Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  This response may have been unsophisticated and naive, but it was much more tolerant and embracing than that of many other whites around him. And as he grew older Dahl became increasingly critical of his own youthful attitudes. In a speech at Repton in 1975, he described himself in Dar es Salaam as “a ridiculous young pukka-sahib,” and in his last year of life, he admitted that he was “mildly ashamed” by his tacit acceptance of certain British imperial attitudes while he was in Tanganyika, regretting his failure at the time to see that the whole colonial situation was just “not right.” He blamed it on the values he saw around him and on the fact that he had not yet learned to think independently. “When you’re very young, you just swim along with what everyone else is doing,” he told an Australian radio interviewer. “You can’t buck the tide. It was the last days of the British Empire.”81

  Over forty years earlier, in his short story Poison, he had been even more forthright, revealing a surprising empathy for the Indians he had once dismissed as “bloody fools.” The tale is set in India. There, a white man, Harry Pope, lies in bed, sweating with fear because he believes a krait, a venomous nocturnal snake, has slithered under the sheets and curled up on his stomach. The narrator, discovering his terrified friend, sends for the local Indian medic, Dr. Ganderbai, who eventually pumps chloroform under the covers in an attempt to anesthetize the deadly creature. In an atmosphere of tense drama the sheet is eventually removed to reveal: nothing. The snake has been a figment of Pope’s imagination. Humiliated, Pope turns on Ganderbai, shouting at him and calling him a “dirty little Hindu sewer rat” and other “terrible things,” as the embarrassed narrator thanks the doctor for his trouble and ushers him apologetically toward his car. As published, it was clear that Dahl (in the person of the narrator) is totally on the side of Ganderbai. However, an earlier incarnation of the tale included a paragraph (later removed) that was even more overt in its condemnation of British colonial snobbery:

  Dr. Ganderbai was worried about his reputation and I must say I couldn’t blame him. It was probable that he had never been called in to attend a European. None of them bothered with him much, except perhaps the British upon whom, in those days, his job depended, and who noticed him only in order to be politely offensive—as only the British can be. I imagined that even now little Ganderbai could hear the thick, fruity voice of Dr. James Russell in the lounge at the club, saying, “Young Pope? Ah yes, poor fellah. Not a nice way to go. But then if people will call in a native witch doctor, what can they expect?” 82

  Dahl’s own encounters with venomous snakes were few and far between. Once he encountered one outside his home. “These black mambas are real bastards,” he told his mother. “Not only are they one of the few snakes that will attack without provocation, but if they bite you, you stand a jolly good chance of kicking the bucket in a few hours unless you receive treatment at once.” This one was reportedly “eight feet long and as thick as my arm and as black as soot.”83 Roald killed it with his hockey stick. Another time he saw one through the window of his car driving back from a cricket match in Morogoro.84 In Going Solo, however, he recounts a host of exotic African animal adventures, including a close encounter with another mamba at the home of a customs official in Dar es Salaam and one with a man-eating lion, who steals into the garden of the District Officer’s homestead and abducts his cook’s wife. None of these incidents is recorded in his letters home. Aside from the snakes, and a glimpse of a “bloody great leopard”85 in his back garden, his letters chronicle much more mundane experiences, such as climbing up trees to pick coconuts,86 Dog Samka’s attempts to impersonate the Empress of Australia in a swimming costume,87 and countless visits to the club for a “snifter.”88 His life frustrated as much as it exhilarated and Dahl was clearly often bored with an existence that was often little more than one “long string of sundowners.”89 Trips into the interior were extremely rare and a lot of the time he was forced to admit that there was “bugger all to do except sweat,”90 complaining that, even with his car (a Ford 10 that he bought for £40), “you can’t go up country more than a few miles, the roads are too bad.”91 The more exotic tales recounted in Going Solo are likely either to be compelling recreations of stories heard from others or just flights of pure fancy, written in the manner of his heroes Rider Haggard and Isak Dinesen.

  These African experiences did fire his imagination, however, and give him the feeling that he had something special to write about. One of his earliest short stories, An Eye for a Tooth, eventually published in 1946 as An African Story, used a plot device that hinged upon another snake, a black mamba, which had learned to suckle milk from a cow. It was a bizarre and unlikely idea. Concerned that the tale was implausible, his literary agent at the time, Ann Watkins, contacted a certain Dr. Bogert, an expert at the Museum of Natural History in New York, to ascertain whether such a thing might indeed be possible. Assured by Dr. Bogert that it was not, a potential publisher rejected the story. This irritated Dahl, not only because he had lost a sale but also because he believed the event to have been entirely credible. In his own mind, he now saw himself as an expert on Africa and, in any event, it was quite against his nature to admit that he could ever be in the wrong. Writing to Ann Watkins, he acknowledged that perhaps as far as strict accuracy was concerned, he had indeed “slipped up.” “Nevertheless,” he continued, “I still maintain that if Dr. Bogert or any of his learned friends go to Africa and talk to some of the native tribes there, they will tell them they have seen that sort of thing happen. But let us forget it. Send me back the story and I will keep it to read to my children.”92 To his mother, a week later, he wrote that, though the story had been declined, “morally and metaphorically I count it a sale.”93

  His time in Tanganyika was also formative in other ways. He learned to run a house, adopting the role of housekeeper and “holding court” each morning with Mpishi the cook and Mwino the head boy; paying wages, deciding menus, planning recipes and devising social events. He also indulged himself in the role of present giver and treatmaker, regularly sending back ornate jewelry, unusual furs and curios to his family. Hardly a letter goes by without mention of a gift he is seeking out or having made for one of them.‡‡ His love of classical music deepened, as did his pleasure in listening to his records at a very high volume. He sent long and detailed lists of exactly what he wanted to his family back in Bexley, declaring that listening to his music gave him “a hell of a kick.”94 His taste for his own company intensified as well. A few months before Dahl left Dar es Salaam, he chose to rent a remote house on his own rather than live in the club or share with others. “It’ll be rather fun living there alone,” he wrote, “plus wireless and gramophone and about three boys for whom incidentally there are special quarters built beyond the house. The rent is bloody high … but the rest of the blokes would give me piles to live with.”95 One evening, listening to Beethoven symphonies, he studied the antics of two transparent lizards hunting on the ceiling of his sitting room. It was “very exciting,” he told his mother, watching the gecko “fixing his unfortunate victim—often a small moth—with a very hypnotic eye.”96 He nicknamed the two reptiles “Hitler” and “Mussolini.”

  Those two names were frequently on his lips during his year in East Africa, for the political background to his time there was one of increasing certainty of war between Britain and Germany. As Roald set sail on the Mantola, German troops were occupying the disputed Sudetenland territory on the border with Czechoslovakia. By the time he arrived in Dar es Salaam, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich and announced to the world that he had won peace for his time. Dahl was one of many who did not believe it. He sided with the outsider Winston Churchill, who argued that Britain had suffered an “unmitigated defeat,” that it had succumbed to a bullying German regime, and that soon all of Czechoslovakia would be “engulfed in the Nazi regime.”97 Two years earlier, Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had occupied Abyssinia,
now Ethiopia, with little international opposition. Now, it seemed to Dahl, Hitler was being allowed to do the same. Listening to the BBC’s Empire Broadcasts on his short-wave radio in Shell House, he kept abreast of the growing international crisis. Sometimes he tried to make light of it, wishing that Mussolini would take up a useful hobby like “collecting bird’s eggs instead of countries,” but adding ruefully that the Italian dictator would “probably say it was cruel.”98

  In March 1939, Churchill’s predictions were realized when the German Army occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. It left Chamberlain’s “peace with honour” exposed as empty rhetoric. From then onwards, Dahl was convinced that war was inevitable. Repeatedly he urged his mother to get out of their house in Bexley, which he rightly believed would be directly under the flight path of any German bombers attacking London. He hoped that his mother and sisters would move to their holiday haunt on the Welsh coast in Tenby. There he believed they would be safe. “If war breaks out you’ve jolly well got to go to Tenby otherwise you’ll be bombed,” he wrote. “None of you must stay in London. … Don’t forget, you’ve got to go if war breaks out.”99 But Sofie Magdalene was stubborn. She did not want to move. And neither did her daughters, who were enjoying their social life in London too much and had no desire to relocate to the remote Welsh seaside. They elected to stay on, believing that Oakwood’s large cellar would make an effective air-raid shelter against any attack.

  Roald was infuriated by his mother’s refusal to bend to his logic and repeatedly tried to make her change her mind. But mother and son were as obstinate as each other. By the end of September, the Germans had invaded Poland, Britain was formally at war, and Roald was desperate. “I say once more,” he wrote, certain that the Luftwaffe raids were about to begin, “that you’ve no right to be sitting in one of the most dangerous places in the world at the moment, quite happy in the mere thought that you’ve got a cellar—That cellar’s no good once the real raids start, which presumably they must before very much longer.”100 Roald’s fears, though amply justified, would prove somewhat premature, as his family got a stay of execution from the bombs for another year. The “Phoney War” continued for another eight months, until May 1940, when Germany invaded France, while air raids on London did not begin in earnest until four months after that, in September 1940.

  The impending war in Europe may have been thousands of miles away, but it had an immediate manifestation in Tanganyika, where the majority of white settlers were still German nationals. By the summer of 1939, significant tensions had already begun to develop with the British. Never the diplomat, Dahl’s unbridled sense of mischief soon got him into trouble. One day at the Gymkhana Club, he and two of his friends drew a picture of a naked Hitler on a blackboard and spent an hour throwing darts at it. He described the game in some detail: “Hitting his balls with a dart counted 10, hitting his tool counted 15, his navel counted 5, his moustache 20 etc.” A German member of the club made a formal complaint. “There was a frightful show … the little bugger whipped straight off to the German Consulate … and the Club Committee were called to an extraordinary General Meeting and all that sort of bullshit. … There’s one hell of a showdown—you see there are so many Germans in this place and everything is rather on the boil,” he told his mother. Dahl was formally reprimanded, but he didn’t care. The only lesson he had learned was: “Don’t throw darts at Hitler’s balls in public. They’re private parts.”101

  By the late summer of 1939, the British authorities were preparing internment camps across Tanganyika for all German nationals should war be declared. On September 1, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, to whom Britain was pledged as an ally, appeared to make that declaration inevitable. Roald had enlisted as a Special Constable. He was given a platoon of native soldiers to command and charged with guarding a stretch of road running south from Dar es Salaam to the border with Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique. His job was to arrest any escaping German nationals and escort them to one of these internment camps. “If war breaks out it’ll be our job to round up all the Germans,” he had written to his mother on August 27, adding that he hoped they “would allow themselves to be rounded up quietly.”102 According to the report which Sir Mark Young, the Governor of Tanganyika, sent back to Whitehall almost two weeks after war was eventually declared, that is exactly what happened. Sir Mark told Malcolm MacDonald, the secretary of state for the colonies, that, despite his anxieties, the local Nazis under their leader Herr Troost had been unexpectedly cooperative, urging German nationals to submit to arrest and bear their fates with dignity and honor. “No resistance was offered by any enemy national and for the most part they submitted cheerfully and good-humouredly,” Sir Mark noted. “In no single case was opposition reported.”103

  On September 2, Dahl and his six armed native Askaris from the King’s African Rifles spent the night sleeping rough in the bush by the road from Dar es Salaam to Portuguese East Africa. Shortly after one o’clock the following afternoon, the field telephone rang and Dahl heard a “grim voice” announcing: “War has been declared—arrest all Germans attempting to leave or enter the town.” His own account of the ensuing events, in a letter written a few days later, concurred with the Governor’s report that the Germans offered no resistance, though he gave few specific details in case the “ruddy censor” held up the letter.104 His early short story The Sword painted a similar picture: “The Germans started coming … as fast as they could. Some were in trucks and some were in private cars, Fords and Chevrolets mostly, and we rounded them up bit by bit without much difficulty. They saw our machine-gun and very quickly gave themselves up.”105 A later story, Lucky Break (1977), was more expansive, but also followed a similar pattern. There, Dahl described how he marched about two hundred German civilians back to Dar es Salaam, “where they were put into a huge camp surrounded by barbed wire. … There was no battle. The Germans, who after all, were only civilian townspeople, saw our machine-guns and our rifles and quickly gave themselves up.”106 Less than ten years later, in Going Solo, Dahl was to embellish the story grandly. Now an angry bald German, whose movements are “full of menace,” threatens him by the roadside. In a style reminiscent of Ian Fleming, he describes how the man points a Luger pistol to his chest and how one of his own Askari guards shoots the German through the face: “It was a horrible sight. His head seemed to splash open and little soft bits of grey stuff flew out in all directions. There was no blood, just the grey stuff and fragments of bone. One lump of the grey stuff landed on my cheek. More of it went all over my khaki shirt. The Luger dropped onto the road and the bald man fell dead beside it.”107

  This is the first of two unlikely deaths that conclude the African adventures in Going Solo. The second comes later that night when Dahl discovers that his good-natured servant Mdisho, excited by the declaration of war, has run off into the bush and murdered a rich local German landowner with an eighteenth-century ceremonial Arab sword that Dahl kept hanging on his wall. Running several miles through the night, Mdisho arrived at the homestead of this “unpleasant bachelor,” who was rumored to beat his employees with a whip made from rhinoceros hide, and sliced his head off as he stood in his back garden throwing pieces of paper onto a fire. Dahl recounts with relish Mdisho’s proud but grisly description of his deed. “Bwana, it is a beautiful sword. With one blow it cut through his neck so deeply that his whole head fell forward and dangled down onto his chest, and as he started to topple over I gave the neck one more quick chop and the head came right away from the body and fell to the ground like a coconut and the most enormous fountains of blood came spurting out of his neck.” Dahl then explains to the uncomprehending young man that he has committed a crime and must keep quiet about it or risk arrest. Mdisho is dumbfounded, but thrilled when Dahl presents him with the sword as a gift for his bravery. He concludes that the two men are now “exactly equal,”108 as both have been involved in killing a German.

  This story was in essence a reworking of The Sword, wher
e Mdisho is replaced by an older boy called Salimu. That was presented as fiction. In Going Solo, it is presented as fact. In each case, however, the symbolism is clear. A rite of passage has been enacted. By killing a man, as young Masai warriors traditionally kill a lion, the two men have left their youth behind and become adults. They have grown up. It was a powerful fable and one that clearly resonated with Dahl himself. Whether it was presented as fact or fiction was of little interest to him. In much the same way as he had done at Repton, he simply constructed for himself a world that evolved naturally from his impulse to tell a story. As time went by, that imaginary world, revisited, relished and refined in storytelling, gradually became more real and more alive than the reality it had replaced. Sitting in his writing hut in the English countryside in the early 1980s, his interest was not with facts, but rather with visceral memories and narrative possibilities.

  Unlike the early drafts of Boy, those of Going Solo are not tortured with changes and emendations. They flow with ease and speed. Occasionally one even senses Dahl dropping his entertainer’s mask and pausing for a moment almost to moralize. The tale of Mdisho and the sword, for example, serves as a poignant curtain-raiser to the violence and absurdity of the coming war. There normal values will be turned on their heads and a single comprehensible killing, like Mdisho’s of the brutal German, will be replaced by something much more faceless and inhuman. The little parable seems to be telling us something important—about life and death, about masters and servants, about whites and blacks, about innocence and experience, about youth and adulthood. Perhaps it also tells us something about the author himself. For Mdisho’s viewpoint, even if fictional, was one to which Dahl himself was powerfully drawn. He too saw himself trapped by English values and manners to which he did not entirely relate and which he did not completely understand. The loner listening to Beethoven and watching geckos, the scatological humorist, the fantastical chronicler of Dog Samka’s amorous adventures—all of these set him apart and, despite his efforts to fit in, compounded his reputation as the club’s subversive misfit. Mdisho’s fictional predicament was thus rather like his own. “I looked at him and smiled. I refused to blame him for what he had done. He was a wild Mwanumwezi tribesman who had been moulded by us Europeans into the shape of a domestic servant, and now he had broken the mould.”109