by Roald Dahl
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Games and photography
It was always a surprise to me that I was good at games. It was an even greater surprise that I was exceptionally good at two of them. One of these was called fives, the other was squash-racquets.
Fives, which many of you will know nothing about, was taken seriously at Repton and we had a dozen massive glass-roofed fives courts kept always in perfect condition. We played the game of Eton-fives, which is always played by four people, two on each side, and basically it consists of hitting a small, hard, white, leather-covered ball with your gloved hands. The Americans have something like it which they call handball, but Eton-fives is far more complicated because the court has all manner of ledges and buttresses built into it which help to make it a subtle and crafty game.
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‘Eton-fives’ was first played between the buttresses on the outside of the chapel at the famous public school, Eton College, which is where the ‘ledges and buttresses’ on the courts originated, and why the courts have only three walls instead of four. Players must hit the ball up on to the front wall of the court after no more than one bounce on the floor, though the ball can bounce any number of times on the ledges and buttresses!
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Repton-fives courts, c.1933.
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Fives is possibly the fastest ball-game on earth, far faster than squash, and the little ball ricochets around the court at such a speed that sometimes you can hardly see it. You need a swift eye, strong wrists and a very quick pair of hands to play fives well, and it was a game I took to right from the beginning. You may find it hard to believe, but I became so good at it that I won both the junior and the senior school fives in the same year when I was fifteen. Soon I bore the splendid title ‘Captain of Fives’, and I would travel with my team to other schools like Shrewsbury and Uppingham to play matches. I loved it. It was a game without physical contact, and the quickness of the eye and the dancing of the feet were all that mattered.
A Captain of any game at Repton was an important person. He was the one who selected the members of the team for matches. He and only he could award ‘colours’ to others. He would award school ‘colours’ by walking up to the chosen boy after a match and shaking him by the hand and saying, ‘Graggers on your teamer!’ These were magic words. They entitled the new teamer to all manner of privileges including a different-coloured hat-band on his straw-hat and fancy braid around the edges of his blazer and different-coloured games clothes, and all sorts of other advertisements that made the teamer gloriously conspicuous among his fellows.
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‘Colours’ are awards given to pupils or students who have excelled themselves in a sport.
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A Captain of any game, whether it was football, cricket, fives or squash, had many other duties. It was he who pinned the notice on the school notice-board on match days announcing the team. It was he who arranged fixtures by letter with other schools. It was he and only he who had it in his power to invite this master or that to play against him and his team on certain afternoons. All these responsibilities were given to me when I became Captain of Fives. Then came the snag. It was more or less taken for granted that a Captain would be made a Boazer in recognition of his talents – if not a School Boazer then certainly a House Boazer. But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. I was probably the only Captain of any game who has never become a Boazer at Repton. I was certainly the only unBoazered Double Captain, because I was also Captain of squash-racquets. And to pile glory upon glory, I was in the school football team as well.
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Postcard about winning heavyweight boxing.
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A boy who is good at games is usually treated with great civility by the masters at an English Public School. In much the same way, the ancient Greeks revered their athletes and made statues of them in marble. Athletes were the demigods, the chosen few. They could perform glamorous feats beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Even today, fine footballers and baseball players and runners and all other great sportsmen are much admired by the general public and advertisers use them to sell breakfast cereals. This never happened to me, and if you really want to know, I’m awfully glad it didn’t.
But because I loved playing games, life for me at Repton was not totally without pleasure. Games-playing at school is always fun if you happen to be good at it, and it is hell if you are not. I was one of the lucky ones, and all those afternoons on the playing-fields and in the fives courts and in the squash courts made the otherwise grey and melancholy days pass a lot more quickly.
There was one other thing that gave me great pleasure at this school and that was photography. I was the only boy who practised it seriously, and it was not quite so simple a business fifty years ago as it is today. I made myself a little dark-room in a corner of the music building, and in there I loaded my glass plates and developed my negatives and enlarged them.
Our Arts Master was a shy retiring man called Arthur Norris who kept himself well apart from the rest of the staff. Arthur Norris and I became close friends and during my last year he organized an exhibition of my photographs. He gave the whole of the Art School over to this project and helped me to get my enlargements framed. The exhibition was rather a success, and masters who had hardly ever spoken to me over the past four years would come up and say things like, ‘It’s quite extraordinary’ … ‘We didn’t know we had an artist in our midst’ … ‘Are they for sale?’
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Arthur Norris, the Arts Master.
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Arthur Norris would give me tea and cakes in his flat and would talk to me about painters like Cézanne and Manet and Matisse, and I have a feeling that it was there, having tea with the gentle soft-spoken Mr Norris in his flat on Sunday afternoons that my great love of painters and their work began.
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A Zeiss camera from the 1930s.
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Close-up Photograph of plant tissue were taken by Roald Dahl in his final year at Repton. He developed all his own photos too.
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After leaving school, I continued for a long time with photography and I became quite good at it. Today, given a 35mm camera and a built-in exposure-meter, anyone can be an expert photographer, but it was not so easy fifty years ago. I used glass plates instead of film, and each of these had to be loaded into its separate container in the dark-room before I set out to take pictures. I usually carried with me six loaded plates, which allowed me only six exposures, so that clicking the shutter even once was a serious business that had to be carefully thought out beforehand.
You may not believe it, but when I was eighteen I used to win prizes and medals from the Royal Photographic Society in London, and from other places like the Photographic Society of Holland. I even got a lovely big bronze medal from the Egyptian Photographic Society in Cairo, and I still have the photograph that won it. It is a picture of one of the so-called Seven Wonders of the World, the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq.
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Ctesiphon was once the largest city in the world. Now all that remains is a ruined palace and the huge arch that Roald Dahl photographed during the Second World War. The Arch of Ctesiphon is 20 miles southeast of Baghdad in Iraq.
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This is the largest unsupported arch on earth and I took the photograph while I was training out there for the RAF in 1940. I was flying over the desert solo in an old Hawker Hart biplane and I had my camera round my neck. When I spotted the huge arch standing
alone in a sea of sand, I dropped one wing and hung in my straps and let go of the stick while I took aim and clicked the shutter. It came out fine.
Goodbye school
During my last year at Repton, my mother said to me, ‘Would you like to go to Oxford or Cambridge when you leave school?’ In those days it was not difficult to get into either of these great universities so long as you could pay.
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China.’
You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous any more. But it was a very different matter in 1934.
So during my last term I applied for a job only to those companies that would be sure to send me abroad. They were the Shell Company (Eastern Staff), Imperial Chemicals (Eastern Staff) and a Finnish lumber company whose name I have forgotten.
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In 1934, Shell’s headquarters were at Shell Mex House, at 80 Strand in London. By a curious coincidence, this glamorous building is now the home of Puffin, Roald Dahl’s publisher since 1973.
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I was accepted by Imperial Chemicals and by the Finnish lumber company, but for some reason I wanted most of all to get into the Shell Company. When the day came for me to go up to London for this interview, my Housemaster told me it was ridiculous for me even to try. ‘The Eastern Staff of Shell are the crème de la crème,’ he said. ‘There will be at least one hundred applicants and about five vacancies. Nobody has a hope unless he’s been Head of the School or Head of the House, and you aren’t even a House Prefect!’
My Housemaster was right about the applicants. There were one hundred and seven boys waiting to be interviewed when I arrived at the Head Office of the Shell Company in London. And there were seven places to be filled. Please don’t ask me how I got one of those places. I don’t know myself. But get it I did, and when I told my Housemaster the good news on my return to school, he didn’t congratulate me or shake me warmly by the hand. He turned away muttering, ‘All I can say is I’m damned glad I don’t own any shares in Shell.’
I didn’t care any longer what my Housemaster thought. I was all set. I had a career. It was lovely. I was to leave school for ever in July 1934 and join the Shell Company two months later in September when I would be exactly eighteen. I was to be an Eastern Staff Trainee at a salary of five pounds a week.
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He might have remembered his new salary as being five pounds a week, but Roald Dahl was actually paid £2 1s 3d. But it was still an awful lot of money in 1934!
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That summer, for the first time in my life, I did not accompany the family to Norway. I somehow felt the need for a special kind of last fling before I became a businessman. So while still at school during my last term, I signed up to spend August with something called ‘The Public Schools’ Exploring Society’. The leader of this outfit was a man who had gone with Captain Scott on his last expedition to the South Pole, and he was taking a party of senior schoolboys to explore the interior of Newfoundland during the summer holidays. It sounded like fun.
Without the slightest regret I said goodbye to Repton for ever and rode back to Kent on my motorbike. This splendid machine was a 500 cc Ariel which I had bought the year before for eighteen pounds, and during my last term at Repton I kept it secretly in a garage along the Willington road about two miles away. On Sundays I used to walk to the garage and disguise myself in helmet, goggles, old raincoat and rubber waders and ride all over Derbyshire. It was fun to go roaring through Repton itself with nobody knowing who you were, swishing past the masters walking in the street and circling around the dangerous supercilious School Boazers out for their Sunday strolls. I tremble to think what would have happened to me had I been caught, but I wasn’t caught. So on the last day of term I zoomed joyfully away and left school behind me for ever and ever. I was not quite eighteen.
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An Ariel 500
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The Public Schools’ Explorers Society expedition was led by Admiral Murray Levick (‘who had gone with Captain Scott on his last expedition to the South Pole’).
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I had only two days at home before I was off to Newfoundland with the Public Schools’ Explorers. Our ship sailed from Liverpool at the beginning of August and took six days to reach St John’s. There were about thirty boys of my own age on the expedition as well as four experienced adult leaders. But Newfoundland, as I soon found out, was not much of a country. For three weeks we trudged all over that desolate land with enormous loads on our backs. We carried tents and groundsheets and sleeping-bags and saucepans and food and axes and everything else one needs in the interior of an unmapped, uninhabitable and inhospitable country. My own load, I know, weighed exactly one hundred and fourteen pounds, and someone else always had to help me hoist the rucksack on to my back in the mornings. We lived on pemmican and lentils, and the twelve of us who went separately on what was called the Long March from the north to the south of the island and back again suffered a good deal from lack of food. I can remember very clearly how we experimented with eating boiled lichen and reindeer moss to supplement our diet. But it was a genuine adventure and I returned home hard and fit and ready for anything.
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This is Roald Dahl’s passport.
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There followed two years of intensive training with the Shell Company in England. We were seven trainees in that year’s group and each one of us was being carefully prepared to uphold the majesty of the Shell Company in one or another remote tropical country. We spent weeks at the huge Shell Haven Refinery with a special instructor who taught us all about fuel oil and diesel oil and gas oil and lubricating oil and kerosene and gasoline.
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On board RMS Nova Scotia, 9th August:
‘… as Murray Levick said we were all to have our hair cut short I went along to Sam who cuts hair in his spare time (there is also a ship’s barber) and had all my hair cut off! I’ve just got a tiny little bit of bristle on the top – I look fine.’
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After that we spent months at the Head Office in London learning how the great company functioned from the inside. I was still living in Bexley, Kent, with my mother and three sisters, and every morning, six days a week, Saturdays included, I would dress neatly in a sombre grey suit, have breakfast at seven forty-five and then, with a brown trilby on my head and a furled umbrella in my hand, I would board the eight-fifteen train to London together with a swarm of other equally sombre-suited businessmen. I found it easy to fall into their pattern. We were all very serious and dignified gents taking the train to our offices in the City of London where each of us, so we thought, was engaged in high finance and other enormously important matters. Most of my companions wore hard bowler hats, and a few like me wore soft trilbys, but not one of us on that train in the year of 1934 went bareheaded. It wasn’t done. And none of us, even on the sunniest days, went without his furled umbrella. The umbrella was our badge of office. We felt naked without it. Also it was a sign of respectability. Road-menders and plumbers never went to work with umbrellas. Businessmen did.
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As ever, Roald Dahl wrote to his mother while he was away. And he took plenty of photos too. Here are just a few of them.
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‘11th August:
Dear Mama,
This’ll be a very short letter. We’re just setting out for the base camp 30 miles away.
We arrived at St John’s and got straight on to the train for Grand Falls in the evening at about 5 o’clock …’
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‘… We are now right up in the North of Newfoundland & we are travelling due South & then South East about 80 miles. As I look south over Rattling Brook from here all I can see is pine-clad hills … ’
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Sleeping
Walking
Trekking
Eating
Daydreaming
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When he worked for Shell, Roald Dahl used to buy a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate as a lunchtime treat. But he never threw away the silver paper. On his very first day, he rolled it into a tiny ball and left it on his desk. On the second day, he rolled the second bit of silver paper around the first. And so on. After a year, it was nearly as big as a tennis ball, and much, much heavier. When he was older, he kept the foil ball on a table beside his writing chair. It’s still there.