Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Within days of the outbreak of war, Dar es Salaam began to fill up with soldiers. Dahl instinctively disliked the army, and described the new arrivals with thinly disguised contempt: “Fellows in uniform and cockade hats all over the place and a frightful lot of snobbishness. All bullshit.” Joining this invasion of khaki did not appeal to him at all. Its regulations and pomposities reminded him only of school. Pointedly, he told his mother he had invented an “oxometer” designed to measure “the amount of bullshit talked and written by the military.”110 He had another plan. Inspired by his friend the pilot Alec Noon, who flew small commercial aeroplanes out of Dar es Salaam, Dahl had decided how he would finally see the Africa of which he had long dreamed, but which his job in Shell had largely denied him. He would join the Royal Air Force and become a pilot.

  It was a fateful decision, perhaps the most important he ever made. That October, Noon had taken him on a patrol flight along the Tanganyikan coast to Mafia Island. Dahl was thrilled, writing home lyrically of the views and the “long, long line of sandy beach with palm trees on it and an endless white surf breaking.”111 A few days later he went up to Nairobi for his RAF medical, which he passed “with flying colours” despite the disadvantage of being just over six foot five inches tall. Reassuring his mother not to be alarmed by “this flying business,” he told her it was all just “very good fun,”112 that he would get £1,000 worth of flying lessons for free, and that it would be “a bloody sight better than joining the army out here and marching about in the heat from one place to another doing nothing special.”113

  Dahl returned to Dar es Salaam, packed most of his clothes into mothproof trunks, paid his bills, resigned from his club, and wrote to his mother asking her not to send him a luxury Christmas hamper “because it will be difficult to eat those things … in an airmen’s mess. I can imagine a pot of pâté de foie gras going in one meal, and someone who’s never had it before saying they prefer bloater paste.”114 Two weeks later, in a large three-seater Chevrolet, he drove 900 miles north to Nairobi. The journey gave him time to contemplate the glories of the African landscape and ponder what the future had in store for him and his family. He talked to giraffes, crossed fast-running rivers on wooden rafts, watched Masai warriors demonstrating their skill with bows and arrows, and reflected philosophically on the gentle beauty of a family of elephants. “They are better off than me,” he mused, “and a good deal wiser. I myself am at this moment on my way to kill Germans or be killed by them, but those elephants have no thought of murder in their mind.”115

  In Nairobi, Dahl was one of sixteen pilots enrolled in the Initial Training School. Only three would survive the next two years. Yet thoughts of death were far from his mind as he squeezed into his tiny two-seater Tiger Moth and someone chased the grazing zebra off the airfield. Nonetheless, he faced one significant problem. At six foot five, perched on top of his parachute, Dahl’s head stuck so far over the top of the windshield that once the plane was airborne, its powerful slipstream made it almost impossible for him to breathe. Every few seconds he had to duck down behind the shield just in order to take a breath. Characteristically, he soon devised a solution: a thin cotton cloth tied over his nose and mouth allowed him to avoid being choked while flying. His love affair with this new element was immediate and intense. “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much,”116 he wrote his mother. After seven hours and forty minutes, he went solo and was soon flying alone over the wide African savanna, soaring high through the Great Rift Valley and around Mount Kenya, then swooping down to only 60 or 70 feet above the ground, causing giraffes to look up in amazement and herds of wildebeeste to stampede. He felt at one with his aeroplane and took an intense delight in the experience of being alone in the vast open spaces of the sky, from where he could view the landscapes about which he had fantasized for so long, from the vantage point of a god. He learned to navigate, to loop the loop, and make forced landings with his engine cut.

  Then, after eight weeks, and with about fifty hours’ flying time in their logbooks, the young pilots were all put on a train to Kampala in Uganda, where “bursting with energy and exuberance and perhaps a touch of self-importance as well, because now we were intrepid flying men and devils of the sky,”117 they went, via Cairo, to complete their flying training in Iraq—at a vast base called Habbaniya. After six months there in the fierce desert heat, “the worst climate in the world,” where they were to live “only for the day we will be leaving,”118 in September 1940 Dahl found himself heading for action in the Western Desert of North Africa, ferrying an out-of-date and unfamiliar biplane toward a camouflaged airstrip just behind the Allied front line.

  * The equivalent of about £25,000 in 2010.

  † His sister Alfhild maintained that it was principally the tales of the Danish Karen Blixen that made her brother long to go to East Africa—Conversation with author, 08/07/92.

  ‡ Letter from Asiatic Petroleum Company Ltd. to Roald Dahl, 07/16/34–RDMSC RD 13/1/9/53. This letter, reminding Dahl that he could not take up a foreign posting with Shell without having British citizenship, suggests that at that point he may have had a Norwegian passport. The possibility that Roald was not a UK citizen until at least 1934 is reinforced by the fact that his sister Alfhild remembered none of the girls could join the British Forces until after Norway entered the war, and that, although they were British-born, they were treated as “foreigners and spies”—Conversation with the author, 08/07/92.

  § Aadnesen & Dahl continued in existence until the late 1950s, but by 1930, Ludvig Aadnesen “Parrain” was spending much of his time travelling in Norway and France. A bon viveur, without children of his own, he was a generous and supportive godfather to the Dahl children, who always spoke of him with enormous warmth and affection.

  ¶ Originally known as German East Africa, Tanganyika finally became independent in 1961. In 1964 it merged with the neighboring island of Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania.

  ** Thirty-four years later, Mrs. Taubsypuss would also make a cameo appearance as the U.S. president’s cat in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

  †† In Going Solo, Dahl describes Mdisho as coming from the nonexistent Mwanumwezi tribe. It is likely he intended to write Nyamwezi—the main tribe from the area in northwest Tanzania where Mdisho was born.

  ‡‡ “I’ve got a present in the offing for you,” he told his mother in May 1939. “It’s a large unlined fur made of a special rare & very beautiful kind of rabbit which is found only on the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It would make a lovely coat—or otherwise a car rug. The deal is not yet completed”—Dahl, Letter to his mother, 05/07/39—RDMSC RD 14/3/36.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Monumental Bash on the Head

  ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1940, a tiny aircraft landed at a remote military airfield in northern Egypt. It was just after 5 p.m. and the sun was already falling low in the Western sky, causing the small machine to cast distorted shadows on the bright blue sea as it came in on its final approach. There was a light wind from the northwest. Visibility was good. The Gloster Gladiator, barely 27 feet long, touched down on the primitive airstrip and taxied rapidly to a standstill. The pilot switched off the single 830hp Bristol Mercury radial engine and all was silent. A couple of engineers approached the aircraft. As they did so, the canopy tilted backwards and a tall, gangly figure emerged from the tiny cockpit. He was wearing a light cotton flying suit. A route map was strapped to his knee. Pilot Officer Roald Dahl was just twenty-four years old and he was understandably nervous, for it was his first venture into a field of war. He had been in the air for much of the afternoon, ferrying the new Gladiator from an airstrip on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron at a secret location somewhere in the North African desert. At Amiriya, near Alexandria, where he had stopped to refuel an hour earlier, he had landed in a sandstorm. Now he was tired. He had yet to discover his final destination, which was still confidential. In a few moments’ time, the airstrip’s commanding officer would tell him
its coordinates and he could depart. He asked directions to the CO’s tent, hoping the end of his journey would not be far away.

  The tiny coastal airstrip at Fouka was no more than a huddle of tents and parked aircraft—around it sand and water stretched as far as the eye could see. Less than 100 miles west was the front line. The invading Italian Army, which had crossed over from Libya the week before, was now encamped further down the coast at Sidi Barrani. Fouka was the last place of safety. Beyond it lay the real war—a war for which Dahl knew he was largely unprepared. He was flying a plane with which he was relatively unfamiliar and had received no air-to-air combat practice during his six months of advanced training. The sand blew against the tents, making the canvas rustle and sometimes flap violently. Inside one of them, the commanding officer made a phone call. He asked the pilot for his map. “Eighty Squadron are now there,” the officer declared, pointing to a spot called Sidi Heneish in the middle of the Libyan Plateau 30 miles south of Mersah Matruh, another small coastal town on the edge of the Mediterranean. “Will it be easy to see?” Dahl asked. He knew the airstrip was camouflaged and it was already beginning to get dark. “You can’t miss it,” was the reply.

  At 6:15 p.m. the aeroplane took off from the landing strip at Fouka and headed southwest. The windsock by the runway stood out straight like a signpost. Dahl estimated the journey would take fifty minutes at most. It would not be properly dark until seven-thirty, so he should just have time to get to there before night fell. He had calculated his bearings carefully, but navigating across desert was always dangerous. He flew low, at about 800 feet, but now he was travelling away from the coast. Now, the reassuring white foamy guideline, running between blue sea and yellow sand, was no longer there to keep him on track. The terrain below him was quite different. It offered no visual landmarks to help him on his way, and dusk was the most difficult time to fly. With no cloud cover, the winds could suddenly change direction, sometimes even by 180 degrees, as the temperatures over the sand plummeted. He might easily be thrown off course. An error of 1 degree would leave him a mile away from his destination; an error of more than 5 or 10 would be disastrous. He began to wonder if he should not have stayed overnight at Fouka and joined his squadron early the following morning instead.

  As the minutes passed, the ground beneath him became a mottled canvas of browns, yellows and reds, shifting and darkening as the sun moved toward the horizon. The desert seemed to stretch away forever, featureless and hostile. He felt lonely, but protected, within the tight womb of the cockpit. Sometimes he wondered if he was the only living thing left in the world. The Gladiator’s engine whirred away in front of him, but its deep song no longer delighted his ear. Fifty minutes was up. And now, as the sun began to set, the young man began to sweat. There was no sign of an airstrip anywhere—just an endless vista of boulders, ruts and dried-out gullies. Had he been given the wrong coordinates? Had he miscalculated his bearings? Or become a victim of a sudden change in wind direction? He circled the area—scouring the ground below for aircraft, tents, any signs of human habitation. He flew around to the north, south, east and west, but all he could see was sand, rock and camel-thorn.

  The last rays of the setting sun illuminated the desert with a fierce red glow. Soon it would be really dark. His fuel was low. Going back to Fouka was not an option. He had only one possibility left—a forced landing. That was what he had been trained to do in these circumstances. He would land in the desert and spend the night there. Tomorrow morning a search party would be sent to find him. It was not the way he had planned to arrive at his squadron for his first day in action, but now there was no alternative. Desperately, he looked for somewhere to land the tiny craft. He skimmed low over the bumpy ground but could find nothing suitable. The sun disappeared behind the horizon and he knew his time had run out. He must land the plane immediately. He took a chance, throttling back and touching down at about 80 miles an hour, praying the wheels would not strike a rock. But luck was not on his side. The undercarriage hit a boulder and collapsed instantly into a pile of twisted metal and rubber, burying the nose of the plane into the ground. He was thrown violently forward against the front of the canopy. His nose was driven back into his face, his skull was fractured, and he was knocked unconscious.*

  It was a humiliating start to a flying career that had promised great things. Dahl had been one of the top trainees on his training course in Iraq, finding “great joy”1 in all the flying exercises undertaken there, despite the fact that he thought the station at Habbaniya—“Have a Banana,” as it was known in RAF slang—tedious and enervating.2 Later he recalled it as “an abominable, unhealthy, desolate place … a vast assemblage of hangars and Nissen huts and brick bungalows set slap in the middle of a boiling desert on the banks of the muddy Euphrates river miles from anywhere.”3 Nevertheless, at least initially, he was awestruck by the sheer size of this city in the sand, constructed 60 miles away from Baghdad and boasting as many as 10,000 inhabitants. Cataloguing its many buildings, which included churches, a cinema, a dental hospital and a mineral water factory, Dahl added ruefully to his mother that “women do not come this way, so amongst numerous other things … they will have to be forgotten. But that will not be difficult because we are working and flying so hard.”4 The trainees flew almost every day, mostly in the mornings. There were navigational, technical and meteorological classes in the afternoons. His instructors had praised Dahl’s flying skills as “well above average,” judging his aerobatic skills “exceptional.”5 His written tests too had been excellent and he was an assiduous student—although he did occasionally find time to venture out into the surrounding territory. Once he went to see the ruins of Babylon and several times he went to bandit-infested Baghdad, shopping in the street markets and playing poker with the infamously knife-wielding, gun-toting natives. They were, he reported, “a treacherous crowd.”6

  Dahl’s response to the locals had initially been one of interest and wonder. The Bedouin tribesmen he encountered in Palestine on the way to Habbaniya had fascinated him with their “huge sheepskin coats and furry hats.”7 But in Iraq it was a different matter. There the first responses to the RAF airmen were almost invariably hostile. Iraqis hurled stones at the planes and took potshots at the pilots with their rifles. Dahl’s trips into the capital, to haggle with the coppersmiths and the silversmiths, excited him, and he was filled with admiration for the skills of the jewelers and craftsmen, but he was also horrified by the squalor he found there and revolted by the “horde of horrible little boys” who always followed him around. He described Baghdad as “a bloody awful town. Easily the dirtiest I’ve been to yet. The whole place is literally falling down. On either side of most of the streets you have mud brick ruins, in which people live, with the most loathsome smells issuing from their doorways. The pavements are simply packed with every conceivable kind of person—Arabs, Syrians, Jews, Negroes, Indians and the majority who are just nothing at all, with faces the colour of milk chocolate, and long flowing, but very dirty robes.” After driving back through bandit country, and being chased by pariah dogs, cackling Bedouin hags, and “blokes with guns and knives who don’t think twice about cutting your balls out for the sake of getting your brass fly buttons,”8 he was probably more relieved than he admitted to get back to the air-conditioned tedium of RAF Habbaniya.

  Named after the Arabic word for the oleanders that had been planted along its avenues, in a futile attempt to soften the ferocity of the desert sun, Habbaniya may have been dull, but its conveniences made the harsh desert conditions tolerable. While Dahl was there, however, it was also to prove unexpectedly vulnerable to the elements. The camp had been constructed on a location that was prone to flooding, and that spring, when a swollen Euphrates threatened to burst its banks, thousands of inhabitants were forced to abandon their duties for six weeks, and build themselves a tented city on higher ground nearby. It was a miserable task, made worse by heat, scorpions, flies, sand vipers, and incessant 40mph sandstorms.
Eventually the danger passed, everyone returned to the relative luxury of their messes and Nissen huts, and flying training resumed once more. The sandstorms ground down everyone’s spirits. But they also brought out the Stoic in Dahl. “It’s an excellent thing,” he wrote his mother, “to experience discomforts which are so intense that you can be tolerably certain that you will never have to experience ones which are worse.” He concluded that when, if ever, his flying training resumed, he would probably be “a sort of fossilised sand mound.”9

  In high summer, as temperatures soared to over 50 degrees Celsius in the shade, the pilots were only able to train between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. The rest of the day was spent skulking indoors, avoiding the heat. Then the boredom was acute and Dahl could not wait to get away. “All we do is to fly in the early mornings, sleep and sweat in the afternoons, and listen to the news on the wireless for the rest of the time,” he told his mother. “And anything more dismal than listening to the wireless these days it would be hard to find.”10 He likened the heat to that of a Turkish bath, joking that if he got through the war, he would be “well-qualified to become an attendant in one.”11 He was now flying Hawker Harts and Audaxes, light bombers armed with machine guns, in which he had his first lessons in how to shoot down other planes. He found these experiences “exhilarating.”12 By mid-August 1940, with more than 150 hours in his logbook, he had been made a pilot officer, passing out, he told his mother, with “Special Distinction” and being assessed as having “exceptional” flying ability.13