Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

GABBITAS amp; THRING

SCHOLASTIC AGENCY

They wouldn’t spurn a good public school fellow, a Cambridge Scholar Elect. There must be a prep school out there somewhere in need of extra staff. In need of someone who knew the system and was prepared to step in at a moment’s notice to teach a little Latin, a little Greek, a little French, English and History. Someone who would muck in, referee a rugby match, help mount a play. A typical Uppingham product: a good, solid, all-round chap.

I rang the bell.

‘Thrrrrring!’

I thought of the great whiskers and the Chapel. I thought of hurrying past those great whiskers to see where he might leave his briefcase in the colonnade. Had I really been caught in such a net of madness for so long? And was that stab I felt inside still a stab of longing? No, no. Surely not.

My whole life spread out gloriously behind me.

I knew how to work now. Preparing for the Cambridge Entrance exam I had read every Shakespeare play and written pages and pages of notes on each: scene breakdowns, character lists, cross references, everything. I knew how to concentrate. No need for Lentizol and constipation to keep me attentive.

Was I exuberant? Was the spring back in the step? When I arrived at Cambridge I would be older than the others in my year. I would be twenty and they would be eighteen. Jo Wood, Matthew, all of those Uppingham friends, they had already left. I would be out of place amongst a milling crowd of youths who, pace Churchill, wanted to sow wild oats while all I wanted to do was grow sage.

‘Thrrrrring! Thrrrrring!’

‘Wizzit?’

‘Um, I have an appointment for eleven o’clock. To see a Mr Howard?’

‘Gabbitas!’ The electric door latch snapped open with a triple clunk and I bounded up the stairs.

No. I was Stephen. I was always going to be Stephen. I would always be that same maddening, monstrous mixture of pedantry, egoism, politeness, selfishness, kindliness, sneakiness, larkiness, sociability, loneliness, ambition, ordered calm and hidden intensity. I would cover my life with words. I would spray the whole bloody world with words. They were still all that I had but at last they were getting me places.

Go and sin no more? I’m sorry, Mr Cromie, but there are sins out there I haven’t even heard of yet -not even me: clever-clogs, smart-arse, read-it-all, know-it-all, done-it-all, seen-it-all me.

You bet I was fucking exuberant.

MOST HUMANS manage their path from cradle to crematorium without seeping their lives and the lives of their families all over perfect strangers. I suspect that everybody who ever does come to write an autobiography wants to borrow David Copperfield’s opening words.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that situation will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

I suppose I am, according to Ihab Hassan’s definition, the anti-hero of my own life, with those ‘problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence… clowning his sentimental way…’

If I am lucky I may be yet just halfway through the passage of my time on this earth. I shall be forty years old this very next weekend. Perhaps I shall be ready one day to write down some memories of the twenty years that have passed since I stood outside the offices of Gabbitas and Thring and asked for employment as a prep-school master.

I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the stuff of fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives are, but that it is only given to a few of us to luxuriate in the bath of self-revelation, self-curiosity, apology, revenge, bafflement, vanity and egoism that goes under the name Autobiography. You have seen me at my washpot scrubbing at the grime of years: to wallow in a washpot may not be the same thing as to be purified and cleansed, but I have come away from this very draining, highly bewildering and passionately intense few months feeling slightly less dirty. Less dirty about the first twenty years of my life, at least. The second twenty, now that is another story…

Stephen Fry – Norfolk, August 1997

A PROBLEM THAT bedevils the autobiographer is that he cannot guess with any confidence whom he will offend by inclusion in his book and whom by exclusion. Some who have figured and continue to figure in my life may have felt greatly put out to see their names written down here, others will have been affronted by my negligence, ingratitude and forgetfulness in leaving them out. I must beg all who know me, or have known me, to believe that the foregoing unravelling of reminiscence is bound to contain inaccuracies, omissions and conflations: memory is a most inaccurate and unstable entity, and autobiography can never be the same thing as history. My own memory, often praised, is good for trivia games and for learning dramatic roles quickly, hopelessly unreliable with the dates and facts of my own life but, I think, dependable and honest when it comes to the recall of emotional states and atmospheres.

I owe a great debt to Anthony Cromie, who was kind enough to write a letter that answered many of my questions about the lives and proper names of some of the Stouts Hill staff, any errors in those passages in the book are my own. That one piece of assistance and days of endless rummaging through my old scrapbooks and letters aside, I have allowed my memory and my memory alone to dictate every scene and situation. I have explained already within the book that some names have been changed: sometimes to protect the guilty and sometimes to protect the innocent.

As always, Sue Freestone at Hutchinson’s was angelically patient as she awaited the final, overdue outchug from my printer; Lisa Osborne (no relation…) and her calm, cheerful, brilliant, literate and knowledgeable copy-editing under the highest pressure were of indispensable assistance; Anthony Goff my literary agent remained a model of calm, kindly understanding and my sister Jo, who runs my life more efficiently and more sweetly than is credible, knows that were she not there I would be as a balsa twig in a tornado. She was no older than eleven at the time of my return from Pucklechurch so she does not feature here in much detail. In fact, my life could neither have been led nor written without her.

My parents and my brother Roger may flinch at this book, this further example of the Stephenesque, as it used to be called within the family. They always taught me to be polite so, exhausted of further words, I can only say

Sorry

and

Thank you.