Moab Is My Washpot Read online

  “Sounds better than school food,” said Dale.

  The guard grunted at our giggles and left. Boaters were thrown on to luggage racks, feet put up on seats and talk turned to soccer, what had been done in the hols, who was going to be made prefect and the whole Edwardian schoolboy novel nonsense. Mason seemed to have forgotten all about Bunce’s strange outburst and was delighting the boy opposite with underarm farts.

  After one of those squealing, juddering, stomach-dropping false starts with which trains so tactlessly articulate human emotion, we pulled ourselves out of the great shed of Paddington and steamed west.

  The Gloucestershire town of Stroud, sanctified by the memory and to the memory of Laurie Lee, produces—or used to produce—almost all the baize that Britain and her dominions ever thought to use. Baize for the doors into servants’ quarters, baize for billiards, snooker and pool, baize for card tables, baize for casinos, auction rooms and baize to drape over the cages of songbirds to fool them into thinking it night. Some miles to the south of Stroud stands the Bury, a great green hill over whose shoulders one might believe the weavers of the Slad Valley once threw a huge bolt of their baize as a giant billboard to show off their product to the world. The small village of Uley snuggles itself into the thicker nap at the base of this fuzzy-felt hill and sleeps there contentedly, unaware of triple-thick shakes, pay-per-view Fight Nights, Lottery Winsday and driver’s side air bags. The village of Uley still believes in Gestetnered parish magazines, dividend tea, sherbet dips, Heinz Salad Cream and half-timbered Morris vans. The village of Uley grows lobelias and alyssum on the front fringes of lawns that bank up to warm ham-stone cottages out of which rumble the deep tones of Long Wave wireless. The village pub of Uley radiates a warm vapour in which are mingled the vanilla richness of pipe tobacco and the malty hum of Usher’s Ales. The village church of Uley has its fragrance too, a compound of Esso Blue, Mansion furniture wax and hymn books in a state of permanently suspended decay.

  High on a mound half a mile away stands Stouts Hill School, a dashing castle of knapped flint, all turrets and arrow slits and skirted by a dragonfly flicking, carp-snapping, mallow-flaming lake. The lane from Stouts Hill to the village winds steeply down to the Dursley Road. There is horse shit there, dropped in caramac-coloured lumps by warm-sided bay mares ridden by gymkhana-jolly girls who blush fiercely when they meet your eye.

  There is horse shit there all right.

  In the village of Uley nought-percent-financed Daewoos lurk behind remotely controlled carport doors, satellite dishes glitter from the roofs, copal-varnished slices of barked Do-It-All elm wood proclaim Mulberry Lodge, South Fork and El Adobe. A blackboard outside the village pub vibrates in three-coloured chalk with the promise of Happy Hour, pool, premium guest beers and big-screen satellite TV. The smell of stale lager and Doritos leaks up the main street to the church, where laser-printed A4 pages flap announcements from the chancel wall promising car-boot sales and outreach fellowship retreats in Wales. Lard-arsed fatties in Russell Athletic sweatshirts swap Sensual Love Guide CD-ROMs with their neighbours as their Nike-ticked kids line up burger cartons on the barbecue patio and zap them with turbo-boosted water guns. The girls smear blusher on their cheeks and poke their tongues out fiercely when they meet your eye. Stouts Hill the school has closed now, to be replaced by Stouts Hill the time-share holiday home.

  Well, maybe it’s not so bad. Somewhere between warm gloop and cold water is the tepid truth about the village of Uley, which gets on with life as charmingly as it can. There was a time when the very Mansion furniture wax, dividend tea and gymkhana girls of sentimental memory were themselves modern and noisomely resented intrusions; books will one day be written that recall CD-ROMs and Russell Athletic sweatshirts in a nostalgic melancholy haze as fervent and foolish as any.

  We will cut, just for a moment, to London. These days I have a flat in St. James’s, that elegant parcel of metropolitan clubland bordered by Piccadilly, Pall Mall, St. James’s Street and Lower Regent Street. It suits, I suppose, my self-image—or rather that image of me others have that I often weak-mindedly allow to become my self-image—to live in St. James’s. St. James’s has long been the natural habitat of the upper-class English bachelor. Here he may browse for shirts and ties in Jermyn Street, for hats and shoes in Lock’s and Lobb’s, for foodstuffs in Fortnum’s, for literature in Hatchards and the London Library, and for company in Brooks’s, White’s, Boodle’s, Buck’s or (if tragically pushed) in the improbably named East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public School’s Club, where the best school curry in all London can be found, served with sultanas and slices of banana, washed down with lukewarm London tap water poured into stout little Duralex glasses. I have lived in St. James’s for the last five years, not a proper English upper-class bachelor at all, but tired of Islington, the proper home for people like me, and never at ease west of Hyde Park Corner or south of the Strand.

  From my window I can see the clock face of Christopher Wren’s handsome church of St. James. Behind it—the other side of Piccadilly—Sackville Street leads up to Savile Row and the great Nash curve of Regent Street. In the year 1961 my parents visited Sackville Street, examining each doorway in turn until they came upon a brass plaque on which was written:

  GABBITAS & THRING

  SCHOLASTIC AGENCY

  In the year 1977 I too visited Sackville Street, looking for the brass plaque that still said:

  GABBITAS & THRING

  SCHOLASTIC AGENCY

  I don’t suppose that any writer will ever be able to come up with a partnership that quite matches the ludicrous perfection of the names Gabbitas and Thring.

  What is a scholastic agency?

  Oh, tish now, and come, come, come … you know perfectly well.

  A scholastic agency is a kind of public- and prep-school dating agency. It acts as a private-sector pimp, procuring staff for shorthanded schools, placement for jobless teachers and schools for parents at a loss to know where their little ones might thrive. That second service was of interest to me in 1977, and the third to my mother and father in 1961.

  They wanted to find a prep school for my brother, Roger, and for me. I was four years old then and Roger well on his way to six. Today of course, what with the establishment of social equality, the smashing of the class system and the achievements of a Nation More at Ease with Itself, by the time your offspring have reached four and five it is far too late to be looking for schools: demand for private education is so high that children must be put down for admission not at birth but in utero, ideally before their first cells have divided.

  There may be some reading this who are hazy (and proudly so) about the precise meanings of “prep school” and “public school.”

  A prep school is an establishment designed, as the name implies, untypically for a British institution, to prepare a child. In this instance the preparation is for public school. Public school, as the name decidedly does not imply, very typically for a British institution, is wholly private. Public schools undertake to guide, mould and instruct pupils aged between thirteen and eighteen. Prep schools accept their intake from somewhere in the region of eight, nine or ten years old, and prepare them for the Common Entrance Examination, a test recognised by all the public schools. Different public schools are satisfied by different CE results. Thus Winchester, which has an interest in only the cleverest boys, would expect CE marks way above 70 percent, while Malvern and Worksop and Monckton Combe, by way of example, might be content with percentages in the nether 50s or upper 40s. There is, it follows, no absolute pass mark in the Common Entrance. Public schools can decide whom they take according to their need to have a fully pupilled and profitable school roll, according to their own sense of academic reputation, according to a candidate’s athletic, musical or artistic qualities, or according to his status as offspring of an old boy or a Great, Rich and Desirable Parent.

  At the time of my infancy, the early 1960s, nearly all prep and public schools were single-
sex boarding schools. Today, girls are involved to a much greater degree, sometimes only in the sixth form, sometimes all the way through. Parents are more reluctant to pack their children off early and may choose to have them attend as day pupils or weekly boarders. Headmasters are younger than they were and more likely to be married. Parents expect more say in the running of a school, to attend more PTA meetings and to complain more vocally about living conditions, discipline and the curriculum. Heating, diet, facilities, syllabus and discipline seem far less Spartan now than they were twenty years ago. But these changes aside, the system, so far as I have been able to ascertain, is much as it was.

  It is common enough, all things being equal, for a father to send his sons to the prep school he attended as a boy himself. My father, however, had been a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral and attended its choir school. My brother and I were unlikely to follow in his footsteps. The sound of Roger and Stephen Fry singing, even before Dame Nature had her impertinent pubic way with us, could cause people to stab themselves in the throat with sharpened pencils, jump from high windows, claw out their own inner ears, electrocute their genitals, put on a Jim Reeves record, throw themselves cackling hysterically into the path of moving buses … anything, anything to take away the pain. The cathedral choir school of St. Paul’s with its fussy, outworn emphasis on tunefulness and harmony was never going to be an option. Hence Gabbitas and Thring.

  Young Mr. Thring—or it may have been old Mr. Gabbitas—recommended Stouts Hill Preparatory School, Uley, Near Dursley, Glos. Something in my mother’s manner had told them that a friendly, warm place was required and few schools came friendlier than Stouts Hill: friendliness was its most notable feature. The school glowed with a kindly familial warmth that enfolded even the most sensitive, apron-clutching child. Founded and headmastered by one Robert Angus, it was effectively run by his four daughters, Carol, Sue, Paddy and Jane. These four Angus girls, young Mr. Gabbitas said—and old Mr. Thring signified his agreement by giving the desk a mighty thump—were considerate, charming, enthusiastic, sweet natured and fun. The pupils all rode (for Miss Jane loved ponies and horses to distraction); there was fishing, boating and ice-skating on the lake; traipsing, nutting and blackberrying in the abundant outlying copses and woods; sailing and bird spotting at Slimbridge and as much running, jumping, cricketing, ruggering, soccering, Latining, Greeking and Common Entrance preparing as the most doting parent could hope for. The diet was well-balanced and nutritious, the school uniform amusing and stylish and the fees as frighteningly expensive as any parent could scream at. Every single Gabbitas and each several Thring was united in his commendation of Stouts Hill, Uley, Glos., and they were not afraid who knew it. My parents and Roger too, after a visit of inspection later in the year, approved warmly.

  When my brother began his first term there the Fry family lived in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. When my turn came to follow him in the summer term of the year 1965, we had moved to Norfolk, the other side of England, two hundred British miles distant from Gloucestershire.

  When people today hear that I was sent away to board at a school two hundred miles from home at the age of seven they often raise a disapproving eyebrow, snort a contemptuous snort or fling up a despairing hand at the coldness, cruelty and neglect of parents who could do such a thing to a child of such tender years: the words “bosom” and “snatching” and phrases like “how could any …?” and “at such an age” and “no wonder the British are so …” are often used.

  There is great stupidity in this reaction, or at least minimal imagination, which is more or less the same thing, but morally worse. What is forgotten by those who dislike the idea of children being sent away at an early (or any) age is the matter of expectation and custom. The rightness or wrongness of private boarding education is a separate issue and I change my opinion about it as regularly as I change my socks, the desktop pattern on my computer screen and my views on God.

  When I was seven years old every child that I knew of my own age went away to boarding school. Again the rightness or wrongness of being friendly only with children from similar backgrounds is a separate issue. The point is that my father had been to boarding school, my mother had been to boarding school, all the friends I had in the world went away to boarding school. It was what one did. It was Life as I knew it. A child of seven does not question such a circumstance: it is the way of the world. If I had not been sent away I should have wondered what was wrong with me. I should have felt neglected and left out. At a local day school I most emphatically should not have felt more loved or more cared for, far from it. Going round to play with friends in the school holidays and listening to their stories of boarding school would have left me feeling miserably excluded and inexplicably singled out for strange and unusual punishment. I know this for a fact, for I did spend a term at a primary school and, sweet and friendly as the place was, I couldn’t wait to leave and join my brother.

  Had we lived in Central London I dare say it might have been different. As it was we were hidden in the mysterious interior of rural East Anglia, where the nearest shop was a twenty-minute bicycle ride away and the nearest friends many miles farther. There was no doorbell ringing and can-Stephen-come-out-to-play-ing in Booton, Norfolk: no cool friends called Zak and Barnaby and Luke, no parks, no Saturday morning cinema clubs, no milkshake parlours, no buses, no visiting ice cream vans, no roller-skating rinks. When city-bred friends saw the house I lived in, they cooed with envy and delight at the idea of so much space with so much nature all around. I used to coo with envy when I stayed in a terraced house in suburban London and saw fitted carpets, central heating and drawing rooms that were called sitting rooms and had televisions in them.

  It is also true that the ineptly hidden distress of my mother at the end of the school holidays gave me more direct, clear testament of absolute love than most children are ever lucky enough to receive at such an early age. That I was fucked up as a child and then as a youth, I cannot deny. That my fucked-up-edness sprang from a sense of betrayal, desertion or withheld love I will not allow.

  Roger, my adorable brother, was and is far from fucked up after all, and he was the first to be sent away and might reasonably be expected to have felt the greater sense of abandonment, there being no elder in whose footsteps he might follow. Jo, my adorable sister, wasn’t sent away at all, as girls weren’t by then. She was fairly fucked up as a teenager but arguably because of the very fact that she didn’t go to boarding school. Private education may be a divisive abomination, it may leave its product weird and ridiculous in all kinds of insanitary and peculiar ways, it may have held back the social development of this country, it may be responsible for all kinds of disasters and unpleasantnesses, but in my case it never left me feeling starved of parental love and attention. I think it safe to say that I would have been a fucked-up youth had I been given a secondary-modern, comprehensive or grammar school education. Whether at boarding school, day school or at home with governesses and private tutors, I would always have been as screwed up as an unwanted letter from the Reader’s Digest. Wherever I had been, whatever I had done, I should have experienced an adolescence of sturm, drang, disaster and embarrassment.

  This is all speculation. The facts are that my brother went to Stouts Hill, my sister was born and then the family moved to Norfolk.

  Leaving Buckinghamshire meant leaving Chesham Prep, a day school where I had been having my pre-prep education. The town of Chesham perches itself between London Underground’s Metropolitan Line and the Chiltern Hills embarrassedly unsure as to its status: country town or Metroland banlieu? Chesham Prep had four Houses—a House being a nominal administrative subdivision or gau, that is, not a physical building. I was in Christopher Columbus, and sported its blue badge with great pride. It took me many years to understand or truly believe that Columbus was actually Italian. Even to this day I can’t fully accept it. Why would a school in the heart of England choose a foreign hero? Perhaps they were unaware of his nationalit
y themselves. It was common knowledge that the British discovered everything—trains, democracy, television, printing, jets, hovercrafts, the telephone, penicillin, the flush lavatory and Australia—so it was reasonable to assume Christopher Columbus must have been a Briton. Francis Drake boys—or was the other House Nelson … or Walter Raleigh perhaps? I can’t quite remember—wore badges of flaming vermilion. Chesham Prep was a co-educational school and my girlfriend, the object of my warm six-year-old affection, was Amanda Brooke, from whose soft charcoal lambswool V-neck glowed Florence Nightingale’s proud primrose yellow. Her sister Victoria’s jersey flashed with the lime green of Gladys Aylward, Innkeeper of the Sixth Happiness. Victoria was Roger’s girlfriend, which kept things neat and in the family, so to speak.

  It shames me to remember that eleven years and a couple of expulsions later, at seventeen and on the run from home, I was to return to Chesham, stay as a guest of the Brooke girls and steal a Diner’s Club card from their father before running off on a wild nationwide spending spree that ended in prison and disgrace.

  It was in the playground of Chesham Prep that I tripped and fell on my face one morning and broke my nose. At the time my nose was a cute little button—if any part of me has ever been cute—and the accident, although bloody and loud, was unremarkable in the life of a small child. Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight. From time to time through my teens and beyond I would say, “I must get this damned nose straightened one day …” to which a gushing chorus would always reply, “Oh no, Stephen, you mustn’t … it’s so distinguished.” There is of course nothing distinguished about a bent nose. A duelling scar may rightly be called distinguished, as might a slightly cleft chin or a glamorously imperceptible limp, but a bent nose is idiotic and unpleasant. I suppose people were trying to be kind and protect me from the humiliation of discovering that, even after an operation to straighten my ridiculous nose, I would still look a mess. The trauma of finding out that a straight-nosed Stephen looked every bit as unappetising as a bent-nosed Stephen might have tipped me completely over the edge.