Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Please, Miss. Stephen Fry’s just farted.’

Not on. Outside of enough. You were supposed to giggle secretly and delightedly or pull your sweater up over your nose. To draw adult attention to the event was quite monstrously wrong. Besides, I wasn’t sure that adults knew about farting.

Just as break was coming to an end, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Miss Meddlar surveying the playground. I tried to hide behind Mary Hench, who was bigger than me, but she told me not to be so soft and pushed me ahead.

‘Stephen Fry,’ said Miss Meddlar.

‘Yes, Miss?’

‘Mr Kett says that you never did give him that sheet of paper.’

Boys and girls were pushing past me on their way back to their classes.

‘No, Miss. That’s right, Miss. He wasn’t in his classroom. He must have gone out. So I left it on his desk.’ Said airily. Jauntily. Insouciantly.

‘Oh. Oh I see,’ Miss Meddlar looked a little confused, but in no sense incredulous.

With a calm ‘if there’s nothing further?’ cock of the eyebrow, I moved on.

At lunch Mr Kett came to my table and sat down opposite me. I felt a thousand eyes burning into me.

‘Now then, young man. What’s this about me not being in the classroom this morning? I never left my classroom.’

‘Well, I knocked, sir, but you didn’t answer.’

‘You knocked?’

‘Yes, sir. As you didn’t answer I went away. ‘Miss Meddlar says you said you left the mark sheet on my desk.’

‘Oh no, sir. As you didn’t answer my knock I went away.

‘I see.’

A pause, while, all hot and prickly, I looked down at my lunch.

‘Well, if you give me the mark sheet now then…’

‘Sir?’

‘I’ll take it now.’

‘Oh. I lost it, sir.’

‘You lost it?’

‘Sir. In break.’

A puzzled look spread over Mr Kett’s face. Get to know that puzzled look, Stephen Fry. You will see it many times.

For Narcissus to find himself desirable, the water he looks into must be clear and calm and sweet. If a person looks into a turbulent pool his reflection will be dark and disturbed. That was Mr Kett’s face, rippled with dark perturbation. He was being lied at, but lied at so well and for so impenetrable a reason.

I can see his perplexity so clearly. It looms before me now and the turbulence in his eyes makes me look very ugly indeed.

Here was a bright boy, very bright. He came from a big house up the road: his parents, although newcomers to Norfolk, seemed nice people – even qualifying for what used to be called awfully nice. Their boy was only here at this little school for a term before he went away to prep school. Kett was a man of his village and therefore a man of the world. He had seen bright children before, he had seen children of the upper middle classes before. This boy seemed presentable enough, charming enough, decent enough and here he was telling the lie direct without so much as a blush or stammer.

Maybe I’m over-refining.

There is very little chance that John Kett remembers that day. In fact, I know he doesn’t.

Of course I’m over-refining. I’m reading into the incident what I want to read into it.

Like all teachers, John Kett overlooked and pardoned those thousands of revelatory moments in which the children under his care exposed the animal inside them. Every day he must bid good morning to men and women, parents now themselves, whom once he witnessed thrashing about in mad tantrum, whom once he saw wetting themselves, whom once he saw bullying or being bullied, whom once he saw bursting into terrified screams at the sight of spider or the sound of distant thunder, whom once he saw torturing ladybirds. True, a cold lie is worse than animal savagery or hot fright, but that lie is and always was, my problem, not John Kett’s.

This Affair of the Test Results in Mary Hench’s Wellington Boot is a big episode for me simply because I remember it so clearly: it is significant, in other words, because I have decided that it is significant and that in itself is of significance to me. I suppose it seems to mark in my mind the beginning of what was to become a pattern of lonely lies and public exposures. The virtue of this particular lie was that it was pointless, a pure lie, its vice that it was so consciously, so excellently done. When Kett sat down to question me at the lunch table I had been nervous – mouth dry, heart thumping, hands clammy – but the moment I began to speak I found I became more than simply nerveless, I became utterly confident and supremely myself. It was as if I had discovered my very purpose in life. To put one over, to dupe: to deceive not only without shame, but with pride, with real pride. Private pride, that was always the problem. Not a pride I could share in the playground, but a secret pride to hug to myself like miser’s gold or pervert’s porn. The hours leading up to exposure would have me sweating with fear, but the moment itself would define me: I became charged, excited and happy, while at the same time maintaining absolute outward calm and confidence, able to calculate in microseconds. Telling lies would bring about in me that state the sportsman knows when he is suddenly in form, when the timing becomes natural and rhythmic, the sound of the bat/racket/club/cue sweet and singing: he is simultaneously relaxed and in deepest concentration.

I could almost claim that the moment the police snapped the cuffs about my wrists eleven years later was one of the happiest of my life.

Of course, someone might try to make the connection between all this and acting. When acting is going well, the same feeling of mastery of time, of rhythm, control and timing comes over one. Acting, after all, is lying, lying for the pure exquisite joy of it, you might think. Only acting isn’t that, not to me at any rate. Acting is telling truth for the pure, agonising hell of it.

People always think that actors make good liars: it seems a logical thought, just as one might imagine that an artist would make a good forger of other people’s signatures. I don’t think there’s any especial truth in either assumption.

Things I often heard from parents and schoolteachers.

‘It’s not that you did it, but that you lied about it.’

‘Why did you lie?’

‘It’s as if you actually wanted to get caught.’

‘Don’t lie to me, again, Fry. You’re a terrible liar.’

No I’m not, I used to think to myself. I’m a brilliant liar. So brilliant that I do it when there isn’t even the faintest chance of being believed. That’s lying for the sake of it, not lying purely to achieve some fatuous end. That’s real lying.

All of this is going to return us to Samuel Anthony Farlowe Bunce before long.

First I will tell you what in reality John Kett chooses to remember about me. One by-product of slebdom is that those who taught you are often asked to comment about your young self. Sometimes they do it in newspapers, sometimes they do it in public.

A few years ago I was asked by John Kett’s successor to open the Cawston School Fete, or Grand Summer Fair, to give it its due title.

Anyone who grew up in the country twenty or thirty years ago knows a lot about fetes. Fetes worse than death, as my father called them with self-ironising ho-ho jocularity.

At East Anglian country gatherings there was dwile flonking – now sadly being replaced by the more self-conscious urban appeal of welly throwing. There was bowling for a pig – in those days country people knew how to look after a pig, I expect today’s average Norfolk citizen if confronted by such an animal would scream, run away and sue. There was throwing a wet sponge at the rector (or vicar – generally speaking Norfolk villages thought it smarter to have a rector than a vicar – I believe the difference is, or was, that the bishop chooses a vicar and the local landowner chooses a rector). There were bottle stalls, bran tubs filled with real bran, Guess the Weight of the Ram for a Penny competitions, coconut shies and tractor or traction engine rides for sixpence.