There weren’t many mums like Mrs Dahl. It rather looks as if she thought that being naughty and wild was absolutely fine and part of how a child learns. Maybe this is one of the reasons that Roald and Mama got on so well. In one of his letters, Roald even tells her this: ‘We’ve got a new Matron called Miss Farmer in place of Miss Turner who left last term, one night in the washing room, having inspected a boy called Ford, she KISSED HIM.’
One thing we know about Roald Dahl, both from his books and from real life, was that he was quite naughty and wild himself. Most of us are held back by invisible rules, but Roald wasn’t. Something gave him the confidence to say, write and do things that plenty of other people thought were shocking – think what the BFG did when he visited the Queen! I believe that it was Mrs Dahl who helped to give him this confidence.
‘Stinky snozzcumbers,’ the BFG said.
The school holidays weren’t just spent at home. At Easter, the Dahls would pack their bags and go away. One place they went to was Tenby in South Wales. This is a beautiful Victorian seaside town, with an old harbour and long sandy beaches. Here, Roald could collect his eggs and starfish and go donkey riding. There was an island just off the coast with an ancient monastery on it and Roald would take a boat out to explore. Mrs Dahl used to rent a house overlooking the harbour for the family to stay in.
But for the Dahls there was an even more magical place: Norway. In Boy, Roald lovingly tells the story of how a great group of them travelled for several days to get there.
We were always an enormous party. There were my three sisters and my ancient half-sister (that’s four), and my half-brother and me (that’s six), and my mother (that’s seven), and Nanny (that’s eight) and in addition to these, there were never less than two others who were some sort of anonymous ancient friends of the ancient half-sister (that’s ten altogether).
And, as Roald reminds us, they all spoke Norwegian. In a way, he says, ‘going to Norway every summer was like going home’.
After a long, long journey, this large family group, with all their trunks and bags, would first visit the house in Oslo where Mrs Dahl’s father and mother – Bestepapa and Bestemama – and her two sisters lived.
Bestepapa Hesselberg
Here, they ate old-style Norwegian food, with piles of fresh fish and home-made ice cream with little chips of crisp burnt toffee mixed into it, while the grown-ups drank and toasted each other over and over again, calling out, ‘Skaal!’
Next, they were off to the seaside! The Norwegian coastline is a magical place full of islands and fjords–long, narrow inlets where the mountainsides are steep and the water is very, very deep. In summer, the water is stunningly blue and the mountain slopes are covered in dark green pine forests. If ever you get the chance to visit the coast of Norway, you will see how beautiful and mysterious it is.
The fjords were full of fish and Roald loved to spend hours and hours in a boat, often with Louis, his half- brother, fishing and sunbathing. When he was older, Mrs Dahl got hold of an old motorboat. It was ‘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’. It doesn’t sound very safe, does it? But Roald and the others headed up the fjord, hunting for different islands where they could go rock-pooling, fishing, swimming, diving and exploring, looking at the ‘wooden skeletons of shipwrecked boats’, feeding off wild strawberries and mussels and watching the ‘shaggy, long-haired goats’. Sometimes, the sea was rough and it became pretty dangerous for the little party in this not-very-good boat. But Roald lived to tell the tale.
Louis Dahl
At night, Roald’s mother told stories – sometimes made up, sometimes myths, legends and fairy tales, sometimes the stories of famous Norwegian writers who wrote about the kind of lonely, difficult lives people and animals had in this landscape of forests, mountains, rivers and fjords. She told of Norse gods who fought with giants in battles that lasted for days and weeks on end. There were tales of boys who outwitted wicked trolls, and of giant insects and giant frogs and cloud monsters, and of the hare who laughed till his jaws cracked and the tabby cat who ate too much. It was fantastic, magical, amazing, weird, scary, exciting stuff.
Fishing on the Oslofjord
All this must have helped Roald Dahl to feel wonderfully different, in a good way. He was experiencing both a very proper English education and traditional Norwegian life. He doesn’t seem to have known anyone outside his family who shared this particular mix of cultures. Being different can be very important for a writer. It can make you want to write about what it feels like to be you. It can make you want to write about the things that everyone else takes for granted, but which you see in a different way. Sometimes, it just makes you want to tell people about strange, different places and ways of life. Next time you think of the Big Friendly Giant, you might want to read some of the wonderful Norse myths or look at pictures of the coast of Norway and think about a young boy in his boat, far out on the fjord, looking down into the clear water, thinking, wondering, dreaming, planning and collecting.
Time is something that every writer needs. Time to think, wonder, dream, plan and collect. And Roald Dahl had plenty of that.
Roald, Alfhild, Else – Norway, 1924
Roald Dahl and Food
As well as chocolate, Roald Dahl loved to eat (and drink) many other things too. Here are just a few of them.
Roald Dahl’s favourite foods of all time
Norwegian prawns
Lobster
Caviar
Scrumptious roast beef
Roald Dahl’s favourite pudding
‘Krokaan is simply a kind of crispy, crunchy toffee made from butter, sugar and almonds, and quite apart from the fact that its taste is so beguiling, it makes a most satisfying crunchy noise when you chew it. Ice cream, whatever flavour it is, is invariably a soft and silent meal, but when you fill it with krokaan chips, it suddenly becomes something that goes crunch when you chew instead of just floating silently down your throat.’
Roald Dahl’s favourite soup
‘Chlodnik is a cold Polish soup with a beetroot base and a number of other special ingredients, including chunks of lobster. It is the greatest soup that I have ever tasted, icecold, creamy and with a flavour so subtle and enticing that you feel you want to go on eating it forever.’
Roald Dahl’s favourite family breakfast
Hot-house Eggs
Cut a circle out of a slice of bread. Pop the bread into a frying pan and cook on both sides in a little butter. Crack the egg into the hole in the bread – the white will spill over the edges very slightly to glue the egg in place. Flip the whole thing over and cook briefly on the other side.
‘We always called it Hot-house Eggs,’ said Roald Dahl. ‘Don’t ask me why.’
Roald Dahl’s favourite workday lunch
Gin and tonic
Norwegian prawns with mayonnaise and lettuce
Kit Kat
A favourite supper of Roald Dahl’s
Plump grilled Dover sole straight out of the Atlantic
Faintly green Portuguese wine
Almond tart
School dinners at Repton
Chapter 5
Teenage Years
In 1930 the teenage Roald Dahl was a new boy all over again, at Repton – the big, old public school for boys near Derby. There was a uniform, of course. But now it sounds more like fancy dress – striped trousers, a waistcoat, a long jacket called a tailcoat, a shirt with a stiff collar that had to be fixed to the shirt with special metal studs, very shiny black shoes and, finally, a boater. It must have taken a long time to get dressed.
Roald’s house was called The Priory and about fifty boys lived there, with twelve from each year. Unlike at St Peter’s, it really was a house, separate from the school in the town of Repton. The housemaster, Mr Jenkyns – the boys called him ‘Binks’ – and his family lived there too. Roald liked him a lot.
Mr and M
rs Jenkyns and the boys from Priory House. Roald Dahl is on the right of the second row from the front.
For the younger boys at this school and many like it, the real terror was in the way their lives were run by the older boys. At Repton, they ran a system where the oldest boys used the younger boys as their servants or, as Dahl called them, ‘personal slaves’. Their way of keeping the younger boys in line was to beat them over and over again. So a new schoolboy started off being a slave who was caned and ended up being a slave-master, beating the next new lot of youngsters coming in. It was a sort of training in bullying. But the schoolmasters of the time thought that it was a training in leadership instead. What do you think?
In Boy, Roald tells us how much he hated all the bullying and beatings and nastiness. And, if you think the book sounds bad, you’ll be stunned to know that when he first wrote Boy the descriptions sounded even worse. There, in full gory detail, he told the story of how the older boys once dumped him – fully dressed – into a cold bath and held his head under the water. But here’s the strangest thing. In one draft Roald says that, after the beatings, the boys didn’t sympathize with each other. Instead, they ‘developed a curiously detached attitude to these vile tortures in order to preserve their sanity’. He says, if they had gathered around each other helping each other, ‘I think we would all have broken down.’
As we have seen, illness is something that Roald worried about a lot. Whether he was really ill or not isn’t totally clear. In his letters home, he was always asking his mother to send him pills, lozenges, ointments and medicines of all kinds. He complains of corns, coughs, colds, headaches, constipation, weak bones … and there was even some conversation about him having a weak heart. At school, it was Matron who dealt with any serious illnesses, but when it came to things like cough medicine, the boys looked after themselves. Roald definitely did that. And, because of all his letters home, the view in the Dahl family was that he was not a very well chap.
Roald’s teachers had a lot to say about him and not all of it good. Unlike his teachers at St Peter’s, one thought that he was ‘curiously dense and slow’, another that he went in for ‘fits of childishness’ and ‘fits of the sulks’. One found him a ‘persistent muddler, writing and saying the opposite of what he means’. Other teachers said that he was idle, stupid, obstinate and too pleased with himself. Perhaps he was some of those things or perhaps he was just turning into a teenage rebel. We will never know.
But what we do know about is his writing. And sometimes his letters home were fantastic. Here’s what he wrote after just a week at Repton:
The chap who takes us in Maths: Major Strickland (Stricker) who is chief of the O.T.C. is terrifficly humerous. For instance, he will suddenly turn to you and say, ‘Are you a slug, do you leave a long slimey track behind you,’ the chap says ‘no’ and then he says, ‘Well you’re a fungus, in fact you’re wet!’ And perhaps he’ll make a statement; ‘Do you understand,’ and then he will repeat it about six times, either getting louder and louder, or softer and softer, in the end developing into a concentrated mumble. He does’nt mind being answered back, but rather likes it; He is also very funny when arguing. For instance, if he cant think of an answer, he’ll say, ‘Well your …’ then after the ‘your’ he will start mumbling, gradually becoming louder and louder, and in the end developing into a low pitched groan. I believe he’s half-baked! He’s a short man with a face like a field elderberry, and a moustache which closely resembles the African jungle. A voice like a frog, no chest and a pot-belly, no doubt a species of Rumble-hound. Please dont forget the toothpaste and brush.
Love from Roald
Already, I think that Roald wrote just for the fun of it. After all, this piece of writing wasn’t for homework or for an exam. It was just to entertain his mother, and whoever else she might show it to. Here is Roald giving his mother some advice:
You seem to have been doing a lot of painting; but when you paint the lav don’t paint the seat, leaving it wet and sticky, or some unfortunantely person who has not noticed it, will adhere to it, and unless his bottom is cut off, or unless he chooses to go about with the seat sticking behind him always, he will be doomed to stay where he is …
This sounds very typical of the Roald Dahl I knew, and of Roald Dahl’s writing – funny, a bit rude, and a bit exaggerated!
Another glimpse of both the masters’ odd behaviour and Roald’s growing love of exaggerating things comes when he writes:
Mr. Wall is the most bad tempered man on the staff, but otherwise he is very nice. When he looses his temper he goes completly mad, he rushes round the room, tips his desk clean over, with everything on it, kicked all the furniture in the room as hard as he can, and especially his grandfather clock, which is gradually ceasing to exist. He shouts and yells, rushes round the room, and on Wednesday he nearly threw himself out of the window!
Though good marks are still important to him, the school and his mother, he can’t resist making a joke of it:
P.S. I got minus 100 marks from our vicious form master last Friday, so I expect I’ll be somewhere near bottom at half term.
I think that his mother must have enjoyed his humour and that he tried hard to make her laugh. But I also think that he liked to keep her on the edge of her seat too. Here he is describing the dramatic events when a fire broke out in The Priory:
The flames were enormous and the heat was colossal. The whole place stank of burning … and it got in your throat. I coughed all night. However we got to our bedrooms, which the firemen assured us were safe, but to us they looked as though they were being held up by two thin planks. We picked our way gingerly up the stairs (which were black and charcoaly) of course all the electric light had fused long ago. We got into our beds which were brown and nasty and I don’t how but I managed to get some sleep. The place looked grimmer than ever by daylight. All the passage was black and in our study absolutely nothing was left.
What I like about this piece of writing is that we can really see and feel what it was like to be there. Roald gives us clear pictures – bedrooms that seem to be ‘held up by two thin planks’, beds that are ‘brown and nasty’ and the place looking ‘grimmer than ever by daylight’. We also hear about his other senses – we feel the heat, taste the fire in his throat and smell the burning. He takes us on a journey through the scene: we travel with him from watching the fire, up the stairs to the bedrooms, into bed and looking at the study in the daylight. That gives the writing a feeling of movement. There’s a changing speed in the story too. We start with lots of busy stuff happening – flames, coughing, firemen – but we end with blackness and nothingness. And he’s not afraid to make up a word: charcoaly.
Roald entered school poetry competitions and in one poem he wrote a line that I love:
Evening clouds, like frog spawn, spoil the sky.
It turns something very ordinary into something strange and surprising. Not many people would think of comparing evening clouds to frogspawn, but Roald Dahl did. When writers draw our attention to a similarity we may not have noticed before, you can count that as good writing.
He was never afraid of being alone and the other boys noticed that he liked going off in the fields and hills around the school, fishing and collecting birds’ eggs. Roald became a hit taking photographs too.
Photography at Repton
Many of his letters were about this or that camera or film. Sometimes he asks his mother to make sure his photos get printed up properly and other times he sent these home, and then his letters are full of explanations about who or what is in which photo. In Boy, you can tell that as an adult he was still very proud of how he got to be good at photography, but there’s a way that this too is connected to writing. Taking photos carefully, then keeping them and choosing when to show them to people, is like a writer collecting interesting material, storing it up and then deciding when to use it. As you sit about showing people your photos, talking, telling the stories that go with the pictures, you find o
ut what entertains people, what intrigues them, what little exaggerations and jokes you can get away with.
Here he is in that frame of mind in one of his letters:
Playing Fives the other day I knocked a fellows glasses clean off his head with a beautiful sweep of the right arm, because his head unfortunately happened to be in the same place as the ball at that moment. They flew across the floor and shattered into one hundred thousand pieces (which number of course I verified by counting); and so it was one or two days before he could view the world through glass again.
Then there’s oodles of information about the biscuits and cakes he likes, and he’s especially grateful to his mother for sending him nice ones. This sickly sweet recipe made me think of a very famous chocolate-factory owner:
Yesterday I made some Toffee; dashed good it is too. It cost about 1/10d. 2lbs of sugar. 1/2lb of butter. 2 tins of Nestles condensed milk & some treacle. I have poured it out into greased tin lids, and just cut some out when it is wanted. It is soft of course but dashed good.
Meanwhile, Roald – who was now sixteen years old – had a secret so fabulous that it was surprising he didn’t pop with excitement. None of the other boys or masters knew that he had bought a motorbike. He hid it in a barn at a nearby farm and at weekends he would roar through the countryside on his splendid 500cc Ariel. Clad in goggles, helmet, old overcoat and boots, no one recognized him, not even when he rode through Repton, right under the noses of his teachers. I can imagine him leaving school, telling people he’s just going for one of his walks … making sure no one is following him … going to the secret barn … climbing on to the bike … starting it up … hearing the roar of the engine … nudging out into the road … then speeding past the hedges and trees so that they just become a blur … in a world of his own … away from school … away from everything. It sounds just like one of the stories from his books.
Fantastic Mr Dahl Page 4