Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Why of course, darling.’

‘Do you mean you picked Daddy when you could have chosen Mr Popplewell!’ I exclaimed in outrage and disgust. For years the Popplewells symbolised to me everything that was successful, integrated and marked down by the gods for effortless achievement. What is more, they were impossible to dislike: they proved to me that it was feasible to conform and to excel without losing integrity, honour, charm or modesty. I had always believed that my father, with his irksomely onerous integrity and pathologically intense distaste for worldly rewards could have been like them if only he hadn’t escaped to the remote defensive fastness of rural Norfolk.

Maybe I believed that the failures I associated with Booton and with Uppingham could be wiped out by this return to Chesham. If I had not been taken from Chesham to Norfolk in the first place, I could have been a glowing success like the Brookes and the Popplewells, I would automatically have joined in. I would have grown up healthy, sensible, talented, law-abiding and decent, instead of being transformed into the mess of madnesses that I had become. I don’t know if that is what I thought, but the Brookes and Popplewells were immensely kind and welcoming, either swallowing the story that I was just holidaying around England before A level results and university or tactfully choosing not to probe. The Popplewells had two of the Australian test side staying with them, Ross Edwards and Ashley Mallet, whom I met in a lather of dripping excitement: cricket by now had entered my soul for keeps. Ashley Mallett told me something that I did not want to believe, something that troubled me deeply. He told me that professional cricket was ultimately hell, because the pain of losing a match was more intense than the joy of winning one. Edwards disagreed with him, but Mallett stuck fast to his belief. It was, I see now, simply a personal difference of outlook between the two of them, but to me it was fundamental. One of them must be right and the other must be wrong. Was the pain of failing a deeper feeling than the joy of success? If so, Robert Browning and Andrea del Sarto were wrong: a man’s reach exceeding his grasp did not justify heaven, it vindicated hell.

After a week or so of cheerful, tumbling, merriness in the Brooke household I left, brimming with charm and gratitude.

I took with me Patrick Brooke’s Diner’s Club card and the insanity really took hold.

In those days any credit card purchase under the value of fifty pounds was a simple matter of signature and a roller machine. There was no swiping and instant computer connection. I took some self-justifying comfort in the thought that as soon as the loss of the card was reported Mr Brooke’s account would not be debited, only that of Diner’s Club Inc. But what does that mean? I had stolen from a pensioner s handbag and from anyone who had money, I can’t claim that the smallest scrap of decency, altruism or respect lay behind any of my actions.

The next few weeks passed in a kind of cacophoric, if there is such a word, buzz – which is to say a state of joylessly euphoric wildness, what a psychiatrist would call the upswing of manic depression or bipolar cyclothymia or however they choose to designate it now. The functional opposite, in other words, of the listless misery that had caused me to scoop up a suicidal bowlful of pills a few months earlier. I know that I went to London and transferred my possessions, such as they were (books mostly) from my rolled up sleeping bag to a brand-new suitcase. I stayed for a while in the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, applied for a job as a reader of talking books for the blind and made regular visits to the American Bar of the Ritz Hotel where I had become friends with the barman, Ron, whose passion was renaissance painting. He could remember P. G. Wodehouse sipping a cocktail in the corner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald leaping over the bar, drunk as a skunk, snatching up a bottle of whisky that he brandished like a woodman’s axe, all kinds of juicy and wondrous moments. But these were as nothing to Ron when compared to a Duccio or a Donatello. He would show me slides of Mantegnas and Correggios and of Masaccio and Giotto fresco cycles that he kept under the bar, light-box and all, and speak to me of the great book in his life, the greatest book about art ever written he told me, Reitlinger’s The Economics of Taste. He fed me free peanuts, olives and cornichons as he talked, enthused and displayed and I listened. I drank glasses of tomato juice and smoked Edward VII cigars in my new blue suit and felt for awhile, that this is where I belonged. The American Bar of the Ritz is now a casino club to which, strangely enough, I do belong. Sometimes Hugh Laurie and I will go in there and lose fifty pounds at the minimum stake blackjack table. I once went in with Peter Cook who was solemnly handed a pair of shoes to replace the white trainers he was wearing.

‘What,’ said Cook, ‘take off my lucky Reeboks! Are you mad?’ and we had gone to Crockford’s instead.

London palled however. A rather unsavoury man of fifty with a perpetual giggle had tried very hard to pick me up in a pinball arcade in Piccadilly and I had hated the experience, hated, that is, how close I had come to accepting his offer of accompanying him home. We had walked together towards a taxi rank in Regent Street and I suddenly ran off, streaking up Sherwood Street and deep into unknown Soho, convinced he was following me all the way and that every sex-shop owner was a friend who would lay hands on me and return me to him. He probably, poor soul, rattled home in the taxi in a fever of terror, quite as convinced that I had marched straight into West End Central and was even at that moment furnishing the police with a detailed description.

I decided that really my destiny lay in a visit to Uley. Maybe that is where I would find some kind of something, any kind of anything. A clue. An opportunity to lay an unknown ghost.

What I believed I was looking for I cannot say. I can only assert that, as in a novel, the locations with which this story climaxes are the same as the locations with which it begins. Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

So I arrived in Uley and saw those members of staff who chose to remain there during the summer holidays, staying a few nights with Sister Pinder in her little cottage and drinking pints of beer in the pub with Paddy and Ian Scott-Clarke. There was nothing for me in Uley of course. They must have known that

I had been expelled from Uppingham and they must have wondered what I thought I was up to now. The crushing humiliation engendered by such unquestioningly, such unconditionally kind treatment sent me on the move again, this time towards the Cotswold villages of Bourton-on-the-Water and Moreton-in-the-Marsh.

It was in a Bed and Breakfast hotel in Moreton-in-the-Marsh that I happened upon my second piece of plastic; it lay snugly in the inside pocket of a casually hung jacket in the hallway, just sitting there for anyone, anyone like me, to steal. It was an Access card this time, much simpler to use, and with a signature that I could more easily reproduce than that of Patrick Brooke.

I had a suitcase, a suit I had bought in London, a few other clothes, some books and unlimited spending power. It was time now to head for the Reading Festival and the thrillingly shocking possibility of a meeting with Matthew.

My journey to Reading was broken in a town whose name I cannot even remember. I stayed overnight in as dreary a Post House Hotel as you have ever seen, even in your worst nightmare. Your worst nightmare, of course, is the precise inspiration for designers of this species of hotel. They steal your sleeping fears like a succubus and drop them down beside the ring-roads of dying towns.