Moab is my Washpot

2

It is January 1965. Roger, who is eight, has returned to Stouts Hill for his second term. I am considered a spot too young. I am due to follow him in the summer so in the meantime I attend for one time-marking term a Church of England primary school in the village of Cawston, a mile from our new house in Booton.

Cawston Primary School was run by John Kett, descended from Kett of Kett’s Rebellion, the Kett who ended his days hanging from chains on the ramparts of Norwich Castle. The twentieth-century descendant is a kindly figure who writes books on Norfolk dialect and is much loved and looked up to by everyone for miles around. Whether he shares his noisome ancestor’s belief in eastern independence I could not say, but I am certain that were today’s fashion for devolution to be continued into the ancient kingdoms of England, he would be a very natural candidate for King of Anglia – perhaps with Delia Smith as his consort.

‘I need a volunteer,’ Miss Meddlar said one day.

My hand shot up. ‘Oh, Miss, me Miss! Please Miss!’

‘Very well, Stephen Fry.’ Miss Meddlar always called me by both names. It is one of my chief memories of primary school, that of being Stephen Fry all the time. I suppose Miss Meddlar felt first names were too informal and surnames too cold and too affected for a decent, Christian village school.

‘Take this to Mr Kett’s class please, Stephen Fry.’

‘This’ was a sheet of paper bearing test results. Spelling and Adding Up. I had annoyed myself by getting one answer wrong in the spelling round. I had spelled the word ‘many’ with two ‘n’s. Everyone else had made the same mistake but compounded the error by using an ‘e’, so Miss Meddlar had given me half a point for knowing about the ‘a’. I took the sheet of paper from her knowing that my name headed the list with nineteen and a half out of twenty.

Out in the corridor I walked towards Mr Kett’s classroom door. I stood there ready to knock when I heard laughter coming from inside.

No one in life, not the wartiest old dame in Arles, not the wrinkledest, stoopingest Cossack, not the pony-tailedest, venerablest old Mandarin in China, not Methuselah himself, will ever be older than a group of seniors at school. They are like Victorian photographs of sporting teams. No matter how much more advanced in years you are now than the age of those in the photograph, they will always look a world older, always seem more capable of growing a bigger moustache and holding more alcohol. The sophistication with which they sit and the air of maturity they give off is unmatchable by you. Ever.

The laughter from inside Mr Kett’s room came from nine- and ten-year-olds, but they were nine- and ten-year-olds whose age I will never reach, whose maturity and seniority I can never hope to emulate. There was something in the way their laughter seemed to share a mystery with Mr Kett, a mystery of olderness, that turned my knees to water. I pulled back my hand from the door just in time to stop it from knocking, and fled to the changing room.

I sat panting on a bench by the lockers staring miserably at Miss Meddlar’s sheet of paper. I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t walk into that senior classroom.

I knew what would happen if I did, and I rehearsed the scene in my head, rehearsed it in such detail that I believed that I actually had done it, just as a scared diver on the high board finds his stomach whoomping with the shock of a jump he has made only in his mind.

I shivered at the thought of how the scene would go.

I would knock.

‘Come in,’ Mr Kett would say.

I would open the door and stand at the threshold, knees wobbling, eyes downcast.

‘Ah. Stephen Fry. And what can I do for you, young man?’

‘Please, Mr Kett. Miss Meddlar told me to give you this.’

The seniors would start to laugh. A sort of contemptuous, almost annoyed laughter. What is this squidge, this fly, this nothing doing in our mature room, where we were maturely sharing a mature joke with Mr Kett? Look at him… his shorts are all ruckled up and… my God… are those StartRite sandals, he’s wearing? Jesus…

My name being first on the list would only make it worse.

‘Well, Master Fry. Nineteen and a half out of twenty! A bit of a brain box, by the look of things!’

Almost audible sneers at this and a more muttered, angry kind of laughter. Spelling! Adding up for Christ’s sake…

No, it was intolerable. Unthinkable. I couldn’t go in there.

I wanted to run away. Not home. Just away. To run and run and run and run. Yet I was too frightened to do that either. Oh dear. Oh double dear. Such terrible, terrible misery. And all because I had done well. All because I had stretched up my hand so high and squealed ‘Oh, Miss, me Miss! Please Miss’ so loudly and so insistently.

It was all wrong, the world was all wrong. I was Stephen Fry in a changing room in a small -school in Norfolk and I wanted to be someone else. Someone else in another country in another age in another world.

I looked down at Miss Meddlar’s piece of paper. My name at the top was running saltily into the name of Darren Wright below. Darren Wright had fourteen marks out of twenty. Fourteen was a much more sensible mark. Not at all embarrassing. Why couldn’t I have scored fourteen?

I screwed the paper into a ball and stuffed it into a wellington boot. It was Mary Hench’s wellington boot. It said so in clear black writing on Elastoplast stuck to the inside. Mary Hench and I were friends, so maybe she wouldn’t tell if she found it.

I stood up and wiped my nose. Oh dear.

Over the next ten years I was to find myself alone in changing rooms many, many times more, the longest ten years of my life. This occasion was innocent and infantile, those future visits guiltier and more wicked by far. To this day institutional changing rooms make my heart beat with a very heavy hammerblow of guilt. The feeling of wanting not to be Stephen Fry, wanting to be someone else in another country in another age, that was to return to me many times too.

I left this ur-changing room, this primal prototype of all the changing rooms that were to be, and had no sooner sunk tremblingly back into my seat in Miss Meddlar’s classroom than the bell went for morning break.

As was my habit I joined Mary Hench and the other girls at the edge of the playground, hard by the painted hopscotch lines. She was a large girl, Mary Hench, with gentle brown eyes and a pleasant lisp. We liked to bounce tennis balls against the wall and talk about how stupid boys were while we watched them playing football and fighting in the middle of the playground. Soft, she called them. Boys were soft. Sometimes I was soft, but usually I was daft, which was a little better. With Mary Hench was Mabel Tucker, the girl I sat next to in Miss Meddlar’s. Mabel Tucker wore National Health spectacles and I of course called her Table Mucker which she hated. She would shout out loudly in class when I farted, which I did not believe to be playing the game.

‘Please, Miss. Stephen Fry’s just farted.’

Not on. Outside of enough. You were supposed to giggle secretly and delightedly or pull your sweater up over your nose. To draw adult attention to the event was quite monstrously wrong. Besides, I wasn’t sure that adults knew about farting.

Just as break was coming to an end, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Miss Meddlar surveying the playground. I tried to hide behind Mary Hench, who was bigger than me, but she told me not to be so soft and pushed me ahead.

‘Stephen Fry,’ said Miss Meddlar.

‘Yes, Miss?’

‘Mr Kett says that you never did give him that sheet of paper.’

Boys and girls were pushing past me on their way back to their classes.

‘No, Miss. That’s right, Miss. He wasn’t in his classroom. He must have gone out. So I left it on his desk.’ Said airily. Jauntily. Insouciantly.

‘Oh. Oh I see,’ Miss Meddlar looked a little confused, but in no sense incredulous.

With a calm ‘if there’s nothing further?’ cock of the eyebrow, I moved on.

At lunch Mr Kett came to my table and sat down opposite me. I felt a thousand eyes burning into me.

‘Now then, young man. What’s this about me not being in the classroom this morning? I never left my classroom.’

‘Well, I knocked, sir, but you didn’t answer.’

‘You knocked?’

‘Yes, sir. As you didn’t answer I went away. ‘Miss Meddlar says you said you left the mark sheet on my desk.’

‘Oh no, sir. As you didn’t answer my knock I went away.

‘I see.’

A pause, while, all hot and prickly, I looked down at my lunch.

‘Well, if you give me the mark sheet now then…’

‘Sir?’

‘I’ll take it now.’

‘Oh. I lost it, sir.’

‘You lost it?’

‘Sir. In break.’

A puzzled look spread over Mr Kett’s face. Get to know that puzzled look, Stephen Fry. You will see it many times.

For Narcissus to find himself desirable, the water he looks into must be clear and calm and sweet. If a person looks into a turbulent pool his reflection will be dark and disturbed. That was Mr Kett’s face, rippled with dark perturbation. He was being lied at, but lied at so well and for so impenetrable a reason.

I can see his perplexity so clearly. It looms before me now and the turbulence in his eyes makes me look very ugly indeed.

Here was a bright boy, very bright. He came from a big house up the road: his parents, although newcomers to Norfolk, seemed nice people – even qualifying for what used to be called awfully nice. Their boy was only here at this little school for a term before he went away to prep school. Kett was a man of his village and therefore a man of the world. He had seen bright children before, he had seen children of the upper middle classes before. This boy seemed presentable enough, charming enough, decent enough and here he was telling the lie direct without so much as a blush or stammer.

Maybe I’m over-refining.

There is very little chance that John Kett remembers that day. In fact, I know he doesn’t.

Of course I’m over-refining. I’m reading into the incident what I want to read into it.

Like all teachers, John Kett overlooked and pardoned those thousands of revelatory moments in which the children under his care exposed the animal inside them. Every day he must bid good morning to men and women, parents now themselves, whom once he witnessed thrashing about in mad tantrum, whom once he saw wetting themselves, whom once he saw bullying or being bullied, whom once he saw bursting into terrified screams at the sight of spider or the sound of distant thunder, whom once he saw torturing ladybirds. True, a cold lie is worse than animal savagery or hot fright, but that lie is and always was, my problem, not John Kett’s.

This Affair of the Test Results in Mary Hench’s Wellington Boot is a big episode for me simply because I remember it so clearly: it is significant, in other words, because I have decided that it is significant and that in itself is of significance to me. I suppose it seems to mark in my mind the beginning of what was to become a pattern of lonely lies and public exposures. The virtue of this particular lie was that it was pointless, a pure lie, its vice that it was so consciously, so excellently done. When Kett sat down to question me at the lunch table I had been nervous – mouth dry, heart thumping, hands clammy – but the moment I began to speak I found I became more than simply nerveless, I became utterly confident and supremely myself. It was as if I had discovered my very purpose in life. To put one over, to dupe: to deceive not only without shame, but with pride, with real pride. Private pride, that was always the problem. Not a pride I could share in the playground, but a secret pride to hug to myself like miser’s gold or pervert’s porn. The hours leading up to exposure would have me sweating with fear, but the moment itself would define me: I became charged, excited and happy, while at the same time maintaining absolute outward calm and confidence, able to calculate in microseconds. Telling lies would bring about in me that state the sportsman knows when he is suddenly in form, when the timing becomes natural and rhythmic, the sound of the bat/racket/club/cue sweet and singing: he is simultaneously relaxed and in deepest concentration.

I could almost claim that the moment the police snapped the cuffs about my wrists eleven years later was one of the happiest of my life.

Of course, someone might try to make the connection between all this and acting. When acting is going well, the same feeling of mastery of time, of rhythm, control and timing comes over one. Acting, after all, is lying, lying for the pure exquisite joy of it, you might think. Only acting isn’t that, not to me at any rate. Acting is telling truth for the pure, agonising hell of it.

People always think that actors make good liars: it seems a logical thought, just as one might imagine that an artist would make a good forger of other people’s signatures. I don’t think there’s any especial truth in either assumption.

Things I often heard from parents and schoolteachers.

‘It’s not that you did it, but that you lied about it.’

‘Why did you lie?’

‘It’s as if you actually wanted to get caught.’

‘Don’t lie to me, again, Fry. You’re a terrible liar.’

No I’m not, I used to think to myself. I’m a brilliant liar. So brilliant that I do it when there isn’t even the faintest chance of being believed. That’s lying for the sake of it, not lying purely to achieve some fatuous end. That’s real lying.

All of this is going to return us to Samuel Anthony Farlowe Bunce before long.

First I will tell you what in reality John Kett chooses to remember about me. One by-product of slebdom is that those who taught you are often asked to comment about your young self. Sometimes they do it in newspapers, sometimes they do it in public.

A few years ago I was asked by John Kett’s successor to open the Cawston School Fete, or Grand Summer Fair, to give it its due title.

Anyone who grew up in the country twenty or thirty years ago knows a lot about fetes. Fetes worse than death, as my father called them with self-ironising ho-ho jocularity.

At East Anglian country gatherings there was dwile flonking – now sadly being replaced by the more self-conscious urban appeal of welly throwing. There was bowling for a pig – in those days country people knew how to look after a pig, I expect today’s average Norfolk citizen if confronted by such an animal would scream, run away and sue. There was throwing a wet sponge at the rector (or vicar – generally speaking Norfolk villages thought it smarter to have a rector than a vicar – I believe the difference is, or was, that the bishop chooses a vicar and the local landowner chooses a rector). There were bottle stalls, bran tubs filled with real bran, Guess the Weight of the Ram for a Penny competitions, coconut shies and tractor or traction engine rides for sixpence.

If my brother, sister and I were very lucky, a local fete might offer Harry Woodcock, a local watchmender and seller of ornaments, whose shop sign proclaimed him to be:

HARRY WOODCOCK

‘The Man You Know’

Woodcock went from fete to fete carrying with him a bicycle wheel attached to a board. The wheel had radiating from its centre like the minute hand of a clock an arrow which was spun for prizes. Nicky Campbell does much the same thing on British television, and Merv Griffin’s American original The Wheel of Fortune has been showing on ABC for decades. Harry Woodcock blew such professionals out of the water and left them for dead. He wore extravagantly trimmed pork-pie hats and pattered all the while like a cockney market trader. East End spiel m a Norfolk accent is a very delicious thing to hear.

My sister approached me during one such Saturday afternoon fete just as I was estimating how many mint imperials there might be in a huge jar that an archdeacon bore beamingly about a thronged deanery garden.

‘You’ll never guess who’s here…‘

‘Not…?'

‘Yup. The Man You Know.’

And off we scampered.

‘Hello there, young man!’ boomed The Man You Know, tipping his hat as he did to everyone and everything. ‘And young Miss Fry too.’

‘Hello, Mr Man You Know,’ we chorused, striving with a great effort of will not to dissolve into a jelly of rude giggles. We paid a shilling and received a ticketyboo each. These were blocks of polished wood with a number from nought to twenty painted on each side. All tickety-boos were to be tossed back into a basket, to another tip of the hat, after each spin of the wheel. The Man You Know had attempted some grace with the brush when painting the numbers, giving each digit a little flourish. I could picture him the day he made them – they were decades old by this time – his tongue would have been poking out, as it did when he examined broken watches, while he sissed and haahed out his breath and ruined each wooden block with too much of an effort to be decorative and neat. My sister, who had and has great talent with brush and pen, could have stroked out twenty numbers in twenty seconds and each one would have been graceful and fine and easy. There was a mournful clumsiness about The Man You Know, his dignity and his tickety-boos.

As indeed there was about his patter.

‘Roll, bowl or pitch. You never do know, unless you ever do know. Lady Luck is in a monstrous strange mood this afternoon, my booties. She’s a piece, that Lady Luck and no mistake. A lucky twenty tickety-boos and a lucky twenty numbers, each one solid gold, or my name’s not Raquel Welsh. You can’t accoomerlate, less you specerlate, now if that aren’t the truth I’m not the Man You Know. And I am, oh yes, but I am. I yam, I yam, I yam, as the breadfruit said to Captain Bligh. Here’s a fine gentlemen: two more punters needed fore I can spin, better give me a bob, sir – you might win a present to keep that wife a yours from straying. Thanking you kindlier than you deserve. Here comes a lovely lady. My mistake, it’s the curate, no, that is a lovely lady. Up you step, my bootiful darling, I shan’t let you go – that’s either a shilling for a tickety-boo or you give me the biggest smacker of a kiss that you ever did give in all your born days. Blast, another shilling. I’d rather a had the kiss. Lays and gen’men… The Man You Know is about to spin. The world…’ here he would hold his finger exaggeratedly to his lips, ‘the world…, she hold her breath.’

And so the world did hold her breath. The world, she held her breath and the wheel ticked round.

Well, the world has stopped holding her breath. She has exhaled and blown us a gust of bouncy castles and aluminium framed self-assembly stalls that sell strange seamed tickets of purple pulped paper that you rip open and litter the grass with when you find that you have not won a huge blue acrylic bear. The side-shows we queue for now are the Ride in the All New Vauxhall 4X4 Frontera (courtesy Jack Claywood Vauxhall Ltd.), the Virtual Reality Shoot Out and the chance to Guess the RAM of the Compaq PC, kindly provided by PC Explosion of Norwich.

Hang on, I hear the voice of Mary Hench telling me that I’ve gone soft. Thinking about the countryside can do that to me.

When I was a literature student one was for ever reading that all great literature was and always had been about the tension between civilisation and savagery:

· Apollo and Dionysus

· Urbs et rus

· Court and forest

· City and arcadia

· Pall Mall and maypole

· Town and country

· High street and hedgerow

· Metropolis and Smallville

· Urban sprawl and rural scrub

It is fitting that as I write this I am half-listening to David Bellamy, Jeremy Irons and Johnny Morris as they address a mass rally gathered in Hyde Park. They are warning the nation about the danger being done the countryside by urban ignorance and misplaced metropolitan sentimentality. The point d’appui of the rally was to save fox-hunting, but it seems to have turned into something bigger.

I’ve just turned on the television…, it is a huge crowd, almost as large as the number of townies who flock to the Yorkshire Dales every Sunday, but these people, I suspect, will at least leave the park tidy and free of litter.

I suppose some rat-faced weasel from New Maiden will be interviewed at any minute to give the other side of the hunting debate.

Bingo! I’m right. Though by the sound of him he’s from Romford rather than New Malden. And he’s just described fox-hunting as ‘barbaric’, which is peculiar since he’s the one with the stutter. Forgive the pedantry of a frustrated classicist.

They should have asked a fox instead.

‘Would you rather be hunted by hounds, gassed, trapped, poisoned or shot, old darling?’

‘Well, since you mention it, I’d rather be left alone.’

‘Ng… but given that that isn’t an option?’

‘No? Thought not. It never is, is it?’

‘Well, you know. Lambs. Chicken farms. Hysterical people hearing you rootling through their wheelie bins at night.’

‘I like a nice wheelie bin.’

‘Yes, that’s as may be, but which way would you rather be killed?’

‘Think I’ll stick to dogs if it’s all the same to you. A fox knows where he is with hounds. My direct ancestors have lived in the same place, hunted by hounds every winter, for three hundred years. Hounds are simply hopeless when you come down to it.’

That’s enough about town and country. I was supposed to be telling you about John Kett and the Cawston Village Fete. As it happens, there’s a story about a mole fast approaching, so animals won’t be left out.

Opening the Cawston School Fete counted as both duty and pleasure. I was an Old Boy, I had a connection, something to do, other than wander about with my hands behind my back like minor royalty inspecting a dialysis machine. I could revisit the changing room for example, savour once more the poster-paint tang of the art cupboard and see if the hopscotch rink had been repainted since Table Mucker’s championship season.

The Cawston Fete was not quite the miracle of yesterdecade, but – an alarming exhibition of tae kwando given by local boys aside – there was enough of a smell of oversugared sponge cake and faintly fermenting strawbails to remind me of when the world was young and guilty.

I wandered from stall to stall in a sort of daze, interrupted now and then by the shy murmur of, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll remember me…’

Table Mucker had grown an explosive pair of breasts and a large brood of daughters the eldest of whom looked ready to start production on her own. Mary Hench grinned at me from behind a downy moustache and a fierce girlfriend (clearly boys were still soft in her book) while John Kett himself seemed unchanged from the man whose puzzled eyes had lived with me in silent reproach for twenty-five years.

‘Well, young man, I expect everything seems to have shrunk since last you were here.’

I agreed and he turned the subject to moles.

Moles?

Other people at the fete had mentioned moles too, with twinkles or with amused, nose-tapping suggestiveness on my arrival and as I made the traditional preliminary inspection of cake-stand and bottle-stall.

My parents’ gardeners were a pair of brothers called Alec and Ivan Tubby who battled to keep the tennis court – as well as the improbable pride of our garden, the badminton lawn – free of moles. Was there some connection there?

Mole-catching is a great art and most practitioners (the fluorescent jacketed Rentokil variety always excepted) stand silently for great lengths of time staring at lawns and fresh molehills. After perhaps half an hour of this agonising inactivity they will at last make a move and pad softly towards apparently random places in the grass where they insert a number of traps. Over the next couple of days three or four dead moles will be pulled out. I suppose while they were standing doing nothing the mole-catchers were in fact reading tiny trembles in the earth, or patches of darker or lighter grass that gave them some suggestion as to where the moles were headed. The mole-hills themselves are not much of a clue of course once they’ve dug them, the gentlemen in black velvet move themselves off. The trick is to guess in which direction they have gone.

Back in 1965, during the first weeks of my term at Cawston Primary School I had become more and more depressed about my inability to win a star for the Nature Table.

Every week, we pupils in Miss Meddlar’s class would have to bring something in for a classroom display of biological objets trouvés. The prize exhibit would win a star. One week Mary Hench brought in a sandwich tern’s egg, taken from a nest on the coast at Brancaster. After Miss Meddlar had established in her own mind the truthfulness of Mary Hench’s assertion that the nest had been abandoned and the egg cold when happened upon (I didn’t believe Mary Hench for a second, I remain convinced to this day that the wicked girl had simply clapped her enormous hands and shooed away a sitting mother, so insane and diabolical was her ambition to win more stars than anyone else and the Junior Achievement Cup and five shilling book token that went with them) a star was awarded. I had entertained high hopes that week for my badger’s skull, boiled, vigorously scrubbed clean with Colgate toothpaste for a whiteness you can believe in and total fresh breath confidence, and attractively presented in a Queen’s Velvet envelope box packed with shredded red cellophane. I was to do the same dental cosmetic job on a less easily identifiable bone (I was sure that it was human) some years later, and win my third Blue Peter Badge – and a third Blue Peter Badge, as the world knows, is instantly converted into a Silver Blue Peter Badge. But all these happy achievements lay a long way ahead. For the moment, I was starless. But my blood was up. I was going to win a star and make Mary Hench howl with envy if I had to commit murder to do it.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

Grim weeks of effort and nature-trailing followed. I tried a starfish, a thrush egg, a collection of pressed campions and harebells and a boxful of shards of that willow pattern ironstone china that the Victorians buried in the earth for the sole purpose of disappointing twentieth-century treasure seekers. None of these met with the least success. By the eighth week of term I knew that Nature Table Star List by heart.

Mary Hench

Mary Hench

Jacqueline Wright

Ian Adams

Jimmy Speed

Mary Hench

Mary Hench

One Sunday evening, as I was wheeling round and round the stable block at home on my bicycle, racking my brains for an idea of what to offer up the next morning, Ivan Tubby approached me with something small and soft and dark cupped in his hands.

‘Found a mole,’ he said.

This was not a mole that had been squashed and spiked in a gin-trap, it was a mole that seemed to have died very recently of natural causes. Perhaps its mother and father had been trapped and it had popped up to see what was going on and where dinner was and then discovered with a shock that it couldn’t see at all and in any case wasn’t supposed to be above the ground with the Up There people and the Seeing Animals. In whatever manner it met its end, this was a young mole in the most excellent condition, its pink snout and spreading shovel paws still warm and quite perfectly shaped.

I begged to be allowed to keep him and Ivan generously consented, although as it happened he had marked him down as a treat for his cat.

The next morning I bicycled down the mile-long lane to Cawston in a fever of excitement, the mole packed in straw in my saddlebag. This was to be my day of triumph.

‘Here we have a common European mole,’ I would tell the class, Pear’s Family Cyclopaedia having been thoroughly exhausted on the subject of moles the night before. ‘Moles eat their own weight every day and can actually starve to death within twelve hours if they don’t have enough food. A mole is capable of burrowing up to eighteen feet in one hour. Thank you.'

I imagined executing a small bow and receiving delighted applause from all but a frustrated, white-lipped Mary Hench, whose feeble puss-moth caterpillar or pathetic arrangement of barn owl pellets would go unnoticed.

I parked the bicycle and rushed to Miss Meddlar’s, slowing down as I arrived in the doorway, so as to look cool and casual.

‘Well now, you’re very early this morning, Stephen Fry.’

‘Am I, Miss? Yes, Miss.’

‘And what’s that you have there? Something for the nature table?’

‘Yes, Miss. It’s a -‘ I started, excitedly.

‘Don’t tell me now, child. Wait until class. Put it on the table and…, well now whatever is going on?’

A violent explosion of giggles and screams could be heard coming from the playground. Miss Meddlar and I went to the window and tried to crane round and look towards the source of the uproar. Just then, Jimmy Speed, a chaotic, ink-stained boy, the kind who grins all the time as though he believes everyone to be quite mad, burst into the room.

‘Oh, Miss, Miss. You’ll never guess! You’ll never ever guess!’

‘Guess what, Jimmy Speed?’

‘That’s Mary Hench, Miss! She’s brought a donkey in for the nature table. A real live donkey! Come out and see. That’s ever so beautiful, though how he will fit on the table, that I do not know.’

‘A donkey!’ Miss Meddlar went pink with excitement, straightened her skirt and headed for the door. ‘A donkey. Good heavens!’

I looked down at my little mole and burst into tears.

It was at the end of the week, just as everyone in the school was beginning to talk of things other than Mary Hench and her donkey, that Mr Kett came up to me in the playground and drew me aside.

‘Hello there, young man,’ he said. ‘You look a little down in the dumps if I might say so.’

‘Do I, sir?’

‘You do, sir,’ he said. ‘I remember a joke I heard as a boy in the pantomime. Cinderella. that was. In Dereham, years before the war. One of the ugly sisters, she said, “‘Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I buy myself a new hat.” And the other ugly sister replied, “So that’s where you get them from then.” I remember that as if it were yesterday.’

Only, said in his light Norfolk accent it came out as, '… I remember that as if it were yisty.’

‘So,’ he went on, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘What have you been getting down in those dumps?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, ‘only…’

‘You can tell me, young man. If it’s a secret it won t go any further. A boy told me the most amazing secret twenty years ago. Do you know what it was?’

‘No,’ I asked, perking up. There was nothing I loved better than a secret. ‘What was it?’

‘I shan’t tell you,’ said Mr Kett. ‘It’s a secret. See? That’s how good I am at keeping them.’

‘Oh. Well, you see, the thing is…’

And out spilled some kind of confused description of the disappointment, frustration, rage and despair that burned within me at being trumped by Mary Hench and her double-damned donkey.

‘It was a such a good mole, you see… so perfect. Its paws were perfect, its snout was perfect, its fur was perfect. It was the best mole ever. Even though it was dead. Any other week it would have won a star. And it’s not that stars are so important, it’s just that I’ve never won one for the nature table. Not once. Ever.’

‘You’ve had plenty of stars for spelling though, haven’t you? So Miss Meddlar tells me.’

‘Oh, spelling…’

‘I had a look at your mole. It was a fine mole, there’s no question about it. You should be very proud of him.’

That afternoon, as class ended, I went to the nature table, took the creature, now slightly corrupted by time, and wrapped it in a handkerchief.

‘Is our mole leaving us?’ Miss Meddlar asked, with what seemed to be a gleam of hope in her voice.

‘I thought perhaps so,’ I sighed. ‘I mean, he is getting a bit…, you know.’

Halfway back home I leaned my bike against a hedge and opened the handkerchief, setting myself scientifically to examine the nature of decay. The body of the mole, once so plush and fine, now matted and patched, appeared to be alive with shiny white ticks. From out of the weeping centre of the carcass, a black insect that had been feasting deep in the wet ooze, seemed suddenly to see me, or at least to see daylight and its chance for freedom. Taking fierce wing with a fluttering clockwork buzz, it launched itself into my eye. I gave a scream and dropped the whole bundle. The flying creature, whatever it was, spun upwards into the air and across the fields.

I felt a wetness around my ankles and looked down. The mole had fallen on to my sandals and exploded there, spreading itself all around my socks and feet. Squealing and shrieking in fright and revulsion, I hopped about flicking with the handkerchief at my shins as though they were on fire.

It was too horrible, nature was too horrible. Nature stank and squelched and vomited with slime, maggots and bursting guts.

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself – simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

Pieces of the mole lined the foot of the hedge. I rubbed a little at my legs with the once fine, crisp linen handkerchief and then I held it up to the sky. They were the same, the handkerchief and the evening sky. Both spattered with ink and blood. The alien malevolence of a certain kind of late afternoon sunset has frightened me ever since.

‘Good heavens, darling,’ my mother said. ‘Whatever is that smell?’

‘Dead mole, what do you think?’ I said crossly as I stamped up the back stairs.

‘Well, you’d better go straight up and have a bath then.’

‘What did you think I was doing? Going upstairs to… to… play croquet?’

Not the best put-down ever, but as tart as I could manage.

I didn’t think once about the nature table over the weekend. It had rained, which gave me a fine opportunity to stay indoors and ignore nature entirely.

It was only as I bicycled in to school on Monday morning that I realised I had nothing at all for the weekly show and tell.

A stick, I thought. I’ll jolly well take in a stick. If they don’t want moles, they can make do with a stick. Sticks can be interesting too. Nature isn’t all donkeys and otter spraints and tern’s eggs and coypu skulls and rotten crawling living things. I’ll bring in a dead stick.

So I picked up the first stick I biked past. A very ordinary stick. Dead, but neutral and uncorrupted in its death. And useful too, which is more than you can say for a rotting mole dropping to bits all over your ankles.

I brought the stick into the classroom and dumped it defiantly on the nature table.

Well now,’ said Miss Meddlar, after she had exam-med the week’s crop with the irritating care and slowness of a pensioner paying at a checkout counter. ‘Now then, well. Another wonderful effort from you all. I have to say I half expected to see an elephant in the playground, Mary, but that is a lovely jay’s feather you’ve brought in for us, really lovely. But do you know what? The star this week is going to go to… Stephen Fry.’

‘Hurrh?’

A dozen pairs of disbelieving eyes swivelled between me, Miss Meddlar and the very ordinary dead stick that lay on the nature table like a very ordinary dead stick.

‘Come you on forward, Stephen Fry.’

I came me on forward, bewildered.

‘This star is not for your stick, although I’m sure it is ever such a fine stick. This star is for you taking away your mole Friday…’

‘Excuse me, Miss?’

'… because I have to say that the dratted thing was stinking out my classroom. He was stinking out the whole corridor, was your mole. I’ve never been so glad to see anything go in all my born days.’

The class erupted into noisy laughter and, since I was always, and have always been, determined that merriment should never be seen to be at my expense, I joined in and accepted my star with as much pleased dignity as I could muster.

How strange then, how more than passing strange, to discover a quarter of a century later that it was this trivial episode that the school remembered me for, and not for my cold lies and sly evasions.

John Kett was, still is I hope, a lay preacher and a better advertisement for Christianity than St Paul himself. Then again, in my unqualified opinion, Judas Iscariot, Nero and Count Dracula are all better advertisements for Christianity than St Paul… but that’s a whole other candle for a whole other cake. You aren’t here to listen to my ignorant ramblings on the subject of theology.

The awful thing is this.

Until this day came twenty-five years on, with John Kett and others and their beaming mentions, I had entirely forgotten the mole and everything to do with it.

At the start of the fete, every time moles had been knowingly alluded to as I Prince Michael of Kented my way from stall to stall, I had pretended that I knew what it was all about, but I was dissembling furiously. I imagined that people might be referring to some television sketch that I had been in and since forgotten all about.

This often happens. I remember a few years ago being angrily yelled at from across the street by a complete stranger. Simply purple with fury this man was, shaking his fist and calling me a bastard pigging murderer. I assumed he was someone who didn’t like my politics, my television appearances, my sexual preferences, my manner, my voice, my face – me. It hardly mattered. He could call me a fat ugly unfunny lefty queer and I would see his point of view. But murderer? Maybe it was because I was wearing leather shoes… it is impossible to tell in these days of serial single issue fanatics. I wheeled round the corner and away. Such people are best avoided. One reads things, you know.

You can imagine my consternation when I realised that this lunatic was dashing round the corner after me in hot pursuit.

‘Mr Fry! Mr Fry!’

I turned with what I hoped was a disarming smile, in reality seeking witnesses, policemen or an escape route.

The lunatic was holding up an apologetic hand.

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

‘Well, I must confess…’

‘Speckled Jim!’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You know, Speckled Jim!’

Said as if this would clear the matter up entirely.

And then it had indeed dawned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In neat Olde English lettering, the following is written:

Ode to a mole

I didn’t ask to come here

I didn’t ask to go

But here I was

And off I went

With only a star for show

Cawston ‘89

Grand Summer Fair