Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

One could argue that there was something in each of them that spoke directly to me.

In Cabaret there was homosexuality in the form both of divine decadence and of guilty, smothered English shame; there was guilty, smothered Jewish shame too; there was the tension and love between a stuffy Englishman unable to scream or express himself and the fantasising, romantic Sally Bowles, each equally doomed and equally in pain, each one half of me.

In A Clockwork Orange there was the bad, uncontrollable, rebellious, intolerable and intolerant adolescent, with his mad romping love of Beethoven (even Rossini got a look in too) and society’s need to constrain and emasculate him, to drive away both his devils and his angels and stop him from being himself.

In The Godfather there was… hell, this is pointless, there is everything in The Godfather.

Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.

THE REPLACEMENT FOR Uppingham that my parents chose was The Paston School in the Norfolk market town of North Walsham. A direct grant grammar school (there had been some point to that Eleven Plus after all, it seemed) its greatest claim to fame was its old boy, the ‘Norfolk Hero’ as he is known around these parts, Horatio Nelson.

Having been expelled from Uppingham (‘asked to leave’ is the proper expression) in November 1972 I naturally had to start at Paston in the Spring Term of 1973. The school, which was not accustomed to fifteen-year-olds in the Sixth Form, suggested that I retake all my O levels in the summer of 1974, when I would be sixteen, only then might it be appropriate to think about A levels.

Well I mean, what? The blow to my pride was immense; never had a pride been that so deserved a great blow, but that was not how I looked at it. On hearing this news, I instantly, before I had so much as crossed its threshold, detested and despised all things Pastoman.

By this time I think my parents were beginning to worry about any influence I might have on my sister, Jo. She turned eight years old about the time of my expulsion and had remained entirely devoted to me. Being a girl, it was not considered so necessary, according to the curious logic of these things, for her to board, so she attended Norwich High School for Girls, a private school which involved the snazziest green uniform you can imagine. Now that I was starting at The Paston, a day school too, Jo and I would breakfast together and spend evenings together every single day. My bus went from Cawston to North Walsham, Jo was enmeshed in a complex network of school runs with the parents of other girls around the Booton area, but essentially we were in the same boat now. Roger naturally stayed at Fircroft, where he was to go on to become a House Polly and then School Polly and Captain of House and I would see him only in the holidays.

Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced. I did not take to the place one bit. I can remember barely anything about it, except that it was there that I started to smoke and there that I learned to play pinball: not within the school grounds, but within the town of North Walsham. For within a very short space of time I started to cut the school dead. I would get on the Cawston bus and dismount at either Aylsham or North Walsham and then head straight for a café and spend the day pinballing, listening to records by Slade, the Sweet, Wizzard and Suzi Quattro and smoking interminable Carlton Premiums, Number Sixes and Embassy Regals.

The Paston took this insolence for about a term and a half before suggesting to my parents that maybe I might be happier somewhere else.

I wish I could write more about the place, but I simply do not remember a thing. I drive through North Walsham sometimes, on my way to visit friends in the old wool town of Worsted, and I see the school but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what any of the buildings were used for. I suppose there were assembly halls, sports fields and all the rest of it, but the entire establishment is a vacuum in my mind. My whole being was concentrating entirely on Matthew Osborne and nothing else in the world existed.

I thought of writing to him, but could not begin to express my thoughts, or if I did, I did not dare to communicate them. So I did the next best thing and wrote poetry.

Once The Paston had dislodged me, my ever patient parents thought that perhaps what I needed was the more mature atmosphere of a Sixth Form College, a place where pupils were called students, lessons were called lectures, where smoking was not against the rules, where independence of mind and eccentricity were tolerated. The place available to me, which could take me on as a weekly boarder, was the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King’s Lynn, known as Norcat. I remember visiting the vice-principal, and my mother enquiring about Oxbridge entrance. The VP gave a kind of derisive snort and said that, looking at my record he really didn’t think that this was an option we need consider. I shall never forget the indignant flush that suffused my mother’s face, the closest to fury I had seen her come for a very long time.

I had the summer of 1973 to fill then, before starting on a two-year A level course of English, French and History of Art. I took a job at the Cawston Winery, a little plant that produced kits for home brewing and home wine-making. My job involved making cardboard boxes, millions of the bastards. The rest of the time however, was spent writing poems and starting novels. Always the same subject. The subject of most of The Liar and the subject of this book.

There was always a Me and there was always a Matthew. If I were to quote now extensively from any of these (I have just spent a very bloody seven hours going though them) it would hurt you, dear reader, and me, too much.

Most of the shorter poems have angry, pompous teenage titles like ‘Song of Dissonance and Expedience’ and ‘Open Order: A Redress’, a punning title this, which will only make sense if you’ve ever drilled in the CCF or armed services.

This was too the summer in which I wrote these words.

To Myself: Not To Be Read Until I Am

Twenty-Five

I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you will screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust, or at best with tolerant amusement but deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on my life will be behind me. I tell you now, THIS IS TRUE – truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know. WHAT I AM NOW