The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry Read Free Book Online Page A

striking down, I had dropped the shoe on to him it would have hurt more. It might as well have been a tissue as a plimsoll. It had been not a whack but a feeble tap.
    I drop into the armchair, shaking all over. Never again. Never again would I threaten corporal punishment.
    And never again did I.
    *

    The tall, mostly humorous pipe-smoking oddity who taught all manner of subjects, refereed junior matches and made himself useful to staff and boys as much as he could enjoyed himself at Cundall. And Cundall seemed to like him, for when he said goodbye at the end of the summer term the headmaster asked if he might be able to come back for the next term.
    ‘But that’s when I start at Cambridge.’
    ‘Michaelmas term at Cambridge doesn’t begin till October. Our term starts a month earlier.’
    And so for the next two years I came back to Cundall and taught either side of the short Cambridge terms. In the summer I drove the tractor that pulled the gang-mower around the cricket square and I umpired cricket matches. In the winter months I took the boys for walks and on rainy Sundays I compiled quizzes and competitions to keep them occupied.
    There was no question in my mind that teaching would be my career. It was my true calling and one that sounded in my head as loud as any school bell. Whether I would teach in a place like Cundall, at university level or somewhere in between only my time at Cambridge would decide. If I had the intellectual heft to make it as an academic then perhaps I would make scholarship my life. I imagined that Shakespearean studies would be my
métier
and tweed and briar my constant accoutrements.
    It was a pleasant enough prospect. I was over that terrible sugar addiction and the madness and disruption it had caused. It had been replaced by a woody, tweedy, old-fashioned masculine dependency which, so long as the supply was there, did not modify mood or behaviour and which also served to remind me that I was now a mature,sober, rational adult. I made no allowance for love, sex or the body of course. I was fire and air – in other words, smoke: my other elements, like Cleopatra, I gave to baser life …
    Ten years later, in 1988, I met one of Britain’s greatest smokers. He was at the time a premier drinker too.
    ‘I come,’ he told Rik Mayall, John Gordon Sinclair, John Sessions, Sarah Berger, Paul Mooney and me as we gathered for the first rehearsal of his play
The Common Pursuit
, ‘from the booze and fags generation.’ He slumped his shoulders down ruefully to emphasize that this was an ineluctable fact in whose remorseless face he was powerless.
    Simon Gray was then, I realize with a slight shudder, exactly the age I am as I write this now. He had, like his favourite actor Alan Bates, a full flop of black hair, but his physique was less solid. Years of drinking had bulged his tummy into a gentle pot while simultaneously wasting his lower half, so that he was spindle-shanked and all but arseless. I almost never saw him without a cigarette in one hand and a drinking receptacle in the other. In the mornings he gulped down champagne, which in his eyes barely counted as alcohol. From lunchtime onwards he sipped at endless coffee mugs or plastic cups of Glenfiddich whisky. It was the first time I had been at close quarters with an authentic alcoholic. Some of my generation drank more than was good for them and would go on to develop into the real thing, but for the moment youth was on their side.
    Unusually for the professional theatre, rehearsals for
The Common Pursuit
would begin after lunch. We all decided early on that this was because Simon, who was directing theproduction, was not able to function before that time. In fact, as I found out, it was because he spent the mornings at his desk. No matter how much he drank, he always seemed able to put in plenty of daily writing hours as a playwright and diarist. Just occasionally I caught sight of him early in the morning, before his first champagne.