Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

The place was also, it must be pointed out, full of girls. Two girls, Judith and Gillian, I made friends with very quickly. Judith adored Gilbert O’Sullivan and wanted to be a novelist: she had already created a Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins type heroine called Castella, and would give us excerpts of work in progress. Together we pooled resources to buy Terry Jacks’s ‘Seasons in the Sun’ which one-off single smote us both deeply. I think Judith might have suspected my sexuality, for she was the kind of naturally simpatica, thickly red-haired girl who makes a natural confidante for gay men. Gillian, on the other hand, for a short time became a girlfriend of mine, and there were disco moments of ensnogglement and bra-fumbling which came to very little.

It was in King’s Lynn that I swam into the orbit of a most extraordinary circle of intellectuals who met regularly in the bar of a small hotel and discussed avidly the works of Frederick Rolfe, the infamous Baron Corvo. The very fact that I had heard of him made me welcome in the circle. These men and women, who were led by a bespectacled fellow called Chris and a glamorously half-French Baron called Paul, held regular Paradox Parties. Instead of a password or a bottle, the only way to gain entry to such a party was to offer at the door a completely original paradox. Paul, whose father was the French honorary consul (for King’s Lynn is a port), could play the piano excellently, specialising in outré composers like Alkan and Sorabji, although he was also capable of delighting me with Wolf and Schubert Lieder. He was planning, like Corvo, to become a Roman priest. Also like Corvo, he failed in his attempt, unlike Corvo however he did not descend into bitterness and resentment but became finally an Anglican priest, which suited him better, despite his ancestry. He died unpleasantly many years later in his London parish. This group regularly produced a magazine called The Failiure Press (the spelling is deliberate) to which I contributed a regular crossword. A deal of The Failiure Press was written in the New Model Alphabet, which would take up far too much space for me to explain, but which nearly always looked like this ‘phaij phajboo ajbo jjjbo’ and took a great deal of deciphering to the initiated. The rest was filled with Corvine material (relating to the works of Corvo) and latterly, after I had long since moved on, it plunged into a weird libertarian frenzy of polemical anti-Semitism, gall and bitterness: the title had ever been a hostage to fortune or self-fulfilling prophecy. In its early days it was light-hearted, occasionally amusing, and always self-consciously intellectual. In a town like King’s Lynn, such spirits were rare and it was amongst this group that I found my temporary best friend, and indeed first and only real girlfriend, whom I will call Kathleen Waters, to spare blushes all round.

Kathleen was in many of the same lecture sets as I, and she had the advantage of having her parents’ house just across the road from college. We would spend a lot of time there, playing records and talking. She had entered the phase of smoking Sobranie cigarettes, using green and black nail polish, wearing fringey silks and delighting in that strange mixture of the Bloomsbury and the pre-Raphaelite which characterises a certain kind of girl with artistic temperament and nowhere to put it. For my sixteenth birthday she gave me a beautiful green and gold 1945 edition of Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, which I have to this day, and a damned good fuck, the memory of which is also with me still.

We were up in her room, listening to Don Maclean’s American Pie, as one did in those days, marvelling at the poetry of ‘Vincent’ and how it spoke us, when she remarked that it was odd that we had never screwed. I had told her early on that I was probably homosexual, but she did not see this as any kind of impediment at all.

It was a perfectly satisfactory experience. It was not as I had imagined from that horribly misogynistic scene in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers which seemed to suggest that because Tchaikovsky was attracted to men he must also have vomited at the touch of women. I could not, afterwards, deny that the design features of the vagina, so far as texture and enclosing elasticity were concerned, seemed absolutely made for the job – ideally suited in fact. We remained friends and tried it again once or twice, in a field and in a car. My heart was never in it, but my loins were very grateful indeed for the outing and the exercise.

The summer after my first year at Lynn I earned enough as a barman at the Castle Hotel (sixteen years old, but what the hell, they didn’t ask questions in those days) to buy a Raleigh Ultramatic Moped, which I now used to shuttle me the weekly thirty-something miles between Booton and King’s Lynn. For my second year I bade farewell to the Crootes, Pepe and Mantovani and took up accommodation in a hostel in college. I had two very good friends there, Philip Sutton and Dale Martin, both highly entertaining, charming, funny and resourceful. I must confess too that Dale was almost my first betrayal of Matthew for I found him terrifically cute. He looked like a seventeen-year-old Brad Pitt, which surely no one will deny is a wholly acceptable appearance to present. Matthew still burned a hole in my heart, but Dale was most comely to look upon. We lived on the top floor of the hostel which had a kitchenette, and Phil and Dale patiently taught me over many weeks how to fry eggs and heat up baked beans, a skill I retain to this day to the sick envy and admiration of my friends.

Both Phil and Dale were Norfolk down to their socks, but again they forgave me my background and treated me as one of them. Our idea of a really, really, really good time was to spend hour upon hour in a back parlour of The Woolpack, the pub next door to the college, playing three-card brag for money. Not huge sums, but enough to annoy us if we kept losing. I wasn’t in the least interested in alcohol and usually drank long pints of bitter lemon and orange juice, a St Clements I think the drink is called. I discovered that I absolutely loved the company of completely heterosexual men, where the conversation ranged endlessly between sport, jokes, pop-music and the card game. There was a reluctance to talk openly of women, not out of shyness but I think out of the same graceful good manners that is more stuffily enshrined amongst the smarter classes in all those College sconcing rules and admonitions never to ‘bandy a woman’s name’. Phil and Dale got me a job at Christmas as a waiter at the Hotel de Paris in Cromer. In a week I earned a hundred pounds, and by Christ I earned it. I think I must have walked two hundred miles between kitchen and restaurant, silver-serving from breakfast to late, late, dinner. The money was spent on cannabis, cigarettes and still (I blush to confess) sweets.

I had been elected in my second year at Norcat on to the committee of the Student’s Union. I came upon this clipping the other day which I had proudly cut from the pages of the Lynn News amp; Advertiser.

" West Norfolk not to ban ‘Exorcist’

Members of the environmental health committee of West Norfolk District Council exercised their powers as film censors for the first time on Wednesday.

They watched the controversial film “The Exorcist,” and then approved it.

The committee members attended a private showing of the two-hour film at the Majestic Cinema, King’s Lynn, to decide whether they were prepared to accept the recommended certification of the British Board of Film Censors.

COMPLAINTS

At a committee meeting afterwards the committee agreed that the film which has an X certificate, could be shown in West Norfolk.