedy. I can’t explain. Until that moment, I had been content and perfectly delighted to watch The Guns of Navarone and You Only Live Twice; now films suddenly seemed to have reached a puberty like mine and were the Real Thing. It was me, of course, not films that had really changed, though there is no doubt that it was a good crop and that there was something new about their style and their treatment of subject matter. As every scene of The Godfather unwound in front of my disbelieving eyes, from the wedding to the final famous closing of the door and the shot of the leather chair, Uppingham School looked smaller and smaller and smaller.

I think I even forgot about Matthew.

I remember feeling the desire to see the films with him, the need to show them to him, but while I was watching them, neck up, front row, over and over and over again, I forgot everything except the world of each film.

When we returned to Uppingham, still blinking at the light and at the dawning realisation of our madness, all was up. In my case the camel’s back had been snapped completely in two by this final straw and I was instantly expelled, not even given the chance to say goodbye to a single friend.

In Jo’s case, punishment came in the form of rustication until the end of term.

I shall never forget my father’s only words in the car as he, yet again, drove his infuriating, ungrateful, monstrous middle child home.

‘We will discuss this sorry business later.’

We did discuss it later, this sorry business, of course we did. One aspect, however that we never discussed, oddly enough, was the films. To my father, and I can see why, this was disobedience, rebellion, wildness, attention-seeking… all kinds of things. He saw the urge to self-destruct, but he did not choose to examine the weapon I had selected. I think that is a fair and a reasonable thing for anyone, but it is strange that we never spoke about the films.