An Ariel 500
It’s no surprise that Roald was never made a prefect. A prefect was one of the boys who were in charge, which meant they ruled over the younger ones. The headmaster and housemaster must have seen that Roald wasn’t the kind of boy who lived by the rules. They never knew what he would do next and could see he wasn’t someone who would enjoy bossing other boys around. There was even a chance that if they did give him the job of prefect he would do something strange or crazy!
Roald wasn’t sad to leave school – quite the opposite, in fact. In Boy, he says, ‘Without the slightest regret I said goodbye to Repton forever and rode back to Kent on my motorbike.’ But, no matter how happy he was to leave Repton, there was one thing that the school gave him and that was the opportunity to develop his writing. Here’s something rather wonderful that he wrote while he was there:
Dreams
Once I dreamed of an iceberg. It was a large iceberg which floated on a cold ocean, as if in sleep. A warm mist enveloped all but a thin white line, against which the ocean lapped unceasing. Then, as I lay wondering, the mist slid on, and I saw the iceberg, hard and cold like some great fragment of an icy coast, far away northward.
I awoke, stretched out an arm and pulled up my bedclothes from the floor. Outside the hoar-frost lay thick on the field, and in the pens the sheep huddled closer for warmth.
Once I dreamed of the tap in our garden. The tap has an old washer, for even Beck, who has never, never used a lever to fit a tyre on the Morris, failed to stop the drip.
And now, as I dreamed, it was dripping as usual, but in the little hole which the water had made, there lay with its leg caught under a smooth brown pebble, a daddy long-legs.
The drops welled, limpid, on the lip, and fell with a little splash upon the insect below.
I awoke, closed the windows under which I slept and wiped my face on the sheet. Poor daddy-long-legs.
When I dreamed again it was of the Bay of Biscay. All around me I saw the sea, angry as a wounded tiger, sweeping from the North. The waves, like mountains, heaved to and fro, they rose, frowning, paused for a moment then curling savagely, boiled over in a turmoil of green and white – the wounded tiger was showing its teeth.
And all above me hung the wet black clouds, heavy with rain, like airships of paper filled with oil.
I lay on my raft and cursed the Bay of Biscay. I expressed my feelings most aptly in the language I detest, crying with surely as much feeling as Aenias ever cried it: ‘Me miserum quanti, mones volucuntur aquarium.’
And I began to like Aenias …
It was the last morning of the term, and in the bedder they had thought of an excellent way of waking me. Four of them were trying to tip me on to the floor; it had not occurred to them that a quicker way of waking me would have been to shake my shoulder; but nothing occurs to anyone on the last morning.
Luckily I awoke just before my raft sunk, otherwise I should have discovered to my astonishment that the bottom of the Atlantic was made, not of Planktonic or Forameniferic Oooze but of Repton floorboards, less interesting and harder to fall on.
What do you think of this piece of writing? I really like it. I like the way it is not only about dreaming but also feels dreamy to read.
A short while before he left Repton for good, Roald had passed exams in English, history, maths, science, French and religious education. He knew that when he reached his twenty-fifth birthday he would start to receive a small but regular amount of money which his father had left in trust for him. But that was years away. Some young men in his position joined the army, navy or air force. Others became priests or ministers of the church or missionaries. But none of these jobs appealed to Roald.
His headmaster said that Roald had ‘ambition and a real artistic sense … If he can master himself, he will be a leader’. By this he meant that he believed that Roald would do very well one day, particularly through writing, music and art, but only if he got himself organized!
I think Roald’s headmaster was pretty much spot on, don’t you?
Flying training, Nairobi
The Man
Roald Dahl, the businessman
Chapter 6
Travels
In July 1934 Roald Dahl’s school days had come to an end. He was nearly eighteen years old with his whole future ahead of him. But what was he going to do with his life? He wasn’t a writer, not yet. He didn’t even seem to think that writing was something he could make into a career.
But there were plenty of things that he loved doing and was good at, such as taking photos, listening to music, bird-spotting, having fun, dreaming up tricks and jokes, travelling, riding his motorbike, inventing gadgets, having adventures, playing cricket and any other game where he could hit a ball with some kind of bat or stick, hanging out with his family – especially his half-brother Louis – and writing, of course. But none of them qualified him for a particular job. And he didn’t want to do any more studying, or go to university. This explains why, in his last term at Repton, Roald had applied for – and got – a job with a company that had offices overseas. Because what he really wanted to do was travel the world.
First, Roald had to be trained. And for the next four years, until he was twenty-two, he worked for the Shell oil company, sometimes at an oil refinery, but mostly in an office in London.
Shell Mex House, London
He still lived at home in Bexley. In his spare time, he loved listening to music and reading novels – especially modern American crime novels. He continued taking photos and developed them in a darkroom he’d set up. This was long before digital cameras were invented and developing is a long, slow, painstaking process, with a touch of magic about it. The scene you think you’ve captured lies hidden and invisible, deep in the heart of the roll of film. Then, when you pour on the right mix of potions and leave them for exactly the right length of time, often in complete darkness or dull red light, the images of those scenes – people’s faces, mountains, beaches, cricket teams or whatever – begin to appear on the paper.
Roald started writing short stories and even invented a character called Mr Dippy Dud. It was printed in Shell’s company magazine:
Mr Dud is a keen musician, but do not be misled if he’s not playing a mouth organ when you see him. He is an equally adept performer on the harmonica, also on the harmonium, euphonium, pandemonium, saxophone, vibraphone, Dictaphone, glockenspiel and catarrh … Don’t be afraid to tackle anyone you think may be Mr Dud. People who are mistaken for him enter heartily in the fun of the thing, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.
At first glance, this may look like a very serious piece of writing, but it’s actually a spoof – a piece of writing that pretends to be something that it isn’t. Can you see the beginnings of Roald Dahl’s writing style? The list of real instruments mixed up with silly ones sounds to me very like the kind of thing that Roald would later write for children.
After four years of footling around in London, Roald’s next big adventure began in 1938, when the oil company sent him overseas at last – to East Africa. He travelled there by boat, landing first in Mombasa in Kenya, then going on to the then tiny town of Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika (which is now called Tanzania). He was suddenly surrounded by the wildlife that he’d only read about before, including elephants, leopards, lions and giraffes and snakes. But life in Tanganyika was about to change – in fact, the whole world was about to change – because in September 1939 Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany. The Second World War had begun.
Roald wrote to the Royal Air Force, saying that he wanted to become a pilot. They agreed to train him. And then he wrote to his mother, telling her how it would be ‘very good fun’, much better than being in the army, ‘marching about in the heat from one place to another’, and, what’s more, they would teach him how to fly aeroplanes.
Roald Dahl loved gadgets, machines and speed. He loved FUN. He loved spending time on his own – whether that was on h
is motorbike, in the darkroom, listening to music or aboard a rickety boat on rough seas in Norway. He also seems to have liked the idea of danger. He had no idea just how scary and awful the war was going to be, nor what a terrible loss of life there would be, especially among these young pilots.
So Roald left Dar es Salaam and went to Nairobi in Kenya, where the RAF were going to teach him to fly … and immediately hit a big problem. Or rather, a tall problem. With a height of six feet and six inches – or two metres – Roald was too tall to fit into a fighter- plane.
The planes were Tiger Moths, and, compared to modern planes, these aircraft were tiny, weak, fragile things. If ever you look at one in a museum or on the Internet, you’ll see that some of them didn’t even have canopies – the pilots were exposed to the wind. In most planes there was a kind of windscreen, like on an open-topped car, which protected their faces a little. But Roald’s head was higher than the windscreen. This meant that, once he had got up speed and was flying, he could hardly breathe. He got round it, though. He tied a thin cotton cloth over his nose and mouth to stop himself from choking.
Soon he was loving it. He wrote to his mother, ‘I’ve never enjoyed myself so much …’ Terrible things were happening far, far away in Poland and France, but Roald was like a tourist, flying over the beautiful savannah of Kenya and the Great Rift Valley, amazed by the breathtaking scenes of beauty. In his little plane, he could skim along just above the ground, watching herds of giraffes and wildebeest. He was seeing something that only a handful of people had ever seen. If you are a writer, you often want to feel that you’re one of the few to have seen, heard or experienced something, so that when you write you can imagine you’re bringing your readers the news. People who got to know Roald Dahl better than I did said the feeling that he was a person who had some news was something he liked very much. He liked having some kind of secret knowledge that he could share with you, or shock you with.
Then things started getting a bit more serious. Roald and his fellow trainee pilots – there were sixteen of them – travelled to Uganda, then on to Cairo and into Iraq. They were being prepared to fight in the hot, dry lands of North Africa, where the war was now being fought too. It was in Iraq that Roald finished his training.
In the mornings, he and the other pilots flew Hawker Harts and Audaxes – planes that were armed with bombs and machine guns. This was not just learning how to fly. This was training for war, learning how to kill. But in the afternoons they could relax, sometimes wandering about the ancient city of Baghdad. It was unbelievably hot, up to 50°C. Daily life was full of flies, sandstorms, scorpions and snakes.
After a few months, Roald Dahl was made a pilot officer, passing his tests with ‘Special Distinction’. Out of forty pilots, he came third, and the other two men had already known how to fly before the war. A report said that he had exceptional flying ability. He could swoop and swerve and dive and climb and do the scariest manoeuvre of them all – the loop-the- loop. He was proud to wear his RAF flying badge.
It was now September 1940. Roald had just turned twenty-four years old and what took place next would affect him for the rest of his life. It happened when he was flying a Gloster Gladiator, a little plane that he was taking from the Suez Canal to a secret location in the North African desert. He landed near Alexandria in Egypt on a tiny runway where there were just a few tents and other aeroplanes. He needed more fuel, he was tired and it was getting late. He asked the commanding officer for some directions. The officer phoned ahead and then asked Roald for his map, pointing to a spot in the middle of the desert. Roald was concerned that when he arrived it would be too dark to see and that the runway would be hidden with camouflage.
‘You can’t miss it,’ the officer told him.
But after a while Roald started to get worried. There he was, up in the sky, above the desert. It was getting dark. The wind was blowing the sand about. Below him were rocks, sand, little valleys and humps in the ground – mile after mile after mile, stretching away into the distance. He looked hard for a runway, some tents or other aeroplanes, but he couldn’t see a thing. Nothing at all.
And now he was running out of fuel. He didn’t even have enough to get him back to Alexandria. What could he do? What would you do?
Roald decided to take a chance. He thought he would be able to land the plane somewhere flat. So he flew towards the ground, slowed down and hoped for the best. But it was no good. The plane hit a rock, dived nose-first into the ground and smashed up. Inside, tangled among the wreckage, was Roald.
His head had crashed against the plane. The fuel then caught light and the aircraft burst into flames. Meanwhile, the guns and bullets on board were whizzing and zinging in all directions. Roald could easily have been hit by one of them.
This is how the authorities wrote about it in the official report:
Pilot Officer Dahl was ferrying an aircraft from No. 102 Maintenance Unit to this unit, but unfortunately not being used to flying aircraft over the desert he made a forced landing two miles west of Mersah Matruh. He made an unsuccessful forced landing and the aircraft burst into flames. The pilot was badly burned and he was conveyed to an Army Field Ambulance station.
Luckily Roald’s plane was spotted coming down and two soldiers from a nearby base came out to find him. He was so badly smashed up and burned, and the plane was so badly damaged, that at first they didn’t even know he was in the RAF. They took him back to the base, where the army doctors thought he was an Italian pilot – in other words, the enemy! When they realized Roald was in the RAF, they sent him on to the Anglo-Swiss hospital in Alexandria. There the doctors and nurses got to work straight away, treating his burns, his concussion and something that would hurt him for the rest of his life – his back.
At first the doctors thought he might have been permanently blinded in the crash. So did Roald. For several weeks, he couldn’t see. He was dizzy and sick and faded in and out of consciousness. Later, when he was better, Roald wrote a short story called ‘Beware of the Dog’. I wonder if he was describing what it felt like in those early days after his crash.
The whole world was white and there was nothing in it. It was so white that sometimes it looked black, and after a time it was either white or black, but mostly it was white. He watched it as it turned from white to black, then back to white again, and the white stayed a long time, but the black lasted only a few seconds. He got into the habit of going to sleep during the white periods, of waking up just in time to see the world when it was black. The black was very quick. Sometimes it was only a flash, a flash of black lightning. The white was slow, and in the slowness of it, he always dozed off.
If you look at the first three sentences again, you’ll see that he mentions the word ‘white’ seven times! When we write, we can say something like ‘for a lot of the time the world looked white’ and leave it at that. Or we can find ways of saying that same thing by repeating a word. This way, the words don’t just say what’s happening, they start to sound and feel just like the way a person is thinking. The way you write imitates your thoughts. I think it’s really interesting that one of the ways Roald became a writer was through trying to write about one of the most awful experiences he ever went through.
So, Roald lay in bed in a strange, dreamlike state, slowly on the mend. But in the middle of it all he heard some news from back home. His mother’s house in Bexley had been bombed. His mother and sisters were all right. That was good. But he had lost his precious camera, photos and notebooks. And that wasn’t so good. The war was starting to affect everyone and everything Roald knew and loved.
After two months, several operations and hundreds of hours’ sleep, Roald started to feel better. His face was remodelled by a plastic surgeon who – as Roald told his mother – ‘pulled my nose out of the back of my head and shaped it’. He said that the nose looked ‘just as before except that it’s a little bent about’. Like in the letters he sent from school, Roald again seemed to be trying to stop his moth
er from worrying too much about her only son.
After a few more months, he was feeling better still. And the RAF agreed that he was fit and well … so they sent him back to the war.
Roald Dahl’s Hurricane
Roald Dahl’s Jobs
The Businessman
‘I enjoyed it, I really did. I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman.’
The Fighter Pilot
‘I don’t think any fighter pilot has ever managed to convey what it is like to be up there in a long-lasting dog-fight … It was truly the most breathless and the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life. I caught glimpses of planes with black smoke pouring from their engines. I saw planes with pieces of metal flying off their fuselages … The sky was so full of aircraft that half my time was spent in actually avoiding collisions.’
The Spy
Fantastic Mr Dahl Page 5