Moab Is My Washpot

  “I suddenly saw that you didn’t know what on earth I was talking about,” he said, scarlet with exertion and embarrassment.

  “Well, I must confess …”

  “Speckled Jim!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You know, Speckled Jim!”

  Said as if this would clear the matter up entirely.

  And then it had indeed dawned.

  This man was referring to an episode of a television series in which the character I played, General Melchett, court-martials the hero, Blackadder, for killing, roasting and eating Melchett’s favourite carrier pigeon, whose name was Speckled Jim.

  At one point during the court-martial, which Melchett rather unsportingly chairs himself, he refers to Captain Blackadder in a loud splutter of mad rage as “the Flanders pigeon murderer.” That was the phrase this man had been shouting across the street. Not bastard pigging murderer at all …

  The strange thing about television is that you do it once and then forget about it, while some obsessed fans will watch programmes over and over again and end up knowing the scripts infinitely better than you ever did, even at the time of recording.

  Another trap for the unwary comic writer lies in using proper names in sketches. Like many writers I tend to use local place names as fictional surnames and the surnames of people I know as fictional place names.

  My assumption about the mole references, then, had been that I had either appeared in some television programme with a mole, or that I had given the name “Cawston” or possibly “Kett” to such an animal. I racked my brains wondering what article I had ever written, or what commercial, sketch, sitcom, radio broadcast, film or play I had ever performed in that had even tangentially involved a mole: mole as small shovel-pawed mammal, mole as buried secret agent, mole as drilling machinery, mole as unit of molecular weight, mole as melanoma or birthmark, I considered them all. Hugh Laurie and I had written a sketch about the kind of people who collect china plates with woodland voles on them, painted by internationally renowned artists and advertised in tabloid Sunday magazines. But it’s a far cry from a woodland vole to a dead mole, especially as the sketch hadn’t even been performed or recorded yet, let alone transmitted.

  So it was not until John Kett asked whether I still retained a keen interest in moles or if I had found any dead ones lately that the threads of memory pulled themselves together and I realised at last what everyone had been talking about. Not that they had kept mentioning this bloody mole because it was the most exciting animal to have hit Cawston since the Black Death, nor because it was the hero of an anecdote of any especial weight or interest in the life of the village. I realise now what I couldn’t have known then—that they mentioned it because they had a little surprise planned for me and it would have been embarrassing for everyone, myself included, if I had forgotten the whole affair and reacted to their presentation ceremony with dumb puzzlement.

  “Fancy you remembering the mole,” I said to John Kett as he led me up to meet the man in charge of the sound system (every village has one microphone and tape-recording expert). Once the PA had been explained and I had been shown twice where the switch on the microphone was, I asked John Kett if he in turn ever remembered an occasion when I had not dared to go into his classroom to give him some test results from Miss Meddlar.

  He thought for a while and pulled an apologetic smile. “No, I’m afraid not,” he said.

  In John Kett’s past the sun shines and birds sing, in mine there are banks of black thundercloud eternally forming over my head.

  I have on my lap as I type a rectangle of varnished wood, four holes neatly drilled into each corner for convenient hanging and display. It was the little surprise, my present from Cawston Village School, their thank you to me for opening their fete.

  In neat Olde English lettering, the following is written:

  3

  I left Cawston Village School in March of 1965 and arrived at Stouts Hill the following month, the only new boy of that summer term.

  Now it is September. Samuel Anthony Farlowe Bunce and a handful of others are the squits and the Stephen Fry who shouted “Miss, Miss!” and giggled with the girls by the hopscotch court has died and in his place stands Fry, Fry, S. J., Young Fry, Fry Minor, Fry the Younger, Fry Secundus, Fry Junior or, worst of all, Small Fry.

  Stouts Hill, as I have described, was a mock castle, its stone turrets and battlements standing on a mound that rose up from the village of Uley in the shelter of the Bury.

  The school’s coat of arms sported a kingfisher (reflecting perhaps both the school lake and the headmaster Robert Angus’s commitment to creating a halcyon youth for his young charges), beneath which on a scroll was written the school motto, Tοιςμελλουσι—“to the future.” The corpus studenti (since we’ve gone all classical) numbered just over a hundred, boys being divided into four Houses: Kingfishers, Otters, Wasps and Panthers. The dormitories were named after trees—Elm, Oak, Beech, Sycamore and Cypress.

  A nightly spoonful of Radio Malt, a halibut liver oil capsule on the breakfast spoon (later replaced by the more palatable sugar-coated Haliborange), tuition in a musical instrument, riding, sailing, gliding, cubbing, elocution lessons, scouting, shooting and photography all counted as Extras and were surcharged on the termly bill in guineas. Stouts Hill accepted no day boys and the exceptionally grand uniform, which included the most wondrous herringbone winter coat (as worn by my brother, and perched upon by a monkey, in the photograph section in the middle of this book), Aertex shirts for summer, Clydella for winter, a cap, a boater, a grey suit for High Days and Church, blazers, V-necks, ties, games shirts, games pullovers, shorts, snake belt in school colours (optional long trousers for those aged ten and over) and the most fantastical numbers of games socks, uniform socks and regulation elastic garters for the upkeep of same socks, was to be ordered by parents exclusively from Daniel Neale’s in Hanover Square and latterly, when Daniel Neale went out of business, from Gorringe’s in Kensington High Street. All clothing was to be clearly marked with the owner’s name—good business for Messrs. Cash and Company who had cornered the market in name tapes in those days. The other essential item, naturally, was the tuck box, the boy’s surname and initials to be printed in black upon the lid.

  Aside from the Angus girls, the female presence included Sister Pinder, who had a Royal Naval husband, a magnificent wimple, starched cuffs and an upside-down watch of the kind included in the nurse’s outfits little girls always want for Christmas. Her preferred method of punishment when roused was a sharp slap with a metal ruler on the hand—far less painful than it sounds. Her son John was about my age and bound, if I remember rightly, for Pangbourne Naval College. For all I know he is an admiral of the fleet today, although if most of my school contemporaries are anything to go by he works in the City, in advertising, commercial property, the film business or as a happily indigent carpenter (at a pinch, ceramic artist) in Cornwall. Such is my generation. As in the Carry On films, there was a matron as well as a sister; on my arrival the incumbent was a Mrs. Waterston, called Matey or Matey Bubbles after a nursery bath foam of the same name. She also had a nephew at the school, though I fear I remember very litde about him. Assistant matrons came and went on the summer breeze and the only one I recall with any vividness was a bespectacled blonde girl called Marilyn (in my entirely unreliable memory, an evangelical Christian) who played the guitar and would, when begged, lullaby my dormitory to sleep with a song inexplicably about (unless I have gone entirely mad) El Paso. Marilyn won the heart of my brother, Roger, on a walking tour in the Isle of Wight one summer holiday: he returned with a glass lighthouse filled with layers of different coloured sand from Ryde and a much larger Adam’s apple than he had left with. The symbolism of the lighthouse is the kind of hackneyed detail that only real life has the impertinence to throw up. The school secretary, Mrs. Wall, wore nice tweed suits and had a pleasantly citrus and peppery smell. I believe she went by the name of Enid. The school ch
ef was called Ken Hunt and his egg or chicken dishes were the consequent victims of endless spooneristic jokes, which I am sure you don’t need to have spelled out for you. He had two kitchen porters, Celia, hugely fat, hairy and Spanish, by whom I was overwhelmingly mothered throughout my time at Stouts Hill, and her husband, Abiel, almost as hugely fat, Spanish and hairy as his wife and quite as generous to me.

  There was a butler called Mr. Dealey, of whom I was greatly in awe. He wore trousers of the kind known as spongebag and seemed to have no other thing to say to me whenever we encountered each other than, “Now then, Master Fry, now then.” I hear his almost spivvy tones again whenever I watch films like Hue and Cry and Laughter in Paradise, lying as they do somewhere between Jack Warner and Guy Middleton. He in turn had a Brylcreemed son called Colin with hair arranged in what I guess now was known as a rockabilly quiff. Colin helped about the place, could blow smoke rings and whistle through his teeth to make a sound like a kazoo. He also held the tuck-shop key which made him greatly important. The school barber, John Owen, visited once a week and found my name amusing since it put him in mind of a famous auctioneer (famous auctioneer? Well, apparently so.) called Frederick Fry. As he snipped away at my hair, Owen would repeat, again and again, “Frederick Fry FAI, Frederick Fry FAI. Fellow of the Auctioneers’ Institute, Frederick Fry FAI.”

  The Angus love of animals was reflected out of doors by a profusion of ponies and horses and an aviary which housed, amongst other exotic bird life, a most exquisite golden pheasant. Within doors there were birdcages too: these were actually built into the walls near the headmaster’s study. They contained a pair of amiable parrots and my most particular friend, a mynah bird. This was a very prodigious animal which could imitate the school bell, Dealey mumbling to himself as he polished the candlesticks in the grand dining room the other side of the cages, the dull bang of the cane being thwacked on to tight trouser seats in the headmaster’s study and the voices of most of the staff; the bird was even capable of rendering exactly the sound of four crates of third-pint milk bottles being banged on to a Formica-topped trestle table, a sound it heard every day at morning break. It sounds an unlikely feat but I assure you I do not exaggerate. As a matter of fact I heard the broadcaster and naturalist Johnny Morris on the radio not so long ago talking about his mynah bird who could precisely mimic three pints being placed on a doorstep. The aural replication of milk delivery is clearly a common (if evolutionarily bewildering) gift amongst the domesticated mynahs of the West Country and a phenomenon into which more research cries out to be done.

  The Angus family owned dogs too of course. There was a large number of perpetually furious Boston terriers, a boxer called Brutus, something fluffy and loud called Caesar and a squadron of others, all belonging to old Mrs. Angus, who was warm and powdery and of whom I find it impossible to think without there coming into my head the image of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. It was into her presence that my brother and I were ushered to be told of the death of our step-grandmother. I shall never forget the precise intonation she used when she told us.

  My grandfather’s third wife was Viennese and Jewish, like my real grandmother, whom I never knew. She had been a friend of Stefan Zweig and Gustav Klimt and Arnold Schoenberg and all those grand Viennese cafe intellectuals. She used to let me use her typewriter whenever I visited her, which to me was the greatest joy in the world. I have been able to type proficiently since I was ten. Her maiden name was Grabscheidt, pronounced, I fear, grab-shite. There is still a huge cabin trunk somewhere in my parents’ house on which is painted that wonderful name in great white letters. My brother and I had been to visit her in hospital when she was ill and she had been kind and told us not to be frightened by the tubes running into her nose.

  Later on, back at school, we had been summoned to see Mrs. Angus.

  “You knew that your step-grandmother had been very ill,” she said, stroking one of her dogs.

  My brother and I nodded.

  “I’m afraid I have just heard from your mother that she did die …”

  I don’t know why the emphasis of that intonation is with me still. Whenever I think of Auntie Claire, as we called her (although I suppose her name must have been Klara or Klära or something similar) I remember that she did die.

  In the Easter holidays which fell between the end of my term at Cawston and the start of life away at what I thought of as Roger’s School, I had read from cover to cover, over and over again, the Stouts Hill School Magazine, which included a section entitled:

  LETTERS OF ENCOURAGEMENT TO A POSSIBLE NEW BOY

  I have that magazine in front of me now and reproduce the articles without amendment of any kind. Some of them I found I still knew almost by heart.

  Tim Sangster

  We play cars down a little sort of dip.

  Jimmy King

  We have lots of fun playing cricket, tennis, rounders and swimming in the summer. In the winter we play football and rugger. On Sundays we usually watch television. We go to bed at six o’clock. You have lots of free time—the work is not too difficult. You can get gardens to grow things if you want to. You can sail too, if you want to join the sailing club.

  Anthony Macwhirter

  If you are in fourth game you sometimes go boating on the lake and swim every day in the summer if it is warm. On Sundays you may have three swims if you don’t go out.

  Edmund Wilkins

  It is very nice here because if you are in the country you have no one to play with, though at Stouts Hill there are lots of boys. In the summer we have swimming and boating and there is a half-term holiday after the sports. If you are quite young you will go into the small form where you have potty work. We played Latin Football on Saturday which is great fun.

  Richard Coley

  There is a tuck shop only you are not allowed to bring tuck back. There are lots of butterflies to catch. There is a big lake with boats and oysters that clamp down on your fingers.

  Charles Matthews

  We have Cubs on Fridays, you wear your games clothes, its very hilly so we can do all sorts of things. When there is enough snow in winter we can go tobagganing which is super fun.

  Malcolm Black

  You can catch fish and row a boat if you want. Some boys like playing games like “Man Hunt” or “Tip and Run.” Most boys have a garden. In the summer baby frogs jump about. Sometimes there are Treasure Hunts up on the Bury. The Cubs go up into the woods and round about. They have their dens up in the woods.

  Donald Laing

  We have a museum and a model club as well. We have cellars, a changing room and three dining rooms. In the school we have five dormitories and two dormitories not in the school.

  The sentence in Edmund Wilkins’ article, “If you are quite young you will go into the small form where you have potty work,” haunted me for weeks before my arrival. The idea that I might be considered, willy nilly, in need of “potty work” simply terrified me. It is true that from time to time I wetted the bed at home—“It’s not that I mind, darling. If only you would tell me. But when you pretend it never happened it just makes me so cross …”—it was just that, in my fevered imagination “potty work” meant grimmer, darker business than preventing piddling in the bed and I spent much of the holidays begging my mother to write letters to the school excusing me from this humiliation, which I saw as taking place on a grand daïs in front of the whole school.

  Nor was the next section in the magazine, some of which was the work of the same hands, calculated to set my mind entirely at ease.

  OUR FIRST DAYS AT STOUTS HILL

  J. Wynn

  When we got into the car to go to Stouts Hill for the first time I was very excited. They dropped me and drove away. I was not homesick. The very first day I felt rather lost. We had our first ice-cream day and I thought we had to have the money on us. I bought two and put one in the waste-paper basket. I did not realise that I could have given it to someone else.

  A.
McKane

  I had been ill in bed for about two weeks when I heard my parents were coming, this was on a Sunday. I was only just six years old. My parents and brothers came up to see me also my sister. When they left me I started to cry, so my sister stayed with me but later on, she went. My mother and father went to the school service to hear my brothers sing in the choir. By the side of my bed there was a bell which I could ring when I wanted something. At this time I was feeling very homesick, so I rang the bell as loudly as I could. I rang it for some time until I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and in rushed Jane. The whole school had heard it and I was rather ashamed.

  R. Maidlow

  At night time when I got into bed it was horrible because the bed was uncomfortable and the springs were to tight for me. The breakfast was a nice breakfast. The eggs were not to hard for me. My first game of cricket was a nice game of cricket and I hit some runs on my first game of cricket.

  T. Sangster

  When mummy had gone home in the car I met Doland and we explored and looked around. We went and looked in a shed beside the third game pavilion and then went and peered into the empty swimming pool. A bell rang and we wondered what it was for so we went up to the dormitory. Then somebody asked whether we had had tea. So we said “no” and somebody brought us milk and buns. When we had eaten we all talked and read until Matron came in and said “No more talking.” And we went to sleep. Next day we went down to breakfast—I thought I was in IIB. I stayed there for a lesson and then had to move into IIIB. In the middle of the lesson I arrived and sat down in the front row—I learned very little on the first morning. Then I went down to fourth game pitch and I was playing rounders—our side won by seven rounders. I was chosen about third but I did not do very well. My first day in third cricket I was put as square leg but I could not stop a ball. I did not have an innings.