Читать книгу Stephen Fry in America - Stephen Fry, Stephen (Audiobook Narrator) Fry - Страница 25

I spend a morning in the city of Boston, ‘Cradle of the Revolution’, filming around the docks where the Boston Tea Party took place and searching (in vain) for Paul Revere’s house. Revere was the patriot and hero whose midnight ride from Boston to Lexington shouting ‘The British are coming!’ is still celebrated in legend and song. The apparent address of his house defeats the taxi’s satellite navigation system and after driving around Boston’s Chinatown asking puzzled citizens for ‘the Revere House’ I find myself in desperate need of a cup of tea.

It so happens that I have heard of a place across the water in Harvard Yard where, almost uniquely in America, a proper cup of tea can be had. If you can pronounce ‘Harvard Yard’ the way the locals do, you can speak Bostonian. It’s more than I can manage – I contrive always to sound Australian when I try. The ‘a’s are almost as short as in ‘cat’, even though they are followed by ‘r’s. Impossible.

Harvard University is America’s Cambridge. So much so that the town it is in, over the water from Boston, is actually called Cambridge.

Those who like good old-fashioned English ‘afternoon tea’, with proper sandwiches and proper cakes, and tea that isn’t the etiolated issue of a bag dangled in warm water, those who like to meet pert young students and trim graduates and twinkly, stylish professors, all congregate gratefully at the weekly teas held by Professor Peter Gomes, theologian, preacher and a natural leader of Harvard society. He dresses like a character from the pages of his favourite author. When asked to offer his list of the Hundred Best Novels in the English Language for one of those millennial surveys in 1999 he lamented, ‘But any such list will always be four short! P.G. Wodehouse only wrote ninety-six books.’

Black, gay, intensely charming, a connoisseur and an anglophile, Gomes is not what you expect of a Baptist minister, a Baptist minister furthermore who (though now a Democrat) was something of a chaplain to the Republican Party, having led prayers at the inaugurations of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr.

‘I was a Republican because my mother was a Republican and her mother before her. That nice President Lincoln who freed the slaves was a Republican and our family chose not to forget that fact.’

The downstairs lavatory in his beautifully furnished house is filled with portraits of Queen Victoria at various stages of her life, from young princess to elderly widow. I emerge from it murmuring praise.

‘Ah, you like my Victoria Station!’ beams Gomes, ‘I’m so happy.’

‘You’re obviously gay,’ I say to him. ‘But some people might be surprised to know that you are also openly black … no, hang on, I’ve got that the wrong way round.’

He bellows with laughter. ‘No, you got it entirely right, you naughty man.’

‘Your command of language, your love of ornament, literature and social style … is that regarded by some as a kind of betrayal?’

‘Someone once called me an Afro-Saxon,’ he says. ‘It was meant as an insult, but I take it as a compliment.’

I am sorry to leave the elegance and charm of Harvard, but there is plenty more elegance and charm awaiting me up ahead in Rhode Island.