Moab is my Washpot

3

The first year at Uppingham passed more or less uneventfully for me. I found the work easy. The maths and the science I simply didn’t attempt, which made it easier still. I had decided years ago that I had a ‘maths block’ and it infuriated me that this condition was not as properly recognised as dyslexia, for example, which was just beginning to be acknowledged as a syndrome or accepted condition. In fact I don’t have the numeral equivalent of dyslexia, if there really is such a thing, it was all, I fear, to do with my father. Anything at which he excelled I seemed to go out of my way to be not just bad at, but quite staggeringly and impressively awful at. Not just maths and science therefore, but music too. The combination of my singing hang-ups and my father’s talent made sure that music and I were never going to be public friends. Hemuss at Stouts Hill had written to my parents and begged to be excused the nerve-fraying task of teaching me the piano. At Uppingham I elected, Christ knows why, to learn the cello, which was taught by a rather sexy and stylish woman called Hillary Unna, whom I always think of whenever I see that impeccable screen goddess Patricia Neale. Hillary Unna liked me (I think) and I shall never forget that she said to me in a husky, vampy voice at our first meeting, ‘Well, here’s a lissom one…‘ At that time, and at that age, such a compliment to a boy so physically unsure made me glow for weeks. ‘Lissom’, what a kind word to give to a gangling youth. I was thin in those days of course, more than thin I was skinny and growing upwards at a frightening speed, but I believed myself to ‘be awkward- and physically uncoordinated, in fact the unpleasant word ‘unco’ was always hooted at me whenever I dropped a ball or tripped over. There’s no point beating about the bush, I had Lord Nelson’s hand-eye co-ordination and the grace of a Meccano giraffe.

Privately, the music school was my favourite place. There were double-doored practice rooms where one could sit at the piano and hammer furiously away like Beethoven in his last years of deafness. For hours I used to stamp out the descending chords and rising arpeggios that opened Grieg’s piano concerto fancying myself on the stage of the Wigmore Hall. There was a record library there too, where I locked myself in, screaming and roaring with pleasure as I wildly and doubtless unrhythmically conducted Beethoven’s Egmont and the overtures of Rossim -which to this day I still secretly place above the deeper artistic claims of Bach and Bruckner. I am still unable to smell the peculiar smell of vinyl records, dusty amplifiers and anti-static cleaning cloths without being transported back to that room, with its blackboard of ruled staves and its stacked jumble of music stands and chairs; back to that overwhelming surge of rapturous, tumultuous joy and the inexpressibly passionate deluge of excitement that flooded though me when the music bellowed from that one single Leak speaker. I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fl in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.

Amongst the boys of Fircroft there were the cool and the uncool. This was not, after all Edwardian England, not a world of ‘May God forgive you, Blandford-Cresswell, for I’m sure I shan’t,’ or ‘I say, that’s beastly talk, Devenish,’ or ‘Cave, you fellows, here comes old Chiggers.’ This was 1970 and hippiedom and folk rock were making their sluggish, druggy moves.

In my first week Rick Carmichael (way cool) stopped me in the corridor and said, ‘You’re Roger Fry’s brother aren’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Well, could you take a message for me?’

I nodded again.

‘See that bloke over there?’ Carmichael pointed down the corridor towards a boy with dangerously long hair, hair that nearly reached his collar, hair at which this boy pulled, stroked and twiddled, thoughtfully, lovingly and dreamily as he leaned against a wall.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see him.’

‘Well, his name is Guy Caswell and I want you to say this to him. “Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.” Got that?’

‘Sorry?’ I had heard Captain Beefheart as Captain ‘Bee-fart’ and thought this might be some terrible trick to get me into trouble.

‘It’s not difficult. “Captain Beef heart is better than Edgar Broughton.” Okay?’

‘All right, Carmichael.’ I gulped slightly and moved down the corridor, repeating the strange mantra to myself over and over again under my breath. ‘Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart is better than Edgar Broughton.’ It was utterly meaningless to me. May as well have been Polish.

I reached the boy with the long hair and coughed tentatively.

‘Excuse me…

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you Caswell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Er, Captain Beef heart is better than Edgar Broughton.’

‘What?’ Caswell let his left hand fall from its ministrations to the glossy locks.

Oh Christ, surely I hadn’t got it wrong? Maybe he had misheard.

‘Captain Beefheart,’ I said with slow and deliberate emphasis, ‘is better than Edgar Broughton.’

‘Oh yeah? And what the fuck do you know about it?’ snarled Caswell, straightening himself up and starting towards me.

I hared off down the corridor as fast as I could go, past Carmichael, who was doubled up with laughter, and out into the quad, not stopping until I reached the back of the fives courts, panting and terrified.

After tea, as I was making my way towards the study I shared with Whitwell, a new boy in my intake, there came a tap on my shoulder.

‘Hey, Fry…’ It was Caswell. ‘No, no. It’s okay,’ he said as he saw the fear leap into my eyes. ‘It was Rick, right? It was Carmichael. He told you to say that.’

I nodded.

‘Okay, here’s the deal. Go to Carmichael’s study and tell him that The Incredible String Band is better than Jethro Tull.’

Oh Lord, what had I got myself into here?

‘The Amazing String Band is…’

‘Incredible, yeah? The Incredible String Band is better than Jethro Tull.’

‘Jethro Tull?’

‘That’s it. Jethro Tull.’

‘As in the drill?’ My factoid-rich, Guinness Book of Records mind knew that Jethro Tull was the name of the man who had invented the seed-planting drill in 1701, though why this rendered him inferior to an incredible string band, I couldn’t begin to guess.

‘The Drill?’ said Caswell. ‘Never heard of them. Just say what I said, ‘kay?’

There was enough friendliness of manner for me to know that there was no danger for me in this, and the idea of running messages appealed to the frustrated cub scout in me. I liked being thought of as useful.

Carmichael had a study to himself in another corridor. I knocked on the door, only slightly nervously. Loud music was playing inside, so I knocked again. A voice rose from within.

‘C’min…’

I opened the door.

Every boy decorated his study differently, but most went to some lengths to make them as groovy as their incomes would allow. Fabrics were hung on walls and depended from ceilings, which gave the impression of Bedouin tents or hippy dens. These fabrics were known as tapestries, or tapos. Joss-sticks were sometimes burned, to hide the smell of tobacco or just because they were far-out and right-on. Carmichael’s study was highly impressive, a psychedelic tapo here, a low wattage amber light bulb there. It was nowhere near as impressive as his older brother Andy’s study, however. Andy Carmichael was something of an engineer and had constructed out of wood elaborate levels and ladders within the study, turning it into a cross between an adventure playground and Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. At the moment, the House was abuzz with the rumour that Andy Carmichael had nearly completed a hovercraft he had been building and that it was going to get its trial run on the Middle very soon. He did finish it eventually, I remember, and it worked too: every bit as noisy, useless and disgusting as the commercial hovercrafts that ply the channel today.

I believe there was a yet older Carmichael called Michael, but he had already left the school. I liked the idea of his being told to get into the family car and used to repeat endlessly to myself, ‘Get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael… get into the Carmichael car, Michael Carmichael.’

What stunned me about Rick Carmichael’s study however, was the sight of the books on his bookshelf. Six Penguin copies of P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves stones. On the frontmost, Jeeves in the Offing, I could see a photograph from a BBC series of thee or four years earlier which had starred Dennis Price as Jeeves and, as Bertie Wooster… Ian Carmichael.

Rick looked up and followed the direction of my eyes.

‘Are you… is he? I mean…‘ I stammered. ‘You know, on the telly…?’

‘He’s my uncle,’ said Rick, turning down the volume on his record-player, which had been pushing out a rather appealing song about tigers and India, of which more later.

‘I love P. G. Wodehouse,’ I said solemnly. ‘I adore him.’

‘Yeah? Do you want to borrow one?’

I had read them all, all the Jeeves stories, ever since Margaret Popplewell, a friend of my mother’s from her schooldays, had given me a copy of Very Good, Jeeves for my birthday. I had been collecting him in all editions for some time and had a massive collection. The great man wrote nearly a hundred books, so there was still a long way to go.

‘Could I?’

He passed Jeeves in the Offing over to me. I am looking at that very copy now, it is on the desk next to my keyboard. On the front we see a photograph of a beautifully dressed Ian Carmichael wearing a monocle (a source of much debate amongst Wodehousians -there is only one actual reference to Bertie wearing an eye-glass, and that was in a painting of him which became a poster, but you really don’t want to know that) a red carnation is in his buttonhole and a wonderfully dim good-natured look of startlement beams though his exceptionally blue eyes. Above the tubby Penguin that stands next to the title is printed ‘3/6’ (which was shortly to become known as seventeen and a half pence) and on the back we read:

The cover shows Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster in the B.B.C. series ‘The World of Wooster’ (Producer: Michael Mills, by arrangement with Peter Cotes.

Photographer Nicholas Acraman)

Many years later I worked for Michael Mills, who was a formidably shrewish and frightening man. There was very little he had not done in the world of Light Entertainment and he did not take kindly to unpunctual actors. I was booked for a part, very early on in my ‘career’ on a half-hour comedy called Chance in a Million which starred Simon Callow, whom I was desperate to meet, since his book Being an Actor had been a huge inspiration at university. I had not known that Teddington Lock, where Thames TV studios had their being, took well over an hour to get to from Islington, where I was living at the time, and had arrived at least half an hour late. Michael Mills, who was the kind of man who wore spacious cardigans and half-moon spectacles that dangled on black string, gave me a withering look and told me that he would be writing to my agent about the unprofessional hour at which I had arrived. He has died since I believe and I never got a chance to talk to him about the making of that 1960s ‘World of Wooster’ series.

It is strange to touch this book now and know that it was handed to me, lazily and charmingly, by Rick Carmichael more than a quarter of a century ago. Stranger still, I suppose, in the light of the fact that I was to spend four years myself playing Jeeves in another television adaptation of those same stories.

‘Anything else?’ Rick said.

‘Oh!’ I jerked up from my reverent gaze at the book. ‘Oh, yes. The Unbelievable String Band is better than Jethro Tull.’

Carmichael smiled, ‘Er, I think you mean “The Incredible String Band”, don’t you?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Damn. Yes.’

‘Right,’ said Carmichael. ‘You tell Guy that Carol King is better than Fairport Convention.'

I can’t remember how many times I shuttled between Carmichael and Caswell delivering insulting messages on the subject of their favourite music, but it meant that somehow I became more or less accepted early on by these two and by Rick’s best friend, Martin Swindells, who was known as Mart and sometimes as Dog. They were also friendly with a boy called Roger Eaton, who was red-haired and called Roo. They were cool, this group, Guy, Rick, Mart and Roo. They knew more about rock music than I thought I could ever, ever learn. They were cool and they were amiable. They were not interested in status, ambition, gossip about the staff or schooly, status-bound things. They didn’t take joy in teasing the weak or sucking up to the strong. They liked music and they liked fun. One of them, I won’t say which in case their parents are reading this, showed me the first ever joint I had ever seen. He didn’t let me smoke it, but he showed it to me. For all I know it wasn’t a joint at all, just a cigarette rolled up to look like one.

Rock music, of course, was not the same as rock and roll. Nor was it the same as pop. Since the demise of The Beatles, pop and the single-play record had become singularly unhip, at public schools at any rate. Albums were where it was at. Albums meant Pink Floyd, Van de Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Genesis (nice Charterhouse boys with a cockney drummer) and – at the folksy end – Jethro Tull, Procul Harum, Steeleye Span and, bless them, The Incredible String Band.

A lot of that rock would now be called Heavy Metal: Uriah Heep, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were, unless I’ve leapt ahead of myself, already going, and cool people already knew about David Bowie whose ‘Major Tom’ had flopped the year before but was a coming man. There was a rumour too that Long John Baldry’s old keyboard player, Elton John, had produced an album that was so far out it was far in.

These were things I did not know.

There was one band, however, that I soon came to know everything about. About halfway through my first term, Rick Carmichael ran out of cash and decided to hold a Study Sale, an auction in which all the stuff, gear and rig he could do without became available to the highest bidder. I came away from this sale with the complete set of BBC tie-in Jeeves Penguins and an LP, the very album whose first track ‘Hunting Tigers Out in India’ had been playing when I had first knocked on Rick’s door. It was called Tadpoles and was the work of The Bonzo Dog DooDah Band.

I had heard of them because they had enjoyed their one and only Number One hit with ‘The Urban Spaceman’ while I was still at Stouts Hill. This album was most strange and wonderful to look upon. It had holes pierced in the eyes of the band members on the front and, inside, a card which you could slide backwards and forwards, which made all kinds of shapes pass in and out of the blank eye sockets. Below the title Tadpoles was the phrase…

Tackle the toons you tapped your tootsies to in Thames TV’s Do Not Adjust Your Set

… which, it grieves me to say, meant nothing whatever to me, our house not being an ITV house. I am not even sure if my parents’ television could get ITV at this stage. I remember, to divert for a moment, that when we had moved up to Norfolk, aged nine and seven, Roger and I had been desperate to watch television that first evening because the week before, in Chesham, we had seen the first ever episode of

Doctor Who and were already hopelessly hooked. Something had happened in transit to the mahogany Pye television with its tiny grey screen and it wouldn’t work. We missed that second episode and I grieve still at the loss.

Do Not Adjust Your Set, I now know was an early evening comedy show which had featured Michael Palm, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, who had by this time already gone on to join John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was just beginning to seep into our consciousnesses. The music for Do Not Adjust Your Set was provided by a very strange collection of art-students and musicians who called themselves The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. By the time I began seriously to get into them, they had dropped their Doo-Dah and were just The Bonzo Dog Band. The two leading lights of the band were the immensely skilled musical pasticheur Neil Innes (who continued his association with the Python people by writing the songs for and appearing in The Rutles and The Holy Grail and so on), and the late, majestic and remarkable Vivian Stanshall, one of the most talented, profligate, bizarre, absurd, infuriating, unfathomable and magnificent Englishmen ever to have drawn breath.

Stanshall (Sir Viv to his worshippers) died in a fire a few years ago and I felt terrible because I hadn’t been in touch with him for years – ever since I had helped him out a little by investing in a musical he had written called Stinkfoot which played, to generally uncomprehending silence, in the Shaw Theatre, London some ten or so years ago.

Over the next year at Uppingham I bought their other albums, Gorilla, A Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse, Keynsham and finally Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly, their last, which contained Stanshall’s short story, ‘Rawlinson End’ which I can still recite by heart and which he went on to develop into that outré film masterpiece, Sir Henry At Rawlinson End starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry and J. G. Devlin as his butler, Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer. When I first heard the joke, ‘Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer,’ I laughed so much I honestly thought I might die of suffocation.

Oh, very well, it isn’t Alexander Pope or Oscar Wilde, but for me it was as delicious as anything could be delicious. With Stanshall, it was as if a new world had exploded in my head, a world where delight in language for the sake of its own textures, beauties and sounds, and where the absurd, the shocking and the deeply English jostled about in mad jamboree.

It was Stanshall’s voice, I think, that delighted me more than anything. It had two registers, one light and dotty, with the timbre almost of a 19205 crooner, and capable of very high pitch indeed, as when he sang songs like the Broadway standard ‘By A Waterfall’; the other was a Dundee cake of a voice, astoundingly deep, rich and fruity, capable of Elvis impersonations (the song ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ for example) as well as great gutsy trombone blasts of larynx-lazy British sottery, to use a Stanshally sort of phase.

Most people will know his voice from the instruments he vocally introduces on Mike Oldfield’s otherwise entirely instrumental album Tubular Bells, which sold in its millions and millions in the early 19705 and founded the fortune of Richard Branson.

The Bonzos were my bridge between rock music and comedy, but comedy was more important to me by far than rock music. I did eventually buy an Incredible String Band album called, it grieves me to relate, Liquid Acrobat As Regards The Air as well as Meddle, Obscured By Clouds and other early Pink Floyd, but my heart wasn’t really in them. It was comedy for me. Not just the modern comedy of the Bonzos and Monty Python, nor the slightly older comedy of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, much as I adored those geniuses. I also collected records with titles like The Golden Days of Radio Comedy and Legends of the Halls and learned by heart the routines of comics like Max Miller, Sandy Powell, Sid Field, Billy ‘Almost a Gentleman’ Bennett, Mabel Constandouros, Gert and Daisy, Tommy Handley, Jack Warner and most especially, Robb Wilton.

Perhaps we’re getting back to that ‘can’t sing, can’t dance: won’t sing, won’t dance’ subject. If I learned all the comedy, I could repeat it, perform it, which was as close as I could come to singing or dancing. I’m not a bad mimic, no Rory Bremner or Mike Yarwood, but not bad, and I could repeat back the comedy I had learned, word for word, intonation for intonation, pause for pause. Then I might be able to try out some of my own.

I was not alone in this. Richard Fawcett, a boy of my term, shared this love of comedy. He was a fine mimic too, and an astoundingly brave and brilliant actor. He and I would listen to comedy records together, pointing out to each other why this was funny, what made that even funnier, trying hard to get to the bottom of it all, penetrating our passion, wanting to hug it all to us in heaping armfuls, as teenagers will.

Fawcett had a collection which included routines by Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, as well as an extraordinary song called ‘The Ballad of Bethnal Green’ by someone whose name I fear I have forgotten, (I think his first name was Paddy, I expect someone will write to me and let me know) and which included delightfully weird lyrics like:

And somewhere in this ballad came the splendid phrase,

Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as ‘strobile’ and ‘magniloquent’, daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. ‘Strobile’ was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fir-cone, but magniloquent I did manage.

I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn’t when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world.

‘So, Fry. “A lemon yellow colour” is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use thee words where one will do. Hm?’

I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later.

‘Well, Fry? It’s a simple enough question. What is titration?’

‘Well, sir…, it’s a process whereby…’

‘Come on, come on. Either you know or you don’t.’

‘Sorry sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think…’

‘Anxious to avoid what?’

‘Pleonasm, sir.’

‘And what do you mean by that?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I meant that I had no wish to be sesquipedalian.’

‘What?’

‘Sesquipedalian, sir.’

‘What are you talking about?’

I allowed a note of confusion and bewilderment to enter my voice. ‘I didn’t want to be sesquipedalian, sir! You know, pleonastic.’

‘Look, if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. What is this pleonastic nonsense?’

‘It means sir, using more words in a sentence than are necessary. I was anxious to avoid being tautologous, repetitive or superfluous.’

‘Well why on earth didn’t you say so?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll remember in future, sir.’ I stood up and turned round to face the whole form, my hand on my heart. ‘I solemnly promise in future to help sir out by using seven words where one will do. I solemnly promise to be as pleonastic, prolix and sesquipedalian as he could possibly wish.’

It is a mark of the man’s fundamental good nature that he didn’t whip out a knife there and then, slit my throat from ear to ear and trample on my body in hobnailed boots. The look he gave me showed that he came damned close to considering the idea.

Christ, I could be a cheeky, cocky little runt. I gave the character of Adrian in my novel The Liar some of the lines I liked to use to infuriate schoolmasters.

‘Late, Fry?’

‘Really, sir? So am I.’

‘Don’t try to be clever, boy.’

‘Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?’

I regret that I cut such an odious, punchable figure sometimes, but I don’t ever regret those hours spent alone or with Richard Fawcett trawling the dictionary or playing over and over again comedy record after comedy record.

Whether we are the sum of influences or the sum of influences added to the sum of genes, I know that the way I express myself, the words I choose, my tone, my style, my language is a compound which would be utterly different, utterly, utterly different if I had never been exposed to any one of Vivian Stanshall,

P. G. Wodehouse or Conan Doyle. Later on the cadences, tropes, excellences and defects of other writers and their rhetorical tricks, Dickens, Wilde, Firbank, Waugh and Benson, may have entered in and joined the mix, but those primal three had much to do with the way I spoke and therefore, how I thought. Not how I felt but how I thought, if indeed I ever thought outside of language.

I have diverted into this world of The Bonzos and comedy because I am coming soon, all too soon, to my second year at Uppingham, and I don’t want to create the impression of a lone mooncalf Fry, absorbed only in love and the pungent pain of his lonely pubescence. There was a context: there were fifty boys in the House, they had their own lives too and we were all touched by the outside world and its current fads and fantasies.

In my first year I had Fawcett as a friend, and later, a boy called Jo Wood, with whom I was to share a study in my second year. Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world.

But one day he said to me:

‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’

The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read. He taught me a lot about the human will, Jo Wood. But more than that, he was a kind patient friend who had much to put up with in our second year when he had to share a study with a boy whose life had suddenly exploded into a million pieces.

The only real fly in the ointment that first year, senseless brushes with authority aside, came in the form of Games. Ekker. Sports.

There is a fine Bonzo number called ‘Sport’ which follows a sensitive boy at school (called Stephen pleasingly enough) who prefers to lie in the long grass with his pocket edition of Mallarmé (another Stephen) while the big rough boys are at their football. The chorus calls out gruffly:

I laughed at that song, but I inwardly wept at it too. I hated sport, ekker, games, whatever they wanted to call it. And it was a fuck sight harder to get off ekker at Uppingham than it had been at prep school. ‘A fuck sight’ was the kind of language one used at Uppingham all the time, out of the hearing of staff. It was one of the first things I had noticed about the difference between Stouts Hill and Uppingham, the language, just as for Robert Graves in Goodbye To All That it had been the transition from Charterhouse to the Royal Welch Fusiliers that had marked a startling move up in the swearing stakes. From a world of ‘bloody heck’ and the occasional ‘balls’ I had been hurled into a society where it was ‘fuck’, ‘wank’, ‘bollocks’, ‘cunt’ and ‘shit’ every other word. To say that I was shocked would be ridiculous, but I was slightly scared. The swearing was part of the move up towards manliness, part of the healthiness. Study sales, butteries and shops, that kind of independence I could appreciate, but things that were manly frightened me. And nothing was more manly than Games.

Games mattered at Uppingham. If you had your First Fifteen colours, you were one hell of a blood. If you represented just your House, let alone the school in some sport, it gave you something, an air, a reason to feel good about yourself, a sense of easy superiority that no amount of mental suffering with irregular verbs could threaten. Work was ultimately poofy and to be bad at work was no cause for shame.

Games went on all the time. House ekker was a daily thing, except on Fridays. It was no good cheering when Fridays came around however, for Fridays were compulsory Corps days, when we had to march up and down in Second World War battle-dress as part of the school’s Combined Cadet Force. I was Army, poor bloody infantry; my brother wisely chose the Air Force. I must have looked as much like a military unit as Mike Tyson looks like a daffodil, shuffling about the parade ground in my badly blancoed webbing, clodding corps-boots, an overtight black beret that would never fold down and made me look more like a French onion seller than a soldier, writhing in an itchy khaki shirt, trying to march in step with a clunking Lee Enfield rifle over my shoulder and the school sergeant-major, RSM ‘Nobby’ Clarke yelling in my ear.

But you could fuck me with a pineapple and call me your suckpig, beat me with chains and march me up and down in uniform every day and I would thank you with tears in my eyes if it got me off games. Nothing approached the vileness of games, nothing.

Grotesque ‘Unders versus Overs’ matches would arise from time to time, in which under sixteens played over sixteens, and school matches that you had to watch and cheer at. PE lessons cropped up in the syllabus, in academic time: absurd Loughborough educated imbeciles calling everyone ‘lads’ and using Christian names as if they found the snobbery of public school inimical to their healthy, matey world of beer, bonhomie, split-times and quadriceps.

‘Good lad, Jamie!’

Oh, there was always a Jamie, a good-lad-Jamie, a neat, nippy, darty, agile scrum-halfy little Jamie. Jamie could swarm up ropes like an Arthur Ransom hero, he could fly up window frames, leap vaulting horses, flip elegant underwater turns at the end of each lap of the pool, somersault backwards and forwards off the trapeze and spring back up with his neat little buttocks twinkling and winking with fitness and firmness and cute little Jamieness. Cunt.

Then they had the nerve, these barely literate pithecanthopoids in their triple-A tee-shirts and navy blue tracksuit bottoms, with their pathetically function-rich stop-watches around their thick, thick necks, to write school reports citing ‘motor development percentiles’ and other such bee’s-wank as if their futile, piffling physical jerks were part of some recognised scientific discipline that mattered, that actually mattered in the world. Even a tragic management consultant bristling with statistics and psychological advice on the ‘art of people handling’ -art of the so-fucking-obvious-it-makes-your-nosebleed more like – has some right to look himself in the mirror every morning, but these baboons with their clip-boards and whistles and lactic acid burn statistics, running backwards with a medicine ball under each arm, shouting ‘Come on, Fry, shift yourself, let’s see some burn…’

Yeugh! The squeak of rubber soles on sports hall floors, the rank stench of newly leaking testosterone, the crunch of cinder racing tracks, the ugly, dead thump of a rugger ball taking a second later than the ugly, dead sight of it hitting the hard mud as you sullenly watched the match, the clatter of hockey sticks, the scrape of studded boots on pavilion floors, the puke-sweet smell of linseed oil, ‘Litesome’ jock-straps, shin-guards, disgusting leather caps worn in scrums, boots, shorts, socks, laces, the hiss and steam of the showers.

Fu-u-u-u-u-uck! I want to vomit it all out now, the whole healthy spew of it. It ate into my soul like acid and ate its way out again like cancer. I despised it so much… so much… so much. A depth and height and weight and scale of all consuming hatred that nearly sent me mad.

Games! How dared they use that grand and noble word to describe such low, mud-caked barbarian filth as rugby football and hockey? How dared they think that what they were doing was a game? It wasn’t ludic, it was ludicrous. It wasn’t gamesome, it was gamey, as a rotten partridge is gamey.

It was shit, it was a wallowing in shouting, roaring, brutal, tribal shit. And the shittiest shit of it all was the showers.

Yes, I might have been tall, yes, I might have been growing almost visibly, yes, my voice might have broken, but what was happening down there? Fuck all, that was what was happening.

If I heard the word ‘immature’ used, even in the most innocent context, I would blush scarlet.

Immature meant me having no hair down there.

Immature meant me having a salted snail for a cock.

Immature meant shame, inadequacy, defeat and misery. They could peacock around without towels, they could jump up and down and giggle as bell-end slapped against belly-button, and heavy ball-sack bounced and swung, they could shampoo their shaggy pubes and sing their brainless rugby songs in the hiss of the shower-room, it was all right for them, the muddy, bloody, merciless, apemen cunts.

And you want to know the joke, the sick, repulsive joke?

I love sport.

I love ‘games’.

I a-fucking-dore them. All of them. From rugby league to indoor bowls. From darts to baseball. Can’t get enough. Cannot get e-fucking-nough.

Now I do, now.

Part of the reason for this book being a month and half late in delivery is that the England-Australia test matches and Wimbledon, and the British Lions Rugby Fifteen’s tour of South Africa have all been tumbling out of the screen at once. I had to watch every match. Then there were the golf majors, the Formula One season building to its climax and Goodwood too. And now the soccer season is about to begin, and it’ll be Ford Monday Night Football and more precious hours sat in front of the television lapping up sport, sport, sport, one of the great passions of my life. Those poor buggers in the gym trying to get my hopeless weedy body to do something healthy like climb a rope or spring over a vaulting horse, they did their best. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t mean. They would write witty reports on me: ‘The only exercise he takes is the gentle walk to the sports centre to present his off-games chit,’ that kind of thing. ‘Physical exertion and

Stephen Fry are strangers. I have tried to introduce them, but I feel they will never get on.’ Good men, trying to do a good job.

Talk about betrayal.

How am I ever going to apologise to that miserable, furious, wretched thirteen-year-old, huddled in a scared bony heap on the changing room bench trying to work out how to shuffle to the showers without being seen? All he has is his anger, his fury, his verbal arrogance, his pride. Without. that, he would shrivel into a social nothingness that would match his shrivelled physical nothingness. So forgive him the intemperance of his fury, forgive him his rage, his insolence and the laughing cockiness he is prey to: they are just a ragged towel. A towel to hide his shame, to cover up the laughable no-cockiness he is prey to.

Can so much be explained by (literally) so little?

Le nez de Cléopâtre: s’il eût plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé… didn’t Pascal write that? If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed. I’ve never quite understood why he said ‘shorter’, not ‘longer’ -maybe in Pascal’s day, or Mark Antony’s for that matter, a short nose was considered uglier than a long one. Maybe I’ve misunderstood the whole thrust of the thought. Anyway, when I first came upon that pensée, (a favourite with French masters in dictation on account of its silent, subjunctive circumflex) I remember thinking about the face of my world. Le nœud d’Éienne: s’il eût plus long…

But then, as Pascal also said, the heart has its reasons, which Reason knows nothing about. Your guess is almost certainly better than mine. The spectator sees more of the game.

So back to that sad little creature.

It’s an average weekday lunchtime halfway through his first term. As the meal has progressed, he has become quieter and quieter because he knows that after lunch he must face the House polly and the Ekker Book. He has to tick everyone off, this officious polly. He will want to see either a note from matron explaining why you are Off Ekker, or he will Put You Down for a game.

I wait in the queue, my stomach pumping out hot lead. The polly looks up briefly.

‘Fry. Unders Rugger. House pitch.’

‘Oh. No. I can’t.’

‘What?’

‘I’m fencing.’

‘Fencing?’

I had heard someone say this the other day and they seemed to have got away with it. The polly flips though his book. ‘You’re not on the list as a fencer.’

Bollocks, there’s a list. I hadn’t thought of that.

‘But Mr Tozer told me to turn up,’ I whine. Mr Tozer, known inevitably as Spermy Tozer, was big in the world of sports like fencing and badminton and archery. Uppingham’s Tony Gubba. ‘I had expressed an interest.

‘Oh. Okay. Fencing, then. Make sure you bring back a chit from him so I can put you in the book.’

Hurray!

One afternoon taken care of. One afternoon where, so long as that polly doesn’t see me, I can do what I like, roam where I like. He’ll forget about that chit from Spermy Tozer.

But there will be other afternoons, and new excuses needed. Every day is a fresh hell of invention and sometimes, just sometimes, I actually have to turn up and sometimes, I am caught skulking unhealthily, and I am punished.

Peck I think, was the last House-captain to have the right to beat boys without the housemaster’s permission. The most common form of punishment not corporal, was something called the Tish Call. Tishes, as I have already explained, were the cubicles that divided up the beds of the dormitory. Everyone, in every House in the school, slept in a tish.

A Single tish call was a small slip of paper given by a polly to an offender. On it was written the name of a polly from another House. A Double tish call contained two names of two different pollies, again from two different Houses. I was for ever getting Triple tish calls, three different pollies, thee different Houses.

The recipient of a tish call had to get up early, change into games clothes, run to the House of the first polly on the list, enter the polly’s tish, wake him up and get him to sign next to his name on the slip of paper. Then on to the next polly on the list, who was usually in a House right at the other end of the town. ‘When all the signatures had been collected, it was back to your own House and into uniform in time for breakfast at eight o’clock. So that offenders couldn’t cheat by going round in the most convenient geographical order, or by getting up before seven, the official start time, the pollies on the list had to write down, next to their signatures, the exact time at which they were woken up.

A stupid punishment really, as irritating for the pollies who were shaken awake as it was for the poor sod doing the running about. The system was open to massive abuse. Pollies could settle scores with colleagues they disliked by sending them tish callers every day for a week. Tit-f or-tat tish call wars between pollies could go on like this for whole terms.

Of course pollies could do each other favours too.

‘Oh Braddock, there’s a not half scrummy scrumhalf in your Colts Fifteen, what’s his name?’

‘What, Yelland you mean?’

‘That’s the one. Rather fabulous. You… er… couldn’t find your way clear to sending him over one morning, could you? As a little tishie?’

‘Oh, all right. If you’ll send me Finlay.’

‘Done.’

The only really enjoyable part of the tish call for me was the burglary. Officially all the Houses were locked until seven, which was supposed to make it pointless to set off early and take the thing at a leisurely pace. But there were larder, kitchen and changing room windows that could be prised open and latches that could yield to a flexible sheet of mica. Once inside all you had to do was creep up to the dorm, tiptoe into the target polly’s tish, adjust his alarm clock and wake him. That way you could start the call at half-past five or six, bicycle about at a gentle pace and save yourself all the flap and faff of trying to complete the whole run in forty minutes.

That entire description of the tish call is lifted, almost whole, from The Liar, but then, when I wrote The Liar I lifted that description, almost whole, from my life, so it seems fair to take it back.

Because of the simplicity with which the rules of the tish call game could be circumvented, because of the frisson of sexual possibility that they hinted at and because I always enjoyed early mornings anyway, they held no particular terror for me as a punishment. Some boys came away from being given a tish call with their faces white as a sheet. They would dutifully get up at the right time, actually get into full games kit, actually run from House to House, puffing and sweating, and actually shower before coming into breakfast and presenting their filled-in slip of paper to the polly who had punished them. I never presented it, always waited for the polly to chase me up, allowing him a moment’s triumphant thought that maybe I had actually dared not to do the tish call and that this time I was really for it.

‘Where is it, Fry?’

‘Second on the left, you can’t miss it. Smells of urine and excrement.'

‘Don’t be clever. I gave you a triple tish call yesterday.’

‘You did? Are you sure you’re not thinking of my brother?’

‘Don’t be cheeky, you know bloody well.’

‘I’m afraid it entirely slipped my mind.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. Awful, isn’t it?’

‘Well, in that case…’

‘And then I remembered, just in time. Here it is… Copping’s signature is especially elegant don’t you think? Such a handsome swagger in the curve of the… such careless grace in the down-swoop of that final “g”…’

Another duty to enjoy was that of Morning Fag. Most juniors hated it when their turn came round, but I counted off the days with mounting excitement. It involved some of the things I loved best: early mornings, the sound of my own voice, efficient service and a hint of eroticism. Maybe I should have been an airline steward…

At seven-fifteen at the latest I would spring out of bed, get dressed and tiptoe out of the dormitory. I would go downstairs to the Hall, where the skivvies would be laying the table for breakfast, bid them good morning, maybe blag a slice of bread and butter off them and check my watch against the clock on the wall. Then upstairs to a table on the landing where was laid out a huge brass bell with a leather loop for a handle. At precisely half past seven I would lift the bell and start to ring. It was heavy and took three or four shakes before the clapper really set itself in rhythm. I would go to each of the dormitories in turn and then, ringing the bell furiously all the time, shout as loudly as I could in an incantatory chant that was identical to that of all morning fags, and is impossible to set down here without musical entablature:

‘Time half past seven!’

As soon as that had been done in the threshold of each of the four dormitories I would then have to dash from tish to tish waking each boy individually, counting – and this was the tricky part – backwards in five second increments. That is to say, I would have to tell them how long they had to go before ten to eight, which was the last time-call they received before eight o’clock and brekker.

Thus, entering each tish and shaking each shoulder I would yell in each ear, ‘eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds tooo go… eighteen minutes and forty seconds tooo go… eighteen minutes and thirty-five seconds tooo go’ and so on until the time for the next general cry and the next ring of the bell which came at twenty to eight.

‘Ten minutes toooooo go!’ was the chant, and then back to the tishes. ‘Nine minutes and twenty-five seconds tooo go… nine minutes and twenty seconds tooo go…‘ before returning to the bell and the final, triumphant pealing and roaring of:

‘TI-I-I-ME TEN TO EIGHT!’

By which time boys would be clattering and roaring and streaming past me, swearing, cursing, doing up their final buttons, foaming with toothpaste and bad temper.

Some boys were terribly hard to wake, and if you didn’t succeed in rousing them fully and they were senior, they would blame you for not being up in time and make your life hell. Other boys were deliberately hard to wake and played secret unspoken games with you. They might sleep nude, under one sheet and present you as you entered the tish with all the signs of deep sleep and an innocent but perky morning erection. The unspoken game was that, as you tried to shake them awake by their shoulder, your elbow or a lower part of the arm might just accidentally rub against their twitching dick. Never a word spoken, this game sometimes went all the way, sometimes was just a little game. In my year as Morning Fag one got to know which boys played this game and which didn’t, just as they presumably got to know which Morning Fags played it, and which didn’t.

This was before I had ever masturbated myself, and although I knew all the theory and was titillated by the idea of sex, I didn’t really get the whole fuss of it. At Stouts Hill I had already learned the hard way just how complex the attitude of the healthy boy was towards queering.

At my last year at prep school, it had become very much the thing amongst a handful of us in our senior dormitory to do a fair amount of fooling around when the others were asleep. A couple of the boys were equipped with a set of fully operational testicles and bushy pubic undergrowth, others like me were not. I greatly enjoyed creeping over to another boy’s bed and having a good old rummage about. I never quite knew what it was that I enjoyed, and certainly the first time I saw semen erupt from a penis it gave me the fright of my life. I have to confess I found it frankly rather disgusting and wondered at nature’s eccentricity: like Noël Coward’s Alice I felt that things could have been organised better. One of the boys in that dorm, we’ll call him Halford, like me not fully ripened but of a sportive disposition, took the same pleasure that I did in wandering around the school naked. Together we would, with roaring stiffies, or what passed for roaring stiffies in our cases, creep around the bathrooms simply glorying in the fact of our nakedness. We might point and prod and giggle and fondle each other a little, and experiment with that curious squashing of dicks in closing doors and desk-lids that seems to please the young, but it was the nakedness and the secrecy that provided all the excitement we needed.

One afternoon, this same Halford was climbing out of the swimming pool when he suddenly got the most terrible cramp in one leg. He yowled with pain, flopped forward on to the grass and started to thrash his legs up and down in agony. I was standing close by so I went and helped him up and then walked him around the pool until the cramp had gone. Fully recovered, he streaked away to change and I thought no more about it.

As the afternoon wore on it became apparent to me that I seemed suddenly to have become extremely unpopular. One is highly sensitive to these things at twelve, I was at least. Highly. My popularity rating was something I was more aware of than the most sophisticated political spin-doctor. But I simply couldn’t understand it. It must have been one of those rare afternoons when I knew I had done absolutely nothing wrong. It was bewildering, but inescapable: boys were cutting me dead, sneering openly at me, sending me to Coventry and falling sullenly silent when I entered rooms.

At last I ran into someone who could explain. I found myself approaching a fat boy called McCallum in the corridor and he whispered something as I passed.

‘What did you say?’ I asked, stopping and spinning round.

‘Nothing,’ he said and tried to move on. McCallum was someone of little account and I knew that I could master him.

‘You muttered something just now,’ I said grasping him by both shoulders, ‘you will tell me what it was or I will kill you. It is that simple. I will end your life by setting fire to you in bed while you are asleep.’

McCallum was the sort of gullible panicky fool who took that kind of threat very seriously indeed.

‘You wouldn’t dare!’ he said, proving my point.

‘I most certainly would,’ I replied. ‘Now. Tell me what it was that you said just now.’

‘I just said… I said…‘ he spluttered to a halt and coloured up.

‘Yes?’ I said. ‘I’m waiting. You just said…

‘I just said “Queer”.’

‘Queer?’

‘Yes.’

‘You said “Queer”, did you? And why was that?’

‘Everyone knows. Let me go.’

‘Everyone knows,’ I said, strengthening my grip on his shoulders, ‘but me. What is it that everyone knows?’

‘This afternoon…, ow! You’re hurting me!’

‘Of course I’m bloody hurting you! Do you think I would be exerting this much pressure for any other reason? Go on. “This afternoon…“ you said.’

‘When Halford got out of the pool…’

‘Yes, what about it?’

‘You… you put your arm round him like a queer. Halford is hopping mad. He wants to beat you up.

In my shock, outrage, horror and indignation I let go of McCallum completely and he took his opportunity, scuttling away like a fat beetle, shouting ‘Queer!’ as he rounded the corner out of sight.

I didn’t even remember putting my arm round Halford’s shoulder. I suppose I must have done as I had walked him round the pool.

All the blood drained from my face and I came close to one of those early adolescent fainting fits which sometimes stay with you till late in life, a physical sensation that can overwhelm you if you stand up very suddenly – a feeling that you are close to blacking out and falling down.

Halford thought I was queer because I had put my arm round him. Put my arm round him to support him! The very same Halford who was wandering naked with me around the bathroom not two nights previously. The Halford who taught me how to shut my cock in a door. The Halford who did a backward somersault naked on the floor at me and pushed his finger up his arse, giggling. He thought I was queer? Queer for putting an arm round him when he had cramp? Jesus.

I stumbled to a back stairway to try and find a private place to go and weep. I had got no further than the first landing when I walked straight into the hairy tweed jacket of Mr Bruce, history master and quondam internee of the Japanese Army.

‘Hello, hello, hello! What’s up here?’

The tears were streaming down my face and it was no good pretending it was hay fever. Racked with sobs, I explained about Halford's cramp and the disgust I had apparently caused him when just trying to be helpful. I did not, of course, mention our night time prowls in the nude, the sheer hypocrisy of Halford’s reaction, the unfairness and injustice and cruelty of which was what had really knocked me for six. Mr Bruce nodded gravely, gave me a handkerchief and disappeared.

I crawled my way on up to a bed and lay there weeping until tea, when I decided that I might as well get used to my unpopularity and face the howling mob in the senior refectory.

As I tried to wedge myself into my place on the bench, an artificially huge gap appeared as the boys either side made a huge show of distancing themselves from the disgusting homo who was polluting their table. Pale but resolute I started to eat my tea.

Halfway through the meal a gong sounded. Everybody looked up in surprise.

Mr Bruce was standing at the end of the room, an arm upraised for silence.

‘Boys,’ he said. ‘I have a special announcement to make. I have just heard of a heroic act of kindness that took place by the swimming-pool this afternoon. It seems that Halford got into difficulties with cramp and that Fry helped him to his feet and did exactly the right thing. He walked him about, supporting him carefully all the way. I am awarding Fry five merits for this sensible, cool action.’

I stared down at my plate, unable to move a single muscle.

‘Oh, by the way,’ continued Bruce, as if the thought had just struck him. ‘It has also come to my ears that some of the younger, sillier boys, who are ignorant about such things, think that someone putting their arm around a friend in distress is a sign of some sort of perversion. I look to you senior boys, who have a rather more sophisticated understanding of sexual matters, to quash this sort of puerile nonsense. I hope, incidentally, that Halford has thanked Fry properly for his promptness and consideration. I should think a hearty handshake and good manly bear-hug would be appropriate. That’s all.’

A squeak of brogues on floorboards and he was gone. After one and a half seconds of unbearable silence, palms began to rain down congratulatory thumps upon my back, Halford rose sheepishly from his bench to thank me and I was in favour once more.

Ant Cromie writes me that Jim Bruce died a couple of years ago, God rest, nourish and soothe his immortal soul. He walks now with Montrose, William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie himself. He saved my last term at Stouts Hill and I will honour his memory for ever.

But does that, or does that not tell you something of the psychological minefield one trod through in those days, when it came to questions of sexual nature, of sexuality, as we would say now? The difference between sexual play and queering; the blind terror that physical affection inspired, but the easy acceptance of erotic games.

At Uppingham, much the same views obtained. Those whose morning prongers one brushed as Morning Fag did not think of themselves or of me as queer in any way at all. I am not sure anyone really knew what queer really, really meant. The very idea of it made everyone so afraid that each created their own meaning, according to their own dread of their own impulses.

You could openly admire a pretty boy, and all the middle and senior boys did. It was a sign of manliness indeed to do so.

‘Just ten minutes alone, me and that arse…‘ a sixth former might say as a cute junior walked past. ‘That’s all I ask,’ he would add looking skywards in prayer.

‘Oh no!’ One senior would clutch another as they caught sight of a comely new boy, ‘I’m in love. Save me from myself.’

I think that the logic of it was that new boys, pretty boys, were the closest approximation Uppingham offered to girls. They were hairless in the right places and sweet and cute and comely like girls, they had fluffy hair and kissable lips like girls, they had cute little bottoms like… well, they had cute little bottoms like boys, but hell, any port in a storm, and there’s no storm like pubescence and no port like a pretty boy’s bum. All that public swooning however, was no more than macho posture. It proved their heterosexuality.

Some boys however had the most definite reputation for being queer, in the fully snarled out, spat out sense of the word as it was then used – before, that is to say, its triumphant reclamation by the proud homosexuals of today. I never quite understood how these reputations arose. Perhaps they came about because the accused had been caught looking furtively at someone of their own age in the showers – the furtiveness was more likely to earn you the label queer than open, frank inspection – perhaps they gave off some signal, nothing to do with campness or effeminacy, some signal that the healthy adolescent male responded to with hostility or guilt or desire. Perhaps it was all a dress-rehearsal for the tribal tomtomming of irrational rumour, bigotry and dislike, dressed up and explained as instinct, that today in the wider world decides daily on the nature, character and disposition of the well-known: that asserts Bob Monkhouse to be unctuous, David Mellor to be a creep, Peter Mandelson Machiavellian, John Selwyn Gummer odious and John Birt sinister.

I certainly didn’t know. My own view is that most homophobia, if one wants to use that rather crummy word, has almost nothing to do with sex.

‘But have you any idea what these people actually do?’

Self-righteous members of the House of Commons loved standing to ask that question during our last parliamentary debate on the age of homosexual consent.

‘Shit-stickers, that’s what they are. Let’s be clear about that. We’re talking about sodomy here.’

Oh no you aren’t. You think you are, but you aren’t, you know.

Buggery is far less prevalent in the gay world than people suppose. Anal sex is probably not much more common m homosexual encounters than it is in heterosexual.

Buggery is not at the end of the yellow brick road somewhere over the homosexual rainbow, it is not the prize, the purpose, the goal or the fulfilment of homosexuality. Buggery is not the achievement which sees homosexuality move from becoming into being; buggery is not homosexuality’s realisation or destiny. Buggery is as much a necessary condition of homosexuality as the ownership of a Volvo estate car is a necessary condition of middle-class family life, linked irretrievably only in the minds of the witless and the cheap. The performance of buggery is no more inevitable a part of homosexuality than an orange syllabub is an inevitable part of a dinner: some may clamour for it and instantly demand a second helping, some are not interested, some decide they will try it once and then instantly vomit.

There are plenty of other things to be got up to in the homosexual world outside the orbit of the anal ring, but the concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomach is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave. Love as agape, Eros and philos; love as romance, friendship and adoration; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

All the rest of it, parking your dick up an arse, slurping at a helmet, whipping, frotting, peeing, pooing, squatting like a dog, dressing up in plastic and leather – all these go on in the world of boy and girl too: and let’s be clear about this, they go on more - the numbers make it so. Go into a sex shop, skim through some pornography, browse the Internet for a time, talk to someone in the sex industry. You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.

What is more, one begs to ask of these Tony Marlowes and Peregrine Worsthornes and Paul Johnsons, have the guts to Enquire Within. Ask yourselves what thoughts go through your head when you masturbate. If the physical act and its detail is so much more important to you than love, then see a doctor, but don’t spew out your sickness in column-inches, it isn’t nice, it isn’t kind, it isn’t Christian.

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a

Revealed Text – or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

And please, whatever you do, don’t tell us that what we do, either in love or lust, is unnatural. For one thing if what you mean by that is that animals don’t do it, then you are quite simply in factual error.

There are plenty of activities or qualities we could list that are most certainly unnatural if you are so mad as to think that humans are not part of nature, or so dull-witted as to believe that ‘natural’ means ‘all natures but human nature’: mercy, for example, is unnatural, an altruistic, non-selfish care and love for other species is unnatural; charity is unnatural, justice is unnatural, virtue is unnatural, indeed – and this surely is the point – the idea of virtue is unnatural, within such a foolish, useless meaning of the word ‘natural’. Animals, poor things, eat in order to survive: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have Abbey Crunch biscuits, Armagnac, selle d’agneau, tortilla chips, sauce béarnaise, Vimto, hot buttered crumpets, Chateau Margaux, ginger-snaps, risotto nero and peanut-butter sandwiches – these things have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old greed. Animals, poor things, copulate in order to reproduce: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have kinky boots, wank-mags, leather thongs, peep-shows, statuettes by Degas, bedshows, Tom of Finland, escort agencies and the Journals of Anaïs Nin – these things have nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old lust. We humans have opened up a wide choice of literal and metaphorical haute cuisine and junk food in many areas of our lives, and as a punishment, for daring to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, we were expelled from the Eden the animals still inhabit and we were sent away with the two great Jewish afflictions to bear as our penance: indigestion and guilt.

I will apologise for many things that I have done, but I will not apologise for the things that should never be apologised for. It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

For example none of the following is shameful or deserves apology, in spite of our suicidal attempts to convince ourselves otherwise:

· To possess a rectum, a urethra and a bladder and all that pertain thereto.

· To cry.

· To find anything or anyone of any gender, age or species sexually attractive.

· To find anything or anyone of any gender, age or species sexually unattractive.

· To insert things in one’s mouth, anus or vagina for the purpose of pleasure.

· To masturbate as often as one wishes. Or not.

· To swear.

· To be filled with sexual desires that involve objects, articles or parts of the body irrelevant to procreation.

· To fart.

· To be sexually unattractive.

· To love.

· To ingest legal or illegal drugs.

· To smell of oneself and one’s juices.

· To pick one’s nose.

I spend a lot of time tying knots in my handkerchief reminding myself that those are things not to be ashamed of, so long as they are not performed in sight or sound of those who would be pained – which also holds true of Morris dancing, talking about Terry Pratchett and wearing velour and many other harmless human activities. Politeness is all.

But, I fear I spend far too little time apologising for or feeling ashamed about things which really do merit sincere apology and outright contrition.

· Failing to imagine what it is like to be someone else.

· Pissing my life away.

· Dishonesty with self and others.

· Neglecting to pick up the phone or write letters.

· Not connecting made or processed objects

· with their provenance.

· Judging without facts.

· Using influence over others for my own ends.

· Causing pain.

I will apologise for faithlessness, neglect, deceit, cruelty, unkindness, vanity and meanness, but I will not apologise for the urgings of my genitals nor, most certainly, will I ever apologise for the urgings of my heart. I may regret those urgings, rue them deeply and occasionally damn, blast and wish them to hell, but apologise – no: not where they do no harm. A culture that demands people apologise for something that is not their fault: that is as good a definition of a tyranny as I can think of. We British are not, praise the Lord, in Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany or Baptist Alabama, but that does not mean, and has never meant, that we must therefore reside in the fields of Elysium.

Bloody hell, I do rattle on, don’t I? Doth the lady, once again, protest too much? I don’t think so. And if I am protesting, it is not on my own behalf, but on the behalf of my fourteen-year-old self and its confusion.

I knew then, knew I was queer. I had no idea, no idea at all, what anybody else meant by the word: all that inconsistency, that subtle coding that allowed one both to leer at pretty boys’ bottoms and to sneer at faggots, it confused me and it rattled me, but it never stopped me knowing. I knew I was queer for all kinds of reasons. I knew because I just plain knew, and I knew for that negative reason which is so easy to demonstrate to oneself: my loins never twitched at female bodies or the thought of them, there is simply no escaping such a primitive ineluctable fact and its implications. I knew that I could like and love women as friends, because since childhood I had always found the company of women and girls welcome and easy, but I knew just as strongly that I would never be aroused or excited at the thought of any physical intimacy with a girl, that I would never yearn to share my life with a female.

There was physical evidence of women at Uppingham only in the two-dimensional shape of the copies of Forum and Penthouse that were self-consciously passed around from boy to boy like joints at a teenage party, or in the three-dimensional shape of the kitchen-staff and the girls one saw in the town.

Lest anyone think such an atmosphere is enough to make any child homosexual, I should say that most of the boys in the same situation as me (my brother included, whose home life, let’s face it, was identical to mine) lived, breathed, ate and drank girls. One boy whom I have already described to you, but whose blushes I shall spare, was in fact expelled for a sexual liaison with one of the kitchen girls. He could no more have been made homosexual by his time at Uppingham than I could have been made straight by a stint at Holland Park Comprehensive or Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I think it is certainly true that our circumstances made it very difficult for some of the boys around me to cope with girls, but then you see I believe that all boys find it very difficult to cope with girls, and none of my straight friends who went to mixed state schools has ever told me anything different. I operate a sympathetic and comprehensive listening service for many friends in relationship difficulties (as they do for me when I’m brave enough to let them) and from all I have ever heard (or read in the autobiographies of others) sex is every bit as difficult, awkward, embarrassing and heart-rending for the straight as for the bent.

But knowing I was homosexual was one thing, disentangling its meaning (both its perceived cultural meaning and the real meaning it was to have to me) was very difficult. I was, as I have said, not yet masturbating, I had no definable physical or sexual appetites to assuage. All I had was a void, an ache, a hunger, a hiatus, a lacuna, a gap, a need. There’s pleonasm for you…

I remember being at the bedside of a boy at prep school, playing with his (as it seemed to me at the time) colossal and strainingly hard penis. I stared at this phenomenon and – I can recall this scene so exactly in my mind in its every detail – I thought to myself: What now? I know this is fun, this has meaning, this is part of something big, but what now? Do I eat it? Do I kiss it? Do I try and merge with it, become one with it? Do I cut it off and take it back to my own bed? Do I try and stuff it into my ear? What is this supposed to lead to? I don’t find this cock attractive or pretty, in fact it’s frankly rather ugly, but I do know this, it is part of something that matters.

For all my foregoing rant at those who believe homosexuality is simply about buggery, I should make it clear that I was not asserting that homosexuality has nothing to do with sex, I was merely trying to suggest that the sexual element is not what threatens and unhinges the homophobe.

Does homosexuality involve sex? Oh dear me yes, homosexuality involves sex. It involves sexual appeal, stimulation, excitement, arousal and ultimately, of course, orgasm. There can’t be any doubt about that. There is love too and love is bigger than anything else in the world as you know, but that doesn’t mean sex isn’t in there too, doing its best to simplify things. If only it were only about sex… how simple and jolly homosexuality would be, how simple and jolly heterosexuality would be. Still, at least we get Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Beethoven and Cole Porter as a reward for all the pain and heartache.

I had been there then, at the bedside, worshipping at the throne of the cockhead as it were, knowing that this was something that was always going to have meaning for me. But it was disconnected, it was just a great gristly fat thing – all the poor lad wanted was for me to finish him off so that he could get to sleep of course, he had no interest at all in my psychic or romantic destiny – but for me this thing in my hands was at once a potent symbol of something that mattered and just a dick belonging to another boy, nothing more; the very disconnectedness of this dick, coupled with its swollen urgency and such a perplexed presentiment in me of the momentous weight and meaning such scenes as this were to have in my life, made the whole experience, and the dick itself, highly absurd, highly comic and very slightly frightening.

So I giggled.