Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

It was only as I was finishing my dinner of steak and salad and beer in the dining room of this soulless assembly of melamine and artex that I realised that the date that day was the twenty-fourth of August 1975. My eighteenth birthday.

It was my eighteenth birthday. I had come of age here, in this place. I was eighteen years old. Not a fifteen-year-old discovering poetry, the beauty of algebra and the treachery and terror of growing up. Not a tormented fourteen-year-old whose life has exploded into love. Not a naughty twelve-year-old who broke school bounds to visit sweet shops. Not a grown up eight-year-old who put a new boy at his ease on a train. Not a funny little boy who cried when his mole was upstaged by a donkey and didn’t dare go into the Headmaster’s classroom because he was frightened of the big boys. Not a wicked little imp who pulled down his trousers and played rudies with a boy called Tim. An eighteen-year-old youth on the run. A somewhat less than juvenile delinquent. A petty thief who ruined people’s lives with theft, betrayal, cowardice and contempt. A man. A man wholly responsible for all his actions.

Alone in my room, I ordered a half bottle of whisky from room service and for the first time in my life I made myself completely drunk. Drunk in the most dismal, appalling and lonely conditions conceivable. A concrete and smoked glass travelling salesman’s shake-down, an apocalypse of orange cushions, brown curtains and elastic-cornered nylon sheets. Hardly had the whisky gone down my throat in heavily watered gulps than I added to the bathroom sink heave after heave of sour sick.

My sister told me later that this was the worst day, the very worst day of all at Booton, this day of my eighteenth birthday. My first ever birthday away from home and, at that, my eighteenth. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing. Since I had left the Brookes’ house they had had no news of me from anybody. I had been filed as a missing person, but they knew in this England of Johnny Go Home and fresh waves of missing teenagers reported every hour, they knew that they may as well not have bothered. When August the twenty-fourth came round however, when it was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday, so Jo tells me, my mother was inconsolable all day, weeping and sobbing like a lost child, which is, I am afraid, howl am weeping as I type this. I am weeping for the shame, for the loss, the cruelty, the madness and again the shame and the shame and the shame. Weeping too for mothers everywhere, yesterday, today and tomorrow, who sit alone on the day of their child’s birth not knowing where their beloved boy or their darling girl might be, who might be with them or what they might be doing. I am weeping too for grown-up children so lost to themselves and to hope that they squat in doorways, lie on beds, stare in stupors high or wired, or sit alone all eaten up with self-hate on their eighteenth birthday. I am weeping too for the death of adolescence, the death of childhood and the death of hope: there are never enough tears to mourn their passing.

The whisky had done its work with me, as whisky will. It blanked my mind enough to stop it wandering to the raspberry canes at Booton, banned it from conjuring a picture of Jo and Mother stripping clean the gooseberry bushes and denied me the image of the raw red hands of Mrs Riseborough rolling dough, stewing pears and shredding suet. Scenes from a childhood that I loathed and which sent me mad with longing, as did the tattered photograph of the loathed familial prison that still I carried with me everywhere I went – the oval loveliness of Matthew pasted on the obverse side. Without the numb wall of whisky between my head and my heart, all these would have buffeted me with such howling waves of grief that I and all the concrete foulness about me would split apart.

The following day this eighteen-year-old arose and took his headache and his suitcase and his credit cards to Reading. The Festival was too vast and frightening to penetrate, but there was a rumour of something happening on Salisbury Plain later, a rumour that Steeleye Span might be performing in the shadows of Stonehenge. If Matthew went anywhere he would go where Steeleye Span and Maddy Prior were.

I see from irrefutable documentary evidence that it was a full two weeks later before I arrived in Swindon on my way to Salisbury. It seems in my memory to have been only a day or so later, perhaps those two weeks were whiskied into one long stupor.

There was a grand looking hotel in Swindon, calling itself, I think, The Wiltshire, or the Wiltshire County. Four stars I counted on its marquee: four stars was no more than I expected as my due from life.

I checked in, that sunny morning of the ninth of September, well used to the procedure by now.

‘Edward Bridges,’ I said to the receptionist, ‘would you have a room for the night?’ Edward Bridges was, let us imagine, the name of the man whose Access card I had stolen: the real Edward Bridges, innocent victim as he was, does not need to have his name dragged into this sordid tale.

The usual procedure was gone through: the signing in, the flexible friend slapping into the bracket beneath the roller, the keys handed over with a beaming smile.

‘Charming,’ I said to the porter who came up with my suitcase, as I surveyed the room. ‘Quite charming.’ I slipped him fifty pence and laid down on the bed.

Tomorrow Stonehenge. Somehow I knew, because the god of love is capricious and insolent, that this time I would bump into Matthew there. A Matthew with sideburns no doubt, a Matthew thick with muscles, but Matthew none the less. I would probably get stoned with him and, at some propitiously giggling moment, let him know, in a bubble of hilarity that I had mooned after him this four years or more.

‘Crazy man, or what?’ I would drawl, and we would laugh and joke and laugh again.

Yes, that is how I would play it tomorrow.

I frowned as I crossed and uncrossed my feet.

Those shoes. Really, those shoes! The one little luxury I had not been able to obtain with all my stolen money and all my stolen credit was a decent pair of shoes. Being size twelve and half it had never been easy. Perhaps Swindon might provide where others had denied. One never knew. I hauled myself up to my feet, straightened my smart blue suit, winked to myself in the mirror and left the room.

‘There you go!’ I said in that silly, cheerful, English way as I dropped my key on the reception desk.

And would you believe it, the first thing I come across is a damned good shoe shop where they have, as if awaiting my arrival, a pair of thunderingly sound black semi-brogues in a perfect twelve and half? Excellent. Capital.

I walked up and down and inspected them in the angled mirror.

‘Do you know,’ I said, handing over my Access card, and casting a rueful glance at the cracked old pair that lay on the carpet looking for all the world as if they were waiting for Godot, ‘these fit so well I think I’ll wear them home!’

I passed a little jeweller’s shop next and the idea struck me that the wristwatch I wore was commonplace and ill-favoured.

The assistant was most helpful and showed me first a smart young Ingersoll, charming in its way but worth less than ten pounds.

‘Maybe you have something a little more stylish?’ I ventured. The little man dipped down below the counter to find a tray and I ran from the shop with the Ingersoll clutched to me.

A very satisfactory morning’s shopping, I thought to myself as I flew from the shopping centre, but trying on the nerves. Time now, I think, to return to the hotel for a spot of television and a plate of club sandwiches.

I picked up my key from the reception desk and bounced cheerfully up the stairs. I may be eighteen, I conceded, but that did not mean I was in need of electric lifts. There was spring in me yet.