The week-long sea journey from Liverpool to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, began in high spirits. Roald and another friend of his from Repton, the boisterous Jimmy Horrocks, got drunk and Horrocks had to be carried back to his cabin in a stupor. In between avoiding contact with a “silly little missionary” who wanted to talk about Labrador, and flirting with Ruth Lodge, a twenty-year-old actress who was also aboard the boat, Roald found time to make friends with a crew member from British Guiana called Sam. It was typical of him to look outside his immediate peer group for a kindred spirit, and Sam’s freewheeling Caribbean attitudes were much more appealing than those of most of his fellow explorers who, apart from Jimmy Horrocks, scarcely get a mention in his journal. “He’s a marvellous fellow, black curly hair & a blue beret,” Dahl wrote of Sam to his mother, adding that he had asked Sam to shave his head for him—leaving only “a tiny bit of bristle on the top.” Roald thought that he “looked fine”2 with his new haircut, and Sam gave the seventeen-year-old boy his blue beret to keep his head warm. Dahl gratefully added it to a pack that, as he was the expedition’s official photographer, included a camera and eighteen rolls of film in lead cases, as well as 14 ounces of tobacco, two pipes and a mouth organ.
The expedition was led by fifty-seven-year-old Surgeon Commander “Admiral” George Murray Levick, the founder of the Public Schools Exploring Society, and a survivor of Scott’s doomed expedition to the Antarctic. Murray Levick was an eccentric British penguin expert, who advocated Spartan values in the education of young men. For many on the expedition, including one of his three assistants, a journalist called Dennis Clarke, he was tantamount to a national hero. In his official history of the trip, Clarke eulogized his leader’s asceticism as well as his obsessive desire to put his feet where no other had trod before, boasting that, “if exploring were a crime … Commander Levick would have been hanged several times over.”3 He shared his commander’s delight in the pleasures of bathing naked in ice-cold rivers, marching through unknown landscapes, and rejoiced in what we might now call the culture of male bonding. He celebrated Levick’s disgust, for example, at having to travel first class on the 250-mile train journey inland from St. John’s to Grand Falls, where the expedition began, rather than “roughing it” on the third-class tickets he had specifically requested. Roald too clearly enjoyed the sense of pitting himself against a hostile natural environment—though perhaps not quite to the same degree as his commander. His journal records his battle with hunger and the elements in pithy detail, with occasional forays into imaginative fantasy, when things got really tough. “That night the water … soaked into our little bog and the water level in the tent rose several inches,” he wrote one evening. “If some great giant, wandering by that night, having caught a cold in the wet the previous day had, in need of a handkerchief, seized up our tent, we would all have drifted away in our sleeping bags.”4
It was not long too before another characteristic Dahl trait began to reemerge: a dislike of authority. This manifested itself in a growing sense of annoyance at “Admiral” Murray Levick. Roald was already suspicious of people who inflated themselves with unnecessary rank or title, and Murray Levick, who had been a surgeon commander but was certainly no admiral, and had been retired from the Royal Navy since 1918, instantly aroused his irritation. Roald found him both absurd and bogus. And that was not all. The “Admiral” defecated publicly each morning in full view of anyone who happened to be around: “Breakfast at 6.45,” Roald noted in his journal. “The Admiral craps in the middle of the camp—quite unashamed and very successful—we all wish he wouldn’t.” And, as the Long March progressed and things started to go wrong, this distaste soon escalated into contempt. Roald began to believe that the “filthy old boy” was also a fool—albeit a tough one. He became particularly infuriated by one specific issue: Murray Levick’s insistence that his team build a makeshift raft to row across a lake, when walking round it would have both been safer and increased their chances of finding food. At this point the young explorers were not in good shape. One of them was seriously ill with mumps, while Roald’s footwear had disintegrated to such an extent that on one foot he had been forced to improvise a boot out of a canvas bucket. With their supplies of food almost exhausted, talk in his tent quickly began to get “revolutionary.”5 Eventually, Roald and two veterans of other Murray Levick expeditions, Michael Barling and Dennis Pearl, decided they must face the Admiral down and persuade him to return to base.
“We led a mutiny, he and I,” remembered Dennis Pearl. “It didn’t really get us very far, but it was what drew Roald and I together.”6 In fact, the trio made quite an impression. Even Clarke was struck by the intelligence and eloquence of their pleas, recording that although Murray Levick did not actually turn back, he did abandon his plan to cross the lake by raft. Whether he was irritated by the fact that one of his mutineers had been named after Roald Amundsen, who had triumphed over Scott in the race to the South Pole, was not mentioned. The final days of the bad-tempered journey were spent in silence as the marchers fought off their hunger pangs. Eating dominates the closing pages of Roald’s journal. “You see our only thoughts were on food, more food and even more food still.” At night, in their tents, the boys fantasized about imaginary meals in London restaurants—Simpsons, perhaps, or Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. “It really was marvellous to talk about such things and to realise that they still existed,” Dahl observed, adding that then the conversation would turn to literature or music. Those were the subjects that “gave us the greatest pleasure to talk about.”7 He returned to England in September, with “large side whiskers and beard,”8 and a new friend, Dennis Pearl. His suspicions of the pomposities and absurdities of certain elements of the British establishment had been reconfirmed, but so had his confidence that he could deal with them. He believed himself “fit and ready for anything.”9
A few days later, Roald took up his job as a probationary member of staff with the Asiatic Petroleum Company, later to become a part of Royal Dutch Shell. He worked at St. Helen’s Court, in the heart of the City of London, and his salary was £130 per annum.* The job offered him few challenges. Commuting up each day from the family home in Bexley, he fell into a pleasurable rut of undemanding office work, punctuated by weekends playing golf, going racing, listening to Beethoven on his gramophone, and reading American crime stories. He was not a natural office worker. Bored by his time in the Accounts Department, with its chattering clerks seated on stools at their high desks,10 and uninterested in the technicalities of refining petroleum, he dreamed only of travelling abroad. Inspired by the stories of Rider Haggard and Isak Dinesen,† he had asked to be posted to East Africa, but for many months the furthest he got from his desk was to the Shell Central Laboratories in West London, where he was made to study the composition of petroleum products.11 In the summer of 1936 he was despatched to a refinery and oil wharf in Essex, on the lower reaches of the Thames. There too he found little to stimulate him. “Spent most of today on top of an enormous petrol tank—very hot and nearly suffocated by the fumes,” he complained to his mother. “In the evening watched a tanker discharging a cargo of lubricating oil from Mexico.”12 A sales trip around the West Country the following year was a little more interesting, mainly for the opportunities it gave him to take photographs.
It took almost four years for the African posting to come through. Part of the reason for this delay may have been that Dahl was not a full British national when he joined Shell and needed to secure a British passport in order to travel abroad with them.‡ He may also have been considered just too unreliable. One contemporary of his at Shell remembered thinking that Roald would not last the training course because he was such an “independent person” and “didn’t like an awful lot of direction.”13 Yet he was enjoying his release from the prison of school and his emergence into the longed-for sunlight of freedom. So wait he did.
If the four years in the rambling house at Bexley with his mother and sisters were witho
ut particular incident, they were perhaps as happy and carefree times as Dahl was to experience until the last decade of his life. There, he and his siblings moved gently together into adulthood. In April 1930, his chatty and intense half sister Ellen had married Ashley Miles, the talented young pathologist—later an eminent immunologist—whose pipe Roald had once filled with goat droppings on holiday in Norway. Soon the couple had settled into the comfortable professional gentility of Hampstead, in North London. The gentle Louis was more bohemian and took longer to leave the family nest. After a series of professional failures that included some months at Aadnesen & Dahl§
—where he discovered that, like his half brother, he disliked office life—and working as a jackaroo on a remote Australian sheep station, he went to London to study at St. Martin’s College of Art, after which he took on a job as a commercial illustrator.14
While at St. Martin’s, Louis had converted the top floor of the house in Bexley into a studio. There he spent hours painting, often to a soundtrack of Sibelius symphonies on the gramophone. Sometimes he would venture out with Alfhild in the evening to a concert in London at the Queen’s Hall. In 1936, he got engaged to a vicar’s daughter, Meriel Longland, and he married her in Cambridge later that year. The new-lyweds then moved up to London, first into rented accommodation in Marylebone and then to a house in Shepherd’s Bush. Alfhild, who also aspired to be an artist, and was frustrated that Sofie Magdalene told her the family did not have enough money to send a daughter to art school,15 found solace living a rather “fast” London existence, where she had affairs with the composer William Walton and the conservative historian Arthur Bryant, as well as with Roald’s friend, Dennis Pearl. Her sister Asta recalled that she was often to be found “coming home on the milk train.”16 Else, a year younger than Roald, was shier and quieter. Initially she had refused to follow her sisters to Roedean, going briefly to Lindores College in Bexhill17 and a “very expensive” school in Switzerland instead, both of which she left after a single term.18 “I expect she’s quite a connoisseur of schools now,”19 Roald commented wryly to his mother after the Swiss episode, where Else ate her train ticket on the station platform so she would not be able to board the train. She finally joined her younger sister, Asta, at Roedean in September 1933.
As Sofie Magdalene approached fifty, and her family responsibilities began to diminish, she was becoming increasingly arthritic, immobile and concerned with the welfare of her many animals. She had quarrelled with Oscar, her brother-in-law, over his administration of Harald’s estate, accusing him of abusing his position as a trustee and humiliating her by making her submit receipts for every purchase she made. He in turn had threatened to sue her. But her children and stepchildren, led by the vociferous sixteen-year-old Roald, had rallied round. “I should jolly well sue him, get ten thousand and not care what anyone said!”20 he told her. “Get Ellen and Louis to entice him to Bexley; take him up to Dartford … and push him into that most useful and old-established institution—the Dartford Mental Home, where he could spend his time writing lavatory roll after lavatory roll of concentrated libel—for writing libel seems to be his pet hobby nowadays.”21 As her family grew up, Sofie Magdalene’s zest for travelling to Norway also began to wane. She preferred to take her Cairn terriers down to Tenby or to Cornwall instead, provoking her mother to accuse her of caring more for her puppies than her own parents.22 Gradually she retreated into her own space and let her children get on with their own lives. She would be there if they needed her. Otherwise, she kept herself to herself.
In Bexley, Roald had set up his own “very smart”23 darkroom with shuttered windows and zinc-lined sink. He spent much of his spare time there developing photographs and entering them for competitions. He also began to dabble in writing spoofs and sketches, including a short comic piece called Double Exposure which has survived as perhaps his first adult literary work. It is set in America some time in the future when the government has decreed that all couples must produce a child within five years of marriage. The plot tells of the aptly named Mrs. Barren, who has failed to get pregnant and therefore faces a visit from a government official whose job it is to impregnate her—or, as Dahl puts it, to “go through the usual routine prescribed under the code” to ensure “continued propagation of the race.” The humor is built on a premise of mistaken identity. On her fifth wedding anniversary, Mrs. Barren is visited not by the government stud, but by Mr. Litmus F. Lenser, a photographer of children who is trying to sell his services to her. A series of lewd double entendres ensues, as Mr. Lenser talks about his “baby work” and Mrs. Barren becomes increasingly alarmed by the number and variety of sexual acts she imagines she will have to perform with him. “I have reduced it to a science,” says Lenser typically. “I recommend at least two in the bath tub, one or two on the couch, and a couple on the floor. You want your children natural, don’t you?”24
Dahl found other outlets too for this madcap inventiveness. In Norway, in 1935, he had taken a photo of his bare-chested half brother Louis, playing a harmonica, and looking “not unlike a native of Honolulu. Brown granite looks white next to his skin.”25 In September 1937, however, this same photograph appeared in a very different context: The Shell Magazine. In a section entitled “Whips and Scorpions,” the man in the photograph was identified as a Mr. Dippy Dud, and Shell employees from the unlikely town of Whelkington-on-Sea were invited to rugby-tackle him to the ground when they saw him on the promenade. If they floored him while carrying a copy of The Shell Magazine, the article declared, a prize would be theirs. “Mr. Dud,” the anonymous writer continued, “is a keen musician, but do not be misled if he is 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 into the fun of the thing, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.” Dahl was surely the author of this piece, whose subversive tone and extravagant comic vocabulary anticipate the language of one of his most famous fictional characters: Willy Wonka.
It is hard to imagine these four years of relaxed normality—travelling up to London six mornings a week on the 8.15 train from Bexley, with trilby hat and furled umbrella, alongside a “swarm of other equally sombre-suited businessmen.”26 They simply do not fit in with the rest of Dahl’s extraordinarily eventful existence. Perhaps in hindsight not even Roald himself could believe it. In Boy, he telescopes these four years into two and suggests that he was in East Africa for much longer than the single year he spent there. Yet Dahl’s time in the leafy suburbs was important in forming him as a writer for it was at this time that he became a voracious reader. “The best reading times I ever had were in the 1930s,” he declared less than a year before he died, in a speech at the Sunday Express Book Awards, where he listed the novels by Waugh, Greene, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald that had thrilled him in his twenties. “We never had it so good,”27 he continued, celebrating these novels for being entertaining, well-plotted, elegant and yet serious. One story of Damon Runyon’s particularly excited him—for its terseness, its present-tense narrative and the fact that its style “broke all the rules.”28 Those years in Bexley also confirmed his ideal of family life. The carefree, easygoing atmosphere of Oakwood—a huge Edwardian house on three floors with rambling gardens, studios, well-stocked wine cellar, conservatory, grotto and servants—set a kind of standard for Dahl as to what a family house should be. It was relaxed. And there were few, if any, rules. It would become a model for the kind of lifestyle Dahl tried to create for himself and his own young family in rural Buckinghamshire twenty years later.
When not in his darkroom, Dahl could often be found playing golf. He had started playing as an eleven-year-old on the beach at Weston-super-Mare,29 and joined Dartford Golf Club as a Junior Member in 1927, where he went almost every day of the holidays with
Alfhild.30 By 1936, when he was runner-up in the Shell Championship,31 he had become almost a scratch player.32 If not on the golf course, he was likely to be at the races, gambling either on horses or greyhounds. Dennis Pearl remembered Roald being introduced to the world of racing greyhounds by Dick Wolsey, a wealthy bookmaker who played at Dartford Golf Club. Wolsey was from the wrong side of the tracks. He had left school aged twelve, sometimes carried £1,000 in cash in his back pocket, and kept a Rolls-Royce that he only drove at night, “in case the tax man saw him.”33 He was perhaps the first of many self-made entrepreneurs to whom Dahl found himself instinctively drawn.
Wolsey took his young friend to the newly opened Catford Stadium, nine miles away, to see his own dogs racing, and Roald was instantly hooked. From then onwards he would spend most Saturday evenings there, often wagering his week’s earnings on the races. Pearl remembered his friend’s fascination with the other gamblers too and how intrigued Dahl was by “the way in which they gambled, and the effect that gambling had on them.”34 It was the beginning of a love affair with betting that would last to the end of his life. Indeed, he once told his daughter Ophelia that winning on the horses or at blackjack gave him more pleasure than receiving a royalty check from his writing.35
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