Nancy divided the house into “goodies” and “baddies”—Dahl was one of the goodies—but made clear that the opportunities for her to encounter any of them were rare. She did recall with relish one occasion, when Dahl and another goodie, Peter Ashton, were brought over to her side of the house for a few days and “put together in the spare room, which was up near the nursery.” Then she got to spend some time with them.12 Roald, used to the company of his sisters, must have longed to entertain the Jenkyns girls, or “the Binklets,”13 as he called them, more often. But opportunities to do so were rare. Ten years earlier, at a different boys’ boarding school, the novelist Graham Greene had found himself in a similar situation. Greene’s predicament was even more extreme because he was both a pupil and the headmaster’s son, perhaps the most invidious situation a child could imagine. He was haunted by the green baize door which for him seemed to symbolize the division between these two worlds. Beyond the warmth and civilization of one lay “a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties; a country in which [he] was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature.”14 Emerging from Binks’s family back into the harsh environment of The Priory, Roald must have had similar feelings. And in this brutal world—which offered no privacy and where even the outside lavatories had no doors—it was not the adults who wielded day-to-day power but the boys themselves.
Discipline was maintained by the senior boys, and in particular by four or five prefects, or “boazers,” as they were known at Repton. They wielded great power. Each house was, as Dahl put it, “actually ruled by a boy of seventeen or eighteen who was the Head of House. He himself had three or four House Prefects. The House Prefects were the Gods of the House, but the Head of House was the Almighty.”15 Power was codified into a complex system of hierarchies, of “rules and rituals,” which every new boy had to learn. Each study, for example, had at least five members. Its head was a study-holder, usually in his last year at the school. Sometimes the study-holder was also a boazer, which made him particularly “dangerous” for junior boys, because boazers had “the power of life and death” over them.16 Below him there were two or three senior boys called “seconds” and two junior boys called “fags.” The fags were treated as the study-holder’s servants, “personal slaves,” as Dahl would later call them,17 and the system was justified by the rationale that it gave a new boy a sense of place and order. “He was straightaway in a study with five people,” explained Tim Fisher. “He was the bim fag, the junior fag. Then there was the tip fag, the senior fag, in his second year, who would have shown his junior the ropes and helped him to discover how the school worked.”18
The fag’s tasks included cleaning the study, supplying it with coal for the fire, keeping the fire lit, and polishing the study-holder’s shoes, buttons, badges and buckles. The boys received regular parcels of food from home to supplement what the school provided, and once or twice a week the fags cooked meals for the other members of their study in the communal bathroom, on portable paraffin primus stoves that they brought with them from home. With ten or more fags cooking at the same time, the bathroom would quickly fill with thick black smoke. To the young Dahl, the sight was exciting, reminiscent of “a witch’s cauldron.”19 The power structure, however, lent itself easily to abuse. Boazers had only to yell “Fa-a-ag” at the top of their voice and every fag within earshot would have to drop what he was doing and run toward the needy prefect. The last to get there had to perform whatever task the senior boy required of him. There was almost no limit to what a boazer could request. One service, commonly demanded of the younger boys in winter, was to heat the wooden seats of the outside lavatories, by sitting on them, bare-bottomed, for long enough to ensure that the boazer himself did not have to place his own flesh onto an ice-cold seat. In Boy, Dahl memorably describes his first experience of doing this. “I got off the lavatory seat and pulled up my trousers. Wilberforce [the boazer] lowered his own trousers and sat down. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good indeed.’ He was like a wine-taster sampling an old claret. ‘I shall put you on my list,’ he added. I stood there doing up my fly-buttons and not knowing what on earth he meant. ‘Some fags have cold bottoms,’ he said, ‘and some have hot ones. I only use hot-bottomed fags to heat my bog seat. I won’t forget you.’ ”20
For the first two weeks of his time at Repton, a new boy was exempt from the rigors of fagging, but after that he bore its full force. Reading the early drafts of Boy, one senses a long-pent-up bitterness about Dahl’s years there bubbling to the surface. It was a resentment that he clearly struggled to control, and in the final version, many of his most traumatic memories were expunged or watered down. Even so, the book caused considerable controversy amongst Old Reptonians when it was published in 1984. But the first draft was far rawer and more contentious. It painted a portrait of a profoundly melancholy boy, for whom the pleasures of youth had been stifled by an unfair system that was devoid of affection and feeling, and whose chief memories of his time there seem to have been those of loneliness and fear. “Four years is a long time to be in prison,” Dahl writes. “It becomes twice as long when it is taken out of your life just when you are at your most bubbly best and the fields are all covered with daffodils and primroses. … It seemed as if we were groping through an almost limitless black tunnel at the end of which there glimmered a small bright light, and if we ever reached it we would be eighteen years old.”21 He continues with a description of “plodding endless terms,” “grey classrooms” and “incredibly dull teachers … who never stopped to talk to you.”22 The images of isolation and misery are relentless. “At Repton the teachers gained no respect from us nor did they try to. As for the senior boys, they were so busy acting the part of being senior and so conscious of the power they wielded that they never bothered to be friendly. They didn’t have to be. They ruled us by fear.”23 Independence of spirit and wit in the younger boys was stamped on and regarded as “side.” And being “sidey” to a boazer was unthinkable. “You hardly dared speak to him, let alone be sidey.”24 Roald then recounts an incident that could have come straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Once, during my second year when I was fifteen, I was “sidey” to a boy called W. W. Wilson, who was sixteen. W. W. Wilson wasn’t even a study-holder. He was just a second, but he didn’t like what I had said, and at once he rounded up half-a-dozen seconds his own age and they hunted me down. I ran into the yard where they cornered me and grabbed hold of my arms and legs and carried me bodily back into the “house.” In the changing room they held me down while one of them filled a bath brimful of icy-cold water, and into this they dropped me, clothes and all, and held me in there for several agonising minutes. “Push his head under water!” cried W. W. Wilson. “That’ll teach him to keep his mouth shut!” They pushed my head under many times, and I choked and spluttered and half-drowned, and when at last they released me and I crawled out of the bath, I didn’t have any dry clothes to change into.25
Thankfully, Dahl’s friend Peter Ashton gives this episode a redemptive twist, providing a spare suit for the soaking Roald, who is deeply grateful for this rare “act of mercy” in a world that was filled almost entirely with loneliness and terrors.
Repton also boasted an entrenched system of corporal punishment for offenses as minor as forgetting to hang up your football kit in the changing room. In the 1930s, the cane or the strap were, as Tim Fisher described it, “an automatic and assumed part of the growing up process.…”26 They were part of a culture of toughening children up that would survive in England well into the 1950s and 1960s. As an adult, Dahl too did not see any particular harm in boys having their bottoms “tickled” from time to time, if only the human dimension of the beater could be removed. He once even playfully speculated to me that a beating machine, “with knobs on it, like boiled eggs, for hard, medium or soft,” might be a solution.27 But he objected profoundly to the culture of violence he felt existed at Repton and most of all to the fact that the g
reat majority of beatings there were performed by other boys. “Our lives at school were quite literally ruled by fear of the cane,” he wrote. “We walked, with every step we took, in the knowledge that if we put a foot wrong, the result would be a beating.”28
The white-gloved boazer Carleton, searching his study for the speck of dust that would justify a thrashing was typical. In Dahl’s eyes, he was simply a sadistic thug, with a license to inflict pain, in search of an easy victim. Carleton (actually a boy called Hugh Middleton) was perhaps the worst of Nancy Jenkyns’s “baddies” and the most dreaded of Dahl’s boazers. He was a “supercilious and obnoxious seventeen-year-old,” with a cane that became an object of fetishistic interest to the other boys. His “creamy-white monster about four feet long with bamboo-like ridges all along its length and a round bobble the size of a golf-ball where the handle would have been” struck terror into a fag’s heart. “Other Boazers used their OTC (Army) swagger-sticks when they beat the Fags, but not Middleton.”29
The beatings were usually performed in the boazer’s study shortly before going to bed. The victim had a choice between whether to have fewer strokes with his dressing gown off or more with it on. The latter was generally believed to be the less painful alternative. Afterwards the boy had to thank the boazer for his thrashing and return to his dormitory, where he would undergo a ritual inspection of his wounds. In Boy, Dahl describes such an occasion. The ace cricketer, Jack Mendl, had just beaten him, delivering four strokes, “so fast it was all over in four seconds.”30 Now back in the “bedder,” his fellows insist Roald take down his trousers to show them his damaged buttocks. Dahl does not dwell on the “excruciating burning pain”31 he is suffering. Instead, he recalls the boys’ detailed analysis of Mendl’s handiwork. “Half a dozen experts would crowd around you and express their opinions in highly professional language. ‘What a super job.’ ‘He’s got every single one in the same place!’ ‘Boy that Williamson’s [Mendl] got a terrific eye!’ ‘Of course he’s got a terrific eye! Why d’you think he’s a Cricket Teamer?’ ”32
The scene is comic. At the end, the self-satisfied Mendl himself even appears slyly in the dormitory, “to catch a glimpse of my bare bottom and his own handiwork.” However, the first draft of Boy also contains a piece of psychological analysis, unusual in Dahl’s writing, that reveals much about his own state of mind: “It is clear to me now, although it wasn’t at the time, that these boys had developed this curiously detached attitude towards these vile tortures in order to preserve their sanity. It was an essential defensive mechanism. Had they crowded round and commiserated with me and tried to comfort me, I think we would all have broken down.”33 Among its other influences Repton was conditioning Dahl to suppress many of his own fundamental emotional responses and to find consolation in disconnection and standing apart.
Mendl’s beatings, though fierce, were clinical and dispassionate. With Middleton, it was different. Middleton was not simply the real Carleton, he was also the model for the bully, Bruce Foxley, in Dahl’s adult short story Galloping Foxley, which he wrote in 1953. This was the first time Dahl had revisited his schooldays in fiction, and his descriptions of the fagging and corporal punishment there are strikingly similar to those he later penned in Boy. Middleton is evoked more deftly perhaps in the earlier story, with his pointed Lobb shoes, his silk shirts, his “arrogant-laughing glare,” his “cold, rather close eyes,” and his hair, “coarse and slightly wavy, with just a trace of oil over it, like a well-tossed salad.” But the events and settings are the same. Foxley’s specialty is to bound down the corridor at full tilt before inflicting each blow. The actual gallop down the changing rooms, “cane held high in the air,” may be an exaggeration, but what are we to make of the narrator’s admission that his schooldays at Repton made him “so miserable” that he had contemplated suicide?34 Hardened by his experiences at St. Peter’s, Dahl was already a survivor. He does not seem a likely candidate for suicide. However, it is also possible that the loneliness and the bullying might have led him to consider this option, if only briefly.
On top of it all, he was frequently unwell. As his sister Alfhild put it, Roald “caught everything” at Repton.35 Apart from growing pains, for which he took calcium supplements to strengthen his bones, and a heart condition that required him to visit specialists,† he was also prone to respiratory problems. His letters home are filled with requests for a huge variety of medications for everything from corns on his toes to headaches and constipation. With Heath and Heather lozenges, Mistol, Nostroline, Lynol, Kalzana, Ostelin and Radiostoleum, the letters can sometimes read like a 1930s pharmacology handbook. These illnesses, which are clearly catalogued in his letters, and which do not feature at all in Boy, make a poignant appearance in Galloping Foxley. There the narrator bemoans the many colds he caught on his long walks around Orange Ponds, in the rain, gathering wild irises for his tormentor Middleton.
Dahl’s school reports also suggest that he was miserable. “Rather dazed,” “curiously dense and slow,” exhibiting “fits of childishness” and “fits of the sulks” are just some of the many negative descriptions that characterize the way he was perceived there. His academic record was poor. “A persistent muddler, writing and saying the opposite of what he means” was his English teacher’s verdict halfway through his first term. Eighteen months later, little had changed. His mathematics master is dismissive: “He has very little ability and is inclined to be childish.” The following year is no better. Dahl is accused of “idleness,” “apathy,” and “stupidity”; he is “lethargic,” “languid,” and “too pleased with himself.” His housemaster also notices “a vein of obstinacy in him,”36 which he compliments, but his pupil’s happiness or unhappiness never appears to be an issue. Partly this was because these issues were just not considered important and also partly because Roald hid his feelings well from those around him. Constructing a protective facade of indifference, he both preserved his sanity and avoided appearing like a potential victim. The same is true of his letters home, which give absolutely no indication of the melancholy he evoked in his first draft of Boy, and which are packed instead with amusing anecdotes and descriptions. It is as if the letter writing itself had become a means of escape from the grayness of school life. As if, out of the gloom, he had constructed a sunnier alternative reality, which not only reassured his family back in Bexley but entertained the writer at the same time.‡
By the age of fifteen, Roald was a sophisticated humorist and entertainer as well as a skilled and dextrous narrator. The exuberance of St. Peter’s has given way to a more jaundiced and critical view of the world, where he enjoys finding fault and making negative judgments. For example, though he proudly describes The Priory as “easily the nicest house,”37 the others are dismissed as “nasty little dirty looking hovels.” His sharp eye takes pleasure in the discomfiture of the masters, who are “awfully nervous and dithering”38 when school inspectors arrive to vet the lessons, and when Matron Malpas leaves, her replacement is described as having “hair like a fuzzie-wuzzie, and two warts on her face … I think I shall offer her my corn paint.”39 Yet he can be sensitive and empathetic, too. When an opponent’s cap falls off in a hockey match to reveal “an absolutely bald head, his wig remaining in his cap,” Dahl, like his teammates, feels only sympathy toward the “wretched fellow.”40 At other times he recounts escapades, in language reminiscent of the adventure books he enjoyed reading, and often with unexpected comic detail. Tobogganing, rioting on a train,41 powder fights in his “bedder,”42 firing pencils out of his rifle,43 and climbing illicitly up the tower of Repton Church to make the bells ring44 all get this treatment.
But, as he comes to the end of his second year at Repton, he is already longing to live his life on a bigger canvas, and he seizes eagerly on anything dramatic. The inevitable fire that destroyed his study was the kind of thing that really gave him a chance to flex his writing muscles:
The flames were enormous and the heat was colossal. The w
hole 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 know 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.45
In his second year at Repton, Dahl also formed an important friendship, with Michael Arnold, a boy a year and a half older than he was, and two years above him academically. Arnold was something of a celebrity at Repton. He was quick-witted, subversive, and highly intelligent. In his first term, Dahl described him to his mother as a “very clever boy,” who was “going to make the house a three-valve wireless.”46 By the following year, he was hailing him proudly as “the cleverest boy in England.”47 In house photographs, Arnold stares out confidently, casually, hands in his pockets or arms folded, his hair slicked back in the manner of a young W. H. Auden. Like Dahl he despised the school and saw himself as an outsider. According to their contemporary, Ben Reuss, Arnold had no friends at all until Dahl “took him up.” Reuss found their friendship “a little bit strange.”48 But Dahl and Arnold were very much kindred spirits. Arnold’s son Nicholas observed that both of them were “independent and individualistic.”49 They were also both profoundly curious about the natural world, and enjoyed searching the countryside for fruit, hunting crayfish in Orange Ponds, and conducting crazy experiments. Once they put an unopened tin of pea soup in front of the fire, then, when it was superheated, they punctured the can. From behind the shelter of an unfurled Repton umbrella, they watched with delight as the hot soup sprayed all over the study. The can, Dahl observed with relish, “continued to shoot for about two minutes.”50 Together they also obtained the key of the school darkroom and began to print photographs.51 Soon Arnold became Michael—the only boy Roald ever referred to by his first name. He even wrote specifically to his mother to make sure she did the same. Roald invited Michael to Norway with his family in 1932, the summer before Arnold was scheduled to take the scholarship examination to Magdalen College, Oxford. “I expect he’ll get it,”52 Roald wrote confidently to his mother in December. He did. That Christmas he came down to Bexley to stay with the Dahls. Michael had become family.
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