Fantastic Mr Dahl

by Michael Rosen

  So, when I think about Roald Dahl’s childhood, I can’t help but think how there were some things about both Roald and my father and their lives that were quite similar, and how perhaps that led them both to do things in life that were quite similar too.

  I think that a childhood can sometimes last a lifetime.

  The Family Tree

  Llandaff Cathedral

  Chapter 2

  School Days

  Harald Dahl

  Harald Dahl, Roald’s father, was a man who worked very hard for his living. He was a shipbroker. This didn’t mean that he broke ships. It meant that he supplied boats to people who wanted to sell their goods to other countries and who needed to transport their goods there, by sea. Harald must have been a great success at his job, because by the time he died, when Roald was only three, he left a lot of money and property to his family. In today’s money, they would have been worth a colossal £5 million.

  This must have been a relief to Roald’s mother, Sofie. Neither she nor any of her children would need to go without food or new clothes. Mrs Dahl could afford to employ servants – or help, as they were known – to do the washing, cleaning and cooking, and to look after the children. Roald and his sisters could probably have the toys they wanted, they had a big house and garden to live and play in, and went on lots of nice holidays too – sometimes in Wales or often in Norway with their relatives. And one thing his mother could certainly afford was to send Roald to expensive schools.

  First, there was the kindergarten, or nursery, at Elmtree House in Llandaff, near Cardiff, where he went when he was six years old, in 1922. He was there for just one year. Then he went to Llandaff Cathedral School for two years. His next school was St Peter’s, the boarding school in Weston-super-Mare, where he stayed until 1929, when he was thirteen. After that it was off to Repton, a famous public school not far from Derby in the Midlands, which he left in 1934, aged eighteen.

  Thanks to Roald and his mother, we can travel back in time and find out more about his schooldays. This is because he kept his school reports and his mother kept the letters that he sent home to her. Thank goodness. That’s a lot of valuable information about a boy who became a world-famous author.

  One of the first glimpses we get of Roald’s schooldays is at Elmtree House. Here, Roald was looked after and taught by two sisters, Mrs Corfield and Miss Tucker. He remembered his teachers as being ‘sweet and smiling’.

  Things were very different at his next school: Llandaff Cathedral School. It stood next door to the – you’ve guessed it – cathedral. (In fact, it’s still there, if you want to see where Roald went to school.) There was a proper headmaster in this place. And it was steeped in tradition – full of stories about itself, stretching back hundreds of years. Roald’s two years at the school became full of stories for him too, especially the famous one he tells in Boy about the time he and his friends played a trick on a woman they thought was utterly, completely, totally horrible – Mrs Pratchett. She ran the local sweet shop and Roald’s little gang from the cathedral school came to hate her …

  She never smiled. She never welcomed us when we went in, and the only times she spoke were when she said things like, ‘I’m watchin’ you so keep yer thievin’ fingers off them chocolates!’ Or ‘I don’t want you in ’ere just to look around! Either you forks out or you gets out!’

  But by far the most loathsome thing about Mrs Pratchett was the filth that clung around her. Her apron was grey and greasy. Her blouse had bits of breakfast all over it, toast-crumbs and tea stains and splotches of dried egg-yolk. It was her hands, however, that disturbed us most. They were disgusting. They were black with dirt and grime. They looked as though they had been putting lumps of coal on the fire all day long. And do not forget please that it was these very hands and fingers that she plunged into the sweet-jars when we asked for a pennyworth of Treacle Toffee or Wine Gums or Nut Clusters or whatever …

  The other thing we hated Mrs Pratchett for was her meanness. Unless you spent a whole sixpence all in one go, she wouldn’t give you a bag. Instead you got your sweets twisted up in a small piece of newspaper which she tore off a pile of old Daily Mirrors lying on the counter.

  And then Roald says that he and his friends found a dead mouse under the floorboards, which gave him a wonderfully wicked idea.

  ‘Why don’t we,’ I said, ‘slip it into one of Mrs Pratchett’s jars of sweets? Then when she puts her dirty hand in to grab a handful, she’ll grab a stinky dead mouse instead.’

  But how would they put the mouse into the sweet jar without Mrs Pratchett seeing? This called for a fiendishly clever plot. The ‘Great Mouse Plot’, in fact.

  We were strutting a little as we entered the shop. We were the victors now and Mrs Pratchett was the victim. She stood behind the counter and her small malignant pig-eyes watched us suspiciously as we came forward.

  ‘One Sherbet Sucker, please,’ Thwaites said to her, holding out his penny.

  I kept to the rear of the group, and when I saw Mrs Pratchett turn her head away for a couple of seconds to fish a Sherbet Sucker out of the box, I lifted the heavy glass lid of the Gobstopper jar and dropped the mouse in. Then I replaced the lid as silently as possible. My heart was thumping like mad and my hands had gone all sweaty.

  ‘And one Bootlace, please,’ I heard Thwaites saying.

  When I turned round, I saw Mrs Pratchett holding out the Bootlace in her filthy fingers.

  ‘I don’t want all the lot of you troopin’ in ’ere if only one of you is buyin’,’ she screamed at us. ‘Now beat it! Go on, get out!’

  As soon as we were outside, we broke into a run. ‘Did you do it?’ they shouted at me.

  ‘Of course I did!’ I said.

  ‘Well done you!’ they cried. ‘What a super show!’

  I felt like a hero. I was a hero. It was marvellous to be so popular.

  Every time I read that story, I think about one thing: the word ‘trick’. Here is Roald Dahl, less than nine years old, and what is he doing? Coming up with a trick! And that reminds me of the books he wrote. They are full of tricks, cunning plans and naughty jokes. If the story about the mouse and the sweet-shop lady is true (and we can never be absolutely, totally sure about that), and it really was Roald who came up with the ‘Great Mouse Plot’, then I think he had already begun to invent ways of writing.

  Why?

  Because if you plot and plan a trick, you need to think ahead and imagine ‘What would happen if …?’ If you’re someone who loves to imagine ‘What would happen if …?’, such as ‘What would happen if my best friend turned into cat …?’ then you’re well on the way to being a writer. Roald wrote the story of what happened in the ‘Great Mouse Plot’ many, many years after it happened. But, in a way, he ‘wrote’ it when he and his friends looked at the dead mouse and imagined what they were going to do with it. He wasn’t really writing it, of course, but he was thinking ahead, planning and imagining …

  When I read the ‘Great Mouse Plot’, it made me wonder what kind of writer Roald Dahl was. When you write stories, you have to do all you can to grab your readers’ attention. How does Roald do this here?

  First of all, he tells us about Mrs Pratchett. But he doesn’t just say ‘Mrs Pratchett was horrible’ and then move straight on to the plot. Instead, he shows us what’s horrible about how she looks, the things she says and one key thing about her character, her meanness. In fact, he gives us such a thorough picture that we can start to imagine things about her that Roald Dahl does not tell us, like what she might think of this group of boys coming into her shop. Does she think they are horrible? But why would she think that? What might they have done? What else is Dahl not telling us?

  I also noticed that Roald does what can be called ‘inside-outside’. This is where a writer tells some of the story as if he were a fly on the wall, watching everyone from the outside, but at other times he goes‘inside’ a character to tell the story from their point of view. This keeps our minds bus
y, flipping to and fro between outside and inside. One moment we’re looking at what’s going on and the next we’re listening. Just like this. We hear Roald say to his friends, ‘Then when she puts her dirty hand in to grab a handful, she’ll grab a stinky dead mouse instead …’ And he describes the scene: ‘We were strutting a little as we entered the shop.’ This mix of listening and looking also makes us want to follow the story and to enjoy getting the whole picture.

  At first glance, the ‘Great Mouse Plot’ might look one-dimensional. This means that the story is not complicated: in this case, that it’s just about goodies and baddies – Mrs Pratchett is a baddy and the boys are getting their own back on her. ‘Serves her right!’ we might say. And that’s all there is to it. But, if you are a really good storyteller, you can turn a one-dimensional story into something that readers will wonder about. I think that good writing will always give you a chance to look at things from different points of view, rather as if you were seeing a scene first from the front and then from behind, or first from inside one person’s head and then from inside another person’s.

  One thing that none of them – not Roald, nor his friends – seems to have thought about was what would happen to them if their terrible mouse crime were found out. And this was … PUNISHMENT.

  I’m sure you know about punishment. You probably know of people – even you! – who have been sent out of the classroom … or made to stay in at breaktime … or been given a detention … or sent to see the head teacher … or even been excluded from school altogether. What’s absolutely NOT allowed is for anyone in school to hit you. But when I was at school and, before that, when Roald was at school, teachers were allowed to punish children by hitting them. They could use all sorts of things – their bare hands, sticks, belts, rulers, blackboard rubbers, shoes – and they could hit a child in all sorts of places – round the face, across the hand or on their backside. Sometimes they did it when they were angry, while we were sitting at our desks. Sometimes we were called out to the front of the class and they did it in front of everyone. Sometimes they just threw things at us. When I was at secondary school I had one teacher who used to yank my hair, pulling my head down to the desk. Then he’d let go. But, before I could lift my head up, the teacher would turn his hand into a fist and then punch the back of my head. Another one – a very nice man, actually – walloped me round the face.

  Caning was one thing that bothered Roald Dahl more than any other about school. It leaps out of the pages of his books. He wanted all of his readers to know he HATED being caned. He says that plenty of his teachers were ‘cane-happy’, but there was one particular way of dishing out this punishment that always felt very serious and solemn. This was when you were called to the headmaster’s office. Just imagine standing nervously on his carpet, perhaps daring to look around his office at the old photos and books, the chairs and the desk while you waited. Aside from your own parents, the headmaster was probably the most important person you knew, and this special, clever and important person had chosen you for this extra-special thing: to beat you because you had misbehaved. And there was always something you had to do before you were beaten: you had to make some part of yourself available so that he could hit it. Every boy knew by heart the words ‘Hold out your hand’ or ‘Bend over’. These were words that were said over and over again, and they set in motion a series of moves that always happened in the same way, with the same quiet, solemn tone to it all.

  The teachers told themselves that they were trying to make you a better person. It happened to me at primary school because I and some other boys ran after a ball into the girls’ playground, then booed a teacher who tried to take the ball. And, Roald tells us, this kind of punishment happened to him and his friends at school. In fact, he spent a good deal of one book, Matilda, showing us one teacher in particular, Miss Trunchbull, who loved beating children. He made her so horrible and so cruel that many people – and, I’ve noticed, especially children – laugh. One part that people laugh at a lot is when she throws a boy out of the window.

  This doesn’t mean that Roald thought the beating stuff didn’t matter. Just the opposite, in fact. He thought it mattered a great deal. He hated it so much that one of the ways he could deal with his feelings was to turn it into a story and exaggerate it, making it so big that readers end up thinking it’s funny. Writers for children had made punishment funny before – in the Billy Bunter books and in comics like The Beano. What’s really unusual and special about Roald is that he was one of the first writers for children to get us all thinking that this sort of punishment was both funny and wrong at the same time.

  But the point about the beating is that it was supposed to hurt. It hurt Roald and it hurt his friends in the ‘Great Mouse Plot’. They secretly showed each other their wounds. In a school where children were regularly beaten, it wasn’t spoken about in public, but everyone spoke about it in private. Some children made secret plans on how to make it hurt less (like stuffing a book down your trousers). Then there were stories about what you could put on your skin before and after (vinegar, turps, olive oil). There were also mind-games people talked about, ways of making yourself think it didn’t hurt so much or ways of showing the teacher you didn’t care. There were even stories of children who hit the teacher back! And there was the big, big deal about what to tell your parents, what they would say when you told them and what they actually did …

  This is what Roald’s mother did. She saw the marks that the cane had made on Roald’s skin – the scarlet stripes, as he called them – and she took him away from Llandaff Cathedral School at once.

  Roald Dahl’s Schools – Then and Now

  Chapter 3

  Letters

  The next thing that happened to Roald was that the amazing Mrs Dahl, who’d just rescued him from the local school, packed him off to boarding school instead. As you know from the first chapter, St Peter’s was on the other side of the Bristol Channel – a big stretch of water where the River Severn becomes the sea. Roald travelled with his mother to school on a paddle steamer that chugged across the water, going the rest of the way by taxi. And then she left him there.

  Roald was nine years old and he was on his own. Here’s the very first letter that he wrote home from St Peter’s in 1925. It makes me wonder what I would have written to my mother in his situation. What do you think of it? I’ve left in the spelling mistakes because they’re funny!

  23rd Sept

  Dear Mama

  I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs. Will you send my stamp album, and quite a lot of swops. The masters are very nice. I’ve got all my clothes now, and a belt, and, tie, and a school Jersey.

  Love from

  Boy

  At first glance it might look a bit dull – and maybe not a letter from the future Fantastic Mr Dahl. Where are the jokes? Where’s the story about a horrible, crazy teacher or some awful boy at the school? It doesn’t tell us very much about the young Roald … or does it? Let’s look at the letter again, this time as if we’re detectives searching for clues. Because it’s a valuable piece of evidence.

  First, he calls his mother Mama, which reminds us that Roald had strong ties to another country: Norway. Then he says that he’s having a lovely time. Hmm, I wonder! Later, he did have some really good times at St Peter’s, but I can’t help thinking that the very first moments wouldn’t have been lovely. And, in Boy, he tells us very clearly and strongly that his first moments were anything but.

  ‘I had never spent a single night away from our large family before,’ he says. ‘I was left standing there beside my brand new trunk and my brand new tuck-box. I began to cry.’

  So why does he tell Mama that he’s having a lovely time? Maybe his teacher had told him what to write but I like to think he’s making sure at first that she doesn’t worry about him. Don’t you?

  Then he tells Mama that they play football every day. This didn’t mean that he and the other
boys were just kicking a ball about in the playground. Instead, it would have been an organized game on the school field. Roald grew to really like sport and as a newcomer he must have already spotted that it was a big deal at St Peter’s.

  He goes on to tell Mama that the beds have no springs. When I was nine, the springs were broken on my bed and I was always complaining to my parents about it and moaning that my brother’s bed was more comfortable than mine! Maybe, in a way, I was getting all moany and whingy about the fact that having a lumpy bed proved that my parents didn’t care enough about me to get me a nice comfy bed! Is young Roald trying to send Mama a message that he doesn’t think she’s done enough to make sure he’s comfy at night?

  Then it’s on to stamps. All his life, Roald was a great collector. If you go to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden you can see some of the things he collected, including a ball he made out of the silver wrapping gathered from the many chocolate bars he ate! Squirrels collect nuts. They bury them in the ground so that when winter comes and there’s no food they can go round digging them up. I think writers are a bit like that. We collect stuff so that when we’re searching for inspiration we can look at our collections and – hey presto! – ideas might pop into our heads. It would have been very easy for Roald to collect stamps – he had foreign relatives who would have sent letters and parcels covered in exciting stamps, with pictures of intriguing foreign places, kings, queens and famous people. This might have impressed all the boys Roald was meeting. What’s more, he had ‘swops’. These were double copies (or more) of any stamp, which could be swapped with other boys’ stamps in order to make his collection even better. A great future in both collecting and looking good among his friends was opening up straight away, so long as Mama sent them.