Yet.
Yet it also confirmed in my deepest heart something that I had always known. That he and I shared a similar ‘nature’, as he would say, or ‘sexuality’ as we would call it today.
My heart was wrenched by the story of Oscar. The mobile library was no longer enough. The only place for me now was Norwich City Library, twelve miles away. Sometimes I had the energy to bicycle, sometimes I took the daily coach that stopped at that same meeting of lanes at twenty to seven every weekday morning.
Before the internet and Berners-Lee’s miraculous World Wide Web, the closest you came to metadata or hyperlinks were the bibliography and the index cards in the wooden drawers of a library catalogue.
I started by seeing what else this Montgomery Hyde had written. The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name was one book. The Other Love was even more astonishing. I found myself endlessly in Norwich City Library, scribbling down names from the bibliographies at the end of each non-fiction book (bibliographies are the lists of titles and writers that the author has used as sources) and then haring to the catalogues to see if the library might hold a copy of anything related to a newly acquired lead to the world of forbidden love. Through such means I learned about the infamous Baron Corvo, aka William Rolfe, and his eye-popping, trouser-shifting ‘Venice Letters’, Norman Douglas, T. C. Worsley, ‘Y’ (an anonymous gay autobiographer), Robin Maugham, Angus Stewart, the scandalous Michael Davidson, Roger Peyrefitte, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Gore Vidal, John Rechy and dozens and dozens of others. It was the equivalent of clicking on web links, more cumbersome and time-consuming, of course, but breathlessly exciting. Along the way, as a happy accident, I acquired a kind of alternative literary education that ran in parallel to the one I was receiving at school. You cannot read Genet or about him without encountering (the entirely heterosexual so far as we know) Jean-Paul Sartre, and you cannot brush up against Robin Maugham without making the acquaintance of Paul Bowles and the Tangier set. Burroughs leads to Denton Welch, Corvo to the Bensons, Ronald Firbank, Stephen Tennant, Harold Acton and so on until by fortuitous and serendipitous circumstances, fuelled by inner erotic curiosity and stimulation, I found a world of artists and writers, straight and gay, who were their own reward.
Suppose I had been born in the 1980s? All the vindication and support I might ever have needed to make me comfortable about my sexuality could have been found in television programmes like Queer as Folk, by the pioneering gay kisses on EastEnders and Brookside, in Pride marches along the streets of London and in the billions of pathways, savoury and unsavoury, offered by the internet. The fact that my childhood, youth and early manhood preceded all of this diversity, freedom, tolerance and openness I, of course, regret to some degree – the brave new gay world would have saved me the doomed feeling I had that my life was inevitably to be one of secrecy, exile, seedy sex shops and the police courts – but I am very, very glad that the only available route to a proud acceptance and endorsement of my gay nature should have come through literature. I think I would always have loved Shakespeare, Keats, Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Forster, Joyce, Fitzgerald, what the bluff English master of one of the private schools I attended called ‘the big hitters’, but I cannot thank my sexuality enough for giving me, in my particular case, a love of all reading and an introduction to the gay identity which offered so much more than gaytube and xhamster.com.
So, here I am now at Uppingham School, knowing that I was technically one of a despised and secretly special tribe, but little suspecting that the big issue in life was never going to be the gender one masturbated over; that was small potatoes. What smacked me amidships, holed me below the waterline and sent me bubbling to the bottom of the ocean was love. Love made a wreck of me. Love, the silly word that lyric writers and pop songs endlessly overused; love, the subject of so many plays and poems and films; love, that soppy plotline that got in the way of a good story. Love came up and punched me so hard in the face that I have been giddy and brain-softened ever since. I’m flattened on the canvas, towel thrown in and having barnacles affix themselves to my rotting decks on the sea bed, if we are to allow me to mix metaphors. The fact is, real life is sometimes so complicated that a pure unmixed metaphor would be unconvincing. And the truth about love … well, as Auden wondered:
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
The third line was answered by an emphatic ‘yes’. Add together a manic and disruptive nature in the classroom, an addiction to sweets (as covered in loving, meticulous detail in The Fry Chronicles), a fear and hatred of compulsory games (absurdly replaced today by a love of almost all sport) and this new heart-pounding, soul-lacerating feeling that consumed my every waking hour, and a Stephen emerges who is simply too hot to be handled by any school, teacher or parent, let alone by himself.
I was finally expelled from Uppingham School in my first term in the lower sixth form, just as I was embarking on a two-year course of A levels. I had taken all my O levels when I was fourteen, a normal procedure then: if they thought you could get them, they put you in for them. I may have been academically mature but I was as physically and emotionally mature as a newborn puppy. And so much less adorable.
Why was I expelled? Some fraction of you reading this will want to know, another (perhaps larger) will be really seething now. ‘This isn’t a book, it’s a retread!’ they’ll be shouting. On the other hand, it seems so rude to gloss over the whole episode as if expecting those in the dark to guess or spend money on a previous autobiography. So once again, I will remind those who don’t want to watch a repeat that they can change channels, mix themselves a liver-and-whey protein shake, knit a smartphone-cosy or simply take a nap.
I was sacked from school because I had received permission from my housemaster to go to London for a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, of which I was, at the time, the youngest member. I was to deliver a paper on T. S. Eliot’s metrification of Sherlock Holmes’s description to Doctor Watson of the life, appearance and habits of Professor Moriarty, who, in Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, becomes Macavity the Mystery Cat. The idea was to do the evening, which was on a Saturday, be free in London for Sunday and the following Monday, which was a public holiday to celebrate the Queen and Prince Philip’s silver wedding, and return by the last train that day. As it is, I (and my friend Jo Wood, who was not so natural a law-breaker, but loyally attended me) were suddenly gripped by cinemania. We saw Fritz the Cat, A Clockwork Orange, Cabaret, The Godfather, all of them, time after time after time, as they ran and ran repeatedly on all-day programmes in the major West End cinemas. By the time we woke up from our binge it was Wednesday.
Sheepishly we returned and wolfishly we were devoured. Jo, having no form, was rusticated until the end of the term. I was shown the full red card.
My parents tried another seat of learning, the Paston School, a local direct-grant grammar with the distinction of having educated the young Horatio Nelson. Its allure was lost on me, and I developed the habit of hopping off the bus that took me there in the small town of Aylsham, halfway between my house and the school in North Walsham, and spending all day and all the spare money I had managed to find in my mother’s handbag on pinball, cigarettes and Fanta. Before long the Paston had had enough of me too. For one thing they had wanted to put me on a course of O levels. I indignantly (and I daresay defiantly and arrogantly) declared that I had a very good set of O levels already and had been expelled from Uppingham while in the sixth form half a term into an A level course. Why should I have to sink down to the fourth form again? ‘Because we do things by age here,’ was the unsatisfactory reply. Or possibly they sensed that I was all show and no substance. At any rate I was slowly turning into one of those sneering, ‘I’ve had it up to here with edu-bloody-cation’ teenagers. Pinball and smoking wer
e my highest ambitions.
To pursue even these minor pastimes I needed money, however, and when the Paston had hurled me out on my ear, my parents sent me as a last resort to NORCAT, the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King’s Lynn. Here I developed the even more expensive habit of gambling. A set of us would smoke and drink beer in a pub called the Woolpack, playing three-card brag for hours on end. I happily fell in with a group of highly literate and fascinating young eccentrics from the town. We met together to talk Baron Corvo, contribute to a strange magazine called the Failure Press (‘failure’ was deliberately misspelled in some way), devise a unique alphabet and arrange Paradox Parties, parties to which you could not be admitted unless you submitted an original paradox. Pretentious, you might think, but to find such a group in King’s Lynn was thrilling for me. It was like finding not water in the desert, but a flask of quince, starfruit and lychee juice. Original. Strange. Testing. Provocative. And, as we would say of almost everything we liked, highly conducive.
At least NORCAT let me take A levels. But what with falling for a very lovely and smart girl from that group (yes, I have that 10 or so per cent of me that is entirely capable of being attracted to girls), feeling wholly uninspired by the academic side of life and still burning inside with that desperate first love that had made such a mess of me at Uppingham, I was becoming a less stable, predictable or hopeful entity.
It is a terrible thing to look back and realize that one grew up in a kind of golden age. Tarnished, but golden nonetheless. The 1970s are typically portrayed as grey, hopeless, hyper-inflationary, riddled with failure, strikes and sullen class warfare. Certainly, if you watch an episode of The Sweeney, it’s hard to square John Thaw’s menacing, jaw-crunching, whisky-slugging, cigarette-puffing, convention-defying Flying Squad detective Jack Regan with the unconvincing-Oxford-English-accented, crossword-solving, classical-music-loving, vintage-Jaguar-driving, tweed-jacketed Inspector Morse, who appeared a generation later. The brutal realism of the one contrasted with the cosy nonsense of the other is revealing. Similarly, the excellent balance of Upstairs Downstairs stands up very well against the ghastly snobbery and tacked-on noblesse oblige of that horrible Abbey programme. I say this guiltily, having actor friends I like very much who play in it, and play excellently, but truth must out.
Musically the 1970s were astonishing, even for someone like me, who is not especially attracted to pop or rock. You can distinguish early 1973, for example, from late 1973 in terms of both musical and fashion styles. Loons came in and bellbottoms bowed out. Every week you could see the young Elton John, David Bowie or Marc Bolan on Top of the Pops (admittedly Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile too), not to mention Mud, Slade, Wizzard, Roxy Music and a myriad of freakish novelty songs and eclectic mixes. Meanwhile Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes … giant album artists were dominating the world. A few years later punk exploded – all this a heartbeat away from the dissolution of The Beatles. Music, unless my ear is staggeringly dysfunctional, hasn’t undergone anything like such remarkably swift, imaginative, colourful and fundamental changes of style in the twenty-five years between the arrival of rap and now. Bits of acid house, trance, garage and other electronic dance music seem to have coincided with hip-hop in a more or less unbroken line. A photograph of an eighteen-year-old in 1990s clothes looks exactly like a photograph of an eighteen-year-old in twenty-first-century clothes.
But that is not the point, not the point at all. We moan about the sense of entitlement the young are said to have today. I think it is nonsense. It is simply that they are aware of the actual entitlement my generation enjoyed. Despite coming from a comfortably off household, since expulsion from private school all my education was at the expense of the state. Grants to cover living costs, tuition fees, everything. I even, while I was in debt to a bookshop at Cambridge, had the cheek to send a photocopy of their bill for the due sum of four hundred or so pounds (the equivalent of well over a thousand now) to the Norfolk and Norwich Local Education Authority. A tutor had added a paragraph to say that, as a scholar and potential academic of the future, these books were necessary to me. A cheque to cover the bill was immediately sent. I tell stories like that to my godchildren and nephews, who are just emerging from their university careers, burdened with debt, and I can see them wanting to punch me in the face. Hard.
I left university and shared a flat with my friend and Cambridge lover Kim in Chelsea, and life seemed infinitely interesting and straightforward. For the emerging graduate today there seems to be little on offer but a McJob, endless unpaid internships (only then if you know the right people) and a first rung on the property ladder that is higher and less attainable than the middle rung was in my early days.
But wait a minute – you’ve made me leap ahead of myself again. So, NORCAT. Three-card brag, beer, a girl, absolutely no interest in the curriculum and … a disappearance.
My memory cannot quite summon up the absolute circumstances of the First Great Escape. I was seventeen, it was 1974, I think I had agreed to go to some kind of musical festival and meet up with my friend Jo Wood. To cut a long (well it’s fairly long in Moab is My Washpot) story short, some credit cards fell into my possession. Which is to say that I stole them. The short arm of the law had been reaching out feebly for three months or so before I was finally apprehended at the Hotel Wiltshire in Swindon, which stood, conveniently, absolutely opposite the police station.
I refused to give my name. My poor old mother and father had been through enough, surely? A sly officer, who unbeknownst to me had been going through my luggage in another room, returned and slowly whispered names that had been written on the flyleaves of the books I had been lugging around with me during my adventures. A lot of them had been stolen from libraries, bookshops or friends’ shelves, of course, and had all kinds of names scrawled on their title pages. Eventually, as I was being questioned by the detective sergeant in the interview room, I heard ‘Stephen Fry?’ being said in a low voice behind me. I had swung round and answered ‘Yes?’ before I was aware of the trap I had fallen into. I was, of course, on a missing persons list, and it was not long before my parents had sorted out a solicitor – my godmother’s husband, who lived not far away. The game was up, and the goose cooked.
Some months of custody followed in the delightfully named Pucklechurch Prison. I had declined bail (not that I think my parents would have offered it anyway) and stayed at Pucklechurch for two weeks before another magistrate’s appearance in Swindon, at which I was expected to plead. I announced my unquestionable guilt and was sent back on remand while the police took an embarrassingly long time to collect and assimilate the paperwork from the seven counties in which I had fraudulently used the credit cards. Back inside now as a con, as opposed to a non-con, the colour of my uniform changed and I was set to work.
The time passed easily and pleasantly enough. I had spent fourteen years in the private school system for heaven’s sake: this was nothing. Other inmates at this young offenders institution, all tougher and mostly older than me, sobbed themselves to sleep. They had never spent a night away from home before.
At my trial, a dear friend of my parents, the imposing Sir Oliver Popplewell, then a noted QC, now a retired judge, represented me. I had worried that his distinguished name and reputation might rile the magistrates, a metropolitan sledgehammer sent to crack a provincial nut could seem offensive to their amour propre. I was also concerned that they might have little patience with one who, unlike most young offenders, had been given every opportunity and simply pissed his good fortune against the wall each time. I was guiltily stricken myself by the obvious difference in the ‘life chances’, as we would say now, of most of my luckless fellows back at Pucklechurch, who had been born into backgrounds of poverty, ignorance, squalor and abuse.
The magisterial bench, however, concluded that, since I had a solid family background (and perhaps came from the same class as them, I crimson at the thought), there was no need for
a prison sentence, which would in those days and at my age have taken the form of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s ‘short sharp shock’, the notorious detention centre, which was all the rage at the time. I had been dreading this: fellow cons at Pucklechurch told me it was all about running around and gym and weights and eating standing up and running about again like someone in Olympic training. DC provided the world with marvellously fit villains, ideal candidates for posts like nightclub bouncers and drug dealers’ debt enforcers. Fortunately for me, taking into account the months I had already served (plus the other possible reasons I have indicated) I found myself sentenced to two years’ probation in the care of my parents.
We move then from the image of the wretch lying on the stone flags of the prison cell, shadows of the prison bars cast across his sobbing frame, rats squeaking, gibbering and weeing in the corner, we move from this unhappy (and wholly inaccurate) picture to the solemn silence of the journey home from Swindon Magistrate’s Court, father’s stern face at the wheel, jaw tightly clamped and eyes sternly on the road ahead.
I seem to be sketching the biography of a Cambridge spy, a whole genre of literature in itself, factual and fictional. But whenever Kim Philby or Guy Burgess and their circle are written about, or (spoiler averted) the mole in Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for example, there is repeated (to the point of cliché) emphasis on how withdrawal of the parental presence at an early age, the very nature of an old-fashioned classical English education given to a certain kind of person equipped with charm, intelligence, duplicity, guile (I was always called Sly-Fry, from my earliest memories of my very first schools) who had an almost pathological need to prove himself, to belong, could provide all the ingredients of a five-star, twenty-four-carat traitor and spy. I was and am neither of course, but had I been at Cambridge in the ‘low dishonest decade’ of the 1930s, instead of at the beginning of Thatcherism – between the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the Falklands War essentially – then perhaps I would have been drawn into the Ring of Five and made it a Ring of Six. I doubt it: I’m not sure that the SIS, or MI6 as it’s usually called these days, the most exclusive club there ever was in Great Britain, would have taken a Jew. Victor Rothschild came the closest, being a Cambridge Apostle like Burgess and Blunt, but even he, glamorous first-class cricketer, decorated war hero and Bugatti-riding adventurer that he was, was MI5, not 6. Some people still believe that Rothschild was the fifth man who closed the circle. We will probably never know. But there was a world of difference between the two services: 6 was pukka, 5 much less so. I am sure that is not so today, but what is true today is that I possess so many of the similar qualities, right down to a love of cricket, claret and clubland.