The boys slept in dormitories. Between fifteen and twenty uncomfortable iron beds were lined up against the walls of each room, and Roald’s first letter home mournfully reported that none of the mattresses had springs.29 Under each was a bedpan (you were not allowed to go to the lavatory at night unless you were ill), and in the middle of the dormitory, a huddle of basins and jugs filled with cold water, for washing. It was a terrible shock for a young boy, used to a warm, comfortable and largely female environment, and Roald was initially homesick. He slept in his bed the wrong way round, facing the window that looked out toward the Bristol Channel, across which lay his home and his family, tantalizingly close, yet completely out of reach. He feigned appendicitis (having seen his half sister operated on at home a few months earlier, he knew the symptoms) and was sent home, where the local doctor in Llandaff quickly discovered his ruse. Another advocate of hardship as essential to the empire-building spirit, he too reinforced Dahl’s survival mentality. “ ‘I expect you’re homesick,’ he said. I nodded miserably. ‘Everyone is at first,’ he said. ‘You have to stick it out. And don’t blame your mother for sending you away to boarding school. She insisted you were too young, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it, the better for you.’ ”30 They struck a deal. In return for the doctor pretending he had a severe stomach infection and giving him an extra three days at home, Roald promised him he would go back to St. Peter’s and that he would never try the same trick again.
When he returned to Weston-super-Mare, Roald gradually began dealing with his homesickness. His main salvation was sport, something which the boys did almost every day and at which he showed a natural talent. His height and ranginess made him a good rugby player and a competent footballer, cricketer and boxer, though his school report for the summer of 1926 describes him as “overgrown” and “slow.”31 His weekly letters home to his mother, however, are brimfull of his sporting exploits: swimming lengths of the pool underwater, learning to ride horses, scoring goals in soccer and striking boundaries in cricket. “I hit two sixes,” he writes at one point, explaining dramatically to his mother that “you get a six when the ball goes full pitch into the boundary. One hit the pavilion with a tremendous crash and just missed a window.”32 His height was blamed for a “ponderous”33 boxing technique, as were a number of other problems. Sent to a local optician because of recurrent headaches, he was told that there was nothing wrong with his eyes, but that he was “run down, due to growing too quickly.”34
The academic standards at St. Peter’s were high and, initially, Roald was thrown in with a group of boys, including Douglas Highton, who were mostly a year and a half older than he was. He struggled to keep up, finding arts subjects—particularly languages—difficult. A report from Easter 1927 described him as “a little on the defensive” and exhorted him “to have more confidence.” “He imagines he is doing badly,” the report continued, “and consequently does badly.”35 So in September 1927 he stayed down in the 4th Form for a term, regaining his self-esteem and earning a record number of stars for Duckworth Butterflies.† But when he was promoted back to the higher year, things once more became academically difficult and again he became withdrawn. Douglas Highton, whose family lived in Asia Minor, and who was one of the most academic boys in the school, remembered Dahl as an outsider, with few friends. “Roald had a different individuality … he was very much an immigrant from Norway, and I was an immigrant from Turkey, where my mother’s family had been established for about two hundred years. We were both foreigners.” The two misfits became firm friends, walking side-by-side on school trips to Weston-super-Mare, and indulging their mutual contempt for “what we regarded as stupid or unnecessary rules.” In one another’s company saw themselves as “subversives,” developing a love of word games, enjoying a similar sense of humor, and sharing a sense of “the ridiculous nature of the English.” A sprightly ninety-three when I spoke to him, Highton remembered that—even as a nine-year-old—his friend could be stubborn and dogmatic, “but I didn’t mind,” he continued. “I knew as soon as I met him, this was a chap I wanted to be with.”36
Roald’s letters home from St. Peter’s were always written in English, and he later recalled that after the family’s Norwegian nurse left their employment in the mid-1920s, “the whole household started going over to English.”37 For his first year he always signed himself “Boy.” It was the way he had defined himself in a house full of women and it was not until he was almost ten that he started to call himself Roald. The letters reveal many of the enthusiasms that would continue into later life: natural history, collecting (initially stamps and birds’ eggs), food (mostly sweets and chocolates) and sport, where perhaps his most impressive achievement was at conkers.‡ Highton remembers that Roald was an “ace”—selecting his chestnuts “with great care and technical skill” and inventing a process to harden them “to such a degree of indestructibility that he almost always won.”38 One year he was the school champion, writing home to his mother with pride that he had “the highest conker in the school—273.”39
His tone to her was usually confident, often bossy, and his letters are full of detailed and highly specific instructions and requests. “I’m sending some things out of Toblerone chocolate, if you collect forty of them you get shares in the company,”40 he writes at one point, complaining bitterly at another that the toy submarine she has bought him from Harrods does not dive properly. In this context his mind strays to the store’s famous pet department and he wonders how much a monkey might cost. “It would be rather nice to have one,” he suggests hopefully.41 Indeed, Roald often seemed more concerned about the well-being of his pets—which included turtles, dogs, rats, tortoises and a salamander—than he was about his family. His occasional letters to his sisters are generally brief and often patronizing. When Alf got a place at Roedean, for example, Roald merely commented: “What a miracle Alfhild has passed … she was jolly lucky; personally I didn’t think she would.”42
Roald was part of a generation of British children for whom the natural world was a source of immense stimulation and pleasure. As he grew up, he was constantly observing the countryside around him—noting unusual phenomena and picking up anything that attracted his attention. His collection of 172 birds’ eggs, lovingly preserved in a glass cabinet with ten drawers, ranged from a tiny wren’s to those of hawks, gulls and carrion crows. The eggs were things of great beauty for him, each with its own unique colors and speckles. Some were collected from sheer cliff faces, others from the tops of tall trees, and he recalled them with great affection. “I could always remember vividly how and where I had found each and every egg,” he wrote a few months before he died, adding that he thought collecting eggs was “an enthralling hobby for a young boy and not, in my opinion, in the least destructive. To open a drawer and see thirty different very beautiful eggs nestling in their compartments on pink cotton-wool was a lovely sight.”43
In childhood, Roald’s curiosity about the world was insatiable, and his letters from St. Peter’s reveal clearly how much the natural world meant to him. The “snow-white passages” and “beautiful fossils” in the nearby Mendip caves44 counterpoise a lecture on bird legends, in which the boys are told how the thieving blackbird got its black plumage and yellow beak, and—this appealed to him most—how the tiny wren defeated the eagle to become king of the birds. As a correspondent, he treats his mother as someone constantly in need of education, earnestly recounting what he has learned in school: how owls spew up the remains of the food they’ve eaten in pellets,45 how kangaroos box, and how, in Nigeria, “black people live in mud huts.”46 An eclipse of the sun, which he views through special glasses he has got from a children’s newspaper, fascinates him,47 as does the precise means of making fire with wood and a piece of cord.48 And just in case Sofie Magdalene can’t quite grasp it, he makes a careful series of drawings and diagrams for her. His sense of adventure and curiosity is co
nstantly stimulated. A film of the pilot Alan Cobham’s flight to the Cape of Good Hope,49 a lecture by Captain Morris who has been on an expedition to Mount Everest,50 and a newsreel about travelling from Tibet to India in a motorcar,51 compete with a school trip to the caves of the Cheddar Gorge, a nearby local attraction, in a charabanc, where the boys were squashed into the open-topped coach “like sardines in a tin.”52 Fire too is another source of wonder and always exciting—even when Roald’s hand is badly burned by a “jackie jumper” firework.53 And, when three shops burn down in the local town, the masters lead a school expedition there the following day so that the boys can inspect the smoldering ruins.54
Despite its Spartan discipline, the school exposed its pupils to the classics, to literature and to music. At home Roald had begun by reading Beatrix Potter stories, moving on to A. A. Milne, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which he would later describe as “the most enduring of all children’s books,” and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, however, were the first to leave “a permanent impression.”55 They made him laugh, and by the age of nine he had learned them all by heart. St. Peter’s pushed him further. By the time he was twelve, Roald was familiar with compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Grieg,56 and had encountered many of Shakespeare’s plays, three Dickens novels, Stevenson’s Treasure Island,57 and a great deal of Rudyard Kipling. He was already very comfortable with literature. There were books at home and his mother was an avid reader—Horace Walpole, Thomas Hardy and G. K. Chesterton were among her favorites.
Her son’s tastes were catholic, but his preference was generally for exotic tales of action, adventure and the imagination: the adventure stories of G. A. Henty, C. S. Forester, and Henry Rider Haggard, for example, as well as espionage thrillers such as Secret of the Baltic by T. C. Bridges and J. Storer Clouston’s The Spy in Black, a First World War adventure set in the Orkneys that would later become Michael Powell and Emeric Press-burger’s first film. Together with Douglas Highton, Roald also developed a fascination with Victorian ghost stories and Gothic fantasy, which he was to maintain for the rest of his life. The two boys read M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe together, and Roald gave his friend a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 collection of grand guignol short stories Can Such Things Be? as a birthday present. Dahl later admitted that Bierce’s tales of ghosts, ghouls, psychics, robots and werewolves “scared me a lot,”58 adding elsewhere that the book was so frightening he “couldn’t turn the light off at night.”59 He believed it “profoundly fascinated and probably influenced” him.60 The book was so important to him that, almost sixty years later, Roald asked his friend whether he could have it back. Highton obliged and, in return, Roald sent him a signed copy of Boy with a warm dedication apologizing for a few of his more lurid descriptions of St. Peter’s. These were, he confessed, “coloured by my natural sense of fantasy.”61
This love of fantasy did not transfer itself to things medical, for which Dahl was already developing a sharply observant eye. Accident and disease-prone throughout his life, Dahl’s childhood was packed with grisly medical encounters and Boy is full of hair-raising (and mostly true) accounts of these. His nose is “cut clean off” in a car crash and stitched back on by a doctor at home on the kitchen table. Then, on holiday in Norway, a doctor with a “round mirror strapped to his forehead” and a nurse “carrying a red rubber apron and a curved enamel bowl” remove his adenoids without using anesthetic. Dahl often uses the adjective “curved” when he wants to describe something sinister, while gleaming metal also usually presages pain. Here a “long shiny steel instrument,” with a blade that is “very small, very sharp and very shiny,” disappears high up into the roof of his mouth. The doctor’s hand gives “four or five very quick little twists” and the next moment, “out of my mouth into the basin came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood.”62 Looking at the “huge red lumps” that had fallen out of his mouth, Dahl’s first thought was that the doctor had cut out the middle of his head.
Back at school it is not long before he has another encounter with doctor and scalpel. This one has another “long steel handle” and a “small pointed blade.” The young victim in this instance was not Dahl himself, but a fellow patient in the sickroom, Ellis, who has “an immense and angry-looking boil on the inside of his thigh. I saw it,” Roald boasts enthusiastically. “It was as big as a plum and about the same colour.” Ellis’s outraged screams of pain and his floods of tears, as the doctor throws a towel over his patient’s face and lances the purple swelling, driving the knife deep into the boil, provoke no sympathy from either doctor or the “mountainous-bosomed” Matron. “Don’t make such a fuss about nothing,” is all she says. Dahl himself is only marginally more sympathetic, admitting that he thinks the doctor “handled things rather cleverly.” “Pain,” he concludes, “was something we were expected to endure.”63
Some things, however, were too much for his young readers. In the first draft of Boy, for example, Ellis was referred to by his real name, Ford, and Dahl added a coda to the story of the boil-lancing, which he removed before the book was published, almost certainly because he felt it was too somber and gloomy. Ford survived the boil, he wrote, adding that “tragically it was all for nothing,”64 and explaining that, two years later, during an outbreak of measles at the school, the boy died. In this omission also Dahl may well have been being true to his unsentimental child’s eye, for in his letters home from school the death is barely mentioned. His own exploits on horseback and a description of a toy motor canoe, with an automated rower, “whose joints move like real,”65 get far more attention.
It is possible too that, in this regard, Roald was looking after his mother by protecting her from bad news. Perhaps he was keeping his word to the doctor in Llandaff, and taking trouble not to worry her. Certainly, his own accidents and ailments are only reported when the patient is on the mend. And there are never any complaints. Instead, he learns early how to use misfortune as entertainment. “On Bristol station,” he tells her, “Hoggart was sick, and when I looked at it, I was sick, but now I am quite all right.”66 Moreover, behind the desire to entertain and shock, there are traces of great sensitivity. Writing to comfort his mother on the seventh anniversary of his sister Astri’s death, he comments: “I don’t suppose the grave has ever looked nicer than it does now, with all the heather on it.”67 But drama is what excites him most. A trip into Weston to see the Duke and Duchess of York (the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth), who were in town to open a new hospital, is memorable because their train ran someone over and because a local ironmonger got so excited that he fired six blank shots into the air and terrified the nervous duke.68 By his final year at St. Peter’s in 1929, a thuggish quality was starting to reveal itself. After playing rugby against a local team, Roald writes boastfully of his own school’s “rough plays,” which were strongly censured by the match referee. “We got four of their chaps crying,” he brags to his mother, as if pleased that he can now inflict injury as well as receive it.69
By the age of twelve he has also started to notice class and accents, remarking to his mother that the man who cleans his boots calls Highton “Oiton” and himself “Dorl,”70 and that while playing football, he has overheard some navvies arguing with the referee on a neighboring pitch. Their language fascinates him. “Garn, stop yer gob, ref, or I’ll come along and clump you over the ear!”71 he records with evident delight. With Highton, he starts doing the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, and experimenting with his own clumsy but original word games. A competitor in the school boxing finals is described as “a lump of very conceited mass,”72 while a singer practicing in the music room below him is evoked in terms that prefigure some of the language of The BFG. “The noise,” he writes, “closely resembles that of a fly’s kneecap, rattled about in a bilious buttercup, both having kidney trouble and lumbago!”73 His eye for the quirky and absurd is also developing fast. He is intrigued by a letter
from his sister Ellen, who had reported seeing “electrified frogs,”74 while, in a film about a silver mine, he laughs out loud when he sees “a lot of fat old women” mashing up the slurry “in order to get the silver out.”75 Obesity is always a source of comment, usually of amusement and sometimes of condemnation. A passenger at Yatton Station is “at least nine feet around the tummy in circumference,”76 and when “two elderly females” come to the school to act out Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Roald observes critically that “the fattest, in a purple dress, didn’t know it well, so had to hold a book all the time.”77 Even Sofie Magdalene is not exempt from his fat-detecting eye. In the summer of 1929, while on holiday in Cornwall, he writes to his mother warning her that although they are saving her a large room with a double bed, “I am sure your hips will protrude from each side.”78
In April 1927, Sofie Magdalene sold Cumberland Lodge, and the Dahl family moved to Bexley in Kent. The spacious new house, Oak-wood, was only 15 miles from Central London, yet had two acres of tree-filled grounds tended by a gardener called Martin, and, much to Roald’s delight, a hard tennis court.79 It had good railway connections to Roedean, where Alfhild was about to start school, and where Sofie Magdalene hoped Else and Asta would shortly follow. The sophisticated maverick Douglas Highton remembered it as “luxurious and civilized”—with a selection of cooked food laid out on the table each morning at breakfast, and a billiard room with full-sized table, which was used each night after a dinner, over which Sofie Magdalene presided in her “gentle and dignified way.”80 But a few years later, other more conventional guests found the Dahls running wild. One was amazed at the “filthy language” used by the children, to which their mother “paid no regard,” sitting “stone deaf,” while Roald and his sisters indulged themselves in a torrent of swearing.81 His youngest sibling, Asta, agreed that the children “didn’t have many restrictions” and that, by English standards, they were kept on a pretty loose leash. Once Roald sent her up a cedar tree in the garden, “absolutely padded out with cushions,” so that he could shoot at his ten-year-old sister with his air rifle and see how far the bullets would penetrate.82 She gleefully consented. On another occasion he rigged up an elaborate aerial “chariot” made out of Meccano, containing soup cans of cold water, and suspended it on a long wire so he could “bomb” local ladies, as they walked their dogs along the lane at the bottom of the garden. The result pleased him hugely. “The ladies who had halted and looked up on hearing the rushing noise of my chariot overhead, caught the cascade of water full in their face. … It was tremendous,” Dahl remembered. And, despite his mother’s “steely eye” when she discovered what he had done, “for days afterwards I experienced the pleasant warm glow that comes to all of us when we have brought off a major triumph.”83
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