Shell did not offer much in the way of paid holidays, but whenever he could, Roald got away. Twice he went to Norway with Michael Arnold and Dennis Pearl. There, he swam, fished, went boating, chased girls, and reconnected with his cousin Finn, the son of his uncle Truls. Once he sketched out notes for a tale about an absurd encounter with a local mechanic, which some years later, relocated to wartime Greece, would become the basis of his poignant story Yesterday Was Beautiful. He also indulged a sense of fun that could at times be distinctly oafish. Once on a climbing trip to Snowdonia, with Dennis Pearl and Jimmy Horrocks, Roald set fire to Dennis Pearl’s sleeping bag while he was asleep inside it. This provoked outbursts of helpless laughter from the anarchic Horrocks, whom Pearl described as “an early version of the druggy dropout.”36 Next day, while taking a bath in the local hotel, Horrocks also flooded the bathroom. When the owner asked him for some money to repair the damage, Roald told his mother with delight that his friend had simply replied: “My dear sir, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I just washed your floor for you!”37
On the way up to Snowdonia, Pearl also remembered his friend inventing stories about characters glimpsed through the car window, creating detailed situations and plots simply from the look on someone’s face or the way they were walking.38 Most of the key threads that would characterize Dahl’s fiction were subtly coming together in his psyche: an acute observational eye for detail, a madcap relish for fantasy, a sense of the irreverent, a delight in invention and a crude, childish sense of humor. Storytelling too was becoming part of his makeup. But he was a long way from doing it in an organized manner, let alone contemplating it as a means of earning his living. It was a diversion. For the moment, he seemed quite content to remain what he was—a young professional, with a salary and private income, whose spare hours were mostly spent playing golf, gambling, listening to music and practicing his seduction techniques.
“I went into oil because all girls go for oilmen,” Dahl told his Reptonian friend David Atkins, who sometimes had lunch with him in the City.39 But if Dahl thought Shell would provide him with a glamorous social life, he was disappointed. For this, he was forced to look elsewhere, largely following in the wake of his vivacious elder sister Alfhild, and her friend the clever, larger-than-life Alfred Tregear Chenhalls, who worked as business manager for the actor Leslie Howard. “Chenny” was another misfit who became part of the Dahl clan—“a curious character,” as Alfhild would later describe him, “a bit of a womanizer, but a bit of something else as well. You never quite knew what he was.”40 Chenny provided the Dahls with witty conversation and party opportunities in London. He taught Else and Alfhild to play piano duets and invited Sofie Magdalene, who “adored him,” on holiday to his family home in Corn-wall.41 He helped Roald to get his job with Shell.42 He was also “randy as hell” and liked to chase the girls. Alf had “a whale of a time” with him, but Else and Asta used to set traps for him on their bedroom doors in case he prowled the corridors when he stayed overnight.43
However, while Roald enjoyed talking about sex, he was somewhat buttoned up when it came to his own love life. As far as romance was concerned, Alfhild later recalled that Roald “didn’t really discuss himself.”44 Dennis Pearl, who had had a row with his own parents and was now living at Oakwood too, remembered that his friend’s first romances were often secretive. Several originated from his local golf club and at least two involved adultery.45 One was with a peer’s wife (he would always be attracted to aristocrats) and another with a woman from Bexley, whom he saw only when her husband was away on business.46 “He tended to choose something which created difficulties,” Pearl recalled. “He seemed to like mystery.”47 By the time his posting to Africa finally came through in September 1938, Roald had been dating a girl of his own age called Dorothy O’Hara Livesay, whom he had met through Alfhild’s future husband, Leslie Hansen. “Dolly,” as she called herself, was of Belgian-Irish descent,48 and joined Roald’s family on the pierside at London Docks to wave him goodbye on his trip to East Africa. “Look after her, Dennis,” said Roald to his friend as he boarded the SS Mantola. Pearl took the advice to heart. Not long afterwards he got her pregnant and Dolly became the first Mrs. Dennis Pearl.49
For Dahl, aged just twenty-two, a new chapter of his life was beginning. After a two-week journey on the Mantola to Mombasa in Kenya, in the company of some empire-building Englishmen and their “bright, bony little wives,”50 he took a small coastal steamer, a “bloody little ship,”51 down the African coast to Dar es Salaam. His letters home from the voyage describe none of the eccentric passengers he would later evoke in his memoir, Going Solo (1986): the nudist athletes Major Griffiths and his wife, for example, or the rupophobic Miss Trefusis. Not even the bewigged Mr. U. N. Savory gets a mention. Most of these delightful characters were almost certainly invented as an entertaining alternative to his real companions on the journey, who were dismissed in a letter to his mother as “pretty dull.” The welfare of some of the animals on board concerned him more: dogs that needed exercise and, in particular, a horse “doomed to stand in his box in which he can’t even turn round.”52 By the end he longed to reach Tanganyika.
Occupying more than 350,000 square miles of land between the Indian Ocean and three of the African great lakes, this territory of around 5 million inhabitants had been a German colony from the 1880s until 1919, when, following Germany’s defeat at the end of the First World War, it became a League of Nations–mandated territory, and subject to British colonial administration.¶ In 1936, Shell set up an oil terminal on the coast, in the capital, Dar es Salaam, and Dahl was appointed as the most junior of the three-man team charged with running it. Most of the company’s business there involved supplying fuel and lubricants for farm equipment, but Dahl was particularly excited that he was put in charge of “all aviation business.”53 This involved meeting the flying boats that arrived in the harbor every two or three days, as well as dealing with the regular air services from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa and Nairobi. Much of the rest of the job was drudgery—a far cry from the exotic glamour of the bush evoked in Isak Dinesen’s stories—but at least there was plenty of time for leisure. “Everything is OK,” he wrote to his mother shortly after he arrived. “Life’s rather fun. Bloody hard work. Bloody hot—golf or squash or something every evening and about four baths a day.”54 Best of all was the fact that there were new surroundings to observe and that he was no longer a commuter. “I loved it all,” he reflected later. “There were no furled umbrellas, no bowler hats, no sombre grey suits and I never once had to get on a train or a bus.”55
Dahl spent most of his year there living with two colleagues, Panny Williamson and George Rybot. They shared a large, spacious villa called Shell House, set in lush gardens some fifty yards from the beach at Oyster Bay, just south of the center of Dar es Salaam. Much of his spare time was spent playing squash, darts and golf at the whites-only Dar es Salaam Club, or socializing at the colonial cocktail parties. “As far as I can see,” he told his mother, “the average person … gets drunk at least twice a week out here. They have these things called ‘sundowners’ starting at about seven or eight o’clock—cocktail parties really—but no cocktails, only whiskey, beer and gin. … Actually it does you no harm and you never have a hangover because you sweat it all out in the night—it’s so hot! I only get drunk once a week and then not properly drunk—just merry—I think it’s good for you.”56 As his alcohol intake increased, Roald boasted that he was developing “hollow legs,”57 and complained about the vast amounts of money he had to spend on beer and spirits. The drunker he got, the more raucous his behavior became, while his instinctive dislike of anything that smacked of bourgeois good taste led to clashes with the more conformist values of his peers. He dismissed most of his Shell colleagues as “either hearty or dumb,”58 and the expatriates in general as “awful twits really, full of manners, and getting up when women come in etc. etc. I don’t do it and I’m always in the shit.”59 He o
nce disgraced himself at a drinks party in Government House, stealing into the bedroom and returning to the drawing room with the Governor’s chamberpot upon his head. But he found a kindred spirit in his housemate, George Rybot.
George and I were asked to go and have a drink at Mrs. Wilkin’s house. Mrs. Wilkin is a frightful old hag who weighs nineteen and a half stone (and is proud of it) and looks like a suet dumpling covered in lipstick & powder. Well, George went into the drawing room and I went down to the basement to have a widdle. Down there I came across the most marvellous crimson tin pi-jerry[chamberpot], so with a whoop of joy I seized it and dashed upstairs to show it to George, entering the drawing room waving the thing above my head. Well, I wasn’t to know that there were twenty other people in the room, sitting primly around sipping their pink gins. There was a horrified silence. Then George started giggling—then we both got a fit of giggling while I pushed the frightful apparition under the nearest sofa and muttered something about “what a pretty colour it was and didn’t they all think so.” 60
Chamberpots and their contents interested him in other ways, too. Like many of his contemporaries, Roald was profoundly concerned about the frequency and quality of his bowel movements, and his letters home are full of scatological details and jokes about urination,61 enemas,62 and the regularity or irregularity of his motions. For a while he was taken with a contemporary bestseller his mother had sent him called Culture of the Abdomen, by Professor F. A. Hornibrook. Subtitled “The Cure of Obesity and Constipation,” Hornibrook argued that maintaining a particular exercise regime, and adopting a squatting posture when on the lavatory, were the most effective means both of thoroughly evacuating the bowel and of remaining fit and healthy. Dahl was fascinated. He quickly renamed the author “Horniblow” and persuaded his housemates to have a go at all the exercises. “Horniblow” soon became a byword for anything involved with the lower bowel at Shell House: native dancers, rhinoceros droppings, the antics of his dog Samka, all got the treatment. “We do Horniblow every morning—it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen,” he wrote to his mother, “George, Panny and I sprawling over the floor of my bedroom groaning, panting and sweating and cursing the old Professor. But I think it’s done me lots of good.”63 He would remain concerned about his daily “deposit in the bank of good health”64 until the end of his days.
For Roald as for all the Dahls, domestic life was unimaginable without pets, and so Shell House rapidly acquired a menagerie of peculiar animals. Many of these soon made regular comic appearances in his letters home. Chief among them were the tick-infested Samka, “a guard dog with the biggest tool and the longest tail (always wagging) that I’ve ever seen,”65 and two cats, Oscar and Mrs. Taubsypuss.** Dog Samka is “such an important person in this house,” Roald told his mother, “that when he is ill or off colour the whole household is disorganized.”66 Samka’s escapades were recounted with generous dollops of picaresque detail, as the adventures of an insatiable canine Casanova, who suffered a postcoital hangover most mornings because of his propensity to “go out and roger himself silly at the slightest opportunity.”67 At one point he disappeared and no one could find him. Eventually, after much searching, he was discovered locked in the local chemist’s shop. “We consoled ourselves,” Roald reported, “with the thought that by now he would probably have had a very good meal of vanishing cream with a dessert of orange skin food and perhaps a bottle of Nuits de Paris or Blue Grass to wash it down. … They say that when he trotted out his lips were rouged and he’d powdered his balls. … Interviewed later, Dog Samka was heard to remark: I found french letters fried in liquid paraffin very nourishing, I shall always carry a packet with me in future in case of emergencies.”68
One of the reasons that Dahl took such delight in chronicling the sexual exploits of his pets was because he was finding it difficult to have any himself. He wrote enviously of his sisters “gadding about” in Paris, adding rather dolefully that “there’s no-one here worth gadding about with.”69 A week later, his mood was more humorous. Describing how the damp made everything rot, he told his mother: “Golf balls go yellow, but that’s nothing—mine do too, like everything else that’s not used.”70 This was typical of the ribald detail Roald adored and which was enthusiastically lapped up by Sofie Magdalene and his three sisters. Dirty jokes abound in almost every letter. Some of these were quite straightforward, but others already verged on the surreal. When his mother was recovering from dental surgery, for example, Roald asked his sisters to “tell her the joke about the person who had all teeth out & couldn’t be fed through the mouth. So the doctor said—I’ll have to feed you with a tube through your anus—what would you like for your first meal? A cup of tea please doctor—Right, here goes. Hi, stop doctor, stop what’s the matter, what’s the matter, is it too hot? No, there’s too much sugar in it.”71 His sisters, particularly Alfhild, usually responded in kind. And Roald often complimented them on how well their own jokes had been received at the club. Nevertheless, there was much more to Dahl’s time in Africa than playing the fool. If he was not getting the Out of Africa experience of which he had dreamed, he was seeking out its equivalent secondhand among the characters he encountered in Dar es Salaam, be they Brahmin Shell employees, a septuagenarian orchid collector whom he nicknamed “Iron Discipline,” or the servants in Shell House.
Shell House had its own cook and gardener and each of its three white residents had their own personal servant, or “boy.” Roald’s was called Mdisho. He was about nineteen, just three years younger than his master. “I get woken up by my boy at 6.30,” Roald wrote to his mother shortly after his arrival. “He brings tea and an orange—a marvellous orange tasting quite different to anything you’ve ever had. … I eat my orange and drink my tea that is after the boy has removed the enormous mosquito net that is suspended about six feet above you.” Mdisho would then run his morning cold bath and lay out all Roald’s clothes for the day ahead. Initially, Dahl enjoyed this power over “the natives,”72 but soon he became fascinated by the “tall and graceful and soft-spoken”73 Mdisho, who was from a tribe of “magnificent fighters.”74 Mdisho travelled everywhere with him, showing “absolute loyalty” to his “young white master.”75 In turn, Roald looked after Mdisho, advising him on his finances, teaching him to read and write, and even acting as his banker when he wanted to save money to buy a wife.76 Mdisho’s lack of guile and his simple, honest view of the world resonated with Dahl, who was also impressed when Mdisho boasted that his tribe had been the only ones ever to defeat the much-feared Masai.†† Dahl evoked him with respect and affection in Going Solo, and celebrated their friendship.77 Mdisho’s innocent loyalty and toughness may even have helped inspire the hero of Dahl’s most famous children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For when Dahl first sketched out the story, he made his young hero a black boy, drawing a little picture of him and describing him as “the tiniest seven-year-old that you could ever find anywhere … as bright and clever as any other boy of his age in the town, and as brave as a lion and as kind and nice and cheerful as anyone you could meet.”78
As a young man in Tanganyika, Dahl was guilty of making largely unflattering generalizations either about the native Africans, or the Indians, who made up a large part of the professional classes in Dar es Salaam. His endlessly feuding Goanese clerks, Carrasco and Patel, provoked him to complain that “they’re all the same, these bloody Hindus,” and to assert that their minds “grind exceedingly low.” When his shipping clerk invited him to his house, he was appalled by the family’s cramped and filthy living conditions, “their thousands of bloody relations” and “no less than eight horrible little naked children.”79 While he may have been repelled by their living conditions, Dahl was nevertheless curious about the lives of nonwhites and seized with enthusiasm the rare opportunities that occurred to explore their world. On one occasion, he and George Rybot stopped their car to help another car that had broken down at the side of the road. The occupants turned out to be
“an educated native all done up in smart suit & trilby hat, his two wives & two children aged about 4 & 7.” By way of thanks, they took Dahl and Rybot to “a bloody great native fair” that was celebrating “the big Mahomedan holiday of Id Ul Haj.” Roald told his mother he found the experience “damn’d interesting.”
There were lots of frightful old hand-operated roundabouts … made out of coconut trees etc, slip ways down which you slid on coconut matting finishing up amidst a throng of yelling blacks; the most frightful sort of swing boats which were made, by some means or other to revolve round an enormous coconut tree, and at full speed they stood out (that’s the wrong word) parallel to the ground. Then there were native bands, with the players getting drunker & drunker on that frightful brew of theirs called Pombe, and beating the drums in the most weird fashion. But the best thing of all were the native dances. We saw the real thing—these blokes with nothing on except a bit of coconut matting & masses of white & red paint, yelling & swaying their hips in a manner which would make Mae West look like a fourth-rate novice. As each dance progresses, the dancers got more & more worked up, & yelled & shouted & leapt about until they just couldn’t go on any longer and another tribe came on and took their place. The way they wobbled their tummies would have earned for them the fullest approval of our friend Proffessor [sic] Horniblow.80
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