by Roald Dahl
After breakfast, we collected our bathing things and the whole party, all ten of us, would pile into our boat.
Everyone has some sort of a boat in Norway. Nobody sits around in front of the hotel. Nor does anyone sit on the beach because there aren’t any beaches to sit on. In the early days, we had only a row-boat, but a very fine one it was. It carried all of us easily, with places for two rowers. My mother took one pair of oars and my fairly ancient half-brother took the other, and off we would go.
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Not only was Louis Dahl an expert rower but, by accident, he also gave his half-brother Roald an idea for the name of the world’s most famous chocolate-maker. Had Louis not invented a special boomerang – called a Skilly Wonka – then Roald may have ended up calling Willy Wonka something entirely different.
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Louis Dahl.
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My mother and the half-brother (he was somewhere around eighteen then) were expert rowers. They kept in perfect time and the oars went click-click, click-click in their wooden rowlocks, and the rowers never paused once during the long forty-minute journey. The rest of us sat in the boat trailing our fingers in the clear water and looking for jellyfish. We skimmed across the sound and went whizzing through narrow channels with rocky islands on either side, heading as always for a very secret tiny patch of sand on a distant island that only we knew about. In the early days we needed a place like this where we could paddle and play about because my youngest sister was only one, the next sister was three and I was four. The rocks and the deep water were no good to us.
Every day, for several summers, that tiny secret sand-patch on that tiny secret island was our regular destination. We would stay there for three or four hours, messing about in the water and in the rockpools and getting extraordinarily sunburnt.
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This boat was known to the family as ‘The Hard Black Stinker’.
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Roald Dahl’s Norway scrapbook about other islands.
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In later years, when we were all a little older and could swim, the daily routine became different. By then, my mother had acquired a motor-boat, a small and not very seaworthy white wooden vessel which sat far too low in the water and was powered by an unreliable one-cylinder engine. The fairly ancient half-brother was the only one who could make the engine go at all. It was extremely difficult to start, and he always had to unscrew the sparking-plug and pour petrol into the cylinder. Then he swung a flywheel round and round, and with a bit of luck, after a lot of coughing and spluttering, the thing would finally get going.
When we first acquired the motor-boat, my youngest sister was four and I was seven, and by then all of us had learnt to swim. The exciting new boat made it possible for us to go much farther afield, and every day we would travel far out into the fjord, hunting for a different island. There were hundreds of them to choose from. Some were very small, no more than thirty yards long. Others were quite large, maybe half a mile in length. It was wonderful to have such a choice of places, and it was terrific fun to explore each island before we went swimming off the rocks. There were the wooden skeletons of shipwrecked boats on those islands, and big white bones (were they human bones?), and wild raspberries, and mussels clinging to the rocks, and some of the islands had shaggy long-haired goats on them, and even sheep.
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Postcard of islands off Tjöme.
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Now and again, when we were out in the open water beyond the chain of islands, the sea became very rough, and that was when my mother enjoyed herself most. Nobody, not even the tiny children, bothered with lifebelts in those days. We would cling to the sides of our funny little white motor-boat, driving through mountainous white-capped waves and getting drenched to the skin, while my mother calmly handled the tiller. There were times, I promise you, when the waves were so high that as we slid down into a trough the whole world disappeared from sight. Then up and up the little boat would climb, standing almost vertically on its tail, until we reached the crest of the next wave, and then it was like being on top of a foaming mountain. It requires great skill to handle a small boat in seas like these. The thing can easily capsize or be swamped if the bows do not meet the great combing breakers at just the right angle. But my mother knew exactly how to do it, and we were never afraid. We loved every minute of it, all of us except for our long-suffering Nanny, who would bury her face in her hands and call aloud upon the Lord to save her soul.
In the early evenings we nearly always went out fishing. We collected mussels from the rocks for bait, then we got into either the row-boat or the motor-boat and pushed off to drop anchor later in some likely spot. The water was very deep and often we had to let out two hundred feet of line before we touched bottom. We would sit silent and tense, waiting for a bite, and it always amazed me how even a little nibble at the end of that long line would be transmitted to one’s fingers. ‘A bite!’ someone would shout, jerking the line. ‘I’ve got him! It’s a big one! It’s a whopper!’ And then came the thrill of hauling in the line hand over hand and peering over the side into the clear water to see how big the fish really was as he neared the surface. Cod, whiting, haddock and mackerel, we caught them all and bore them back triumphantly to the hotel kitchen where the cheery fat woman who did the cooking promised to get them ready for our supper.
I tell you, my friends, those were the days.
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The Mussel Collectors – the Dahl children and their cousins. (Roald Dahl is second from right.)
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Fishing on the Oslofjord.
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A visit to the doctor
I have only one unpleasant memory of the summer holidays in Norway. We were in the grandparents’ house in Oslo and my mother said to me, ‘We are going to the doctor this afternoon. He wants to look at your nose and mouth.’
I think I was eight at the time. ‘What’s wrong with my nose and mouth?’ I asked.
‘Nothing much,’ my mother said. ‘But I think you’ve got adenoids.’
‘What are they?’ I asked her.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’
I held my mother’s hand as we walked to the doctor’s house. It took us about half an hour. There was a kind of dentist’s chair in the surgery and I was lifted into it. The doctor had a round mirror strapped to his forehead and he peered up my nose and into my mouth. He then took my mother aside and they held a whispered conversation. I saw my mother looking rather grim, but she nodded.
The doctor now put some water to boil in an aluminium mug over a gas flame, and into the boiling water he placed a long thin shiny steel instrument. I sat there watching the steam coming off the boiling water. I was not in the least apprehensive. I was too young to realize that something out of the ordinary was going to happen.
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Roald Dahl aged eight.
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Then a nurse dressed in white came in. She was carrying a red rubber apron and a curved white enamel bowl. She put the apron over the front of my body and tied it around my neck. It was far too big. Then she held the enamel bowl under my chin. The curve of the bowl fitted perfectly against the curve of my chest.
The doctor was bending over me. In his hand he held that long shiny steel instrument. He held it right in front of my face, and to this day I can still describe it perfectly. It was about the thickness and length of a pencil, and like most pencils it had a lot of sides to it. Toward the end, the metal became much thinner, and at the very end of the thin bit of metal there was a tiny blade set at an angle. The blade wasn’t more than a centimetre long, very small, very sharp and very shiny.
‘Open your mouth,’ the doctor said, speaking Norwegian.
I refused. I thought he was going to do something to my teeth, and everything anyone had ever done to my teeth had been painful.
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‘It won’t take two seconds,’ the doctor said. He spoke gently, and I was seduced by his voice. Like an ass, I opened my mouth.
The tiny blade flashed in the bright light and disappeared into my mouth. It went high up into the roof of my mouth, and the hand that held the blade gave four or five very quick little twists and the next moment, out of my mouth into the basin came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood.
I was too shocked and outraged to do anything but yelp. I was horrified by the huge red lumps that had fallen out of my mouth into the white basin and my first thought was that the doctor had cut out the whole of the middle of my head.
‘Those were your adenoids,’ I heard the doctor saying.
I sat there gasping. The roof of my mouth seemed to be on fire. I grabbed my mother’s hand and held on to it tight. I couldn’t believe that anyone would do this to me.
‘Stay where you are,’ the doctor said. ‘You’ll be all right in a minute.’
Blood was still coming out of my mouth and dripping into the basin the nurse was holding. ‘Spit it all out,’ she said, ‘there’s a good boy.’
‘You’ll be able to breathe much better through your nose after this,’ the doctor said.
The nurse wiped my lips and washed my face with a wet flannel. Then they lifted me out of the chair and stood me on my feet. I felt a bit groggy.
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Adenoids are small lumps of tissue found at the back of the throat, just above the tonsils. They help fight infection and protect the body from bacteria and viruses. But did you know that only children have adenoids? They begin to shrink when a child is about seven years old and will have completely vanished by the time they’re grown up. By then, the body has developed much more effective ways of battling infections and viruses.
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‘We’ll get you home,’ my mother said, taking my hand. Down the stairs we went and on to the street. We started walking. I said walking. No trolley-car or taxi. We walked the full half-hour journey back to my grandparents’ house, and when we arrived at last, I can remember as clearly as anything my grandmother saying, ‘Let him sit down in that chair and rest for a while. After all, he’s had an operation.’
Someone placed a chair for me beside my grandmother’s armchair, and I sat down. My grandmother reached over and covered one of my hands in both of hers. ‘That won’t be the last time you’ll go to a doctor in your life,’ she said. ‘And with a bit of luck, they won’t do you too much harm.’
That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today.
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It wasn’t the last time poor Roald Dahl had to visit a doctor. He had no less than SIX operations on his spine, two hip replacements and an emergency operation for a burst appendix. But despite these – and many more – medical problems, he said he would have wanted to be a doctor if he had not been a writer.
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The Last Lap
For four weeks every summer we stayed in that lovely white hotel on the island of Tjöme. But that was never the whole of the holiday. Our indefatigable mother was not nearly finished yet. Her plan was always that we should have those four weeks by the sea during August and then, as the weather began to get cooler, we would all move up into the mountains for another ten days before finally returning home.
After ten days in our mountain hotel, we took the train, not back to Oslo, but onward to Bergen on the west coast, and from there we caught a boat to Newcastle. Then Newcastle to London and London to home.
I don’t think we knew how lucky we were to have a holiday like that every summer of our growing-up lives. I don’t think we knew either how lucky we were to have a mother who gave us such a lovely time every year.
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First day
In September 1925, when I was just nine, I set out on the first great adventure of my life – boarding-school. My mother had chosen for me a Prep School in a part of England which was as near as it could possibly be to our home in South Wales, and it was called St Peter’s. The full postal address was St Peter’s School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.
Weston-super-Mare is a slightly seedy seaside resort with a vast sandy beach, a tremendous long pier, an esplanade running along the sea-front, a clutter of hotels and boarding-houses, and about ten thousand little shops selling buckets and spades and sticks of rock and ice-creams. It lies almost directly across the Bristol Channel from Cardiff, and on a clear day you can stand on the esplanade at Weston and look across the fifteen or so miles of water and see the coast of Wales lying pale and milky on the horizon.
In those days the easiest way to travel from Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare was by boat. Those boats were beautiful. They were paddle-steamers, with gigantic swishing paddle-wheels on their flanks, and the wheels made the most terrific noise as they sloshed and churned through the water.
Photograph©francisfrith.com
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Weston-super-Mare.
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Now the easiest way to travel from Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare is over the magnificent Severn Bridge. Opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966, it was forty-one years too late for Roald Dahl.
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On the first day of my first term I set out by taxi in the afternoon with my mother to catch the paddle-steamer from Cardiff Docks to Weston-super-Mare. Every piece of clothing I wore was brand new and had my name on it. I wore black shoes, grey woollen stockings with blue turnovers, grey flannel shorts, a grey shirt, a red tie, a grey flannel blazer with the blue school crest on the breast pocket and a grey school cap with the same crest just above the peak. Into the taxi that was taking us to the docks went my brand new trunk and my brand new tuck-box, and both had R. DAHL painted on them in black.
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A preparatory school – prep school for short – is a fee-paying school that prepares children for public school. Roald Dahl went to prep school between the ages of nine and thirteen. Nothing had prepared him for this.
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A tuck-box is a small pinewood trunk which is very strongly made, and no boy has ever gone as a boarder to an English Prep School without one. It is his own secret store-house, as secret as a lady’s handbag, and there is an unwritten law that no other boy, no teacher, not even the Headmaster himself has the right to pry into the contents of your tuck-box. The owner has the key in his pocket and that is where it stays. At St Peter’s, the tuck-boxes were ranged shoulder to shoulder all around the four walls of the changing-room and your own tuck-box stood directly below the peg on which you hung your games clothes. A tuck-box, as the name implies, is a box in which you store your tuck. At Prep School in those days, a parcel of tuck was sent once a week by anxious mothers to their ravenous little sons, and an average tuck-box would probably contain, at almost any time, half a home-made currant cake, a packet of squashed-fly biscuits, a couple of oranges, an apple, a banana, a pot of strawberry jam or Marmite, a bar of chocolate, a bag of Liquorice Allsorts and a tin of Bassett’s lemonade powder. An English school in those days was purely a money-making business owned and operated by the Headmaster. It suited him, therefore, to give the boys as little food as possible himself and to encourage the parents in various cunning ways to feed their offspring by parcel-post from home.
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Lemonade powder was made of sugar and tartaric acid and flavoured with essential oil of lemons. When mixed with water, it made a drink that was very different from the fizzy lemonade sold today. But to young Roald it probably tasted great.
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‘By all means, my dear Mrs Dahl, do send your boy some little treats now and again,’ he would sa
y. ‘Perhaps a few oranges and apples once a week’ – fruit was very expensive – ‘and a nice currant cake, a large currant cake perhaps because small boys have large appetites, do they not, ha-ha-ha … Yes, yes, as often as you like. More than once a week if you wish … Of course he’ll be getting plenty of good food here, the best there is, but it never tastes quite the same as home cooking, does it? I’m sure you wouldn’t want him to be the only one who doesn’t get a lovely parcel from home every week.’