Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

If my brother, sister and I were very lucky, a local fete might offer Harry Woodcock, a local watchmender and seller of ornaments, whose shop sign proclaimed him to be:

HARRY WOODCOCK

‘The Man You Know’

Woodcock went from fete to fete carrying with him a bicycle wheel attached to a board. The wheel had radiating from its centre like the minute hand of a clock an arrow which was spun for prizes. Nicky Campbell does much the same thing on British television, and Merv Griffin’s American original The Wheel of Fortune has been showing on ABC for decades. Harry Woodcock blew such professionals out of the water and left them for dead. He wore extravagantly trimmed pork-pie hats and pattered all the while like a cockney market trader. East End spiel m a Norfolk accent is a very delicious thing to hear.

My sister approached me during one such Saturday afternoon fete just as I was estimating how many mint imperials there might be in a huge jar that an archdeacon bore beamingly about a thronged deanery garden.

‘You’ll never guess who’s here…‘

‘Not…?'

‘Yup. The Man You Know.’

And off we scampered.

‘Hello there, young man!’ boomed The Man You Know, tipping his hat as he did to everyone and everything. ‘And young Miss Fry too.’

‘Hello, Mr Man You Know,’ we chorused, striving with a great effort of will not to dissolve into a jelly of rude giggles. We paid a shilling and received a ticketyboo each. These were blocks of polished wood with a number from nought to twenty painted on each side. All tickety-boos were to be tossed back into a basket, to another tip of the hat, after each spin of the wheel. The Man You Know had attempted some grace with the brush when painting the numbers, giving each digit a little flourish. I could picture him the day he made them – they were decades old by this time – his tongue would have been poking out, as it did when he examined broken watches, while he sissed and haahed out his breath and ruined each wooden block with too much of an effort to be decorative and neat. My sister, who had and has great talent with brush and pen, could have stroked out twenty numbers in twenty seconds and each one would have been graceful and fine and easy. There was a mournful clumsiness about The Man You Know, his dignity and his tickety-boos.

As indeed there was about his patter.

‘Roll, bowl or pitch. You never do know, unless you ever do know. Lady Luck is in a monstrous strange mood this afternoon, my booties. She’s a piece, that Lady Luck and no mistake. A lucky twenty tickety-boos and a lucky twenty numbers, each one solid gold, or my name’s not Raquel Welsh. You can’t accoomerlate, less you specerlate, now if that aren’t the truth I’m not the Man You Know. And I am, oh yes, but I am. I yam, I yam, I yam, as the breadfruit said to Captain Bligh. Here’s a fine gentlemen: two more punters needed fore I canspin, better give me a bob, sir – you might win a present to keep that wife a yours from straying. Thanking you kindlier than you deserve. Here comes a lovely lady. My mistake, it’s the curate, no, that is a lovely lady. Up you step, my bootiful darling, I shan’t let you go – that’s either a shilling for a tickety-boo or you give me the biggest smacker of a kiss that you ever did give in all your born days. Blast, another shilling. I’d rather a had the kiss. Lays and gen’men… The Man You Know is about to spin. The world…’ here he would hold his finger exaggeratedly to his lips, ‘the world…, she hold her breath.’

And so the world did hold her breath. The world, she held her breath and the wheel ticked round.

Well, the world has stopped holding her breath. She has exhaled and blown us a gust of bouncy castles and aluminium framed self-assembly stalls that sell strange seamed tickets of purple pulped paper that you rip open and litter the grass with when you find that you have not won a huge blue acrylic bear. The side-shows we queue for now are the Ride in the All New Vauxhall 4X4 Frontera (courtesy Jack Claywood Vauxhall Ltd.), the Virtual Reality Shoot Out and the chance to Guess the RAM of the Compaq PC, kindly provided by PC Explosion of Norwich.

Hang on, I hear the voice of Mary Hench telling me that I’ve gone soft. Thinking about the countryside can do that to me.

When I was a literature student one was for ever reading that all great literature was and always had been about the tension between civilisation and savagery:

· Apollo and Dionysus

· Urbs et rus

· Court and forest

· City and arcadia

· Pall Mall and maypole

· Town and country

· High street and hedgerow

· Metropolis and Smallville

· Urban sprawl and rural scrub

It is fitting that as I write this I am half-listening to David Bellamy, Jeremy Irons and Johnny Morris as they address a mass rally gathered in Hyde Park. They are warning the nation about the danger being done the countryside by urban ignorance and misplaced metropolitan sentimentality. The point d’appui of the rally was to save fox-hunting, but it seems to have turned into something bigger.

I’ve just turned on the television…, it is a huge crowd, almost as large as the number of townies who flock to the Yorkshire Dales every Sunday, but these people, I suspect, will at least leave the park tidy and free of litter.

I suppose some rat-faced weasel from New Maiden will be interviewed at any minute to give the other side of the hunting debate.

Bingo! I’m right. Though by the sound of him he’s from Romford rather than New Malden. And he’s just described fox-hunting as ‘barbaric’, which is peculiar since he’s the one with the stutter. Forgive the pedantry of a frustrated classicist.

They should have asked a fox instead.

‘Would you rather be hunted by hounds, gassed, trapped, poisoned or shot, old darling?’

‘Well, since you mention it, I’d rather be left alone.’

‘Ng… but given that that isn’t an option?’

‘No? Thought not. It never is, is it?’

‘Well, you know. Lambs. Chicken farms. Hysterical people hearing you rootling through their wheelie bins at night.’

‘I like a nice wheelie bin.’

‘Yes, that’s as may be, but which way would you rather be killed?’

‘Think I’ll stick to dogs if it’s all the same to you. A fox knows where he is with hounds. My direct ancestors have lived in the same place, hunted by hounds every winter, for three hundred years. Hounds are simply hopeless when you come down to it.’

That’s enough about town and country. I was supposed to be telling you about John Kett and the Cawston Village Fete. As it happens, there’s a story about a mole fast approaching, so animals won’t be left out.

Opening the Cawston School Fete counted as both duty and pleasure. I was an Old Boy, I had a connection, something to do, other than wander about with my hands behind my back like minor royalty inspecting a dialysis machine. I could revisit the changing room for example, savour once more the poster-paint tang of the art cupboard and see if the hopscotch rink had been repainted since Table Mucker’s championship season.

The Cawston Fete was not quite the miracle of yesterdecade, but – an alarming exhibition of tae kwando given by local boys aside – there was enough of a smell of oversugared sponge cake and faintly fermenting strawbails to remind me of when the world was young and guilty.

I wandered from stall to stall in a sort of daze, interrupted now and then by the shy murmur of, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll remember me…’

Table Mucker had grown an explosive pair of breasts and a large brood of daughters the eldest of whom looked ready to start production on her own. Mary Hench grinned at me from behind a downy moustache and a fierce girlfriend (clearly boys were still soft in her book) while John Kett himself seemed unchanged from the man whose puzzled eyes had lived with me in silent reproach for twenty-five years.