Moab Is My Washpot

Moab Is My Washpot is the first volume of Stephen Fry's autobiography, covering his life from early childhood through adolescence and ending just before he enters Cambridge University. The memoir traces his trajectory through a series of English boarding schools, a descent into compulsive theft and fraud, weeks in a young offenders' prison, and an improbable academic redemption.

The book opens in the mid-1960s with Fry, aged eight, comforting a terrified new boy named Bunce on the train to Stouts Hill Preparatory School in Gloucestershire. Fry lent Bunce a handkerchief and a comic, promising to look after him, but this tenderness was undercut when an older boy displaced Fry from his seat, revealing that Fry held no real status among his peers. The episode establishes two qualities that define Fry throughout the memoir: an instinct for kindness and performance, and an acute awareness of his own powerlessness.

Fry explains how he came to boarding school. His parents visited the scholastic agency Gabbitas & Thring in London to find a prep school for Stephen and his older brother, Roger. In the English system, prep schools prepare boys for entrance to the prestigious private secondary schools known as public schools. Since neither boy could sing, the agency recommended Stouts Hill. Before arriving there, Fry spent a term at Cawston Primary School in Norfolk, where two episodes foreshadow what is to come. Asked to deliver spelling test results to Mr. Kett's classroom of older pupils, he hid the paper in a girl's Wellington boot and lied fluently to both teachers. He identifies this as the start of a lifelong pattern: lying not for advantage but for the private thrill of deception. A dead mole he brought in for the nature table later decayed and burst on his sandals, planting in him an urge not to exist: not a wish to die but a sense that the world was not made for him.

At Stouts Hill, Fry developed asthma and broke his arm, triggering intense physical self-consciousness. His inability to swim marked him with humiliating red trunks while competent swimmers wore blue. At Congregational Practice, the school's hymn assembly, a prefect with authority over younger boys forced Fry to sing solo; the hall erupted in laughter, permanently destroying his ability to sing in public. Fry reflects on music as emblematic of what he calls a lifelong inability to "join in" (126). He sees this separateness as both his curse and the engine of his creativity, since it drove him toward language, literature, and comedy. Elocution lessons cured his habit of speaking so rapidly he was unintelligible, and words became his substitute for music.

His capacity for deception deepened alongside his verbal gifts. He stole money from classmates and sweets from a secret drawer in headmaster A. J. Cromie's desk. Cromie predicted Fry would go "very, very far. Whether to the Palace of Westminster or to Wormwood Scrubs I can't quite tell" (112). The cruelest episode came when the head boy, the school's senior student leader, caught Fry with stolen sweets. Facing expulsion, Fry manipulated the loyal Bunce into taking the blame. Cromie saw through the scheme and beat Fry with eight strokes, calling the act vile and cowardly. Fry left Stouts Hill at twelve without having been made a prefect or selected for any team.

In September 1970, aged thirteen, Fry arrived at Uppingham School, a public school in Rutland. He frames his experience through the concept of "healthiness," a value encoding English middle-class ideals of physical vigor, conformity, and emotional restraint. Drawing on E. M. Forster's essay "Notes on the English Character," he describes the public school product as possessing well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts. He identifies himself as someone marked as unhealthy, though he admits he was never fully the sensitive outsider he liked to picture himself as.

Everything changed at the start of his second year when Fry saw a boy whose gait and golden hair caused an instantaneous transformation in him. Through the boy's older brother Nick Osborne, a classmate, Fry learned his name: Matthew Osborne. He insists his feelings were sacred, a longing for beauty entirely distinct from lust. The love drove his behavior to new extremes. His stealing intensified, and when Matron noticed money disappearing from her handbag, she set a trap by hiding in a cupboard. Fry reached in and she stepped out. He was suspended and sent home in disgrace. A psychiatrist diagnosed "developmental delay." During this enforced period, Fry's father, a brilliant physicist and inventor, tutored him in mathematics from first principles. Fry experienced a revelation: algebra was "metonym and metaphor, substitution, transferral, analogy, allegory: it is poetry" (278). The breakthrough enabled him to pass his O levels, the standard British secondary-school examinations, and transformed his relationship with his father.

Back at Uppingham for the sixth form, the final years of secondary school, Fry studied under the inspiring English teacher Rory Stuart. He experienced one brief sexual encounter with Matthew, an episode never repeated or discussed. Given permission for a weekend in London, Fry and his friend Jo Wood instead watched A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, and Cabaret repeatedly for four days. On their return, Fry was instantly expelled.

A period of drift followed. At the Paston School, Fry refused to engage and was asked to leave. His parents enrolled him at the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology for A levels, the advanced examinations required for university entry. During his second year, everything he cared about was growing away from him. He saw photographs of Matthew and realized with devastating finality that the only Matthew who truly existed now existed only in his mind. After an argument with his father, he swallowed a large quantity of pills. His brother Roger called an ambulance; the drug mixture induced vomiting that saved his life. He failed all his A levels.

Fry then embarked on a weeks-long journey across England fueled by stolen credit cards, retracing the geography of his childhood. On his eighteenth birthday, he sat alone in a dismal hotel and made himself drunk for the first time. At a hotel in Swindon, a receptionist noticed the gap between his smart suit and his battered shoes and alerted the police. Fry felt "blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy" at his arrest: "At last I was free" (334).

He spent seven weeks on remand at Pucklechurch, a young offenders' prison near Bristol, adapting with ease because the environment resembled boarding school. His mother visited and pushed under the glass partition a bundle of Times crosswords, each puzzle neatly clipped with the previous day's answers scissored out. The sight of those careful cuts nearly broke him. At trial, the court sentenced him to two years' probation.

On the final enrollment day at Norwich City College, Fry declared he would earn top grades, take the Cambridge entrance exam independently, and win a scholarship to Queens' College. In the summer of 1976, he achieved the promised results. His mother telephoned a café to read him the telegram: "Congratulations stop Awarded Scholarship Queens' College stop Senior Tutor" (359). Two days later, Fry walked to the brass plaque of Gabbitas & Thring, the same agency his parents had visited when he was four, and applied for a position as a prep school master to fill the gap before Cambridge. He reflects that words, which had always been all he had, were at last getting him places.