by Roald Dahl
* * *
Things you might not know about chamber-pots … They were usually ceramic. They often had a lid. They were also known as thunder pots, jordans, pos and potties.
* * *
The first miserable homesick night at St Peter’s, when I curled up in bed and the lights were put out, I could think of nothing but our house at home and my mother and my sisters. Where were they? I asked myself. In which direction from where I was lying was Llandaff? I began to work it out and it wasn’t difficult to do this because I had the Bristol Channel to help me. If I looked out of the dormitory window I could see the Channel itself, and the big city of Cardiff with Llandaff alongside it lay almost directly across the water but slightly to the north. Therefore, if I turned towards the window I would be facing home. I wriggled round in my bed and faced my home and my family.
From then on, during all the time I was at St Peter’s, I never went to sleep with my back to my family. Different beds in different dormitories required the working out of new directions, but the Bristol Channel was always my guide and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. Never once did I go to sleep looking away from my family. It was a great comfort to do this.
* * *
As the crow flies, Roald Dahl’s school was only 15 miles from his home in Llandaff. But it must have seemed much further away to a homesick boy.
* * *
There was a boy in our dormitory during my first term called Tweedie, who one night started snoring soon after he had gone to sleep.
‘Who’s that talking?’ cried the Matron, bursting in. My own bed was close to the door, and I remember looking up at her from my pillow and seeing her standing there silhouetted against the light from the corridor and thinking how truly frightening she looked. I think it was her enormous bosom that scared me most of all. My eyes were riveted to it, and to me it was like a battering-ram or the bows of an icebreaker or maybe a couple of high-explosive bombs.
‘Own up!’ she cried. ‘Who was talking?’
We lay there in silence. Then Tweedie, who was lying fast asleep on his back with his mouth open, gave another snore.
The Matron stared at Tweedie. ‘Snoring is a disgusting habit,’ she said. ‘Only the lower classes do it. We shall have to teach him a lesson.’
She didn’t switch on the light, but she advanced into the room and picked up a cake of soap from the nearest basin. The bare electric bulb in the corridor illuminated the whole dormitory in a pale creamy glow.
None of us dared to sit up in bed, but all eyes were on the Matron now, watching to see what she was going to do next. She always had a pair of scissors hanging by a white tape from her waist, and with this she began shaving thin slivers of soap into the palm of one hand. Then she went over to where the wretched Tweedie lay and very carefully she dropped these little soap-flakes into his open mouth. She had a whole handful of them and I thought she was never going to stop.
What on earth is going to happen? I wondered. Would Tweedie choke? Would he strangle? Might his throat get blocked up completely? Was she going to kill him?
The Matron stepped back a couple of paces and folded her arms across, or rather underneath, her massive chest.
Nothing happened. Tweedie kept right on snoring.
Then suddenly he began to gurgle and white bubbles appeared around his lips. The bubbles grew and grew until in the end his whole face seemed to be smothered in a bubbly foaming white soapy froth. It was a horrific sight. Then all at once, Tweedie gave a great cough and a splutter and he sat up very fast and began clawing at his face with his hands. ‘Oh!’ he stuttered. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh no! Wh-wh-what’s happening? Wh-wh-what’s on my face? Somebody help me!’
The Matron threw him a face flannel and said, ‘Wipe it off, Tweedie. And don’t ever let me hear you snoring again. Hasn’t anyone ever taught you not to go to sleep on your back?’
With that she marched out of the dormitory and slammed the door.
* * *
Reread the letter extracts throughout this chapter and you’ll find out about Ford, who sadly died of double pneumonia after having had measles during an eidemic at the school in February 1928. Ford was nine years old when he died and had been at the school for less than a year.
* * *
Homesickness
I was homesick during the whole of my first term at St Peter’s. Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die. The only comfort is that both homesickness and seasickness are instantly curable. The first goes away the moment you walk out of the school grounds and the second is forgotten as soon as the ship enters port.
I was so devastatingly homesick during my first two weeks that I set about devising a stunt for getting myself sent back home, even if it were only a few days. My idea was that I should all of a sudden develop an attack of acute appendicitis.
* * *
Never cry wolf. Much later Roald Dahl really did have appendicitis in 1945. He managed to get himself to hospital to have it removed in an emergency operation, but as he was living in the USA at the time he had to write to his mother afterwards to tell her about it!
* * *
You will probably think it silly that a nine-year-old boy should imagine he could get away with a trick like that, but I had sound reasons for trying it on. Only a month before, my ancient half-sister, who was twelve years older than me, had actually had appendicitis, and for several days before her operation I was able to observe her behaviour at close quarters. I noticed that the thing she complained about most was a severe pain down in the lower right side of her tummy. As well as this, she kept being sick and refused to eat and ran a temperature.
* * *
The appendix is a tube in the abdomen. It leads nowhere and does nothing. But appendicitis – when the appendix becomes inflamed – is no joke. If left untreated, it can be deadly.
* * *
You might, by the way, be interested to know that this sister had her appendix removed not in a fine hospital operating-room full of bright lights and gowned nurses but on our own nursery table at home by the local doctor and his anaesthetist. In those days it was fairly common practice for a doctor to arrive at your own house with a bag of instruments, then drape a sterile sheet over the most convenient table and get on with it. On this occasion, I can remember lurking in the corridor outside the nursery while the operation was going on. My other sisters were with me, and we stood there spellbound, listening to the soft medical murmurs coming from behind the locked door and picturing the patient with her stomach sliced open like a lump of beef. We could even smell the sickly fumes of ether filtering through the crack under the door.
The next day, we were allowed to inspect the appendix itself in a glass bottle. It was a longish black wormy-looking thing, and I said, ‘Do I have one of those inside me, Nanny?’
‘Everybody has one,’ Nanny answered.
‘What’s it for?’ I asked her.
‘God works in his mysterious ways,’ she said, which was her stock reply whenever she didn’t know the answer.
‘What makes it go bad?’ I asked her.
‘Toothbrush bristles,’ she answered, this time with no hesitation at all.
‘Toothbrush bristles?’ I cried. ‘How can toothbrush bristles make your appendix go bad?’
Nanny, who in my eyes was filled with more wisdom than Solomon, replied, ‘Whenever a bristle comes out of your toothbrush and you swallow it, it sticks in your appendix and turns it rotten. In the war,’ she went on, ‘the German spies used to sneak boxloads of loose-bristled toothbrushes into our shops and millions of our soldiers got appendicitis.’
‘Honestly, Nanny?’ I cried. ‘Is that honestly true?’
‘I never lie to you, child,’ she answered. ‘So let that be a lesson to you never to use an old toothbrush.’
For years after that, I used to get n
ervous whenever I found a toothbrush bristle on my tongue.
* * *
Did Nanny’s white lies inspire Roald Dahl to come up with his own fantastic stories … ?
‘Tell me what else to look out for in a witch?’ I said. ‘The eyes,’ my grandmother said. ‘Look carefully at the eyes, because the eyes of a REAL WITCH are different from yours and mine. Look in the middle of each eye where there is normally a little black dot. If she is a witch, the black dot will keep changing colour, and you will see fire and you will see ice dancing right in the very centre of the coloured dot. It will send shivers running all over your skin.’
(The Witches)
* * *
As I went upstairs and knocked on the brown door after breakfast, I didn’t even feel frightened of the Matron.
‘Come in!’ boomed the voice.
I entered the room clutching my stomach on the right-hand side and staggering pathetically.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ the Matron shouted, and the sheer force of her voice caused that massive bosom to quiver like a gigantic blancmange.
‘It hurts, Matron,’ I moaned. ‘Oh, it hurts so much! Just here!’
‘You’ve been over-eating!’ she barked. ‘What do you expect if you guzzle currant cake all day long!’
‘I haven’t eaten a thing for days,’ I lied. ‘I couldn’t eat, Matron! I simply couldn’t!’
‘Get on the bed and lower your trousers,’ she ordered.
I lay on the bed and she began prodding my tummy violently with her fingers. I was watching her carefully, and when she hit what I guessed was the appendix place, I let out a yelp that rattled the window-panes. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!’ I cried out. ‘Don’t, Matron, don’t!’ Then I slipped in the clincher. ‘I’ve been sick all morning,’ I moaned, ‘and now there’s nothing left to be sick with, but I still feel sick!’
* * *
‘When Bruce Bogtrotter had eaten his way through half of the entire enormous cake, he paused for just a couple of seconds and took several deep breaths.
The Trunchbull stood with hands on hips, glaring at him. ‘Get on with it!’ she shouted. ‘Eat it up!’
Suddenly the boy let out a gigantic belch.’
(Matilda)
* * *
This was the right move. I saw her hesitate. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said and she walked quickly from the room. She may have been a foul and beastly woman, but she had had a nurse’s training and she didn’t want a ruptured appendix on her hands.
Within an hour, the doctor arrived and he went through the same prodding and poking and I did my yelping at what I thought were the proper times. Then he put a thermometer in my mouth.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It reads normal. Let me feel your stomach once more.’
‘Owch!’ I screamed when he touched the vital spot.
The doctor went away with the Matron. The Matron returned half an hour later and said, ‘The Headmaster has telephoned your mother and she’s coming to fetch you this afternoon.’
I didn’t answer her. I just lay there trying to look very ill, but my heart was singing out with all sorts of wonderful songs of praise and joy.
I was taken home across the Bristol Channel on the paddle-steamer and I felt so wonderful at being away from that dreaded school building that I very nearly forgot I was meant to be ill. That afternoon I had a session with Dr Dunbar at his surgery in Cathedral Road, Cardiff, and I tried the same tricks all over again. But Dr Dunbar was far wiser and more skilful than either the Matron or the school doctor. After he had prodded my stomach and I had done my yelping routine, he said to me, ‘Now you can get dressed again and seat yourself on that chair.’
He himself sat down behind his desk and fixed me with a penetrating but not unkindly eye. ‘You’re faking, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘How do you know?’ I blurted out.
‘Because your stomach is soft and perfectly normal,’ he answered. ‘If you had had an inflammation down there, the stomach would have been hard and rigid. It’s quite easy to tell.’
I kept silent.
‘I expect you’re homesick,’ he said.
I nodded miserably.
‘Everyone is at first,’ he said. ‘You have to stick it out. And don’t blame your mother for sending you away to boarding-school. She insisted you were too young to go, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it the better for you.’
‘What will you tell the school?’ I asked him, trembling.
‘I’ll say you had a very severe infection of the stomach which I am curing with pills,’ he answered smiling. ‘It will mean that you must stay home for three more days. But promise me you won’t try anything like this again. Your mother has enough on her hands without having to rush over to fetch you out of school.’
‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ll never do it again.’
* * *
Homesickness is no joke. Symptoms include difficulty sleeping, sadness and depression. Even though there is nothing medically wrong with them, sufferers often complain of stomach ache, sore throat, headache and feeling sick.
* * *
A drive in the motor-car
Somehow or other I got through the first term at St Peter’s, and towards the end of December my mother came over on the paddle-boat to take me and my trunk home for the Christmas holidays.
* * *
You can see how desperate Roald Dahl was to get home from this anxious letter he sent before the end of term.
* * *
Oh the bliss and the wonder of being with the family once again after all those weeks of fierce discipline! Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home. It is almost worth going away because it’s so lovely coming back. I could hardly believe that I didn’t have to wash in cold water in the mornings or keep silent in the corridors, or say ‘Sir’ to every grown-up man I met, or use a chamber-pot in the bedroom, or get flicked with wet towels while naked in the changing-room, or eat porridge for breakfast that seemed to be full of little round lumpy grey sheep’s-droppings, or walk all day long in perpetual fear of the long yellow cane that lay on top of the corner-cupboard in the Headmaster’s study.
The weather was exceptionally mild that Christmas holiday and one amazing morning our whole family got ready to go for our first drive in the first motor-car we had ever owned. This new motor-car was an enormous long black French automobile called a De Dion-Bouton which had a canvas roof that folded back. The driver was to be that twelve-years-older-than-me half-sister (now aged twenty-one) who had recently had her appendix removed.
She had received two full half-hour lessons in driving from the man who delivered the car, and in that enlightened year of 1925 this was considered quite sufficient. Nobody had to take a driving-test. You were your own judge of competence, and as soon as you felt you were ready to go, off you jolly well went.
* * *
In Danny the Champion of the World, Danny was even younger than Roald Dahl’s sister when he took to the road.
‘I will not pretend I wasn’t petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn’t be exciting if they didn’t. I sat very stiff and upright in my seat, gripping the steering-wheel tight with both hands. My eyes were about level with the top of the steering-wheel. I could have done with a cushion to raise me up higher, but it was too late for that.’
* * *
As we all climbed into the car, our excitement was so intense we could hardly bear it.
‘How fast will it go?’ we cried out. ‘Will it do fifty miles an hour?’
‘It’ll do sixty!’ the ancient sister answered. Her tone was so confident and cocky it should have scared us to death, but it didn’t.
‘Oh, let’s make it do sixty!’ we shouted. ‘Will you p
romise to take us up to sixty?’
‘We shall probably go faster than that,’ the sister announced, pulling on her driving-gloves and tying a scarf over her head in the approved driving-fashion of the period.
* * *
Roald Dahl’s favourite car as a grown-up was a BMW.
* * *
The canvas hood had been folded back because of the mild weather, converting the car into a magnificent open tourer. Up front, there were three bodies in all, the driver behind the wheel, my half-brother (aged eighteen) and one of my sisters (aged twelve). In the back seat there were four more of us, my mother (aged forty), two small sisters (aged eight and five) and myself (aged nine). Our machine possessed one very special feature which I don’t think you see on the cars of today. This was a second windscreen in the back solely to keep the breeze off the faces of the back-seat passengers when the hood was down. It had a long centre section and two little end sections that could be angled backwards to deflect the wind.
We were all quivering with fear and joy as the driver let out the clutch and the great long black automobile leaned forward and stole into motion.
‘Are you sure you know how to do it?’ we shouted. ‘Do you know where the brakes are?’