Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

My accent and vocabulary endeared me to everyone. Again, I had expected nothing but jeering cries of ‘Oh I say! How absolutely topping, don’t you know?’ and similar inaccurate mockeries, but I think the inmates enjoyed the confusion I caused to the screws who found it difficult to talk to me without thinking of me as Officer Class or suspecting me to be some Home Office official’s son, planted to keep an eye on things.

‘Don’t think me some awful antinomian anarch, sir,’ I might say to one of the screws, ‘but is the rule about drinking hot cocoa in precisely forty seconds not perhaps dispensable? The ensuing scalding of the soft tissues about the uvula is most aggravating.’

Pathetic, I suppose, pathetic, vain and silly, but in circumstances where survival is the key any human characteristic or quality you can dredge up must be used. If you are strong physically, you use your strength, if you have charisma and inner dignity, you use them, if you have charm, you use charm. The smallest sign of servility, subservience, flattery, sycophancy or sneakiness is loathed by screws and cons alike. The screws will act on ‘information received’ but they won’t thank the grass or protect him when he is duly punished by his victim.

The only unpleasant moment within my eye- or earshot came when a sixteen-year-old who was ungovernable in his stupidity, insubordination and insolence (I thought he was suffering from some sort of mental illness, for he would giggle and became so manic that it sent shivers down my spine) was, after pushing things too far, taken into the bathroom along from my cell by three of the screws. There was the sound of much pummelling and exceptionally dull thumping and I realised, with a shock, that he was being expertly beaten up. He came out alternately giggling and weeping. As he was led down the corridor, in great physical pain as he was, he tried to kick one of the screws. This was not a Jimmy Boyle refusal to be broken, this was not Shawshank resilience, this was illness.

I wanted immediately to write to the Home Secretary and talked to Barry, a witty Welshman whose cell was opposite to me, about doing so.

‘They reads your letters, see. Won’t do no good. And when you’re out of yurr you’ll forget allabout it.’

He was right of course. When I left, I made no representation to anyone.

Barry, as it happens, couldn’t read at all, so I set about teaching him. He it was who dubbed me ‘The Professor’, which was to become my prison nickname. Most people are ‘that cunt’ but the possession of a nickname puts you a little higher up the ladder than the others. I was lucky enough to have a whole cell to myself, back in those days of disgraceful prison undercrowding, and would alternately sleep on the top and the bottom bunk to help demarcate the days.

We had the treat to look forward to every Sunday of a visit from the prison chaplain, who, bizarrely, went by the name of the Reverend Chaplin and, more bizzarrely still, looked exactly like Charlie Chaplin: exceptionally thin, with tight black hair and a toothbrush moustache. With the usual inmate irony he was referred to as Ollie, as in Hardy. He let me play the piano for the Sunday service, attendance at which was optional, but which became, on account of the eccentricity of my playing, the hottest event of the prison week. I was allowed six hours off work a week without loss of pay so that I could practise the hymns. I entertained hugely by performing, not accurately (‘Anyone can play accurately, but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte’) but with massively self-important arpeggios and symphonic style endings.

Thus, after ‘The church’s one foundation’ for example I would end with a Daaaaaah-dum! Dadum-da-dum-da-um-da-dum-daaaaa-aaaaah DUUUMMMMM! And just as everyone was sitting down, I would add a high Dum-di-dum-di-dum. Dum DUM! Dum. (Pause) Dum (Pause) Dum (bigger pause, followed by a tiny) Dim … That surely must be the end, but no… a sudden quick bass Tara-tara-DOM. And finally it was over.

The Bishop of Malmesbury came to visit one Wednesday. A group of us was selected to sit round him m a circle while he asked us to speak frankly about prison conditions and how we were being treated and what we thought of ourselves. There were screws standing against the walls, eyeing the ceiling and we all knew better than to complain. All except Fry, of course.

‘I would like to draw your lordship’s attention to one thing that has been bothering me,’ I said. ‘It is, I fear, a very grave matter and the source of aggravation and discomfort to many of us here.’

There was a hissing in of breath from the others and a meaningful clearing of the throat from one of the senior screws.

‘Please,’ said the Bishop, ‘please feel free.’

‘I am sure,’ I said, ‘that Her Majesty has many calls on her time and cannot be expected to know everything that goes on in her name within the walls of institutions such as this.’

‘No indeed,’ agreed the Bishop, blinking slightly.

‘However, I must urge you to draw her attention to the quality of the soap available in our bathrooms.’

‘The soap?’

‘The soap, my lord Bishop. ‘It lathers not, neither does it float it doesn’t smell nice, it doesn’t even clean you. The best that can be said for it, I am afraid, is that it keeps you company in the bath.’

This was from an old Morecambe and Wise book I had bought years ago at Uppingham.

The Bishop burst out laughing and the screws dutifully joined in with smiles, shaking their heads at the jollity of it all.

‘If your lordship will undertake to make urgent representation in the right quarters?’

‘Certainly, certainly! Um, may I ask you, young man, I know this is not good prison form and you really don’t have to answer, but may I ask you none the less,… what, ah, are you in for?’

‘Oh the usual,’ I said carelessly. ‘Churchmen.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The senseless slaughter of clerics. I murdered four minor canons, two archdeacons, a curate and a suffragan bishop in a trail of bloody carnage that raged from Norwich to Hexham last year. Surely you read about it in the Church Times, my lord? I think it made the third page of the late racing extra.’

‘All right, now. That’s enough of that, Fry.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, Bishop, you must forgive my freakish humours. In here we laugh that we may not weep. It was theft I’m afraid, my lord. Plain old credit-card fraud.’

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’

I continued to teach Barry to read, while I practised the piano, zoomed along the corridors with my silver electric polisher and wrote letters to Jo Wood and other friends.

Barry had, when I had collected my wage packet at the end of my first week as a con, told me that the best way to make your burn go further is to pre-roll the cigarettes and lay them out to dry on the radiator pipe of your cell. I had dutifully done this and returned from Association to find every single one of my beautifully rolled cigarettes gone.

‘Lesson number one, matey,’ he said. ‘You can’t trust no one on the inside.’

What an arse. The cell door is left open during Association, it is only closed when the occupant is ‘banged up’ inside. The idea that in a building full of thieves I could cheerfully have left tobacco lying around and expected it to be there on my return was absurd. Barry enjoyed my cigarettes and every now and then would let me have half of one as that first pitiful burnless week dragged by.

We were walking towards Association one evening the following week when Barry and I thought it would be amusing to drag our heels on the floor, which always left a black rubber mark. I stopped doing it as I heard approaching footsteps and Barry was caught mid-streak.