Fantastic Mr Dahl

by Michael Rosen

  Next Roald tells his mother that the masters are very nice. I doubt it. In 1925 the masters of private boarding schools were all sorts of things, but on the whole I’ve never heard them called ‘nice’. Is Roald trying to reassure Mama it’s not like the other school where he got beaten really badly? When young children see anxious looks on their parents’ faces, some think that it’s their job to get rid of that worry, even if it means making up a little story to do so. Perhaps Roald was trying to convince her that everything was all right, even when it wasn’t. Anyone who learns how to do that is well on their way to becoming a storyteller!

  Finally, Roald finishes the letter with his nickname, ‘Boy’. In his new world, where everyone called him ‘Roald’, it must have been a relief to use a name that no one else at school knew about. ‘Boy’ was his home name and must have reminded him and his mother of how much they loved each other.

  In Boy Roald says their letters were censored. This meant each boy had to show his letter to a teacher so that he could point out any spelling mistakes. But, secretly, Roald thought that the teachers were checking up on them, making sure that the boys didn’t complain to their parents about the food or being badly treated.

  Here’s Roald’s second letter, which was written only two days later:

  Dear Mama

  Thank you for the stamps. I’ve swoped quite a lot. I played football yesterday, and scored one goal. We went for a walk today but it was not a very long one. I am going to write to Bestemama and Bestepapa and tante Ellen. I doant think I want eny moor stamps. I’ve got my straw hat. I had it yesterday. I hope Mike will get better soon. Thank Else, and Alfhild, and baby for thire letters. I can understand your writing very well. I am very glad you found my boat.

  I like this letter a lot. I like the way Roald includes his Norwegian relatives – Bestemama and Bestepapa are his mother’s parents, Roald’s grandparents. I like the way he remembers that Mike’s ill (I think Mike could be a pet but I’m not entirely sure); the way he reassures Mama that he can decipher her handwriting, so can understand her letters; the way that he is telling her how glad he is that she’s looking after his things back home; and I also like his occasionally dodgy spelling.

  I enjoy the fact that the letter hints that Mama has sent him a whacking great pile of stamps – too many by the sound of it – so he doesn’t need ‘eny moor’. And now he’s got what might have struck Mama as being one of the most English things ever: a straw hat. It would have been a boater – a hard, flat straw hat with a ribbon around it.

  It occurs to me that this letter is strong on empathy – that’s the ability to understand and feel what other people feel. All writers need empathy. They need to be able to imagine what other people think and feel so that they can write about them, and they need to be able to guess what readers would like to know. In Roald’s letter, I can hear loudly and clearly that he’s trying to figure out what Mama would like to hear, and he’s trying to think about his relatives and Mike. Funnily enough, some people have said that Roald Dahl the writer was sometimes short of empathy, that he made too many people in his books into people we just hate or despise. Think of George’s grandmother in George’s Marvellous Medicine, Miss Trunchbull and Matilda’s parents in Matilda, the landowner in Danny the Champion of the World, the witches in The Witches, Boggis in Fantastic Mr Fox and even the crocodile in The Enormous Crocodile. But saying that these characters are just hateful or that they prove Roald the writer didn’t show empathy misses the point, I think. As he was writing, Roald Dahl was always asking himself what kinds of things children would like reading about. (He also thought a good deal about why they might enjoy them too.) He was showing empathy for children by inventing characters and scenes that they would enjoy. Anyway, apart from that, he was also someone who did more than show us horrible people being defeated; he also tried to show people’s kindness and love or their kind and loving deeds – there’s Miss Honey in Matilda, Grandmamma in The Witches, Danny and his father in Danny the Champion of the World and even Mr Fox in Fantastic Mr Fox. That needs empathy too.

  In the four years Roald was at St Peter’s he had a big advantage when it came to sport and that was his height. Because he was taller than the other boys – one school report called him ‘overgrown’ – he was a useful player in the rugby team. He did well at boxing and also enjoyed cricket and football. In his letters, he talks a lot about his sporting achievements, telling Mama things like:

  ‘I hit two sixes … One hit the pavilion with a tremendous crash and just missed a window.’

  Oops.

  But sometimes his studies didn’t go very well. ‘He imagines he is doing badly and consequently does badly,’ said one teacher’s report. At that school, if you did badly, it meant that you were kept in the same class for another year, with younger pupils. The danger of being kept back a year must have bothered Roald quite a lot, because some of his letters are just lists of where he is in each class for the different subjects, like the one below, written in November 1926.

  There are several letters like this. I get the feeling that Roald, his mother and the school cared a great deal about learning, study, tests and marks.

  Dear Mama

  This is my order,

  French = 6th

  Latin = 3rd

  grammar and composition = 5th

  General knolidge = 1st

  Geometry = 1st

  Divinity = 2nd

  History = 5th

  Arithmetic = 1st

  Algebra = 1st

  Geography = 3rd

  There are 14 boys in the form.

  I am first in the three maths.

  Love from

  Roald

  One of his old school friends, Douglas, noticed that there was something quite different about Roald and said, ‘He was very much an immigrant from Norway. I was an immigrant from Turkey … we were both foreigners.’ This seems to have brought them together. The two boys used to walk together on school trips into the local town of Weston-super-Mare, talking about the school’s ‘stupid or unnecessary rules’, as they put it. But they didn’t just whinge. They liked playing with the English language too, making up word games. And this reminds me of The BFG. Every time I read it, I think that The BFG is a book written by someone who liked having fun with words, with how they sound and how you can make up new ones.

  Douglas also says that his friend was brilliant at conkers and in one letter Roald told his mother that he was the school champion because he had ‘the highest conker in the school – 273’. This meant that Roald’s conker had won a phizz-whizzing 273 times!

  In his letters, Roald also talked about collecting things from the great outdoors, like birds’ eggs (this is absolutely forbidden now – do not do it unless you actually want to be arrested). Altogether, he collected 172, all carefully laid out in a special glass cabinet with ten drawers, ranging from the eggs of a little tiny bird like the wren up to the eggs of big birds like gulls and crows.

  But, besides collecting and conkers, there was something else that Roald was becoming good at: writing.

  His letters start to fill up with loving descriptions of the things he sees and finds. And he spends pages telling his mother the latest fabulous things he has just learned in school – especially anything to do with animals and birds. He and the other boys were shown films that fired his imagination. In one, a pilot flew to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa (it may not seem like a world-shattering event now, but this was in the very early days of flying) and in another he learned about climbing Mount Everest. They watched a film about a long-distance car journey to India and Tibet, and another showing ants fighting a centipede and flipping a woodlouse on its back.

  Roald Dahl was a writer of extremes – he liked writing about amazing, odd, extraordinary and exaggerated things. When reading some of his letters, I can’t help feeling that he was always on the lookout for bizarre events. There was the trip to the caves in Cheddar Gorge near his school, when Roald and the
others were crammed into an open-top coach called a charabanc. Once in Weston-super-Mare there was a gas explosion, which started a terrible fire that burned down three shops – Roald went the next day to inspect the damage. Perhaps Mama liked to hear about them. Perhaps he liked to write about them. But, if something worth writing about happened, then that’s what he did.

  It’s not surprising that if there was anything to do with storytelling at school, Roald loved it. In November 1925 he wrote to his mother about a lecture on ‘bird legends’ and he tells her the Aesop fable of how the wren became king of the birds, and another of how the blackbird got black feathers and a yellow beak.

  One of Roald’s favourite speakers was Major Cottam, who seems to have been quite a showman. The Major features quite often in Roald’s letters, reading and reciting, and that conjures up for me an interesting picture: a man with a military background – I wonder, did he wear his uniform? – acting out stories and poems to groups of the boys, fascinating them, making them laugh, fall silent and be thoroughly amazed as he brought great books to life.

  Last night about seven o’clock Major Cottam recited ‘The Merchant of Venice’ on the field under the trees, he was awfuly funny, and then he recited a little Sweedish poem and then a famous poem from Kiplin, ‘Gounga-Dedn’, it was awfuly funny, he acts as well while he is reciting.

  Just before Christmas in 1926, when he’s ten, Roald writes:

  On friday we had a topping lecture in Esqimaux, all the slides were coloured, it was very interesting. And today we are having a cinamatograph on Dr Banardos Homes …

  We had a special treat last night, we all hung up our stockings, and when it was dark matron came in dressed up as father Xmas, and put things in our stockings, I got a kind of musical box and a soldier on a horse in mine. The same night she hung up hers outside her door and we all put things in it, it was full in the end. We start Exams next Tuesday and they go on till Thursday. I AM COMING HOME NEXT FRIDAY ON THE 17TH OF DECEMBER, BY the 1.36 (one thirty six) train, please meet me.

  So, if Matron dressed up as Father Christmas, maybe she wasn’t quite as bad as he made out in Boy …? And I like the capital letters too. Is he reminding Mama to be there? Is it possible that she sometimes forgot to meet him?

  Another topic that really seemed to interest Roald was anything to do with illness and accidents, and all the different medicines and cures too. Here’s a letter he wrote on 6 October 1929:

  My headaches have quite gone now. I had one all the first week of the term, and I thought I would try ‘Mistol’. So I did, I fairley poured it down for two days and it developed into a bad cold which I soon got rid of with that worthy muck. And now if I ever get the slightest head, I take a go of Mistol and it goes. What do you think it was? Hay fever perhaps. There are now a lot of colds about, and several boys in the sick room, so I think there will be flu soon, (there might not be of course), but after all that I have nearly finished my bottle of mistol, so please send me another, because I don’t want flu this term, for the Common Entrance is on the 12th November.

  It sounds as if young Roald has already learned – or thinks that he’s learned – to take control. Today, children don’t dose themselves up with medicine because that would be very dangerous. But back then Roald was pouring it down his throat. He figures that the medicine is making him better and keeping the flu away. It wasn’t doing anything of the sort. That’s just his imagination. But a belief in special, magic potions is very handy if you want to write books. And I can’t stop myself thinking about a certain George and some marvellous medicine … can you?

  Roald Dahl was also developing an eye for detail. During a royal visit to Weston-super-Mare, what interested him most was the fact that a train ran over someone and a local shopkeeper became so excited that he fired six shots into the air and terrified the royals!

  When he writes to his sister Alfhild, he says:

  The barber is a very funny man, his name is Mr Lundy, when I went to have my hair cut last Monday, a lot of spiders came out from under the cupboard and he stepped on them and there was a nasty squashy mess on the floor.

  In the Drill Display we have a Pyramid, there are a lot a boys standing in the shape of a star fish and some boys in the middle and a boy standing on one of the boys shoulders with his hands out, it looks very nice.

  No one becomes a writer overnight. Just as actors rehearse their parts over and over again before we see them in plays and films, and sports people practise their movements, strokes, aims and tackles, so writers practise their writing – perhaps without even realizing it. It doesn’t seem as if ten-year-old Roald knew that he was going to be a writer, but nevertheless he was practicing and not just in lessons.

  His letters home were giving him the chance to see what sounded good and what worked. He was finding out what sorts of things grabbed his mother’s and his sisters’ attention. And he was learning what made them laugh. Many years later, Roald discovered that his mother had secretly kept every single one of his letters to her. Isn’t that amazing? I think this shows how proud she was of her young son, and how much she missed him.

  And there’s something else a young writer needs to do: read lots of different books. Before he went to St Peter’s, Roald had read Beatrix Potter’s stories. He liked Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen, such as The Snow Queen. He also liked Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, which he learned off by heart. If you compare Roald Dahl’s Dirty Beasts and Revolting Rhymes with Cautionary Verses, you can see that in some ways he wrote in Hilaire Belloc’s style.

  At St Peter’s, he began to read Shakespeare’s plays, novels by Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. And he loved rollicking adventure stories by authors with wonderful names like H. Rider Haggard. Roald and his friend Douglas moved on to ghost stories and they were soon reading and talking about the scary stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s clear that he and his fellow pupils were expected to read a lot and read very widely.

  Many times he wrote home to tell his mother about the exams he had to do. On one occasion, he challenged her to answer one of the exam questions.

  He says that he got most of these right:

  In what books do the following carecters occur and give the authors:-

  Beccey Sharp

  Sam Weller

  Beetle

  Mowgli

  Israel Hands

  Athos

  Jean Val Sican

  Complete the following proverbs:-

  A little learning …

  A Rolling stone …

  Bird in the Hand …

  A sticth in time …

  One job that a writer has to do is to help their readers see and feel what things are like. And one way of doing this is by using metaphors and similes. When talking about the charabanc that took them to the caves in Cheddar Gorge, Roald wrote that they were packed in ‘like sardins in a tin’, which is a simile. And here are the closing words that Roald wrote in his very last letter home from St Peter’s:

  Please excuse this bad writing, but I am writing it in Prep, under rather bad conditions, also, an excuse is that someone is singing downstairs, and the noise closely resembles that of a flys’ kneecap, rattled about in a bilious buttercup, both having kidny trouble and lumbago.

  These sound to me like the words of a boy who loves language. This is a boy who is trying hard – maybe a little too hard – to think up similes that sound weird, funny and amazing. And this is a boy who is thoroughly enjoying doing it.

  Roald Dahl’s Letters

  Here are a few more of Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother from St Peter’s.

  The beach at Nevlunghavn

  Chapter 4

  Holidays

  Roald Dahl aged eight

  Roald didn’t just come across stories at school. For him, the holidays were crammed with strange and wonderful events too. By the time he was eleven, his mother and
sisters had moved from Wales to a house in Bexley in Kent, about fifteen miles from London. It sounds a beautiful place, with a tennis court and grounds so huge that his mother had a gardener to look after them. In the house, there was even a special room for playing billiards.

  In the 1920s many people as rich as the Dahls were very keen on behaving ‘properly’. They had perfect manners, they wore the right clothes for every occasion, they spoke very politely and never ever said rude words or made rude noises. A lot of attention was paid to being clean – clean rooms, clean clothes, clean hair, clean face, clean hands – and any kind of shouting or running was strictly reserved for sport. Every day followed a special schedule, with breakfast, lunch and tea happening exactly on time. Boys were supposed to behave in one kind of a way and girls in another. There were also things that were ‘proper’ to read and see (and a lot of things that weren’t). It was as if there were invisible rules. And people who didn’t stick to the rules were frowned upon.

  Did the Dahl family behave like this at home? Not at all. It seems as if Roald’s mother didn’t mind the children running about all over the place. She didn’t appear to be bothered about them saying rude words, climbing trees or doing naughty and dangerous things. They were unconventional – they weren’t like other people and they didn’t stick to the rules. One story that the Dahl family liked to tell was how young Roald got himself an airgun, persuaded his sister to climb up a tree and then shot at her! In January 1928 he wrote to his mother, ‘Please can you send my blank cartridge revolver, everybody here has one, including Highton and no one minds.’ Years later, Roald told the story of how he once rigged up a kind of chariot on a wire so that he could water-bomb passers-by with water from old soup tins.