If holidays at home were like paradise for the children, going away was even better. Easter was usually spent on the coast of Wales, at the picturesque seaside resort of Tenby, where the family rented a house in the Old Harbour, right on the seafront. There, accompanied by both of their maids from Bexley, Roald took donkey rides on the beach, collected winkles from the rock pools, walked with the dogs on the clifftops, and occasionally took the boat to nearby Caldy Island, where he gathered seabirds’ eggs. He also indulged his rich schoolboy sense of humor. Else, his younger sister, remembers Roald asking her to lean out of the window of the house and shout at the passersby: “One skin, two skin, three skin, four skin!”84 without understanding why her brother was rolling on the floor with laughter.
But Tenby was as nothing compared to the summer holidays in Norway. After a candlelit dinner in Oslo, at the home of their Hesselberg grandparents and their two eccentric spinster aunts, the children and their indomitable mother would head off to the coast and the countless islands that lay scattered through the fjords. These afforded endless opportunities for swimming, fishing, sunbathing, eating seafood, and yet more pranks, such as replacing the tobacco in their future brother-in-law’s pipe with goat droppings and waiting to see how he would react when he smoked it. Asta remembered sailing in Louis’s boat The Hard Black Stinker and handing up buckets to be filled with fresh prawns from the returning shrimp boats, while Roald revelled in the lyrical pleasures of fishing. “On our summer holidays in Norway we would often row out into the fjord in the early evenings to fish,” he wrote later. “We dropped anchor and baited our hooks with mussels and let out the lines until the weights hit the bottom. Then, unless we were after flat fish, we pulled our lines up two good arms-lengths above the seabed and waited. Each of us held the line in the proper manner around the back of the first finger with the thumb on top, hardly daring to speak because, although the fjord was deep, we weren’t certain that the fish mightn’t hear us.”85
And in the evenings, Sofie Magdalene told stories. Sometimes they were English ones, read from books, but often the fare was darker and more Scandinavian. These were the ones Roald and Alfhild remembered: fairy tales, either freshly invented or adapted from the nineteenth-century collections of Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe.86 These accounts of wicked trolls and other mythical Norwegian creatures that lived in the dark pine forests were unsentimental yarns, usually with a highly developed sense of the fantastical and the grotesque. They featured satires on the consequences of greed, stories about battling giants and cloud monsters, tales of children who soared high into the sky on the backs of eagles, and a series about outsize insects and frogs entitled Have Animals Got Souls? They were to have a profound influence on the young Roald and shape his sense of what a story should be. Fables such as The Boy Who Challenged a Troll to an Eating Competition, The Hare Who Laughed Until His Jaws Cracked and The Tabby Cat Who Ate Too Much overflow with zany black humor. They clearly struck a chord with Roald, for he would reuse their themes and reinvent them in his own manner many years later.
These tales were illustrated by an artist called Theodor Kittelsen. Kittelsen was a Norwegian mystic—a visionary and fantastical painter, much loved by the Dahls. He was born in 1857 on the west coast of Norway, in Kragerø, the birthplace of Ludvig Aadnesen. Like his contemporary Edvard Munch, many of his paintings and illustrations are not for the fainthearted. He too was fascinated by the grotesque. His drawings of the bubonic plague, for example, which raged through medieval Norway, are remarkable for their evocations of death and loneliness in a dark, hostile landscape; yet he was also able to depict the evanescent swiftness of a running stream, the misty stillness of an autumn sunrise, and the strange shapeless wonderland of a familiar human landscape transformed by a heavy fall of snow. His eye is sharply observant, and his sense of humor usually coarse and hard-edged in a way that prefigures Dahl’s own. In Morbid Love, for example, a bedraggled green mosquito and a frog in a crumpled white ball gown embrace by the side of a tranquil blue lake. A distant sun is setting. At the water’s edge stands an empty bottle of wine. Beside it a drained glass lies on its side. The two animal lovers are parting. Both are weeping. But the pathos of this melancholy moment will soon be shattered. For, unbeknown to them, a mischievous crab has emerged from the water and is about to nip the grasshopper’s leg, while on a branch above their heads a warbling bird has just evacuated its bowels. In a moment the resulting mess will splatter all over the lovers’ tear-stained faces.87
This dimension of the ironic and absurd masked Kittelsen’s profound fascination for the natural world. A fellow painter, Erik Werenskjold, praised his concern with “man’s pettiness and absurdity, his vindictiveness and jealousy,” which was set against “the lofty and unfathomable grandeur of Nature, as revealed in snowclad mountains, desolate hills or a tiny fragrant blossom.”88 This combination of the satirist and the naturalist, the fantasist and the observer, also defined an important aspect of Dahl’s own aesthetic. His sisters, particularly the sharp and observant Alfhild, saw the link at once between their brother’s tales and those Norwegian legends they had been told as children, recognizing in both a distinctive blend of humor and fear, combined with a sense of the solitary majesty of the natural world.89 Recalling his childhood diaries, scribbled high up in the branch of an ancient chestnut tree, far away from other humans and deep within the realm of nature, Dahl himself would later write: “In springtime, I was in a cave of green leaves surrounded by hundreds of those wonderful white candles that are the conker trees flowers. In winter it was less mysterious, but even more exciting because I could see the ground miles below me as well as the landscape all around. Sitting there, above the world, I used to write down things that would have made my mother and my sisters stretch their eyes with disbelief had they ever read them. But I knew they wouldn’t.”90
This acute sense of the ecstasy and agony of childhood—of the strange opposition of happiness and sadness, reality and fantasy, success and failure—was something that Dahl never forgot. It remained familiar to him all his life. He remembered with ease how a child sees the world, how isolated he or she can feel even within the bosom of the family, how quickly they must adapt to new experiences, and how odd the world of adults can seem when viewed through younger eyes. As he was to write of the young matron at St. Peter’s, “it made no difference whether she was twenty-eight or sixty-eight because to us a grown-up was a grownup and all grown-ups were dangerous creatures.”91 In later life, some adults would find this “childish” aspect to his personality irritating. They objected to it either in his writing, which they accused of coarseness and vulgarity, or when it was manifested personally in boastfulness, bragging or contentiousness. Yet, what came with it was an ever present sense of wonder. This imaginative verve was essential to his nature and in many ways, the keystone of all his writing—both for adults and children. It could result in the grotesque and repulsive, for which he would become notorious, but it could also be tender and elegiac, dark and mysterious. Expressed in spare, simple prose that sometimes verged on the poetic, Dahl’s sense of the child’s perspective was always sure-footed, and often immensely powerful. “I cannot possibly describe to you what it felt like to be standing alone in the pitchy blackness of that silent wood in the small hours of the night,” he wrote in Danny The Champion of the World, describing a child who has got lost in the forest. “The sense of loneliness was overwhelming, the silence as deep as death, and the only sounds were the ones I made myself. … I had a queer feeling that the whole wood was listening with me, the trees and the bushes, the little animals hiding in the undergrowth and the birds roosting in the branches. All were listening. Even the silence was listening. Silence was listening to silence.”92
* Not 150, as Dahl recalls in Boy, p. 72.
† This was equivalent to year four in current UK educational practice and sixth grade in the United States and Canada.
‡ Conkers is a traditional English autumn gam
e, played by schoolchildren, in which the seed of a horse chestnut, a conker, is suspended on a string and then used to strike another conker similarly suspended. When one of the two is destroyed, the survivor is declared victorious. A winning conker assumes the score of all its victim’s preceding foes.
CHAPTER FOUR
Foul Things and Horrid People
ON A CHILLY JANUARY morning in 1930, Roald Dahl set off for his first day at Repton School. He had bidden farewell to his pet mice, Montague and Marmaduke, at home, and to his mother and sisters at Bexley Station, where he caught the train for London. At Charing Cross, he loaded his luggage aboard a taxi and crossed the city, arriving at the neoclassical grandeur of old Euston Station, through its magnificent Doric arch—the largest ever built—and into the spectacular Great Hall, with its galleries, murals, gilded ceilings and the awe-inspiring double staircase, which swept down from the gallery level to the bustling station floor below. Gaggles of Reptonians, all immediately recognizable by their distinctive uniform of pinstripe trousers and long black tailcoats, chattered and joked as they waited to board the Derby train. A porter loaded Roald’s trunks, each stamped with his name, onto the train, and an hour later it steamed out of the station on the 130-mile journey north.
On board, Roald struck up a conversation with one of his fellow pupils, Ben Reuss. He was a year older than Roald and had already been at the school for a term. He was a good ally for a new boy. Despite natural first-day nerves, Reuss was struck immediately by Dahl’s “unconventional” manner1 and his madcap sense of humor. By midafternoon, as the train pulled into Derby Station, the light was already fading. Roald then boarded one of a series of taxis that drove the boys and their luggage out of the grimy city and into a damp and dismal surrounding countryside. After about ten miles his cab drifted past St. Wystan’s Church, whose honey-colored stone seemed dark gray in the dim light and whose tall spire, “as slender as a sharpened pencil,”2 to use a simile of one of his contemporaries, looked down upon the twelfth-century arch, where the main school buildings of Repton lay. A minute or so later, it came to a halt outside the doors of Priory House, the building that was to be Roald’s home during term time for the next four years. He was thirteen years old.
Repton is a dour place. Squatting in the foothills of the Peak District, and sandwiched into a strip of countryside between the industrial towns of Derby and Burton-on-Trent, its stone and Victorian redbrick buildings cluster together in a tight huddle alongside Repton Brook, as if sheltering from the fierce winds that whistle down off Darley Moor to the north. Now, as in the 1930s, the town is dominated by the presence of the school, whose buildings lie scattered around its center, but Repton itself has an ancient history, which goes back well over 1,500 years. It was once an early center for English Christianity. An abbey was founded there and two Anglo-Saxon kings, Ethelbald and Wiglaf, were buried in the crypt, before the Vikings sailed down the Trent and destroyed the abbey in 873. In the twelfth century a magnificent priory was founded on the Saxon ruins, but this too was destroyed during the Reformation, in a spasm of Puritan zeal. Secretly, however, the old religion lingered on, and in 1553 Popish prayers were answered when the Catholic Mary Tudor acceded to the throne.
Three years later, a rich and devout local Catholic, Sir John Port, died. In his will, he set aside money to found a school in Repton, stipulating that its headmaster should be a priest. To this end, his executors purchased what remained of the old Priory and set about creating the college. Port’s charity had an element of self-interest. He wanted a chantry founded at the school so that schoolboys could sing masses daily to speed his soul to heaven—a practice that had been outlawed the previous decade, but which under Mary was now legal again. His wishes were thwarted. In 1558, Mary died and her half sister, Elizabeth, a Protestant, ascended the throne. Thus Repton was established as an Anglican school. In the subsequent four and a half centuries, it experienced many ups and downs. By the late eighteenth century, one corrupt headmaster and his staff were employed to teach just a single pupil. Fifty years later, Repton was remodelled to conform to the values of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School and one of the founding fathers of the Victorian ethos of hard work, discipline and duty. Arnold placed the cultivation of religious and moral principles above academic instruction, defining his object at Rugby as being “to form Christian men—for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make.”3 His implication, that boys were naturally wild and undisciplined and that schooling was about creating a training ground where rigorous moral values might be instilled within them, resonated at one level with Roald Dahl. He too believed that children were born savage, but he would celebrate the innocent anarchic attitudes of each “uncivilised little grub.”4 For Arnold, however, as for many of the staff at Repton in 1930, the opposite was true. They viewed that youthful freedom of spirit as something subversive that needed to be crushed.*
Sofie Magdalene had promised her dying husband that their children would all be educated in England, but precisely why she chose Repton for Roald is not immediately clear. The son of a family friend in Radyr was already there, and Captain Lancaster, the twitching orange-haired terror from St. Peter’s, was also an alumnus, or “Old Reptonian.” One might think that this connection would have deterred young Roald. But it does not seem to have done, although the elaborate uniform put him off a bit. The stiff butterfly collar, attached to a starched shirt with studs, pinstripe trousers, twelve-button waistcoat, tailcoat and straw boater struck him as entirely ludicrous. He later described the tailcoat as “the most ridiculous garment I had ever seen”; he thought the costume made him look “like an undertaker’s apprentice in a funeral parlour.”5 However, it was thus attired, with accompanying umbrella to keep the Peak District rain off the vulnerable boater, that Roald arrived for his first night at The Priory—one of nine boarding houses that were scattered around the town. Each house was a community of around fifty boys, about twelve from each year. Apart from some team sports and lessons, which were taught in forms drawn from the entire school, the house was the focus of a boy’s discipline, loyalties and social life. It was where he ate, slept, studied, and where he made friends. Dahl himself described that existence as “a curious system … you never walked to class with a boy from another House. You rarely spoke to boys from other houses and you seldom knew their names.”6
The Priory is a steeply gabled redbrick building, with turrets and Gothic chimneys, a few hundred yards down the High Street from the Arch. Constructed by Geoffrey Fisher, the headmaster between 1914 and 1932, it contained a series of small dormitories known as “bedders,” a collection of studies where boys worked in groups of five to seven, a panelled dining room, a tarmac yard at the front with fives courts, and a garden at the back called the Deer Park, in which there was a small plunge pool that was filled in the summer and in which the boys bathed naked. It also contained living quarters for the housemaster, J. S. Jenkyns, and his family.
Jenkyns was a classic interwar schoolmaster. Bald, with toothbrush mustache, tweed jacket, and polished leather brogues, he had already been at the school for twenty-four years when Roald arrived, and he would remain on the staff there for another sixteen. Educated at Winchester and Balliol, he had fought in the trenches during the First World War and his experiences there had made him gloomy, nervous and a trifle forbidding. In photographs he looks world-weary. “Twitchy,” was how Dahl was often to describe him in his letters home. Jenkyns’s youngest daughter Nancy admitted that sometimes even his children were “a bit frightened” of their father. “He could snap your head off,” she recalled and could on occasions be “scratchy.”7 Yet Tim Fisher, Geoffrey Fisher’s youngest son, believed that Jenkyns—or “Binks,” as the boys called him—was adored by many of his pupils.8 He certainly took a liking to his young six-foot Norwegian charge, and sometimes played fives with him. Dahl liked the sport, describing it as a “subtle and crafty” game played with a small hard leather ball that is struck at great speed by gloved
hands and sent shooting around a court with “all manner of ledges and buttresses.” On the fives court, his nervous housemaster could relax, “rushing about,” as Roald described it, “shrieking what a little fool he is, and calling himself all sorts of names when he misses the ball.”9
Perhaps the most curious aspect to the way pastoral care worked in The Priory was that Binks and his family were usually distant from the boys. His study was part of the “house,” but his living quarters were elsewhere—in a separate wing at the top of the main staircase, where he resided with his “rather cold” wife10 and their three boisterous daughters, Peggie, Rachel and Nancy. Rachel remembered Roald Dahl as a good-looking lad, twice her age and height. However, since she only saw the boys from afar, she could recall little else about him, except that he was “Scandinavian by birth and had had an unhappy early life.”11 Nancy, the youngest, a mischievous six-year-old with a shock of unruly dark hair, remembered a little more. She was fascinated by the older boys, peering over the banisters of the staircase to watch them go into the dining hall, or spying out who was being sent to her father’s study to deliver their “blue”—a form of punishment in which a boy had to write out the same line of text up to 240 times in blue ink.
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