Moab is my Washpot

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My brother and I nodded.

‘I’m afraid I have just heard from your mother that she diddie…’

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

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

LETTERS OF ENCOURAGEMENT TO A POSSIBLE NEW BOY

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

Tim Sangster

We play cars down a little sort of dip.

Jimmy King

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

Anthony Macwhirter

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

Edmund Wilkins

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

Richard Coley

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

Charles Matthews

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

Malcolm Black

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

Donald Laing

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

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

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

OUR FIRST DAYS AT STOUTS HILL

J. Wynn

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

A. McKane

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

R. Maidlow

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

T. Sangster

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

Ian Hicks

I was worried about the lessons and wondered if I would be hacked playing football and what the food would be like and whether I would get indigestion like I always did at home. Then how was mum in the car and had she got back all right. I went to bed and everybody asked me my name. Then the next morning the master came into lessons and said ‘Hicks, have you learnt to do History yet?” ‘Yes, a bit” came the reply. By lunch I had settled down.

R. Coley

My first night at school the thing I dreaded most was seeing mummy and daddy go down the drive. However I found another new boy named Povey. We walked around a bit till the tea bell rang and we went to tea. Everybody thought I was most peculiar because I had 3 cups of milk and slices of bread and 3 buns.

M. Dolan

At bed time we go to wash and go to bed. We are allowed to talk until 7 o’clock and we talk all the time. When we are closed down we talk lots of times and get caught and have to stand out for twenty minutes. Our legs get tired.

I found myself dreading this strange world of ice-cream days and third game pavilions and being put as square leg. The idea that I might be asked if I had learnt to do History yet also filled me with horror. I knew plenty of history, thanks to my mother, herself a historian, and the endless quizzes I pestered her to give me as I followed her about the house, but I was certain that I hadn’t in any way ‘learnt to do History’.

Another essay in the magazine puzzled me, puzzles me to this day. I felt it was getting at something, something awful to which it didn’t dare put a name. Ironic, given its title.

"FEAR," by S. Alexander

Fear is the basis of cowardice and cowardice is the opposite to courage, but fear is not the opposite to courage. In many cases, fear is even the basis of courage and so it is an extraordinary thing.

It gets complicated after that – the author presses Socrates and Douglas Bader into the argument and I get a trifle lost even now.

I was more heartened by the following:

WINNIE

Winnie was a loveable little pony. She had a gentle temperament and liked having a fuss made of her. She was very old when she died. Everyone who rode her will probably remember her for a long time. She was very persevering and would tolerate a tremendous amount of hitting around. I have never known her to lose her temper, so I think if there is a heaven, Winnie is there. Winnie passed into the next world on the afternoon of the _30th January. May she find rest in the endless pastures of Paradise.

J. Bisset.

I think I remember this Bisset. I believe he came from Rhodesia and had a younger brother who arrived at Stouts Hill at about the same time as me. The younger Bisset quite suddenly and inexplicably announced one term that he had changed his name to Tilney, something we all rather envied and I, personally, decided to emulate at once. I informed the master on duty that from now on I was to be referred to as Whatenough, Peregrine Ainsley Whatenough, but was told not to be an arse, which struck me as unfair. Looking back, one assumes the Bisset/Tilney name change was something to do with step-fatherage, a broken home and other things that were kept from us.

Returning to the magazine, there follow endless pages cataloguing the achievements of old boys, with the usual depressing information as to their destinies.

We were delighted to hear from Ian who is doing very well at Price Waterhouse and still plays squash regularly.

John has done extremely well with an Agricultural firm dealing with machinery in Uganda.

Adam Carter wrote to us from Gibraltar where he is stationed with the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry.

No reunion or social gathering would be complete without Charles Hamilton. He looked splendid at the Berkeley Hunt Ball in his kilt.

We hear Martin Wood is very happy at Stowe and is now a keen Beagler.

Peter Presland goes up to London every day, where he is with a firm of solicitors, Bracewell and Leaver, where he specialises in commercial work during the day and at night is a libel “Expert” for a daily newspaper.

I like the capitalised, double inverted-commas ‘Expert”, lending it a properly disreputable air.

Of one old boy, later to become well known through marriage, we learn:

Mark Phillips (1957-1962) Marlborough

We were all delighted when Mark once again won at Badminton.

… the annual three-day eventing horse-trials, one assumes, not some ordinary game of shuttlecock and battledore…

Stouts Hill was a country school, this is the point that seems to emerge most from the magazines. London and all things urban were miles away. Whenever I picture myself at prep school, I picture myself out of doors: walking, sliding, tumbling, den-building, boating, fishing and in winter, sliding across the thickly iced lake, tobogganing and rolling snowballs down slopes until they grew to be the size of small vans. I remember being taught the names of wildflowers and birds, climbing trees, penetrating the woods and scaling the Bury.

None of these activities came without pain. The pain began with bad luck over which I had no control but ended in a physical self-consciousness that has dominated my life ever since.

The bad luck was principally asthma, a congenital condition inherited, I suppose, from my father who had spent a year in hospital as a child.

I had joined the school’s tree climbing club and found to my surprise that a dread of heights did not prevent me from climbing trees quickly and without fear. Then, when I was nine, I developed a terrible allergy to whatever it is that lime trees put out in the summer, that same stuff that deposits its layer of sticky goo on the roofs of cars that are foolish enough to park in lime avenues. The result was two days in bed with my lungs wheezing like mouse-nibbled organ bellows. A number of boys at Stouts Hill had asthma, the Gloucestershire air was said to be good for them. One boy came for that very reason but made no improvement. He left for Switzerland after only five weeks, a five weeks spent with an inhaler constantly at his lips. The following term at morning prayers the headmaster reported his death to us and everyone turned to look at me.

Later, at public school in particular, I became adept at using my asthma as an excuse for avoiding undesirable activities. I could induce attacks easily by burying my head inside dusty desks or in bushes and shrubs which I knew to be dangerous. I became intensely proud of my asthma, just as I was to become proud of my jewishness and proud of my sexuality. Taking an aggressively defiant stance on qualities in myself that others might judge to be weaknesses became one of my most distinctive character traits. Still is, I suppose.

Seesawing with a friend one afternoon, I fractured the humerus bone of my left arm and went about in a sling for the rest of the term. Two days later my brother broke his arm in exactly the same place, a genuine coincidence. He had broken it in the field of battle, at rugger. I was the fool who could have avoided it, he was the brave soldier. As it later turned out, Roger had actually broken his arm by trying to pinch some food from the kitchen under the eye of Abiel, who had hurled him up some steps. In those days, things like that were hushed up. Poor Abiel hadn’t meant any harm, and a rugger injury looked better all round.

I can’t separate out the connections, the causes and effects, but by my third year at Stouts Hill, after the onset of asthma and the breaking of my arm, I began to dread physical activity of almost any kind. I became prey to an acute sense of physical self-consciousness.

This has sexual connections which we will come to later. In a prep school set in the country, in love with the country, inspired by the country and dedicated to the country, the boy who fears the country, fears it in all its manifestations, naturally becomes something of a loner: if his home-life is also spent in even deeper country he has a problem. The terror of the rotting mole and of the insects that gorge on dead flesh had never left me. I was scared to distraction by the mere thought of silverfish and lice, maggots and blow-flies, puff-balls and exploding fungi. The malignancy and stench of death that hung over the forests, copses and lakeside woods at Stouts Hill expunged any pleasure I derived from the lively quickness of squirrels and badgers, from the gentle dignity of alders, larches, elms and oaks and from the delicate beauty of the herb robert, the campion, the harebell and the shepherd’s purse.

More than that, the fearlessness of the other boys became itself something new to fear. That they could not see what was amiss with the world showed them to be strong and me to be weak.

I was at the time, I think, unaware of all this at any conscious level worth bothering with. Other boys, after all, were what we would call today wimps. Some were wimpier than me by far. Some wore absurd spectacles with lenses an inch thick, others had spazzy walks and possessed eye-hand co-ordination that made me feel positively athletic. One boy was so afraid of horses that he would break out into a sweat if he came within twenty yards of the smallest pony.

Two defects of mine did haunt me consciously however, and I cannot claim ever to have entirely exorcised myself of them.

Natation first. The school had an excellent lake, in which some supervised swimming was allowed. There was a swimming-pool too, a most extraordinary white oval affair which might have been designed by Gropius, with an elaborate gravel filter for the water, which showed itself in the form of an endlessly playing fountain beside the pool. At either end was a bowl filled with a deep purple liquid into which one had to dip one’s feet before entry – something to do with verrucas I believe.

If a boy had been officially witnessed to have swum two full unassisted lengths of the pool he was a Swimmer and entitled to wear blue swimming trunks and enjoy access to the deep end and the diving board. Non Swimmers wore red trunks and had to paddle in the shallow end holding preposterous polystyrene swimming aids sculpted into the shape of tombstones or, worse still, have inflatable water-wings sealed about their skinny arms.

I was a non swimmer until my very last year.

All my life I have never since bought a pair of red swimming trunks.

At night, as others slept, I projected films in my head, films in which I swam like Johnny Weissmuller, Esther Williams and Captain Webb. Dipping, rolling and diving, head facing down into the surface of the water, I powered myself with easy, rhythmically pumping feet. I launched myself backwards and forwards, up and down the pool, head rising up to take one lungful of air for each length, while boys crowded round the pool, their mouths rounded in wonderment and admiration, watching me, praising me, cheering me on…

I could do it, I knew I could do it then. It was clear to me that the achievement was all in the knowing.

The only reason I couldn’t swim was that I had been told that I was a non swimmer. But there, on my hard-sprung Vono bed, while the others slept, I knew that I was an otter, a sea-lion, a leaping dolphin, Poseidon’s child, Marine Boy, the friend of Thetis and Triton, at one with water.

If only they would let me wear blue trunks, then I would show them.

The loud collision of detail, noise and hurry in the daytime confused everything and threw me off balance.

‘Aren’t you changed, Fry?’

‘Right, in you get.’

‘Come on, boy!’

‘It’s not cold, for God’s sake…’

‘Legs! Legs, legs, legs! Get those legs working!’

‘Get your head down. It’s water, it’s not going to bite you…'

‘What a spazz…’

The explosions of other boys laughing and bombing and belly flopping at the deep end turned into a distant mocking echo as the blood and fear flooded into me.

‘But I could do it last night!’ I wanted to shout. ‘You should have seen me last night. Like a salmon, I was… like a leaping salmon!’

Blue and shivering, I would push the polystyrene tombstone out before me, eyes screwed shut, head up so far that my neck bent backwards, thrashing myself forwards, my legs kicking up and down, panting and whooping with exertion and panic. Then I would rise, gasping and choking like a new born baby, twisted strings of snot streaming from my nose, chlorine burning my throat and eyes, sure that this time, this time, I had covered at least half the length of the pool.

‘Congratulations, Fry. One and a half yards.’

Hurrying across the grass, I would wrap myself in a towel, shivering and gulping with shame and exhaustion.

The aching and the longing in me as I watched Laing silently glide underwater from end to end like a silver eel. He would break the surface without a ripple or a gasp, and then, laughing like a lord, backstroke, side-stroke and butterfly to the other end, rolling over and over as he swam, the water seeming to encase him in a silver envelope that glistened and pulsed like the birth sac of a gigantic insect.

With my towel Balinese tight about my waist, I would, in Adam’s primal pudeur, perform the awkward ballet of swapping trunks for underpants, so absolutely, unconditionally and helplessly cast into black misery that nothing, not money, hugging, sweets, understanding, friendship or love, could have offered me the smallest sliver of joy or hope. The fierce knot of admiration, resentment, shame and fury that tightened in the pit of my stomach is one of those background sensations of childhood, like the taste of lemon sherbet or tomatoes on fried bread, flavours that can be blown back on the wind of memory or association to torture and now, of course, to amuse.

Swimming was for me the closest a human being could come to flight. The freedom of it, the ease, the elegance, the delirious escape. Every living creature but Fry could swim. The tiniest tadpole, the most reluctant cat, the most primitive amoeba and the simplest daphnia.

And I would never be able to do it, never. Never be able to join in, splashing and laughing and ducking and grabbing and roaring with the others. Never. Save in my mind.

We talk of the callousness of the young. ‘Children can be so cruel,’ we say. But only those who are concerned with others can be cruel. Children are both careless and carefree in their connections with others. For one nine-year-old to think passingly about the non-swimming agonies of another would be ridiculous.

There were contemporaries of mine at prep school who laboured and tortured themselves over their absolute failure to understand the rudiments of sentence structure: the nominative and accusative in Latin and Greek, the concept of an indirect object, the ablative absolute and the sequence of tenses – these things kept them awake at night. There were others who tossed in insomniac misery because of their fatness, freckledness or squintedness. I don’t remember, I don’t remember because I didn’t care. Only my own agony mattered.

Nothing prayed for – it is life’s strictest and least graceful rule – comes to you at the time of praying. Good things always come too late. I can swim now.

I cannot recall how and when I passed my test and won those blue trunks. I know it did happen. I know that somehow I learned to doggy-paddle without the tombstone and the water-wings and that I completed my two compulsory lengths. I know too that I discovered how swimming was never going to be that fine, free soaring expansion of joy I had dreamt it would be.

The pain of the red trunks, however, was as a minor aggravation, a teasing itch when compared to the blistering agony of Cong Prac.

Stouts Hill never gave off an atmosphere of being any more or less religious than other schools I have known. It was with some surprise that I discovered not long ago that Robert Angus, the headmaster, had been a writer of deeply spiritual Christian poetry. Today, with the foul miasma of evangelism rising up to engulf us from every corner of God’s poor earth it is hard to remember that good Christian lives were once lived without words like ‘outreach’ and ‘salvation’ being dragged into general conversation. God was a dignified, generous, father and Christ his beautiful, liquid-eyed son: they loved you even when they saw you on the lavatory or caught you stealing sweets. That was Christianity, something quite unconnected to hymns, psalms, anthems and the liturgy of the church.

In the 1960s Britain was just beginning to slither about in the horrid mess made by sacred music written especially for children – ‘Jonah’, ‘The Lord of the Dance’, ‘Morning Has Broken’ and all that preposterous rubbish. New tunes for ‘0 Jesus I have Promised’ were being composed, as music masters and idle, fatuous composers the length and breadth of the land were bothering us all with new carols and new settings for the Te Deum and Nunc Dimittis, some of them even ransacking the rhetoric of negro spirituals and American gospel songs, with results so nauseatingly embarrassing that I still blush to recall them. White, well-nourished British children who holidayed with their parents in old plantation houses in the Bahamas and Jamaica, clapping their hands, thumping tambourines and striking triangles to the lisped words of ‘Let my people go’ and ‘Nobody knows the trouble I see’, to a clash of cymbals and symbols that still harrows the imagination.

But there, the very thought of music masters clapping their hands in rhythm and calling out ‘And one and two and three and ta-ta-ta-tab!!’ will always send the blood simmering to my head, never mind ethnic guilt and other associations.

Every morning after breakfast at Stouts Hill, a bell rang for chapel, a service which involved no more than a perfunctory clutch of prayers, a lesson read by a prefect (hitting hard, in time honoured British fashion, the italicised words of the text of the Authorised Version as if they had been put there for emphasis) and a known hymn, but on Sundays there was held a proper service, with collects, psalms, canticles, versides, responses, anthems and a sermon. The choir dressed up in blue surplices and starched ruffs and processed with candles, the masters added the appropriate ermine or scarlet hoods to their gowns and we boys turned out in our best suits and tidiest hair, all checked up in the dormitories by Sister Pinder, Matron and a squad of sergeant-majorly prefects. Each Sunday service, according to litany and season, had its own psalm, and Mr Hemuss, the music master, liked also to use Sundays as an opportunity to introduce us to hymns we had never sung before. This meant they had to be learned. After morning prayers on Saturday therefore we stayed behind in the’ chapel (actually a gymnasium with an altar) and Cong Prac was held – an abbreviation, though it never ever crossed my mind as such at the time, for Congregational Practice. Here the setting for the morrow s psalm and the tunes for the morrow’s unfamiliar hymns would be gone through, bar by bar. Saturday’s breakfast was always boiled eggs, and there is nothing so unpleasant in all this world as a roomful of human beings who have just eaten boiled eggs. Every fart and burp sulphurises the room with the most odious humming guff, a smell I can never smell to this day without returning to the hell of Gong Prac.

I have just leaked all over you the feelings of longing and self-reproach that tortured me over my inability to swim. These feelings were as nothing, are as nothing, to what I felt and still feel about God’s cruelty, God’s malice, God’s unforgivable cruelty in denying me the gift of music.

Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. So E. M. Forster wrote somewhere. If swimming suggested to me the idea of physical flight, then music suggested something much more. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry ‘Wow!’ all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

Other arts do this too, but other arts are for ever confined and anchored by reference. Sculptures are either figuratively representative or physically limited words by their material, which is actual and palpable. The words in poems are referential, they breathe with denotation and connotation, suggestion and semantics, coding and signing. Paint is real stuff and the matter of painting contains itself in a frame. Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy ‘music-making’, all that grain of human performance, so messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-conscious painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fl speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.

The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

AND I CAN’T FUCKING DO IT

I can’t so much as hum ‘Three Blind Mice’ without going off key. I can’t stick to the rhythm of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ without speeding up. I can’t fucking do it.

Bollocks to Salieri and his precious, petulant whining. Maybe it is worse to be able to make music just a bit, but not as well as you would like to. I d love to find out. But I can’t fucking do it at all.

To see friends gathering round a piano and singing ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, ‘Anything Goes’, ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Summertime’, ‘Der Erlkonig’, ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’, ‘Edelweiss’, ‘Non Più Andrai’ – it doesn’t fucking matter what bloody song it is…

I CAN’T FUCKING JOIN IN

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday… mime or mumble and rumble and grow and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

I’M NOT EVEN TONE

FUCKING DEAF

I’m tone DUMB.

The tunes are there in my head. There they are all right, perfect to the last quarter-tone of pitch and the last hemi-demi-semi-quaver of time. The ‘Haffner’, ‘Fernando’, the Siegfried motif, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Marche Militaire’, ‘Night and Day’, ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’, ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, ‘Lara’s Theme’, ‘Now Voyager’, ‘Remember You’re a Womble’, even the opening bars of Till bloody Eulenspiegel, I can play them all effortlessly in my head.

Not just the tunes, but the harmonies too, the rhythmic patterns, everything. I find I can usually tell if a tune is in the keys of C minor, D major or E flat major, they are like recognisable colours to me, not a stunning gift, but proof surely that I am not tone deaf. But between what is there in my head and what I can express with my voice or my fingers… there falls a mighty and substantial shadow.

‘Oh, how does that tune from Bonanza go?’ someone will ask, and everybody will clutch their foreheads and screw up their faces as they try to force their memories.

But there it is, the whole Bonanza theme in my head, fully armed, orchestrated entire, perfect to the last trill and triplet, every element complete and perfect, as if played inside me by the Vienna Philharmonic, led by Isaac Stern and conducted by Furtwangler. I can hear it as clearly in my head now as I can hear the mighty roar of King’s Lynn’s rush-minute traffic heading for Swaffham along the A47.

‘Go on, then, Stephen. If you can hear it, hum it…’ Ha! That’s a joke. Hum it. I might as well try to make a car engine out of spaghetti or a well-dressed man out of Martyn Lewis.

If I try, if I really try to render it, to reproduce the concord of sweet sound that moves so perfectly in my head, the sound that emerges will shock and embarrass. I am looked at with reproach and faint disgust as if I’ve done something unpardonably tasteless and unbritish, like farting at the Queen Mother or kicking Alan Bennett in the balls.

I’ve got a voice, haven’t I? A voice that can mimic accents, a voice with a fair repertoire of impressions and impersonations. Why can’t it express musical sounds as I hear them? Why this musical constipation? Why, oh Lord, why?

And why so cross about it? I’ve covered a page with the most intemperate profanities and the most ungovernable rages on this subject, why does it upset me so much? Some people can’t walk, for Christ’s sake. Some people have severe dyslexia or cerebral palsy, and I’m whining about not having a gift for music. After all, what’s so bad about not being able to render a tune?

‘Come on, old fellow,’ the reasonable person might say, ‘we all know what the Mona Lisa looks like. We can all picture her in our heads, right down to the crazing on the varnish and the smokily shaded dimples at the side of her mouth. But which of us can doodle her? We don’t complain, we just shrug and say that we’re hopeless at drawing…, why can’t you say that about not being able to sing?’

Yeah, that’s all very well. But you see music is more than that. Music is social, music begins in dance. Music is actually about joining in. When I moan about swimming or about singing, I’m really moaning about not being able to join in. And I’m not really moaning, either. I’m trying to recapture an old misery and unravel it.

There is a scene in one of my favourite films, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 Running On Empty, where River Phoenix (at his absolute coltish best) arrives at a new school with a new name (Manfield), a new history (made up) and hair dyed newly blond (dreamy). He and his family have spent their life running from the FBI – ‘on the lam’ as they say in America. We the film audience know, but Ed Crowley who plays the music teacher at this new school does not, that Phoenix’s character is an exceptionally gifted pianist. As Phoenix is welcomed into the music class, he sinks down into his seat and Crowley plays excerpts from two musical tapes, one a Madonna dance track, the other a classical string piece.

‘What’s the difference between these two pieces of music?’ asks Crowley.

The class giggles. The difference is surely so obvious.

‘One is good and the other is bad?’ suggests a student.

What a sycophantic creep. We can see that most of the class find the Madonna much more fun than the classical.

‘That’s a matter of opinion surely,’ Crowley says to the sycophant.

Phoenix, trained his whole life not to draw attention to himself, looks around the classroom. We know that he has an answer, but what can it be?

What answer would you give, come to that, if asked to describe the difference between a Madonna track and a classical string quartet?

Ed Crowley turns to this new student.

‘Mr Manfield?’ he asks. ‘Help us out. What do you think?’

There is a fraction of a pause as Phoenix twiddles shyly with his pencil before giving this reply.

‘You can’t dance to Beethoven?’

I like that.

You can’t dance to Beethoven.

And if you can’t dance, you can’t join in.

Music from the ‘ragtime and jazz tradition’ (why do I feel that the word Tradition is taking on the greasiness of the word Community? The ‘gay community’, ‘the divided communities of Northern Ireland’ – the ‘Gospel tradition’, the ‘folk tradition’) all the way through to blues, R amp;B, rock and roll, soul, funk, reggae, pop, ska, disco, rap, hip-hop, techno, acid-house, jungle, Tesco, handbag, trance, hypno and the rest, always keeps its back-beat and its dance roots; its proper home is still the dance floor and the shared experience of adolescents swapping records in their bedrooms. It is public music, it publicly defines an age, it is still dance, now in fact, since the high days of folk-rock and hard rock, it is more than ever dance.

When two or three gather together and hear ‘Blockbuster’, ‘Blowin in the Wind’, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, ‘Come on Eileen’ or ‘Relax’, there is that other dance to be danced, the generational dance in which listeners are united in their decade, the age they were at the time of the music’s release, the ridiculous trousers they wore, the television programmes they watched, the sweets they bought, the hi-fl set-up they spent weeks arranging and rearranging in their bedroom, the girls and boys they thought of as the love-lyrics and guitar licks pounded into them.

To earlier generations ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, ‘A-tisket, a-tasket’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’ might perform the same office. Those same people who, listening to the Andrews Sisters’ ‘Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy’ will shriek, ‘Oh, that takes me back to my very first dance! My very first nylons! My very first Alvis motorcar!’ will have been young and bouncy when Britten wrote The Turn of the Screw or when Walton produced Belshazzar’s Feast, but you won’t hear them squeal with the delight of public reminiscence and the memory of first snogs and first lipsticks when the ‘Sea Interlude’ from Peter Grimes floats over the airwaves. Classical music is private art, stripped of that kind of association.

That, partly, is why classical music is also very nerdy. Its decontextualised abstractions take the classical music lover and the classical music practitioner out of the social stream and into their own heads, as do chess and maths and other nerdile pursuits. Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’ is not nerdy however, when it makes everyone brighten up and do their whispering impression of the slogan for that cassette tape TV commercial: ‘Maxell! Break the sound barrier…’

Classical music can be ‘rescued’ therefore from the void of abstract nerdaciousness by association with film, television and advertising, so that Beethoven can make you think of power generation companies, Mozart of Elvira Madigan and Trading Places, Carl Orff of Old Spice aftershave and so on, and no doubt our own contemporary composers Philip Glass, Gorecki, and, God help us all, Michael Nyman, will be similarly pressed into service by Laboratoires Gamier and Kellogg’s Frosties before the century is out. It is customary for those who like classical music to damn the advertising industry and the producers of commercials and TV programmes for vulgarising their beloved music. If you can’t hear ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, they say, without thinking of Robert Robinson and Brain of Britain, or Mozart’s ‘Musical Joke’ without Hickstead and the Horse of the Year Show galloping through your head, then you’re a philistine. Well that’s just the arse’s arse. The same snobbery is being applied now to pop music and we are starting to hear complaints about the Kinks being yoked to the Yellow Pages and John Lee Hooker turning into a lager salesman.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

Hugh Laurie made me laugh for a week early on in our friendship when he re-enacted the youthful party scene in which some nameless figure will approach a stack of records next to the hi-fl, go through them one by one and then say, his brow wrinkled with cool, sour disfavour, ‘Haven’t you got any decent music then?’

The mirror-shaded NME journalists have no idea how close they are to the opera queen, the balletomane and the symphonic reviewer for Gramophone magazine. They are sisters under the skin. Cysts under the skin more like.

The tribal belonging, the sexual association, the sense of party - these are what popular music offer, and they have always been exclusion zones for me. Partly because of my musical constipation – can’t dance, can’t join in the chorus – partly because of my sexise of physical self, feeling a fool, tall, uncoordinated and gangly.

On the other hand I’m not Bernard Levin. I am not in love with the world of classical music or set upon the intellectual, personal or aesthetic path of a private relationship with Schubert, Wagner, Brahms or Berg. Nor am I a Ned Sherrin, devoted to the musical, to Tin Pan Alley and twentieth-century song. I did well professionally first crack out of the box with a stage musical, but musicals don’t mean much to me. I am not a show girl I fear.

There is no proper way for me to express what music does to me without my sounding precious, pretentious, overemotional, sentimental, self-indulgent and absurd. No proper way therefore to express either what it has done to me over the years to know that I would never be able to make music of even the most basic kind.

I would like to dance. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

I would like to sing. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

I’d like to join in, you see.

Guilty feet, as George Michael tells us, have got no rhythm.

I can play… I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking though fingers, blood dripping from ears. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the notes as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. Playing the piano is not the same as making music.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing – they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Singing began for me; as it does for most of us, in a communal form. Whether it is ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘Little Bo-Peep’, ‘Away in a Manger’ or ‘Thank You For the Food We Eat’ that is how children first raise their voices in music. I joined in like every other child and never thought much about it until prep school and Congregational Practice.

It was the custom of prefects to patrol the pews during Cong Prac and make sure that everyone was paying attention and doing his best to join in.

One Saturday, perhaps my third or fourth week at Stouts Hill, Hemuss the music master had selected the hymn ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ for the next day’s service. We had never sung it before. Don’t know if you re familiar with it – it’s very beautiful, but not easy. Lots of unusually flattened notes and set in a subtle rhythm that seems a world away from the simple tumpty-tum of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ which is a hymn any old fool can speak-sing without drawing too much attention to himself.

We listened to Hemuss playing this new tune through on the piano a few times then, as usual, the choir had a stab on their own. Next came our turn.

I wasn’t really thinking of much, just joining in aimlessly, when I became aware of a prefect, Kirk, standing next to me. He pushed his face right up to mine, his ear against my mouth and then called out in a loud voice.

‘Sir, Fry’s mucking about!’

The boiling flood that rose to my face then is rising again now. It is of that heat and fever that can only be caused by injustice – rank, wicked, obscene, unpardonable injustice.

Hemuss stopped playing, a hundred voices trailed off into silence, a hundred faces turned to look at me.

‘On your own then, Fry,’ said Hemuss, ‘and two and three and…’

And…

… silence.

My mouth rounded in the shape of the words, a small husky breath may or may not have hissed from my throat, but the school heard nothing and saw nothing, save a crimson straining face and eyes screwed shut in shame.

‘This isn’t a game, Fry! And two, three and…’

This time I tried. I really tried. Words did emerge.

I had got no further than’… with milk and honey blest’ before, within seconds of each other, Hemuss stopped playing, Kirk hissed, ‘God you’re completely flat!’ and the whole hall exploded with hooting, braying laughter.

Since that time I have been to weddings and to the funerals of deeply loved friends and been entirely unable to do anything but mime the words of the hymns I have so desperately wanted to sing. I have felt guilty for paying nothing but literal lip service to those for whom I care. Since I have a certain facility with words and with performance I am often asked to give speeches on such occasions and this I can manage. But I don’t want that. All I have ever wanted is to be part of the chorus, to be able to join in.

Is that true?

I’ve just written it, but is it true?

An odd thing is this. I had no memory at all of the Cong Prac hooting braying incident until I went to see a hypnotist nearly twenty years later.

Oh, hello…, a hypnotist now, is it?

Actually, this was a completely practical visit to a hypnotist.

Hugh Laurie and I used to write and perform material of a more or less comedic nature in a 1980s Channel 4 comedy and music show called Saturday Live. It was the programme that notably launched Ben Elton and Harry Enfield into public fame.

‘One week Hugh and I had some sketch or other which involved an ending in which I needed to sing. Not a complicated song, some sort of R amp;B verse, nothing more. Harry Enfield was to conduct a band wearing amusing headphones and a pleasing Ronnie Hazlehurst grin and Hugh, I suppose, was to play the guitar or piano. I can’t remember why I had to sing and why Hugh couldn’t have looked after the vocal department as he usually did. Perhaps he had a mouth organ to deal with too. Hugh can sing splendidly, and play any musical instrument you throw at him, the son of a son of a son of a son of a son of a bitch.

I said to Hugh, as I say to everyone who will listen, ‘But this is mad! You know I can’t sing…’

Hugh, either out of exasperation or a cunningly laid plan to force me to wrestle my musical demons to the ground, said that I would just plain have to and that was that. I suppose this would have been a Wednesday: the programme, as the title suggested, was transmitted live on Saturday evenings.

By Thursday morning I was all but a puddle on the floor.

How could I possibly sing live on television?

The problem was, even if I spoke the lines, I wouldn’t be able to do so in rhythm. The musical intro would begin and I would be unable to come in on the right beat of the right bar. The very oddity of my performance would detract from the point of the sketch. The whole thing would become a number about a person making an appalling noise for no apparent reason.

Many people get stage fright: the moment they have to speak or act in public their voices tighten, their legs wobble and the saliva turns to alum powder in their mouths. That doesn’t happen to me with speech, only with music. Alone or in the shower, I can soap myself in strict tempo if there is music playing on my Sony Bathmaster. But if I think so much as a house-fly is eavesdropping, everything goes hot, bothered and bastardly: I lose the ability even to count the number of beats to a bar.

It occurred to me, therefore, the Thursday prior to this programme, that a hypnotist might perhaps be able somehow to cure me of this self-consciousness and allow me to kid myself, when the moment came round on Saturday in front of cameras and studio audience, that I was alone and unwitnessed.

The more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. A hypnotist couldn’t turn me into Mozart or Muddy Waters, but he might be able to remove the psychological obstacles that froze me whenever music and I met in public.

I let my fingers do the initial walking and then followed them all the way to Maddox Street, W1 where a hypnotherapist calling himself Michael Joseph had a little surgery. He came complete with a soothing manner and a most reassuring Hungarian voice. The matey, disc-jockey tones of a Paul McKenna would have sent me scuttling, but a rich middle-European accent seemed just what was required. Aside from anything else, it reminded me of my grandfather.

I explained the nature of my problem.

‘I see,’ said Mr Joseph, folding his hands together, like Sherlock Holmes at the commencement of a consultancy. ‘And what is dee… how you say?… dee cue that comes before you must start singing for diss programme?’

I had to explain that the words that immediately preceded my singing were in fact ‘Hit it, bitch…’

‘So. Your friend, he is saying “Hit it, bitch"… and next music is starting and you must be singing? Yes?’

‘Yes.’

The business of being put in a trance seemed childishly simple and disappointingly banal. No pocket watches were swung before me, no mood music or whale song played in the background, no mesmeric eyes bored into my soul. I was simply told to put my hands on my knees and to feel the palms melt down into the flesh of the knees. After a short time it became impossible to feel what was hand and what was knee, while miles away in the distance rich, sonorous Hungarian tones told me how pleasantly relaxed I was beginning to feel and how leaden and heavy my eyelids had become. It was a little like being lowered down a well, with the hypnotist’s voice as the rope that kept me from any feeling of abandonment or panic.

Once I was in what I might as well call a trance, I was asked for all memories and thoughts connected to singing. It was at this point that every detail of Kirk and the humiliation that attended my attempt at a solo ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ flooded unbidden into my mind.

So that was it! That was what had been holding me back all these years. A memory of childish public humiliation that had convinced me that I never could and never would sing in public.

The hypnotist’s voice, at once both far away and incredibly close, made the suggestion that when I heard the words ‘Hit it, bitch…’ I would feel totally relaxed and confident, as if alone in the bath, unjudged, unselfconscious and unembarrassed. I would sing the verse I had to sing on Saturday lustily, forcefully, amusingly and with all the relish, gusto and self-pleasure of a group of Welshmen in the back seat of a rugby coach. Not his simile, but that is what he meant.

I assimilated this suggestion and made a strange, echoey interior note to myself that it was all quite true and that it was absurd that Saturday’s gig had ever held any terrors for me, while my voice murmured assent.

After counting me backwards into consciousness and telling me how refreshed and splendid I would feel for the rest of the day, the hypnotist tried to sell me the inevitable Smoking, Dieting and Insomnia tapes that lined his bookshelves and sent me on my way, my wallet lighter by fifty or so pounds and my heart by a million kilos.

My performance that Saturday will never be counted alongside Marilyn Horne’s début at the Met or the release of Imagine, but I did get through it without a blush of self-consciousness or a tinge of fear.

It was only afterwards, winding down as usual in the Zanzibar, the early pre-Groucho watering-hole of choice amongst 1980s comedians, photographers, artists and the like, that it occurred to me that the bloody man had only released me from my singing burden for that one single occasion.

‘Hit it, bitch…‘ had been my trigger and this one Saturday night the moment of its activation. He had not freed me of my musical inhibitions permanently. The talisman’s power had been all used up and if I wanted to sing again in public I would have to make another sodding appointment. There and then, in the vodka and cocaine fuelled passion of the moment, I made a vow never to do so.

Singing and Stephen were not meant to be.

I am grateful to him for allowing me access to a forgotten memory, but it is not a path I have any desire to travel down again. I dare say there are other memories hidden away in the tangled briar-bush of my head, but I see no earthly reason to start hacking away there.

Music matters to me desperately, I’ve made that clear, and I could cover pages and pages with my thoughts about Wagner and Mozart and Schubert and Strauss and all the rest of it, but in this book my passion for music and my inability to express it in musical terms stand really as symbols for the sense of separateness and apartness I have always felt. In fact they stand too as a symbol of love and my inability to express love as it should be expressed.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

You see, when it comes down to it, I sometimes believe that words are all I have. I am not actually sure that I am capable of thought, let alone feeling, except through language. There is an old complaint:

How can I tell you what I think

until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?

It might have been designed for me, that question. It was years before Oscar Wilde was to shake me out of a feeling that this was a failure in me, when I read his essay, written in the form of a Platonic dialogue, The Critic As Artist:

ERNEST: Even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.

GILBERT: More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other – by language, which is the parent, not the child, of thought. (My italics, Mrs Edwards, my italics)

Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.

Swimming turned out, when I did it, to be simply the ability to move forwards in water. When I did learn to play pieces on the piano, I discovered that I did not fly or approach any penetration of the cosmos. Language, I had to confess to myself, did get me places. It got me academic success, and later financial and worldly rewards that I could never have dreamed of. I learned to use it to save me from bullying, mockery and rejection. Language went on to give me the chance to do things that I am pleased to have done. I have no reason to complain about language.

Others, however, had much to complain about in me, so far as my language was concerned.

They could not understand it.

During my first term at Stouts Hill I found it almost impossible to make myself understood. It drove me insane: I would say things perfectly plainly and always receive the same reply -‘What? Hng? What’s the boy saying?’ Was everybody deaf?

My problem was eventually diagnosed by a keen-eared master. I was speaking too quickly, far too quickly; I talked at a rate that made me unintelligible to all but myself. The words and thoughts tumbled from my mouth in an entirely pauseless profusion.

For example, ‘Sir, is it really true that there are no snakes in Ireland, sir?’ would emerge as something like ‘Sriseel-troosnayxironss?’

I heard myself plainly and was most hurt and offended when the same insulting word was thrown back at me again and again.

‘Don’t gabble, boy.’

A solution was found by the school in the endearingly Margaret Rutherford form of an extraordinary old lady bedecked with amber beads, lavender water, wispy hair and a Diploma in the Science of Elocution. Every Wednesday and Friday she drove from Cheltenham to Uley in a car that looked like a gigantic Bayswater pram and trained me for an hour in the art of Diction.

She would sit patiently at a table and say to me, dipping her head up from the table and blinking her eyelids with astonishing rapidity as she did so: ‘And turn it down! And turn it down!’

I would obediently repeat, ‘Annidern, annidern.’

‘No, dear. “And-ah, turn-ah, it-ah, down-nn!” You see?’

‘And-ah, turn-ah, it-ah, down-nn?’

‘I do not want you to say “and-ah, turn-ah”, my dear. I want you to be aware that the “d” at the end of the “and” must not run into the “t” at the beginning of “turn”, do you see? And. Say “and” for me.

‘And.’

Did she think I was a baby?

‘Good. Now “Turn”.’

‘Turn.’

‘And turn.’

‘Anturn.’

‘And-ah turn!’

‘And-ah turn!’

Poor woman, she did get there in the end. She introduced me to the pleasure of hearing a progression of plosive and dental consonants – the sheer physical delight to be derived from the sounds and the sensations of the tongue on the teeth – by teaching me the tale of that extraordinarily persevering and stupid woman called Elizabeth, whose Shrove Tuesday misadventures with rancid butter teach us all how by striving, we might turn disaster into triumph. The story went like this.

‘Betty had a bit of bitter butter and put it in her batter and made her batter bitter. Then Betty put a bit of better butter in her bitter batter and made her bitter batter better.'

From there we moved on to ‘She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish sauce shop, welcoming them in.’

The standing at the door was fine – piece of piss -but the welcoming of them in nearly turned my tonsils inside out.

‘Yes, perhaps that one is too difficult for you, dear.’

Too difficult? For me? Ha! I’d show her.

Hours I spent one weekend mastering the art of welcoming them in. At the next lesson I enunciated it like Leslie Howard on benzedrine.

‘Very nice, dear. Now I should like you to say: “She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish sauce shop, welcoming him in.”’

Aaaaagh! Disaster. I made a great run for it and fell to the ground in a welter of ‘mimming’ and ‘imimming’, my larynx as tangled as a plate of spaghetti.

‘You see, my dear, I am not interested in you learning these sentences as if they were tongue twisters. I want you to try and feel how to talk. I want you to allow the words to come one after the other. I think you like to compress them all into one bunch. Your mind races ahead of your tongue. I would like your tongue to see the words ahead, each one a little flower on the wayside, that can only be picked up as you pass. Don’t try to snatch at a flower before you have reached it.’

I wriggled in my seat at the soppiness of the image, but it did clarify things for me. Before long I was even able to tell the strange story of the blacksmith’s mother who wants to know just what her son thinks he’s up to with that set of saucepans:

‘Are you copper-bottoming ‘em, my man?’

‘No. I’m aluminiuming ‘em, mum.’

I was able to say: the seething sea ceaseth, and thus sufficeth us, and able to imagine an imaginary menagerie manager, managing an imaginary menagerie.

But many an anemone has an enemy, and her enemy was pace.

‘This is not a fifty-yard dash, my dear. I want you to love every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth. Every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth. What is it that I want you to love?’

‘Ev-ery single movement of my tongue and lips and teeth.’

‘Ev’ry, dear, not ev-ery. We do not wish, after all, to sound foreign. But you said there “tongue and lips and teeth”. A few weeks ago you would have said “tung-nips-n-teeth”, wouldn’t you?’

I nodded.

‘And now you know our wonderful secret. How beautiful it is to hear every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth.’

We moved on from John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ to Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Blow Bugle Blow’ and within a term I was comprehensible to all. Like those foreigners in adventure stories who would come out with Caramba! Zut! and Himmel! when excited, I was still likely to revert to rushing streams of Stephenese at moments of high passion, but essentially I was cured. But something wonderful and new had happened to me, something much more glorious than simply being understood. I had discovered the beauty of speech. Suddenly I had an endless supply of toys: words. Meaningless phatic utterance for its own sake would become my equivalent of a Winnie the Pooh hum, my music. In the holidays I would torment my poor mother for hours in the car by saying over and over again ‘My name is Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton.

Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton. Snetterton. Snetterton. Snetterton.’ Ignoring the gender implications of such a name choice, which are not our concern just now, these were the only songs that I could sing. It was the journey from consonant to vowel, the tripping rhythm, the texture that delighted me. As others get tunes on their brain, I get words or phrases on the brain. I will awaken, for example, with the sentence, ‘Hoversmack tender estimate’ on my lips. I will say it in the shower, while I wait for the kettle to boil, and as I open the morning post. Sometimes it will be with me all day.

I was immensely put out, incidentally, when a few years later Monty Python used the name Vince Snetterton in one of their sketches. Snetterton is a village in Norfolk, and I felt that they had stolen it from me. From that day forward, Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton ceased to be.

Language was something more than power then, it was more than my only resource in a world of tribal shouts and athleticism and them, the swimmers and singers, it was also a private gem collection, a sweet shop, a treasure chest.

But in a culture like ours, language is exclusive, not inclusive. Those on easy terms with words are distrusted. I was always encouraged to believe that cleverness and elegance with words obscured and twisted decent truth: Britain’s idea of a golden mean was (and still is) healthy inarticulacy. Mean, certainly – but golden? Leaden, I think. To the healthy English mind (a phenomenon we will dwell on later) there is something intellectually spivvy, something flash, something jewy about verbal facility. George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, Frederic Raphael, Will Self, Ben

Elton even…, how often that damning word clever is attached to them, hurled at them like an inky dart by the snowy-haired, lobster-faced, Garrick Club buffoons of the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator.

As usual, I scamper ahead of myself.