up with my friend Jo Wood. To cut a long (well it’s fairly long in Moab is My Washpot ) story short, some credit cards fell into my possession. Which is to say that I stole them. The short arm of the law had been reaching out feebly for three months or so before I was finally apprehended at the Hotel Wiltshire in Swindon, which stood, conveniently, absolutely opposite the police station.
I refused to give my name. My poor old mother and father had been through enough, surely? A sly officer, who unbeknownst to me had been going through my luggage in another room, returned and slowly whispered names that had been written on the flyleaves of the books I had been lugging around with me during my adventures. A lot of them had been stolen from libraries, bookshops or friends’ shelves, of course, and had all kinds of names scrawled on their title pages. Eventually, as I was being questioned by the detective sergeant in the interview room, I heard ‘Stephen Fry?’ being said in a low voice behind me. I had swung round and answered ‘Yes?’ before I was aware of the trap I had fallen into. I was, of course, on a missing persons list, and it was not long before my parents had sorted out a solicitor – my godmother’s husband, who lived not far away. The game was up, and the goose cooked.
Some months of custody followed in the delightfully named Pucklechurch Prison. I had declined bail (not that I think my parents would have offered it anyway) and stayed at Pucklechurch for two weeks before another magistrate’s appearance in Swindon, at which I was expected to plead. I announced my unquestionable guilt and was sent back on remand while the police took an embarrassingly long time to collect and assimilate the paperwork from the seven counties in which I had fraudulently used the credit cards. Back inside now as a con, as opposed to a non-con, the colour of my uniform changed and I was set to work.
The time passed easily and pleasantly enough. I had spent fourteen years in the private school system for heaven’s sake: this was nothing. Other inmates at this young offenders institution, all tougher and mostly older than me, sobbed themselves to sleep. They had never spent a night away from home before.
At my trial, a dear friend of my parents, the imposing Sir Oliver Popplewell, then a noted QC, now a retired judge, represented me. I had worried that his distinguished name and reputation might rile the magistrates, a metropolitan sledgehammer sent to crack a provincial nut could seem offensive to their amour propre . I was also concerned that they might have little patience with one who, unlike most young offenders, had been given every opportunity and simply pissed his good fortune against the wall each time. I was guiltily stricken myself by the obvious difference in the ‘life chances’, as we would say now, of most of my luckless fellows back at Pucklechurch, who had been born into backgrounds of poverty, ignorance, squalor and abuse.
The magisterial bench, however, concluded that, since I had a solid family background (and perhaps came from the same class as them, I crimson at the thought), there was no need for a prison sentence, which would in those days and at my age have taken the form of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s ‘short sharp shock’, the notorious detention centre, which was all the rage at the time. I had been dreading this: fellow cons at Pucklechurch told me it was all about running around and gym and weights and eating standing up and running about again like someone in Olympic training. DC provided the world with marvellously fit villains, ideal candidates for posts like nightclub bouncers and drug dealers’ debt enforcers. Fortunately for me, taking into account the months I had already served (plus the other possible reasons I have indicated) I found myself sentenced to two years’ probation in the care of my parents.
We move then from the image of the wretch lying on the stone flags of the
I refused to give my name. My poor old mother and father had been through enough, surely? A sly officer, who unbeknownst to me had been going through my luggage in another room, returned and slowly whispered names that had been written on the flyleaves of the books I had been lugging around with me during my adventures. A lot of them had been stolen from libraries, bookshops or friends’ shelves, of course, and had all kinds of names scrawled on their title pages. Eventually, as I was being questioned by the detective sergeant in the interview room, I heard ‘Stephen Fry?’ being said in a low voice behind me. I had swung round and answered ‘Yes?’ before I was aware of the trap I had fallen into. I was, of course, on a missing persons list, and it was not long before my parents had sorted out a solicitor – my godmother’s husband, who lived not far away. The game was up, and the goose cooked.
Some months of custody followed in the delightfully named Pucklechurch Prison. I had declined bail (not that I think my parents would have offered it anyway) and stayed at Pucklechurch for two weeks before another magistrate’s appearance in Swindon, at which I was expected to plead. I announced my unquestionable guilt and was sent back on remand while the police took an embarrassingly long time to collect and assimilate the paperwork from the seven counties in which I had fraudulently used the credit cards. Back inside now as a con, as opposed to a non-con, the colour of my uniform changed and I was set to work.
The time passed easily and pleasantly enough. I had spent fourteen years in the private school system for heaven’s sake: this was nothing. Other inmates at this young offenders institution, all tougher and mostly older than me, sobbed themselves to sleep. They had never spent a night away from home before.
At my trial, a dear friend of my parents, the imposing Sir Oliver Popplewell, then a noted QC, now a retired judge, represented me. I had worried that his distinguished name and reputation might rile the magistrates, a metropolitan sledgehammer sent to crack a provincial nut could seem offensive to their amour propre . I was also concerned that they might have little patience with one who, unlike most young offenders, had been given every opportunity and simply pissed his good fortune against the wall each time. I was guiltily stricken myself by the obvious difference in the ‘life chances’, as we would say now, of most of my luckless fellows back at Pucklechurch, who had been born into backgrounds of poverty, ignorance, squalor and abuse.
The magisterial bench, however, concluded that, since I had a solid family background (and perhaps came from the same class as them, I crimson at the thought), there was no need for a prison sentence, which would in those days and at my age have taken the form of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s ‘short sharp shock’, the notorious detention centre, which was all the rage at the time. I had been dreading this: fellow cons at Pucklechurch told me it was all about running around and gym and weights and eating standing up and running about again like someone in Olympic training. DC provided the world with marvellously fit villains, ideal candidates for posts like nightclub bouncers and drug dealers’ debt enforcers. Fortunately for me, taking into account the months I had already served (plus the other possible reasons I have indicated) I found myself sentenced to two years’ probation in the care of my parents.
We move then from the image of the wretch lying on the stone flags of the
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