Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

The greatest educational stimulation at this time, oddly, seemed to come from History of Art. I became obsessed in particular with architecture, the Greek orders, the Gothic orders, Michelangelo, and then the English House, the Gothic revival and the Victorians. My bible was Bannister Fletcher and my God was Inigo Jones. I am ashamed to say I cannot even remember what texts were set for English or for French. Hold up… for French it was Anouilh’s Antigone again. That’s it, I fear, that’s the sum of my memories of King’s Lynn in my second year there.

I sat the A levels – most of them, ducking out of the final papers of French and English. Fear of failure again:

‘Of course I failed! I didn’t even bloody turn up!’

And then, in the phoney period of awaiting results that we all knew would be disastrous, the stealing began again in greater earnest. My mother had been used to the raids on her handbag, God knows how she could bring herself to look at me sometimes, and I felt sick myself then, not as sick as I feel now, but sick all the same.

I was still stuck at home, knowing that by the end of August, my eighteenth birthday, I would be without A levels, without friends, without purpose, without anything but the prospect of a winding down into permanent failure and lost opportunity. I had started, in King’s Lynn, occasionally visiting the public lavatories, cottages as they are known in the gay world, and I saw a future for myself, at best, as an assistant librarian in a mouldy town somewhere, occasionally getting a blow job in a public bog. Arrested once or twice every four or five years and ending up with my head in an oven. Not so uncommon a fate in those days, or today. Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.

I remember an episode of Star Trek that ends with Jim turning to McCoy and saying, ‘Out there, Bones, someone is saying the three most beautiful words in the galaxy.’ I fully expected the nauseous obviousness of ‘I love you’. But Kirk turned to the screen, gazed at the stars and whispered:

‘Please, help me.’

Strange, the potency of cheap television.

I had no concept of such a thing as seeking help. I had successfully signed up on the dole, to the distressed resignation of my parents, and I headed, that July, with my Giro cheque to King’s Lynn. for one last Paradox Party, which would be followed by my meeting up with Jo Wood for a camping holiday in Devon.

When I next returned to Booton, it would be as a convicted felon.

One of the most shameful of many shameful acts that were to follow was the theft of pension money from the handbag of the grandmother of the young man who was hosting the Paradox Party. There are few crimes lower and nothing I write in this paragraph will mitigate, deaden or palliate the pain and fury it must have caused that family.

I caught a train to Devon, arranged some humiliating business to do with Giro cheque forwarding by telephone with my mother and wandered with Jo Wood around Chagford and other beauty spots until it was time for Jo to go home to Sutton Coldfield.

I accompanied him there. The next two months were to see me moving around the country searching for some element of my past that might give me a clue as to my future.

That is a very strange way to describe what happened.

A very strange way to describe it indeed.

But it is true, for over the next two months I found myself making my way towards Chesham, desperate to see a town again that I barely remembered, a town that I had not seen since I was seven years old, but which pulled me like a magnet. I went to Yorkshire and stayed with Richard Fawcett’s family. I went to Uley and saw Sister Pinder and the Angus girls and Cloud the pony, still alive, her grey milky belly now all but brushing the ground. I made my way to the Reading rock festival because I had heard a rumour that Matthew might be there. I knew Matthew wasn’t the same Matthew, the real Matthew, but I wanted to search for the traces and I wanted perhaps at last to tell him, to let it all go.

A less strange way to describe what happened is to report that I went about Britain stealing, stealing, stealing and stealing until the police caught up with me.

Jo’s place was in Sutton Coldfield where he lived with his mother, sister and two brothers. I stole some money from the hosts of a drinks party I had been invited along to and headed to Sheffield, where I stayed a while with Richard Fawcett and his parents. They were kind to me: Richard and I chatted and caught up with each other, but my feet were itching, the desire to return had gripped me, I wanted to go right back, right back to the beginning. I don’t believe that I stole from the Fawcetts, but maybe I did.

My next destination was Chesham and the Brookes and Popplewells. Amanda Brooke, Florence Nightingale yellow, lambswool V-neck and straight brunette cut had been my girlfriend when we were five and six. The Popplewells were a family of four boys, all of whom were horrifyingly good at cricket and everything else. At Christmas the Popplewells traditionally sent, instead of cards, general letters that delineated their sons’ enviable records of shining academic and athletic distinction – ‘Alexander has won a scholarship to Charterhouse, Andrew achieved Grade 7 in the viola, Nigel had a successful trial for Hampshire Seconds, Eddie-Jim’s prep-school composition “What I Did In The Holidays” has been short listed for the Booker Prize…‘ that kind of thing. Our family, in moments of rare collective ‘humour would wryly compose the equivalents that the Fry family might send: ‘Stephen has been expelled from his third school and continues to lie and steal. Jo has defiantly smeared mascara all over her ten-year old eyelashes and looks a mess, Roger’s CO describes him as too considerate and pleasant to make a successful career officer. The house temperature has now plummeted below anything an Eskimo would tolerate.’ We knew that the Popplewell Christmas Letter was never designed to crow or gloat, but its effect on us was none the less that of lemon on a paper-cut.

Margaret, to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude for presenting me with my first Wodehouse book, had been at school with my mother. Her husband Oliver, a team-member along with Peter May and Jim Prior of the Charterhouse XI immortalised by Simon Raven, won his Blue at Cambridge and then turned to the law. He kept in touch with the cricket establishment however and only last year completed a two-year term as President of the MCC: he now judges away full-time in the law courts. One of the greatest regrets of my life was to turn down his offer to put me up for MCC membership. I don’t know why I declined, a kind of embarrassment I suppose. Two years later I changed my mind but by then the waiting list had gone supernova and the opportunity was lost. Whether coaching me in cricket as a tiny tot along with his sons, or later as a skipper trying to teach me the rudiments of sailing, he always presented the image of a bluff, Hawk’s Club, won’t-put-up-with-any-of-this-intellectual-nonsense hearty, which belied a deep intelligence and very real sensitivity – as we shall see. The oldest son Nigel, closest in age to me, was also to become a Cambridge Blue, double Blue in fact, and went on to play for Somerset, in the cup-winning side that included Ian Botham, Joel Garner and Viv Richards. He too is now a lawyer.

My mother tells me that, aged five, I once returned from an afternoon in the Popplewell garden, bowling and batting and fielding and said to her, ‘Mummy, are you allowed to choose your husband?’