Moab is my Washpot

5

I can’t remember, I honestly can’t remember if the events I am going to describe happened on the same day I laid eyes on Matthew Osborne. In my imagination it has become the same day, so that will have to do.

I got up and left the study. I crossed through to the main part of the House and entered the changing room.

There were pretty boys in Fircroft too. I went to the locker of the prettiest of them and opened it. The back of my hand just touched the jacket hanging inside and I heard the clink of money.

I stole it.

I stole it all, left the House, went down the music school and conducted my favourite Rossini piece as it had never been conducted before. Not William Tell, or The Barber of Seville, but the overture to The Thieving Magpie and do you know, never up to this very minute has the significance of that title struck me? I knew the piece so well that its individual words had stopped meaning anything. The Thieving Magpie. It seems so neat and organised and obvious as to resemble fiction, but it is God’s honest truth. Or the devil’s. Maybe that should have been the title for this book. The Thieving Magpie… or The Devil’s Honest Truth, for that matter…

I’ve slipped it on now, La Gazza Ladra as it calls itself in this compilation, and I am listening and jumping in my chair as I type this and I can see what I saw in it, and hear what I heard it in. For Rossini the sun always breaks out with such a joyful jerk that nothing, for a while, can ever seem bad, not even the stolen money in your pocket that chinks and clinks as you bring in the woodwinds and the brass section, thrashing like an epileptic in your hysterica passio, twitching with spastic arhythmic heaves and thrusts, not even the hard stone of new knowledge that was born in you that day that childhood is over and that something new has come into your being that may well unseat your reason for ever.

This now became a pattern. I had always been Bad both publicly and privately. Bad in terms of ‘mobbing’ and ‘ragging’, showing off in front of the other boys, daring to go those extra few yards towards trouble and punishment, and Bad in the realms of secret wickedness. But now I didn’t care. I just did not care. My behaviour in the first year may have been judged to be purgatorial, now it became unequivocally infernal.

Sometimes it made me popular, sometimes it made me loathed. In my first year I had tried to improve my judgement of the bounds of propriety that boys set in their tribally codified way. I became better at sensing when I was going too far and risking disfavour, better at riding the bucking bronco of popularity.

Sometimes the jokes worked well and I would rise above my generation in a bubble of fame and admiration. I think it fair to say that of all my intake in my first year I rapidly became the best known in the school. Not the most liked or the most admired, but the most recognisable and the most talked about.

One great achievement was to be the Brewer affair which earned me many thumps on the back and chuckling congratulations.

The Uppingham School Bookshop, where blocks and stationery were bought as well as textbooks, fiction, poetry and other more usual bookshop fare was run on behalf of the school by a rather fussy man called Mr Brewer. Most items were bought by use of the Order Form, a chit which one got one’s housemaster to sign after lunch to authorise the purchases, which would end up on the parental bill at the end of term. A typical order form might look something like this:

UPPINGHAM SCHOOL ORDER FORM

NAME…HOUSE…

6 blocks

1 bottle ink (blue-black)

1 bottle ink (green)

1 pencil sharpener

Signature…Authorised…

The Signature field, as we would say in computer jargon today, was for oneself to sign, the Authorised field was for the housemaster’ s initials.

‘Green ink, Fry?’

‘Well. sir, for English essays. I think it’s more stylish.’

‘Oh Lord. Very well.’

Naturally, I was adept at Frowde’s hastily scribbled ‘G. C. F.’ and on the rare occasion when I could lay my thieving hands on a blank order form pad I would go mad with purchase.

Something about Mr Brewer, however, some quality of fussiness and distrust, made one absolutely desperate to mob and bait the man to distraction. My first scheme was to persecute him by telephone. I had discovered, God knows how, that in those days of pulse telephony, before the introduction of the digital exchange and tone dialling, you could call a number by striking the receiver buttons in Morse code style, ten times for zero, nine times for nine and so on, a small gap left between each number. If you got the rhythm right you could tap out ‘350466’ in a public phone-box and get through without having to pay a single penny. Today’s phreaking and hacking make this look like child’s play, of course, but fun could be had with it.

There was a red telephone kiosk in the market-place just opposite the High Street windows of the bookshop which meant we could call up Brewer and watch one of his assistants passing him the phone.

‘Is that Mr Brewer on the line?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’d better get off, there's a train coming.’

A feeble start admittedly, but it got better.

‘Mr Brewer? This is Penguin Books here calling to confirm the order of four thousand copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’

‘What? No, no. It’s those boys! I never made the order. Cancel it! Cancel it!’

‘I see. And the order for ten thousand of Last Exit to Brooklyn?’

Tee-hee.

Or one could get elliptical and weird, which worked best when he picked up the phone himself.

‘Uppingham School Bookshop.’

‘Yes?’

‘Uppingham School Bookshop.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘How can we help?’

‘This is the Uppingham School Bookshop here.’

‘So you keep saying, but what do you want?’

‘You made the call.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Well what number did you want?’

‘I don’t want any number. I just want to get on with my life without being pestered by Uppingham School Bookshops, whatever they might be. Nuisance calls are against the law you know.’

‘But you called me!’

‘Look, if you don’t get off the line I shall call the police. The bishop is awaiting a very important call from one of his wives.’

‘It’s a boy, isn’t it!’

‘This particular one isn’t, no.’

‘I can see you out of the window! I shall report you all.’

One day I was with Jo Wood in Boots the Chemists. I had been planning to buy a bottle of aniseed liquid to sprinkle on my trouser turn-ups to check out Jeeves’s theory that this would cause dogs to follow me (it didn’t work, incidentally, just made them yap and howl) and I noticed Brewer in another aisle. He hadn’t spotted me or Jo and an idea arose within me.

‘No, it’s so simple,’ I said, in a sudden, artificially low whisper, the kind that causes ears to prick up everywhere. ‘Brewer is so blind he never notices.’

Jo looked at me in his usual strained and constipated manner, but was sharp enough and familiar enough with my ways to realise that I must be up to something. I could tell from the sudden silence and stiffening in the neighbouring row that Brewer had frozen into a keen listening attitude.

‘You just go in with your duffle bag apparently full, a pair of old plimsolls on the top, go up to the book section and stuff as many books as you like in the bag. Put the plimsolls back on top, sling the bag over your shoulder, then go up and buy a pencil or something. Best when the shop’s really busy, during break, some time like that. He never, ever notices a thing. I’ve stolen literally hundreds of books that way. Come on, if you’re done here, let’s hit the buttery.’

I spread the word amongst a few friends and the next morning about seven of us entered the bookshop and oh-so-casually wandered up to the book section, which was on a raised level overlooking the rest of the shop. We all fell to our knees at different shelves, examined books, shot guilty glances over our shoulders and seemed to fumble about with our duffle bags, causing gym-shoes to fall out which had to be hastily replaced.

Down the steps we went, duffle bags over shoulders, towards the girl at the cash desk. We proffered order forms for the acquisition of one block or one pencil (HB), swallowing nervously.

Suddenly Brewer sprang up as if from nowhere. He had, rather pathetically, been hiding under the counter, which was enough to cause one of our number to give a premature scream of laughter that only a swift hack on the shins from me snuffed out.

‘Just a moment, gentlemen!’ said Brewer.

Looks of startled innocence and amazement.

‘Yes, Mr Brewer?’

‘All of you. Kindly empty your duffle bags on to the counter.’

‘Really, Mr Brewer…’

‘Do as I say!’ he rasped. ‘One at a time. Mr Fry first, I think. Yes. You first, Mr Fry.’

I shrugged resignedly and turned my duffel bag upside-down, grasping the sides so that only a pair of tattered black gym-shoes fell on to the surface of the counter.

‘Everything!’ said Brewer, a squeak of triumph entering his voice.

‘Everything?’ I repeated nervously.

‘Everything!’

‘If you insist, Mr Brewer.’

‘I do, Mr Fry!’

I shook and shook the duffle bag and out tumbled:

· 6 very dirty jock-straps

· About 70 loose mixed Jelly-tots, Bassett Mint Imperials, Liquorice All-Sorts and Trebor Refreshers

· 12 broken Digestive biscuits

· of Mr Lanchberry’s best Cream Slices (three days old)

· 200 assorted fishing weights and air-pistol pellets

· Pencil shavings

· 1 leaking bottle of Vosene Medicated shampoo

· 1 brand-new copy of Sons and Lovers (W. H. Smith’s receipt carefully tucked inside)

· packet of Embassy Regal cigarettes and box of matches

It was extremely hard not to fold up in a heap, but we managed to keep our faces straight and earnest.

‘Get those things off my counter!’ screamed Brewer, grabbing at Sons and Lovers, but already the other boys had started adding their own itemries, including condoms (which, with the artful addition of globs of Copydex and paste, presented the horrible appearance of having been very passionately used), a fish, rotting cheeses, a slippery heap of lambs’ kidneys and much, much more.

‘Stop, stop!’ shrieked Brewer.

‘But Mr Brewer you said…’

‘You did say, Mr Brewer!’

‘We heard you.

‘Gosh, look at the time, everyone!’ I called in panic. ‘The bell’s about to go any minute. We’ll be back at lunchtime Mr Brewer, I’ll need the Lawrence book for an English lesson this afternoon. In the meantime do make free with anything you like the look of. I will want the jock-straps back eventually. You know, when you’ve done with them.’

And out we streamed, deaf to his protests. I was especially enjoying the possibilities of the one little ray of hope I had left him, the packet of Embassy and the matches. The Embassy pack was filled with slugs and the matchbox wriggled with a dozen spiders.

This was all part of the thirteen-year-old innocence of my first year. Coupled with my acceptance within the House by boys like Rick Carmichael, Mart Swindells and Roger Eaton and my friendships with Richard Fawcett and Jo Wood life was good. My brother Roger did not have too much cause to blush for me yet. He was getting on with life in the benign way he had, with malice to none.

Another older boy in our house who made me feel accepted was Paul Whittome, who simply exploded with paintings, drawings, surreal rock operas and poems, excellent at both the double bass and rugger. He found me amusing enough to include me in a band that he assembled with a saxophonist friend of his from Brooklands and Rick Carmichael, who played the piano superbly. We performed Jack Teagarden jazz standards, the Bonzo numbers ‘Hunting Tigers Out In India’ and ‘Jollity Farm’ and classics like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and Hoagie Carmichael’s ‘Rocking Chair’. My party piece was to play the trumpet solo in ‘Rocking Chair’ with staggering physical passion and bulging Dizzie Gillespie cheeks. Meanwhile the curtain behind would accidentally rise to reveal that in fact the real trumpeter was a boy called Sam Rudder who stood there, barely moving, playing with completely serene calmness. Aside from that, I can’t remember what I actually did to justify my presence in the band, apart from a little incompetent hammering on the piano when Rick was playing the guitar or singing. I suppose I just arsed about entertainingly. We did well enough to be invited to perform at the public school in Oakham, six or seven miles away. When Paul Whittome left Uppingham he almost instantly made himself a millionaire, as he had promised Frowde he would. He started by selling vegetables in a stall off the A1 and rapidly became a King of Potatoes and Potato broking. He sold his spud business and now runs probably the most successful hotel restaurant in East Anglia. I go sailing with him and his wife sometimes and had the honour of being asked a few years ago to open a new set of guest-rooms for his inn, The Hoste Arms in Burnham Market. He would never forgive me for not giving you the name and address of his establishment for he is quite miraculously shameless and brazen when it comes to publicity. How else does a man get to be a millionaire at twenty-two? Besides, I owe it him for his kindness in believing in me enough to put me, musically talentless as I am, in a band.

My other brush with showbusiness came when Richard Fawcett and I planned our sketches for the House Supper, Fircroft’s end of term Christmas party in which sixth-formers got to wear dinner jackets and drink wine, while the rest of us pulled crackers and mounted a mini-revue composed of music, songs and sketches.

Richard and I rewrote a Benny Hill skit in which a vicar is being interviewed unaware that his trouser flies are widely undone. Richard was the vicar (‘I like to throw open my portals to the public’), I was the interviewer, (‘I see your point, yes I do see your point.’). We rehearsed this endlessly and were astonished, as the curtain descended on our dress rehearsal, to hear Frowde, the housemaster, call out, ‘Trousers down, trousers down!’

We looked at each other, utterly baffled as to his meaning (as I still am).

The curtain jerked up again and Frowde stood there, hands behind his back.

‘No, no. Trousers down,’ he repeated. ‘It’s either trousers up or trousers down. This kind of innuendo won’t do at all.’

So we had to go away and hastily assemble something else.

Rick Carmichael and Martin Swindells had been censored too, so that night, at midnight in our dormitory there was seen a performance of Banned Material. Richard and I did our Vicar Sketch and Rick and Mart a dialogue playing with the St Crispin’s day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V and its suggestive reference to those holding their manhoods, cheap.

Richard Fawcett and I had by this time become so obsessed with comedy that we wrote to the BBC who had just started a new series called Open Door, the pioneer of that now depressingly common programming phenomenon ‘Access Television’. Open Door was designed to allow dyslexics, victims of injustice, support groups and others to air their grievances, but Richard and I had somewhat misinterpreted its aims and believed it to be a chance to Perform On Telly and Become Famous.

In our letter to the BBC, we pompously elaborated our pitch. Comedy, we observed, with the arrival of Monty Python, had entered a modernist phase. Would it, like the other arts, disintegrate into modes of abstraction and conceptuality? How could a ‘new comedy’ be formulated? All that sort of thing. We planned to show the progress of comedy over the last twenty years and compare it with the progress of music, painting and literature. Would comedy disappear up its own self-referential arse, we wondered? Ridiculous, I know, but there you are.

It was enough at least, to get us in interview in Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush. Nothing came of the meeting, but I still have the producer’s card. Mike Bolland went on to become senior programme commissioner for Channel when it started up; in those days he must have been one of the BBC’s most junior juniors, given the unfortunate job of weeding out the loonies who came knocking on the Open Door. I see him from time to time and I’m always far too embarrassed to remind him of those two public school boys babbling pretentiously about comedy and ideas.

We must, I fear, return briefly to sex (as I write this, National Sex Awareness Week is coming to a close and its thrust, I believe, is to get Britain to talk about sex in order to dispel the guilt, misery and taboo surrounding the subject: I feel I’m doing my bit).

It was towards the end of my first year that I was successfully seduced and deflowered. Now, I have never believed myself to be physically attractive. There are three reasons for this.

1. I’m not my type

2. I’m not physically attractive

3. So there

None the less, in the eyes of some, I do know that I can give off a quality that comes close to sex appeal. I was never a prettyboy, or anything like (you have the pictures to hand that prove it) but being a late developer sexually I combined a mixture of knowingness, insolently suggestive sophistication and some kind of appetisingly unspoiled quality that could, on occasion, take the people’s fancy.

A red-haired sixth-former and House Polly called Oliver Derwent called me to his study one day when I was on general fagging duties.

‘Close the door,’ he said.

I obliged, wondering what I could possibly have done wrong this time.

‘Do you play cards?’ asked Derwent.

‘Er, yes. Yes. I suppose I do.’ The question took me completely by surprise. Maybe Derwent was starting up a House bridge club. Mine not to wonder why, however, mine but to stand patiently on the carpet and await instructions.

‘I’m just so bored,’ he said, languidly. ‘I thought I might find someone prepared to have a game or two of cards with me.’

It transpired that the only game Derwent knew how to play was a game called Strip Poker, so strip poker was the game we played.

‘Better lock the door,’ said Derwent.

‘Right-o,’ I said.

Now, you might well be thinking: Hello! If this Derwent could play strip poker, then he could play ordinary poker. This never crossed my mind. One just didn’t question senior boys. They knew.

So the pair of us knelt on the carpet and Derwent dealt. Within a very short time I was completely naked and Derwent was in nothing but his underpants. My legs were drawn coyly up to conceal what little there was to conceal and I was starting to feel a touch embarrassed.

‘Fry,’ said Derwent, blushing with that ferocity peculiar to redheads, ‘may I feel your body?’

Those are the exact words he used. ‘May I feel your body?’ Rather sweet really.

‘Er… okay,’ I said.

So he felt my body. I became excited, in the way that I had been excited at Stouts Hill with Halford and the others. I could see from the prodding in his underpants that he, too, was excited.

He then began a long, complicated speech about the frustration he felt at the lack of girls at Uppingham and how, in my smoothness, I was actually rather like a girl. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind if he made love to me?

I had simply no idea what that phrase meant, but it sounded charming and I said that it sounded like a reasonable idea.

At this point there came a knock on the door.

‘Derwent!’

‘Just a minute!’

I leapt to my feet and started to scrabble frantically with my clothes. The door handle rattled.

‘Ho! Wanking!’ said a voice.

Derwent leaned forward and cupped his hand around one of my ears. ‘Out the window!’ he breathed hotly. ‘I’ll see you in the House Rears in ten minutes.

I nodded, slightly frightened by this time, and not so sure that I wanted to go through with this making love business, but I climbed out of the window and dived into a nearby bush.

Dressed again, teeth chattering, I made my way to the House Rears, a set of disused Victorian lavatories round the back of the House.

When Derwent arrived eight minutes later I regret to say he had come prepared with a tub of Vaseline and a grim determination to see things through.

I remember very little about the experience. I remember being bent forward and I remember grasping my own ankles. I remember some pain, plenty of grunting from Derwent and a sliding, slippy wetness running down the inside of my thighs when I stood up. Derwent was gone by the time I had pulled up my trousers and turned round, and whenever we saw each other in the House it was as strangers, no mention made, no extra friendliness shown or expected. Just a blankness.

I would love to be able to tell you that this Oliver Derwent is now our Ambassador in Washington or the Chairman of ICI, but I have no idea what he’s up to or where he is. Last I heard he had children, and was working in one of the Gulf States. I bear him no grudge and cannot believe he did me any harm. He didn’t make me queer, he didn’t make me a bugger or a buggeree, so all’s jake as far as I’m concerned.

Besides, all that was BMO, Before Matthew Osborne, and events BMO were rendered meaningless by everything AMO.

AMO, as I said, I went loopy. Everything I did publicly and privately became more extreme. Publicly, the jokes and the wildness intensified, privately the stealing became more and more regular.

At this time, the only salvation and sense in my life came from reading. It was then that I started on Douglas, Firbank and Forster. It was then that I discovered the novels and autobiographies that reflected my own emotional turmoil and my own circumstances, sometimes so exactly that I alternated between a triumphant feeling of being vindicated and endorsed by the Masters and a deflated sense of being nothing more than a living cliché: The Flannelled Fool, by T. C. Worsley; A Separate Peace, by John Knowles; Sandel by Angus Stewart; Lord Dismiss Us, by Michael Campbell; Escape from the Shadows by Robin Maugham; Autobiography of an Englishman by ‘Y’; The World, The Flesh and Myself by Michael Davidson (with its famous opening line: ‘This is the life-history of a lover of boys.’); The Fourth of June by David Benedictus; Special Friendships by Roger Peyrefitte, and many, many others, which in turn guided me towards the notorious Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology; The Quest For Corvo by A. J. A. Symons (the unexpurgated edition complete with Baron Corvo’s infamous Venice Letters); the novels of Simon Raven (happily still then being produced in profusion); the works of Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter and the Uranian school, the paintings of Eakins and Tuke, and that wonderful, syrupy slew of pre- and post-First World War sentimental school love stories like The Hill, David Blaize, Jeremy at Crale and Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth.

So, stolen money in my pocket and nothing but Matthew on my mind, that is how I would spend my afternoons, either in the library or howling to Rossini and Beethoven.

The Lower Buttery was perched halfway between the steps that led down from the Magic Carpet to the Music School, so I would leave the record library and climb up, as other boys were coming down, their hair still wet from showers, their faces pink from exercise, and I would avoid their eyes as I went in. My eyes were only for Mrs Lanchberry as she broke more eggs into her vat of boiling lard, money stolen from the pretty and the athletic clutched in my hands, and of course my eyes were for Matthew in case he might come in too. But I had discovered a terrible truth about Matthew.

He was healthy.

He was

Good at games.

In fact, he was brilliant at games. He was going to be a star. We hadn’t seen nothing yet, apparently. You think he’s a fine hockey player? You wait till you see him on the cricket field in the summer term. You just wait, his brother said.

We already had a cricket hero at Uppingham, in the shape of Jonathan Agnew, who went on to play for Leicestershire and England and as Aggers now comments wittily and (thus far) without ego and derision for the BBC’s Test Match Special.

Whether the stealing in earnest really did start the day I first saw Matthew Osborne I cannot, as I say, be sure, but they are connected. Falling in love is not an excuse because, as I have shown you before, this was by no means the first time I had stolen. But now it gripped me like a demon. It became an addiction, a necessity and, perhaps, a revenge. A revenge against beauty, order, healthiness, seemliness, normality, convention and love. To say that I was the victim of these crimes, that I was punishing myself, that is hardly fair. There must have been dozens and dozens of boys whose lives were temporarily screwed and savaged by the sudden disappearance of their money. It’s hard for even the most Christian and temperate soul not to be enraged by theft. And that old complaint about the sense of violation, of invasion, of tainting that is felt by the victims of theft: maybe that is part of what I was doing – leaving a foul kind of urine trail, an anti-social territorial marking, or unmarking, wherever I went, wrestling with Hassan’s Anti-Hero’s ‘problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence.’

Yeah, yeah, yeah – you were a thieving little tosser, we get the picture, we will draw the conclusions, thank you.

My behaviour too, as I said, my general social behaviour, that went to hell in a handcart. Poor old Ronnie Rutter who taught me French. He had joined the school aged seventeen, just after the First World War and was so gentle, so pliable, so plain sweet that he had never even been made a housemaster. Temporarily he had taken charge of Meadhurst for a term during the Second World War, that was the greatest career height he had ever scaled. I used to mob him up, as the school slang had it, so thoroughly, so completely, so humiliatingly that I blush cardinal red at the memory of such cardinal sin. I once stood on top of my desk, took out a gat gun (one of those air pistols that fires pellets but looks to the uninitiated to be a deadly automatic weapon) and shouted in a hysterical Cody Jarrett voice, ‘I’ve had it. Had it, I tell you! Just one move, and you’re dead. You’re all dead.’ Everybody pissed themselves and Ronnie did the best he could.

‘Put it down, there’s a good fellow, we’ve so much to get through this period.’

I made up a letter once that purported to come from a female ‘pen-friend’ in France and filled it with every dirty, disgusting sexual French word I knew or could find out. I approached him at the end of a lesson and asked if he could help me with it, as I found some of the vocabulary rather difficult.

‘I’m so pleased to hear you have a French pen-friend, Fry,’ said Ronnie. And he proceeded to translate the letter for me, replacing the obscenities with innocent little phrases of his own as he went, pretending for all the world that it was the most ordinary communication in the world. ‘I would like to suck your big fat cock’ became, ‘I look forward so much to visiting your country’ and ‘Lick my wet pussy till I squirt’ emerged as, ‘There are so many interesting things to do and see in Avignon’ and so on throughout the letter.

The word he used in his school report to my parents at the end of term was, I think, ‘exuberant’. ‘Sometimes a little more exuberant than is good for him.’ None of that ‘bad influence’, ‘rotten apple’, ‘thinks he’s so clever’ stuff the others off-loaded. He invited me to tea with his wife. It brings a lump to my throat to think of such absolute sweetness of nature, such tenderness.

He hadn’t given up, either. We used to say sometimes, in our sneering way of schoolmasters, that after more than ten years they had turned into cynical time-servers or unworldly eccentrics. Ronnie was neither cynic nor sentimentalist, and he put all of himself into every lesson. Utterly ineffectual as a disciplinarian maybe, but I cannot think of a life that was less of a failure.

There’s a passage in Portnoy’s Complaint (which I had read greedily and joyfully, loving the daring of those jerk-off scenes in the bathroom):

… society not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but encourages them… Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possessions, money, property – on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

Scarcely fresh news I suppose, but then the Gospels aren’t either, yet they too contain ideas that bear repetition. Only a fool dismisses an idea because it has been heard before.

‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like,’ Chekhov thought. Maybe Ronnie tried to show me what I was like. He did so more effectively than many masters who tried to tell me what I was like, which is not the same thing at all. I used in the end to feel a kind of sickness, a feeling of nauseous surfeit after a Ronnie Rutter French lesson, a sickness that I soon identified as self-disgust. After a while I gave up and became sanctimoniously fierce in my refusal to allow others to mob him up. Anybody else was fair game, but Ronnie was exempt.

Maybe Ronnie saw, that was the other thing. Maybe it was written all over me, this agony of love that I was enduring.

We’re in the second term of the year now. I’ve got to know Matthew a little better, partly by getting to know Nick better, partly by following the promptings of unrequited love, which train you exquisitely well in the art of accidental meetings.

When you love you plan your day entirely according to the movements of your loved one. I knew Matthew’s timetable by heart. I knew the places he was likely to visit. I knew the matches he played in – he was already in the Colts First XI – I knew the clubs and societies he had joined and I joined them too. I knew what sort of music he liked, when he was likely to be visiting the Thing Centre and when he was likely to be in his House.

And every day he grew more and more beautiful. He was still climbing the gentle slope to his peak of perfection. He never succumbed to acne, greasy hair or gawkiness. Every day he grew and grew in grace towards the completion of his beauty.

I was subtle, Christ Jesus, was I subtle. He could never have imagined for ten seconds that I had any interest in him at all, not from the accident of our endless meetings, nor from the coincidence of our mutual interests. I never looked unpleased to see him, but neither did I show any pleasure. I took a kindly interest and…

I entertained.

For the joy of it was…

He found me funny

and, like Elizabeth Bennett, Matthew was one who dearly loved a laugh. He was talented. He played the piano like an angel, his athleticism was outstanding and he was academically competent. I don’t remember what degree he later took at Cambridge, but it was either a First or a 2: 1 as well as an inevitable triple haul of sporting Blues. Verbally however, he was ordinary. He had no rhetoric, no style, no wit nor any easy companionship with words. Since I seemed to him to have all these things, he looked on me as extraordinary and would roll and roll about with laughter whenever I wanted him to, which was often, a kitten on the end of my verbal balls of wool. Never too far… I learned early on that like a kitten he could suddenly bore of a game, suddenly appear to think it all rather facile and beneath his dignity. Often then, just when I sensed that moment might come, I would stop the joking at its still pleasurable height, shake my head and express some deep thought of frustration, anger at the political injustices and criminal stupidity of ‘this place’ as the school was mutteringly called by all.

Once, I remember, I was in the Thring Centre, typing out the whole of a P. C. Wodehouse novel on one of the big IBM electric typewriters. Frozen Assets, the book was, I recall. I did this sort of thing a great deal, I adored the feel of typing, watching the keys leap and smack the paper, making words appear with such clean magical clarity; I loved too the way I could monitor my noticeable improvement in accuracy and speed and God how I gloried in the admiration when boys clustered around gasping in amazement at the rapidity with which my fingers could fly over the keys without my even looking down. Today’s qwerty generation would think me abominably slow, of course, but in those days typing proficiency was a most eccentric and enviable attainment.

I was alone however in the typing and Gestetner room, that February evening, just clacking away at the keyboard.

I didn’t hear him come in, but a fraction of a second before he cleared his throat to speak I felt a presence in the room, a presence that I later convinced myself I had known was his even before I heard his voice.

‘What are you doing?’

A great surge went through me that tingled my cheeks (still does, you know, to remember it) as I heard that voice. Something else there was too. Something that alerted me to the possibility that all was not well with him.

‘That you, Matteo?’

I called him Matteo: it was my nickname for him. I scorned the ‘Ozzie Two’ that had become ‘Ozziter’ as far as the rest of the school was concerned. To be given a private nickname, even if it is carelessly, almost disdainfully given, is a massive compliment; successful nicknaming is an absolutely essential weapon in the armoury of any romantic seducer. I had discovered that his middle initial (unlike his brother he turned out to have just the one) was A for Anthony, which made him M. A. O. I had experimented with the idea of calling him the Chairman, as in Mao, but that seemed obvious. Then it struck me that Matt. A. O. sounded like the Italian for Matthew, so Matteo it was, from me and me alone. I once walked on air for a week when I overheard him ticking off a contemporary, Madeley-Orne, who had dared to call him that.

‘Matteo is not my name,’ he had said hotly.

‘I’ve heard Fry call you that.’

‘Yes, well Fry calls everybody weird things, but that doesn’t give you the right. He calls you Makes-Me-Yawn, if it comes to that.’

The real reason I came on Monday evenings to the Thing Centre was because I knew that Monday was Matthew’s pottery day. This was one activity 1 had not tried to join him in, since I had queered my pitch with the pottery department my very first term by contriving to burn out the motor that drove one of the throwing wheels and then, the very next week, breaking one of the pug-mill dyes. A pug-mill, in case you haven’t been introduced, is a sort of potter’s mince-making machine. You shove all the spare off cuts of slip and old clay into a hopper at the top, squeeze them down with a lever and pure, consistent clay comes out the other end, either in one great thick sausage, or – if you fix a template or dye over the exit hole – in smaller little wriggly snakes that can be used to make those coil-ware mugs, vases and pots that are still produced in woundingly huge quantities to this day, much to the distress and embarrassment of all. Fearing that during the third week I might do even more damage I was pronounced persona non grata by the staff, the pot-it-buro, as I liked to call them, and so filled my Mondays, while Matthew was there, in the Thring Centre too, by typing or playing with the gerbils that scuttled about in transparent perspex conduits and pipes all round the building, citizens of their own Fritz Lang Rodent Metropolis. The system was designed – like almost everything else in Uppingham from the theatre up the road that was even now rising from the skeleton of the old Victorian gymnasium, to the chairs and light fixtures of the Thring Centre – by the remarkable master in charge, Chris Richardson, who is today supremo of the Pleasance Theatre, the organisation which seems ever more to dominate the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and which now has permanent habitation in London too. Richardson was known, for no reason I can tell, as Trog – perhaps because his Hogarthian features resembled the work of the Punch cartoonist Trog. He carried the smell of pipe tobacco about with him and tolerated my arsiness, frivolity and absolute incompetence and lack of common sense in those fields of endeavour which came so naturally to him, draughtsmanship, planning and construction, because ‘at least I made use of the bloody place’ even if my idea of making use of such a ‘resource’, as it would be called today, was pointlessly to tip-tap away like a temp in a typing-pool.

So there I am, doing just that, and I hear behind me the voice that is my reason for being.

‘That you, Matteo?’ As if I didn’t know. And said as if I didn’t really care too much, so absorbed was I in my Important Typing.

‘Mm… You writing something?’

‘No just typing practice really. Bored of the potting-shed?’

‘Got something in the kiln.’

‘So… just kiln time then, are you?’

‘Tsserh!’ That is really the best way I can render his polite giggle at my dreadful pun.

I swung round in my seat to look at him.

I was right. He was in distress. I suppose I had sensed it because the way he had asked ‘What are you doing?’ had set up some chime in me, had reminded me of the way I would ask my mother precisely the same question when I knew perfectly well what she was doing but wanted her to stop because I had a grievance to air.

‘You all right, old crocus?’ P. G. Wodehouse was seeping deep into my language.

‘Oh it’s nothing…’

There was a fierce disconsolacy in his expression. I have described him to you as beautiful, which is a senseless description, a space that you will have to fill for yourself with your own picture of beauty; also I have told you he was below the average in height. There was a hint, no more than that, of stockiness about him, a solidity that prevented, despite such overwhelming beauty of countenance and body, any suggestion of the porcelain, any pretty delicacy that might desex and sanitise. It was enough to turn sensuousness into sensuality, but not enough to detract from his liquid grace. It was even more marked, this grounded solidity now, I noticed, as he defiantly attempted not to look unhappy.

‘How long have you got to wait before the dinner’s-ready bell goes in your oven?’ I asked.

‘Oh, about forty minutes. Why?.’

‘Let’s go for a walk then. All this typing is no good for my back.’

‘Okay.’

He waited while I squared the typed sheets, switched off the typewriter, threw on its silvery dust cover and perched a scribbled note next to it: ‘Leave alone or die bloodily.’

This was the era when military greatcoats were the innest thing to wear. I had a WW2 American Air Force coat that was the envy of the world, Matthew an RAF equivalent: he had also, perhaps on account of his older brother, managed to get one of the old school scarves, striped in knitted wool like a Roy of the Rovers football scarf, unlike the scratchy new college-style black and red that I wore. With his wrapped warmly about his neck he looked so divine and vulnerable I wanted to scream.

It was a cold night and just beginning to snow.

‘Yippee, no games tomorrow by the looks of it,’ I said.

‘You really hate sport, don’t you?’ said Matthew, vapour steaming from the hot mystery of his mouth and throat.

‘I don’t mind watching it, but “Is this the man who has lost his soul?”’ I misquoted: ‘The flannelled fool at the wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal.’ I had just read Cuthbert Worsley’s autobiography and it had sent me into quite a spin.

‘Is that what you think of me as then? A muddy oaf?’

‘I wouldn’t have said so,’ I said, a little surprised. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not sure I think of you as anything, really.’

‘Oh.’

We walked on in silence, while I tried to work out where this was leading.

‘You don’t…‘ he blurted in some confusion,’… you don’t like me then?’

‘Well of course I like you, you daft onion. I’m not in the habit of going for walks with people I dislike.’

‘In spite of the fact that I’m a flannelled fool and a muddy oaf?’

‘I’ll let you into a secret, Matteo. The reason I hate games so much, and don’t you dare tell anyone this, is simple… I’m no bloody good at them.’

‘Oh,’ he said again. Then. ‘Why do you like me then?’

‘Christ, Osborne,’ I said, getting a bit senior in my panic at the direction all this seemed to be going in, ‘I like most people. You seem harmless. You’re polite and most importantly of all, you laugh at my bloody jokes. You fishing for compliments here or what?’

‘No, no. I’m sorry. It’s just that. Well. It was something someone said to me.’

Oh fuck here we go, I thought. His brother has been warning him off. Some jealous son of a bitch has been whispering. The game is up.

‘Who said what to you?’ I asked, trying to smother the swallowing nervousness I felt.

‘It doesn’t really matter who it was. Just someone m my House. I was sweeping the corridor, you know, and he started…, he started trying stuff.’

‘He made an advance you mean?’ I said. Advance? Well what other word could I have used?

Matthew nodded, looked away and out it all came in a hot, indignant tumble. ‘I told him to leave me alone and he called me a tart. He said that everyone could see the way I played up to certain pollies and to people like Fry who I was always hanging around with. He said I was a prettyboy pricktease.’

In my head, even as I winced at hearing such words from him, I rapidly ran through a list of possible names that might fit the picture of this bungling, asinine, spiteful brute from Redwood’s and at the same time just as rapidly selecting, from a whole suite of possible reactions, the right stance for me to take on this choked and miserable confession: outrage, indignity, tired man-of-the-world cynicism, fatherly admonition, comradely sympathy… I considered them all and settled on a kind of mixture.

I shuddered, half at the cold, half at the horror of it all. ‘This place!’ I said. ‘This fucking place… thing is, Matteo, it’s a hothouse. You wouldn’t think so with the snow falling all around us, but it is. We live under glass. Distorting glass. Everything is rumour, counter-rumour, guesswork, gossip, envy, interference, frustration, all that. The secret of survival in a place like this is to be simple.’

‘Simple?’ It was hard to tell whether the clear swollen globes of moisture that glistened at the end of his lashes were melted snowflakes or tears.

‘In a way simple. Rely on friendship.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘If you’ve got a good friend, you’ve never really got any reason to worry. You’ve always got someone to talk to, someone who’ll understand you.’

‘Like you and Woody, you mean?’

It wasn’t what I meant, of course. It was far from what I meant.

‘Yes. Like me and Woody,’ I said. ‘I could tell Jo anything and I know he’d see it in its right proportion. That’s the trick in a place like this, proportion. Who would you say is your best friend?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t know,’ he said, almost sulkily. ‘You see, thing is, I know, because my brother told me…’

‘Know what?’

‘You know, that I’m… you know, pretty.’ He got rid of the word as if its presence had been souring his mouth like a bad olive.

Pretty! God I hated that word. Pretty boy, pretty boy… only a lumpen, half -witted heterosexual would think Matthew pretty. He was beautiful, like the feet of the Lord on the hills, he was beautiful. Like the river, like the snow that was falling now more thickly than ever, like nothing on earth, like everything on earth he was beautiful. And some roaring hairy-pizzled Minotaur had dared to grab at him and call him a prettyboy pricktease. Even his own brother had used that word.

‘Pretty?’ I said, as if the idea had never struck me before. ‘Well you’re exceptionally good-looking, I suppose. You’ve got regular features, unlike me with my big bent nose and my arms ten foot long. But pretty isn’t a word I would have used. Morgan is pretty, I would say.’

Morgan was a Fircroft new boy, on whom many eyes had fallen.

‘Thomas Morgan?’ said Matthew in surprise. ‘Oh.’ Was there just a touch here, the merest hint of wounded vanity in his reaction or was that my imagination?

‘If you go in for that sort of thing, that is,’ I added hastily. ‘Personally, as I say, friendship is my credo.’

He nodded dumbly and I took a chance.

‘Look,’ I said, and I put my arm round his shoulders and squeezed. ‘That’s what friends do in a natural world. It’s affection and support in a universe where we all need affection and support. But in this place it’s “queering” and it makes people point and sneer. You and I know it’s friendship, but when someone like that vile cunt in your House tries it on with you, he kids himself that it’s your fault. Always remember that he’s the one who’s scared. He may insult you but secretly he’s terrified that you’re going to tell your brother or your housemaster or the whole House. That’s why he’s trying to kid himself that you led him on. It’s the old, old story. Just like Potiphar’s wife and just like every rejected rapist the world over. But don’t let what your brother said worry you. He meant well but he’s obviously made you doubt everyone’s motives towards you. Those millionaires who are convinced that people only like them for their money, you know the type? Well, you don’t want to become the equivalent, do you? Someone who only believes that people like you because you’re good-looking. You wouldn’t want to live like that. That’s nothing but the lack of confidence trick.’

He had allowed my arm to stay around him without protest. It was dark. No one could see us.

It was the finest achievement of my life so far, arrived at with bluff, deceit, hypocrisy, manipulation, abuse of trust and a few exploitative elements of gimcrack wisdom and genuinely good advice. Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep.

I let my arm drop and returned it to the warm interior of my greatcoat pocket. ‘Do you think you’re pretty?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘Well there you are then. You can’t live your life in the shadow of other people’s opinions, can you? As I say, keep it simple.’

‘Thanks, Fry,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew how you know all these things.’

‘Hey, come on. You’re only in the second term of your first year. You’re thirteen years old. You’re not expected to know the secrets of the universe.’

‘I’m fourteen actually,’ he said. ‘It was my birthday last week.’

Jesus, he was only… what, six months younger than me?

‘Well, fourteen, then. Still, you can't…’

‘The same age as you. But you just seem to know everything.’

The bass-line to the badly produced dance-track of my life. ‘How come you know everything, Fry?’

I want to reply, ‘How come you think I know everything? Or, how come you think I think I know everything? How come that?’

Well, I must be honest, I do have some idea how people might believe it.

Take for example the selection of photographs to accompany this book. What a job. To find a single photograph of me in which I don’t look like a smug, self -satisfied creep who has just swallowed a quart of cream and knows where he can get his complacent paws on another. That photograph of me, standing next to my brother dressed for his first day at Chesham Prep, my smugness there qualifies for swagger, pride in him at least. You should see the photographs I had to discard.

Every time I pose for a photograph I try and smile a friendly smile, a sort of ‘Hello there! Gosh! Crumbs! Isn’t this jolly!’ sort of smile. Every time the photograph comes out I see a silken smirk on my face that makes me want to wail and shriek.

Vanity of course, as the preacher saith, all is vanity. Maybe I should have let you see my graduation photograph and a few other pictures that would have sent you doubled-up to the vomitorium.

So that look, that oh-so-pleased-with-himself look, combined with a lamentable propensity to explode with unusual words, to spout like a thesaurus and to bristle with look-at-me-aren’t-I-clever general knowledge… I’d be the fool of the world if I didn’t see how that might give others the impression that I thought I knew all the answers. But then you see, I am the fool of the world.

Matthew was no exception to the general view of me. He looked up to me, physically because I was a foot taller and intellectually because he sincerely believed that I had access to wisdom and knowledge that were denied him. I did a lot of reading, and I had a good memory, everyone knew that of me. He thought that this knowledge gave me power, even when he knew, as everyone knew, that I was always getting into trouble, getting into more and more trouble all the time: he couldn’t have known that so much of that was on account of him or that I was on the verge of getting into the most serious trouble of my life so far that very week.

Still this persists. Enough people know by now what a mess my life has always been, yet they continue to believe either that ‘It’s all right for you, Stephen, you’ve got it sorted’ or that I think it’s all right for me and that I think I’ve got it sorted, neither of which – however many times I scream it and however many times history and circumstance prove it – is true.

This whole thread somehow started with my speculating about the gentle kindness of Ronnie Rutter and wondering whether maybe he saw. Perhaps it was written all over me, this agony of love, I wondered.

That has been the big cleft stick of my life. It was around this time that I started punstering like a maniac, mostly dreadful nonsense, but I do remember being struck by discovering the happy accident of this:

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

It’s sort of too neat and too perfect (perfect in the wrong way) to be amusing or even interesting, just another example of the weirdnesses thrown up by our extraordinary language, but the two stools that I fell between, and daily fall between still, are best described as being defined by the circumstance that I was and am both transparent and opaque, illegible and an open book.

Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all my dissembling and simulation if so many friends, acquaintances, enemies (if I have any) and perfect strangers are able to see through my every motive, thought and feeling. Then I wonder what is the point of all my frankness, sharing of experience and emotional candour if people continue to misinterpret me to such an extent that they believe me balanced, sorted, rationally in charge, master of my fate and captain of my soul.

My guess is that the instinct of Ronnie Rutter was that I was an ‘unhappy boy’ and that he was too scrupulously well mannered or too trusting in the benevolence of time and fate as to enquire into the whys and wherefores.

Matthew, the source of all my misery and all my joy, all my feeling and all my inability to feel, was completely blind to my absolute need for him, too lacking in imagination to be able to see that my happiness was entirely contingent upon him, and I blamed him for that without being able to see that I was trapped in a hole that I had dug. How could he possibly have known? How could he possibly have guessed? Until someone has loved they cannot possibly know what it might be like to be loved.

Such then was the spin of my madness. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

When I wrote the phrase, many pages back now, ‘unrequited love’ I giggled to myself, for at the first go I committed the Freudian keyslip of typing unrequired love.

It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness. He, after all, was to prove brave enough…, but that is jumping the gun.

The real Matthew Osborne is reading this now and laughing. Maybe he is groaning. Maybe he is writhing in embarrassment. It might fall out that one day in the future he will say to his wife or his children (for he is a family man now) that if they happen upon Moab is my Washpot in a library or second-hand bookshop they might be interested to know that he is Matteo. If they do read this book they will look at his grey, thinning hairs and his paunch and his faded blue eyes and they will giggle and shake their heads.

We walked back to the Thing Centre, Matthew thinking – what? Pondering my advice on friendship, ruing the snow that might cancel tomorrow’s match, hoping that his vase hadn’t cracked in the kiln, I could not guess. I walked by his side, everything inside me crying out to make this speech:

‘Come on, let’s just turn on our heels and leave this place. What does it hold for you? There’s nothing here for me. We’ll walk along the road to the end of town and, in the end, someone will give us a lift to London. We will survive there. Whom else do we need but each other? Me with my quick wits, you with your quick body. We could find work doing something. Painting, decorating, stacking shelves. Enough to buy a flat. I would write poetry in my spare time and you would make pots and play the piano in bars. In the evenings we could lie by each other’s side on a sofa and just be. I would stroke your hair with my fingers, and maybe our lips would touch in a kiss. Why not? Why not?’

Instead, we made the rather awkward farewells of those who have just exchanged intimacies -exchanged? I had taken, he had given – and he returned to the pottery shop. With no stomach left for the keyboard I trudged my way back through the snow to Fircroft. I had a horrible feeling if I went to my study I might open my heart out to Jo Wood, so I decided to seek out Ben Rudder, the House-captain and ask his permission to have an early bath and go to bed with a book. I needed to clear it with him so that I could be absent from evening call-over. Rudder could be a stickler: strange to think that such an efficient public school authoritarian should go to Cambridge, get a degree, then a doctorate in zoology, and suddenly transform himself into a committed and far left socialist, ending up as editor of Frontline, the newspaper of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Strange, but true. I’ve lost touch however, so maybe now he’s changed again. I hope so, not because I disapprove of the WRP, but because people who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.

Rudder consented to my request and I went upstairs. That’s when it happened.

Everyone has their own story. With some it’s a deliberate and concerted attempt to get things moving, with others it might be the result of a friend’s assistance. A common one is sliding down a rope, I believe. With me it was the old cliché of soap in the bath.

Well, it gave me the shock of my life, I can tell you. I’ve described the slight revulsion of watching that boy’s penis at Stouts Hill suddenly sick up with semen, so I was prepared for the appearance of the stuff itself qua stuff; what I had no inkling of was the physical sensation. I don’t suppose anyone will be able to forget the head-swimming power of their first orgasm. Still, you don’t want to hear any more on that subject. We’ve all been there, unless we’re female in which case we’ve been somewhere else, but I dare say it amounts to more or less the same thing, but in different colourways.

I am certain, certain as I can be, that this breakthrough of mine was a mechanical response to idle lathering and nothing to do with Matthew and my having had my arm round him. At least I think I am certain.

Once I realised, at any rate, that I was not going to swoon into a dead faint or see hairs sprouting from the palms of my hands, I tidied things up and went to bed feeling rather pleased with myself. A good day.