If his mother was the principal source of Roald’s sense of adventure, she may unwittingly have been the source of some of his talents as a writer as well. For according to Roald’s niece Bryony, Sofie Magdalene was also a born storyteller, and sometimes a gossip too, who enjoyed “weaving fantasies about members of the family, interspersed with downright lies.” Bryony here hints at the division in Sofie Magdalene’s attitude toward her blood children and her stepchildren, to whom one suspects she was always dutiful but less loving. They were usually the victims of her more malicious stories. “She used to have dreams about members of the family and say terrible things about what was going to happen to them,” remembered Bryony, “and she loved to spread foul rumors about.” It seems likely she was the source for the story of Marie Beaurin-Gressier’s abortion and she once put it about the village that her stepson Louis’s wife Meriel (Bryony’s mother) was starving her husband. In hefty old age, confined to a wheelchair and dressed in black, Sofie talked less, but could still petrify her grandchildren and stepgrandchildren. “Witchy,” “terrifying” and “like a spider” were some of the many descriptions of her. But she was not the only fabulist in the family. Alfhild and Roald both quickly honed their skills in that department, under the tutelage of their half sister Ellen, who also enjoyed an exaggerated yarn. Nevertheless, Sofie Magdalene was in a different league. “She was the real storyteller,” Bryony recalled with a wistful chuckle. “I reckon Roald got it all from her.”10 And one of the first and most enduring legends she created for her children was about their father.
Roald was only three years old when his father died. The tales of Harald’s personality and background, both real and invented, became therefore unquestioned, unexamined truths for his children. And Sofie Magdalene was largely responsible for all of them. As the years passed, she gradually cut off contact with almost all the other Dahls, creating a situation where few could contradict her version of events. The entrepreneur who left his family in Norway to find success abroad; the one-armed survivor, undaunted by adversity, who learned to cope with everything life could throw at him; the craftsman/painter living the high life in finde-siècle Paris; the lover of nature, the proponent of “glorious walks”; the grieving father, who lost the will to live. All these aspects of Harald’s personality came to acquire talismanic qualities for his young son, who used them to help define himself. In later life, when things got difficult, sometimes he found himself looking for father figures who could measure up to this ideal. But he never inquired too deeply as to the veracity of the stories about his own father. They were too ingrained in his own personality. The legend of Harald, passed on to his children by his devoted wife, was perhaps the most powerful of the many myths of which his mother was the prime architect. Much of what she said, of course, was true. Yet Sofie Magdalene would later admit, in moments of weakness, that her husband had not been an entirely easy man to live with. For her young children, however, and for Roald in particular, Harald would always be the ideal “papa.”
Roald criticized his father for only one thing: leaving an intricate, complex and controlling will, which suggested a distrust of his wife and which made the family’s day-to-day survival much more difficult than was necessary. His plans were predicated on the assumption that Sofie Magdalene would marry again, so the bulk of the estate was left in a trust that was constructed more in favor of his children than his wife. But she remained a widow, and the result was that she was left with very little direct control of the family finances. Although she was one of the trustees, Sofie Magdalene still had to get approval from the other two trustees, her brother-in-law Oscar, and Ludvig Aadnesen, for almost everything she bought for the household. This was time-consuming and Sofie Magdalene sometimes also found it humiliating. The estate was large. In 1920, it was valued at over £150,000.11 In today’s terms its equivalent could be reckoned about £5 million (or $7.5 million). Harald’s family in Norway were not entirely forgotten, but the bequests to them were small ones. He left £100 to each of his sisters, but to his eighty-six-year-old father, Olaus, who was still alive, and living in poverty in Kristiania in a tiny flat, and to his brother Truls, who had taken over the family business as pork butcher and sausage maker, he left nothing. Almost all of his wealth was left to his children.
One might have thought that the income from the modern-day equivalent of £5 million would have been enough for the Dahl family to go on living in Radyr, but it was not, and their life as rural landowners was abruptly terminated soon after Asta—“Baby,” as she became known—was born in the autumn of 1920. By Christmas, the beloved farm was put on the market, the animals auctioned off, and the servants dismissed. From that moment onward, Radyr, with its turrets and fields, occupied an idealized place in the minds of the Dahl children, and the house came to embody a kind of paradise, irretrievably taken from them at a very young age. This sense of loss is echoed in many of Roald Dahl’s books, most strikingly perhaps in James and the Giant Peach, where, on the very first page “the perfect life for a small boy”—which in this instance involved beaches, sun and sand rather than horses, fields and servants—comes to an abrupt end. James’s parents had been up to London to go shopping (always a mistake in Dahl’s eyes) and there they met a terrible, if hilarious fate—“eaten up in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street, by an enormous angry rhinoceros that had escaped from London Zoo.” Though this was “a rather nasty experience” for them, Dahl reflects, “in the long run it was far nastier for James.” His parents’ end had been swift and relatively painless. Their son, on the other hand, was left behind, cut off from everything familiar and everyone he loved: “alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world.”12
So Radyr was sold. The family, with Birgit the nanny and a couple of maids, moved back to Llandaff, into a “pleasant medium-sized suburban villa”13 called Cumberland Lodge, now part of Howell’s School, which was also near the home of Ludvig Aadnesen. It was a comfortable existence, if less grand than life in Radyr. But there were consolations for a young boy. Its principal attraction was a large garden, with a swing and some rudimentary cricket nets, where Roald, already a keen sportsman, could practice his batting. Even more important than the garden was the man who worked there—a fellow whose real name was Jones, but whom the children called Joss or Spivvis. “Everyone loved him,” Dahl would later recall, “but I loved him most of all. I adored him. I worshipped him, and whenever I was not at school, I used to follow him around and watch him at his work and listen to him talk.” Every Saturday in the winter, when there was a home match, Joss would take young Roald to Ninian Park, to see Cardiff City, the local football team. Roald was already tall enough to see over many people’s heads and clearly relished the experience of being away from a house full of women. “It was thrilling to stand there among those thousands of other men,” he later wrote, “cheering our heroes when they did well and groaning when they lost the ball.” The experience gave him “an almost unbearable sense of thrill and rapture,” and contrasted with his feelings toward his first school: a local kindergarten called Elm Tree House, run by two sisters, Mrs. Corfield and Miss Tucker. Their “sweet and smiling” faces made little impression on him and few memories of his short time there would linger in his brain.14 One alone remained fresh. The swashbuckling thrill of riding his new tricycle down the road to school and leaning into the corners so steeply that only two of the cycle’s three wheels touched the ground.
Roald’s next school would be much more memorable. Llandaff Cathedral School, an elegant three-story Georgian building, constructed in the shadow of a medieval cathedral, is an educational institution with a pedigree that dates back to the ninth century. Roald’s elder brother Louis had been sent there, and though Sofie Magdalene was already planning a move to England, she was not yet quite ready to leave Wales. The school was also a stone’s throw from Cumberland Lodge and so it was the natural place to send Roald after his year with the smiling sisters. He went there in 1923, at the age of se
ven, and stayed for two years. Of all the incidents he would later recall there, one adventure stood out above the others. It was both exciting and traumatic, and contained three ingredients that would come to characterize his later children’s fiction: a sweetshop; a foul old hag; and violent retribution. In Boy, he introduces the story with a fanfare that is both swaggering and yet deliciously ironic. “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful,” he begins. “Truth is more important than modesty. I must tell you therefore, that it was I and I alone who had the idea for the great and daring Mouse Plot. We all have our moments of brilliance and glory,” he concludes, “and this was mine.”15
The story is a simple one. A boy finds a dead mouse under the floor-boards at school. Along with a group of friends, Roald decides to use it to play a trick on the ugly and bad-tempered proprietor of the local sweetshop, Mrs. Pratchett. He takes the dead mouse into the shop and when she is not looking, drops the mouse into a glass jar of sweets. Mrs. Pratchett is so shocked when she opens it and finds the dead rodent that she drops the jar to the ground, where it shatters in pieces. Furious, she tracks down the offenders and takes revenge on them by ensuring they are ferociously beaten. A simple tale of a schoolboy prank that goes wrong, you might think. But not for Roald Dahl. For his sensitive child’s antennae, this is an adventure story of grandiose proportions—enacted with buccaneering style and panache. Its setting, a sweetshop, is the center of the universe. It is “what a bar is to a drunk, or a church is to a Bishop”—the most important place in town. Despite the suspicion that the tasty liquorice bootlaces may be made from rat’s blood, or that the Tonsil Ticklers are infused with chloroform, the contents of its jars and boxes are objects of reverence and profound fascination. Dahl and his young accomplices are a “gang of desperadoes,” locked in mortal combat with the hideous villain of the piece, Mrs. Pratchett, a comic distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life.16 She is “a small, skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry.” She has “goat’s legs” and “small malignant pig-eyes.” Her “grimy hands” with their “black fingernails”17 dig horrifyingly deep into the fudge as she scoops it out of the container. She is a typical Dahl enemy—cruel, bony, repulsive and female—and she wreaks a savage revenge on her five child tormentors, insisting that they are each caned by their headmaster while she sits in a chair, enthusiastically egging him on to greater violence.
Dahl’s description of corporal punishment and adult unkindness in Boy is memorable and utterly convincing. It is the first time that any of the five boys have been beaten, so the tension is tremendous, as they venture ever deeper into the adult world, arriving at the inner sanctum of the enemy, the headmaster’s study, with its forbidding smell of tobacco and leather. Mr. Coombes, the headmaster, has so far seemed comic—a sweating, pink-faced buffoon. No longer preposterous, however, he is now transformed into a chilling agent of retribution: a giant, dangerously flexing his curved yellow cane. Roald’s friend Thwaites is the first to feel its sting. As he bends over and touches the carpet with his fingers, Roald cannot help noticing “how small Thwaites’ bottom looked and how very tight it was.”18 Each stroke of the cane is exaggerated, as the rod cracks “like a pistol shot” and boys shoot into the air, straightening up “like elastic.”
But when Roald’s own turn comes, the tone loses all comedy. The pain of the first stroke causes him to gasp so deeply that it “emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them.” Aiming the strokes of the rod so that they come down in the same place has been a source of abstract comment, even admiration for the young boys. Now it is revealed as an act of cruel brutality. “It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin,” he declares, “but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.”19 No surprise then to find that when his mother sees “the scarlet stripes” that evening at bathtime, she marches over to the school to give the headmaster a piece of her mind. No surprise either that, a term later, she takes Roald away from the school. But the outraged Sofie Magdalene does not then send her son to a gentler institution. Instead, she packs him off to St. Peter’s, a boarding school, across the Bristol Channel, which would prove to be even more draconian than the one in Llandaff.
The journey was taken on a paddle-steamer that “sloshed and churned” its way through the water from Wales to England for twenty-five minutes, before a taxi ferried boys to the school, which lay just outside the “slightly seedy” Somerset seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare. It was a typical English prep school of the period, as Dahl described it, “a purely money-making business owned and operated by the headmaster,” educating about seventy boys,* aged between eight and thirteen, in a three-story, ivy-clad Victorian Gothic mansion, surrounded by playing fields, tennis courts and allotments. In hindsight the school was to remind Dahl of “a private lunatic asylum,”20 an opinion corroborated by another celebrated St. Peter’s alumnus, some twenty years Dahl’s junior, the writer and comedian John Cleese.21 Looking at a faded postcard of the school dining room as it was, one might think it a civilized place. Light floods in through high sash windows onto tables laid with starched white tablecloths. Portraits of notables hang on the walls. Vases of fresh flowers even decorate the tables.
But, if Dahl and his contemporaries are to be believed, this was all a terrible illusion—a temporary image thrown up to persuade potential clients to part with both their offspring and their cash. For, once the parental back was turned, the picture became much uglier. Douglas Highton, Dahl’s best friend for the last two of his four years at the school, agreed with Roald that it was a grim place, describing the headmaster, Mr. Francis, as a “beastly cane-happy monster” with a “nasty collection” of rods on top of his bookshelves, who “seemed to enjoy beating little boys on the slightest pretext.” It was an almost entirely male environment. The headmaster kept his “finicky and fussy”22 wife and two unattractive daughters under lock and key, away from the eyes of the boys, and so the only feminine presence was a “female ogre”—the Matron, who “prowled the corridors like a panther” and obviously “disliked small boys very much indeed.”23
Each boy was assigned one of four curiously named houses into which the school was divided: Duckworth Butterflies, Duckworth Grasshoppers, Crawford Butterflies and Crawford Grasshoppers. Dahl was a Duckworth Butterfly. Competition was encouraged at all levels, as each house vied with the others in both work and games to see who would come out top. Every boy in the school received either stars or stripes for successes or failures in the schoolroom or playing field and these were tallied up at the end of each term, when winners and losers were declared. Three times a year, a twenty-page magazine was professionally published, which formally chronicled and categorized these achievements, listing each boy’s scores in a series of tables. It was taken very seriously. “Congratulations to you all, Butterflies, for you have this term risen from bottom place to second, and you were very nearly top,” declares Duckworth Butterfly housemaster Mr. Valentine Corrado in the December 1927 issue, adding grandly, as if reflecting on the outcome of a military battle, “to the very end it was uncertain whether you or the Duckworth Grasshoppers would triumph.”
Corrado, who taught Latin when he was not trying to seduce the school matron,24 was just one of the motley band of five or six schoolmasters who taught there. Most had fought in the First World War, many still hung on to their army rank, and some of them still bore the mental and physical scars of that conflict. All were eccentrics. They stare out of the school photographs that have immortalized them with a melancholy confidence—garbed in heavy tweed, mustaches trimmed, hair slicked back, jaws thrust forward. There is something untrustworthy yet forlorn about them. The shell-shocked grunting bully Captain Lancaster, for example, renamed Captain Hardcastle in Boy, whose thick orange mustache constantly twitched and bristled, or timid Mr. S. K. Jopp, nicknamed “Snag” because that was one of his favorite words, who had on
ly one hand and whose face had been deformed by an RAF flying accident.25 It was to this peculiar collection of men, whose pleasures included stamp collecting,26 and chasing the boys around the school on tea trolleys,27 that Sofie Magdalene entrusted her nine-year-old son. Odd though they seemed, they instilled a sense of self-discipline and self-protection into their young charges. “They were tough, those masters,” Roald wrote in Boy, “and if you wanted to survive, you had to become pretty tough too.”28
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