Moab Is My Washpot
My other brush with show business came when Richard Fawcett and I planned our sketches for the House Supper, Fircroft’s end of term Christmas party in which sixth-formers got to wear dinner jackets and drink wine, while the rest of us pulled crackers and mounted a mini-revue composed of music, songs and sketches.
Richard and I rewrote a Benny Hill skit in which a vicar is being interviewed unaware that his trouser flies are widely undone. Richard was the vicar (“I like to throw open my portals to the public”), I was the interviewer (“I see your point, yes I do see your point”). We rehearsed this endlessly and were astonished, as the curtain descended on our dress rehearsal, to hear Frowde, the housemaster, call out, “Trousers down, trousers down!”
We looked at each other, utterly baffled as to his meaning (as I still am).
The curtain jerked up again and Frowde stood there, hands behind his back.
“No, no. Trousers down,” he repeated. “It’s either trousers up or trousers down. This kind of innuendo won’t do at all.”
So we had to go away and hastily assemble something else.
Rick Carmichael and Martin Swindells had been censored too, so that night, at midnight in our dormitory there was seen a performance of Banned Material. Richard and I did our Vicar Sketch and Rick and Mart a dialogue playing with the St. Crispin’s day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V and its suggestive reference to those holding their manhoods cheap.
Richard Fawcett and I had by this time become so obsessed with comedy that we wrote to the BBC, who had just started a new series called Open Door, the pioneer of that now depressingly common programming phenomenon “Access Television.” Open Door was designed to allow dyslexics, victims of injustice, support groups and others to air their grievances, but Richard and I had somewhat misinterpreted its aims and believed it to be a chance to Perform on Telly and Become Famous.
In our letter to the BBC, we pompously elaborated our pitch. Comedy, we observed, with the arrival of Monty Python, had entered a modernist phase. Would it, like the other arts, disintegrate into modes of abstraction and conceptuality? How could a “new comedy” be formulated? All that sort of thing. We planned to show the progress of comedy over the last twenty years and compare it with the progress of music, painting and literature. Would comedy disappear up its own self-referential arse, we wondered? Ridiculous, I know, but there you are.
It was enough, at least, to get us an interview in Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush. Nothing came of the meeting, but I still have the producer’s card. Mike Bolland went on to become senior programme commissioner for Channel 4 when it started up; in those days he must have been one of the BBC’s most junior juniors, given the unfortunate job of weeding out the loonies who came knocking on the Open Door. I see him from time to time and I’m always far too embarrassed to remind him of those two public school boys babbling pretentiously about comedy and ideas.
We must, I fear, return briefly to sex (as I write this, National Sex Awareness Week is coming to a close and its thrust, I believe, is to get Britain to talk about sex in order to dispel the guilt, misery and taboo surrounding the subject: I feel I’m doing my bit).
It was towards the end of my first year that I was successfully seduced and deflowered. Now, I have never believed myself to be physically attractive. There are three reasons for this.
1. I’m not my type
2. I’m not physically attractive
3. So there
None the less, in the eyes of some, I do know that I can give off a quality that comes close to sex appeal. I was never a pretty boy, or anything like (you have the pictures to hand that prove it) but being a late developer sexually I combined a mixture of knowingness, insolently suggestive sophistication and some kind of appetisingly unspoiled quality that could, on occasion, take the people’s fancy.
A red-haired sixth-former and house polly called Oliver Derwent called me to his study one day when I was on general fagging duties.
“Close the door,” he said.
I obliged, wondering what I could possibly have done wrong this time.
“Do you play cards?” asked Derwent.
“Er, yes. Yes. I suppose I do.” The question took me completely by surprise. Maybe Derwent was starting up a House bridge club. Mine not to wonder why, however, mine but to stand patiently on the carpet and await instructions.
“I’m just so bored,” he said, languidly. “I thought I might find someone prepared to have a game or two of cards with me.”
It transpired that the only game Derwent knew how to play was a game called strip poker, so strip poker was the game we played.
“Better lock the door,” said Derwent.
“Right-o,” I said.
Now, you might well be thinking: Hello! If this Derwent could play strip poker, then he could play ordinary poker. This never crossed my mind. One just didn’t question senior boys. They knew.
So the pair of us knelt on the carpet and Derwent dealt. Within a very short time I was completely naked and Derwent was in nothing but his underpants. My legs were drawn coyly up to conceal what little there was to conceal and I was starting to feel a touch embarrassed.
“Fry,” said Derwent, blushing with that ferocity peculiar to redheads, “may I feel your body?”
Those are the exact words he used. “May I feel your body?” Rather sweet really.
“Er … okay,” I said.
So he felt my body. I became excited, in the way that I had been excited at Stouts Hill with Halford and the others. I could see from the prodding in his underpants that he, too, was excited.
He then began a long, complicated speech about the frustration he felt at the lack of girls at Uppingham and how, in my smoothness, I was actually rather like a girl. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind if he made love to me?
I had simply no idea what that phrase meant, but it sounded charming and I said that it sounded like a reasonable idea.
At this point there came a knock on the door.
“Derwent!”
“Just a minute!”
I leapt to my feet and started to scrabble frantically with my clothes. The door handle rattled.
“Ho! Wanking!” said a voice.
Derwent leaned forward and cupped his hand around one of my ears. “Out the window!” he breathed hotly. “I’ll see you in the House Rears in ten minutes.”
I nodded, slightly frightened by this time, and not so sure that I wanted to go through with this making love business, but I climbed out of the window and dived into a nearby bush.
Dressed again, teeth chattering, I made my way to the House Rears, a set of disused Victorian lavatories round the back of the House.
When Derwent arrived eight minutes later I regret to say he had come prepared with a tub of Vaseline and a grim determination to see things through.
I remember very little about the experience. I remember being bent forward and I remember grasping my own ankles. I remember some pain, plenty of grunting from Derwent and a sliding, slippy wetness running down the inside of my thighs when I stood up. Derwent was gone by the time I had pulled up my trousers and turned round, and whenever we saw each other in the House it was as strangers, no mention made, no extra friendliness shown or expected. Just a blankness.
I would love to be able to tell you that this Oliver Derwent is now our Ambassador in Washington or the Chairman of ICI, but I have no idea what he’s up to or where he is. Last I heard he had children, and was working in one of the Gulf States. I bear him no grudge and cannot believe he did me any harm. He didn’t make me queer, he didn’t make me a bugger or a buggeree, so all’s jake as far as I’m concerned.
Besides, all that was BMO, Before Matthew Osborne, and events BMO were rendered meaningless by everything AMO.
AMO, as I said, I went loopy. Everything I did publicly and privately became more extreme. Publicly, the jokes and the wildness intensified, privately the stealing became more and more regular.
At this time, the only salvation and
sense in my life came from reading. It was then that I started on Douglas, Firbank and Forster. It was then that I discovered the novels and autobiographies that reflected my own emotional turmoil and my own circumstances, sometimes so exactly that I alternated between a triumphant feeling of being vindicated and endorsed by the Masters and a deflated sense of being nothing more than a living cliché: Flannelled Fool by T. C. Worsley; A Separate Peace by John Knowles; Sandel by Angus Stewart; Lord Dismiss Us by Michael Campbell; Escape from the Shadows by Robin Maugham; Autobiography of an Englishman by “Y”; The World, The Flesh and Myself by Michael Davidson (with its famous opening line: “This is the life history of a lover of boys.”); The Fourth of June by David Benedictus; Special Friendships by Roger Peyrefitte, and many, many others, which in turn guided me towards the notorious Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology; The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons (the unexpurgated edition complete with Baron Corvo’s infamous Venice Letters); the novels of Simon Raven (happily still then being produced in profusion); the works of Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter and the Uranian school, the paintings of Eakins and Tuke, and that wonderful, syrupy slew of pre- and post-First World War sentimental school love stories like The Hill, David Blaize, Jeremy at Crale and Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth.
So, stolen money in my pocket and nothing but Matthew on my mind, that is how I would spend my afternoons, either in the library or howling to Rossini and Beethoven.
The Lower Buttery was perched halfway between the steps that led down from the Magic Carpet to the Music School, so I would leave the record library and climb up, as other boys were coming down, their hair still wet from showers, their faces pink from exercise, and I would avoid their eyes as I went in. My eyes were only for Mrs. Lanchberry as she broke more eggs into her vat of boding lard, money stolen from the pretty and the athletic clutched in my hands, and of course my eyes were for Matthew in case he might come in too. But I had discovered a terrible truth about Matthew.
He was healthy.
He was
Good at games.
In fact, he was brilliant at games. He was going to be a star. We hadn’t seen nothing yet, apparently. You think he’s a fine hockey player? You wait till you see him on the cricket field in the summer term. You just wait, his brother said.
We already had a cricket hero at Uppingham, in the shape of Jonathan Agnew, who went on to play for Leicestershire and England and as Aggers now comments wittily and (thus far) without ego and derision for the BBC’s Test Match Special.
Whether the stealing in earnest really did start the day I first saw Matthew Osborne I cannot, as I say, be sure, but they are connected. Falling in love is not an excuse because, as I have shown you before, this was by no means the first time I had stolen. But now it gripped me like a demon. It became an addiction, a necessity and, perhaps, a revenge. A revenge against beauty, order, healthiness, seemliness, normality, convention and love. To say that I was the victim of these crimes, that I was punishing myself, that is hardly fair. There must have been dozens and dozens of boys whose lives were temporarily screwed and savaged by the sudden disappearance of their money. It’s hard for even the most Christian and temperate soul not to be enraged by theft. And that old complaint about the sense of violation, of invasion, of tainting that is felt by the victims of theft: maybe that is part of what I was doing—leaving a foul kind of urine trail, an anti-social territorial marking, or unmarking, wherever I went, wrestling with Hassan’s Anti-Hero’s “problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah—you were a thieving little tosser, we get the picture, we will draw the conclusions, thank you.
My behaviour too, as I said, my general social behaviour, that went to hell in a handcart. Poor old Ronnie Rutter who taught me French. He had joined the school aged seventeen, just after the First World War, and was so gentle, so pliable, so plain sweet that he had never even been made a housemaster. Temporarily he had taken charge of Meadhurst for a term during the Second World War, that was the greatest career height he had ever scaled. I used to mob him up, as the school slang had it, so thoroughly, so completely, so humiliatingly that I blush cardinal red at the memory of such cardinal sin. I once stood on top of my desk, took out a gat gun (one of those air pistols that fires pellets but looks to the uninitiated to be a deadly automatic weapon) and shouted in a hysterical Cody Jarrett voice, “I’ve had it. Had it, I tell you! Just one move, and you’re dead. You’re all dead.” Everybody pissed themselves and Ronnie did the best he could.
“Put it down, there’s a good fellow, we’ve so much to get through this period.”
I made up a letter once that purported to come from a female “pen-friend” in France and filled it with every dirty, disgusting sexual French word I knew or could find out. I approached him at the end of a lesson and asked if he could help me with it, as I found some of the vocabulary rather difficult.
“I’m so pleased to hear you have a French pen-friend, Fry,” said Ronnie. And he proceeded to translate the letter for me, replacing the obscenities with innocent little phrases of his own as he went, pretending for all the world that it was the most ordinary communication in the world. “I would like to suck your big fat cock” became, “I look forward so much to visiting your country” and “Lick my wet pussy till I squirt” emerged as, “There are so many interesting things to do and see in Avignon” and so on throughout the letter.
The word he used in his school report to my parents at the end of term was, I think, “exuberant.” “Sometimes a little more exuberant than is good for him.” None of that “bad influence,” “rotten apple,” “thinks he’s so clever” stuff the others off-loaded. He invited me to tea with his wife. It brings a lump to my throat to think of such absolute sweetness of nature, such tenderness.
He hadn’t given up, either. We used to say sometimes, in our sneering way of schoolmasters, that after more than ten years they had turned into cynical time servers or unworldly eccentrics. Ronnie was neither cynic nor sentimentalist, and he put all of himself into every lesson. Utterly ineffectual as a disciplinarian maybe, but I cannot think of a life that was less of a failure.
There’s a passage in Portnoy’s Complaint (which I had read greedily and joyfully, loving the daring of those jerk-off scenes in the bathroom):
… society not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but encourages them … Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possessions, money, property—on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
Scarcely fresh news I suppose, but then the Gospels aren’t either, yet they too contain ideas that bear repetition. Only a fool dismisses an idea because it has been heard before.
“Man will become better when you show him what he is like,” Chekhov thought. Maybe Ronnie tried to show me what I was like. He did so more effectively than many masters who tried to tell me what I was like, which is not the same thing at all. I used in the end to feel a kind of sickness, a feeling of nauseous surfeit after a Ronnie Rutter French lesson, a sickness that I soon identified as self-disgust. After a while I gave up and became sanctimoniously fierce in my refusal to allow others to mob him up. Anybody else was fair game, but Ronnie was exempt.
Maybe Ronnie saw, that was the other thing. Maybe it was written all over me, this agony of love that I was enduring.
We’re in the second term of the year now. I’ve got to know Matthew a little better, partly by getting to know Nick better, partly by following the promptings of unrequited love, which train you exquisitely well in the art of accidental meetings.
When you love you plan your day entirely according to the movements of your loved one. I knew Matthew’s timetable by heart. I knew the places he was likely to visit. I knew the matches he played in—he was already in the Colts First XI—I knew the clubs and societies he had joined and I joined them too. I knew
what sort of music he liked, when he was likely to be visiting the Thring Centre and when he was likely to be in his House.
And every day he grew more and more beautiful. He was still climbing the gentle slope to his peak of perfection. He never succumbed to acne, greasy hair or gawkiness. Every day he grew and grew in grace towards the completion of his beauty.
I was subtle, Christ Jesus, was I subtle. He could never have imagined for ten seconds that I had any interest in him at all, not from the accident of our endless meetings, nor from the coincidence of our mutual interests. I never looked unpleased to see him, but neither did I show any pleasure. I took a kindly interest and …
I entertained.