Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  In his final exams, Dahl passed out third out of forty. The only two men to pass with higher marks had already flown as civilian pilots before the war.14 Now, proudly wearing his RAF flying badge, he returned to Egypt, to the RAF station in Ismailia, where he was posted to 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. But he never arrived there. Instead, on the eve of his first day as a combat pilot, he destroyed his own plane, crashing it in the desert, before he had fired a shot in anger.

  The smell of petrol stirred his consciousness. He tried to open his eyes, but he could see nothing. Moments later both the Gladiator’s fuel tanks exploded and the craft itself caught fire. Blinded and numb, Dahl contemplated what seemed to be a certain death. “All I wanted was to go gently off to sleep and to hell with the flames,”15 he wrote later. But something forced him to act, to extricate his damaged body from its parachute straps, push open the cockpit canopy, and drop out of it onto the sand beneath. His overalls were burning too, but he put out the fire by rolling on the ground. It was not bravery, Dahl later noted, simply a “tendency to remain conscious”16 that saved him from being burned to death. “All I wanted was to get away from the tremendous heat and rest in peace. The world about me was divided sharply down the middle into two halves. Both these halves were pitch black, but one was scorching hot and the other was not.”17 In terrible pain, Dahl crawled slowly away from the burning wreckage. But he was not yet out of danger.

  My face hurt most. I slowly put a hand up to feel it. It was very sticky. My nose didn’t seem to be there. I tried to feel my teeth to see if they were still there, but it seemed as though one or two were missing. And then the machine guns started off. I knew right away what it was. There were about fifty rounds of ammunition left in each of my eight guns and, without thinking, I had crawled away from the fire out in front of the machine, and they were going off in the heat. I could hear them hitting the sand and stones all round, but I didn’t feel like getting up and moving right then, so I dozed off.18

  All the bullets missed him. Later that night, three infantrymen from the Suffolk Regiment, who had seen the plane come down some two miles west of their base in Mersah Matruh, went out to inspect the wreckage and found the injured pilot, barely conscious, but still alive. His flying overalls were so burnt and his face so disfigured that he was almost unrecognizable as an RAF officer. The soldiers carried him back to the underground Army Field Ambulance Station in Mersah, where one of the army doctors initially mistook him for an enemy Italian.19 Eventually, he was patched up, sedated, and sent by train to the Anglo-Swiss Hospital in Alexandria, where he was treated for burns, severe concussion and spinal trauma. Initially, his face was so swollen that he could not open his eyes and it was impossible to assess whether the accident had blinded him. The doctors did not know whether he would ever see again.

  For Dahl, it was a time of existential crisis. For almost a month he inhabited a hazy world of total darkness, uncertain of time or surroundings.† Concussed, blind and isolated from family and friends, he was disoriented and helpless. His imagination ran wild. It was a situation he recreated in an early short story, Beware of the Dog:

  The whole world was white and there was nothing in it. It was so white that sometimes it looked black, and after a time it was either white or black, but mostly it was white. He watched it as it turned from white to black, then back to white again, and the white stayed a long time, but the black lasted only a few seconds. He got into the habit of going to sleep during the white periods, of waking up just in time to see the world when it was black. The black was very quick. Sometimes it was only a flash, a flash of black lightning. The white was slow, and in the slowness of it, he always dozed off.20

  Dahl later wrote that the possibility of losing his sight did not frighten or depress him and that “blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important … the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past was to accept all the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.”21 As he lay in his bed, he also learned that the family house in Bexley had been hit by German bombers (his mother and sisters had survived, but had been forced to evacuate the property) and that the tent in Ismailia, where his air force kit, including camera and photographs, was being kept, had also been destroyed in an air raid. It was a low point, but it confirmed in him the sense that—despite the pleasure that the good things in life could bring—all material possessions were ultimately transitory. He and his family had survived. That was what mattered.

  Gradually, his condition began to improve. The cranial swelling subsided and he was able to see again. Nevertheless, he was still sleeping more than sixteen hours a day and would remain immobilized for more than another month. His features were reconstructed by a Harley Street plastic surgeon, now working for the army, who Dahl later claimed had modelled his new nose on the movie star Rudolph Valentino’s.22 But his first letter back home to his mother, written almost two months after the accident, was probably closer to the truth, as he described how the ear, nose and throat surgeon “pulled my nose out of the back of my head and shaped it.” He added that his new nose looked “just as before except that it’s a little bent about.”23 His injuries were sufficiently severe that his doctors suggested Dahl be invalided back to England on the next convoy, but he resisted their advice, because he had been told that he might yet fly again, and if that were possible, he wanted to remain close to his squadron. It cannot have been an easy decision. He was in great pain. He had not seen his family for more than two years. And, as he had yet to meet any of his fellow pilots from 80 Squadron, which had by that time moved from North Africa to Greece, where it was engaged in a successful counterattack against the invading Italians, he had no real comrades to rejoin. But Dahl was brave, stubborn and eager for action. Moreover, although the RAF had concluded that he was “not to blame” for destroying the Gladiator and that pilot inexperience had caused his accident,24 he wanted to prove his fighting skills, and put behind him what had been an ignominious beginning to his career as a fighter pilot.

  Dahl later claimed that an RAF inquiry had revealed that the commanding officer at Fouka had given him the wrong coordinates and that 80 Squadron’s desert airstrip was actually 50 miles further south of the place where he had crashed his plane.25 Now we will only ever have his word for it, as the official records of that inquiry were destroyed in the 1960s.26 Dahl also implied that the crash was partly due to systemic planning failures within the RAF itself, maintaining that he was quite unused to flying Gloster Gladiators and that he only saw one for the first time less than twenty-four hours before he was due to ferry it from Ismailia into the desert. He added that when he had asked for some training, a “supercilious” officer pointed out to him that, as there was only one cockpit, he would have to teach himself. “This was surely not the right way of doing things,” he concluded.27 The aviation writer and historian Derek O’Connor has subsequently observed that what Dahl failed to mention in that context was that he had spent the preceding two weeks at Ismailia learning how to fly an almost identical aircraft: the Gloster Gauntlet. According to O’Connor, the Gladiator was essentially “an improved version of the Gauntlet with an uprated Bristol Mercury engine and an enclosed cockpit.”28 Dahl’s need to rewrite history here speaks of more than a great storyteller embellishing the truth to entertain his reader. It suggests instead the intensity of his need to tell the story of the crash in a way that exonerated him of any slur of incompetence. The RAF records were not enough. He also needed a version of events that absolved him from responsibility and pointed the finger of blame elsewhere. Inevitably, it contributed to his later repeated fiction that instead of wrecking his plane, he was “shot down” in combat over the desert.

  These was one final piece of mythmaking. On almost every occasion that he retold the events of that evening in the last forty years of his life, Dahl recounted them as if he was entirely on his own. But
there was another pilot involved. This man flew with him from Fouka in a different Gladiator, safely put his machine down on the sand close by the wreckage of Dahl’s plane, and comforted the burned and bleeding Roald through the long cold desert night. And in Dahl’s earliest versions of these events, Shot Down Over Libya and A Piece of Cake, both of which were written in wartime, he too is present in the narrative. In fiction, this man was called “Shorty” or “Peter.” In reality, he was Douglas McDonald. McDonald, who had grown up in Kenya and learned to fly before the war at the Aero Club of East Africa, saw his friend “Lofty” that night in extremis—demoralized, tortured by pain and profoundly physically vulnerable. So vulnerable indeed that until, fifty years later, when he had to face the final days of his own terminal illness, he would always recall it as the worst moment of his life.29 Dahl had always liked to appear strong. His position, since childhood, as the dominant male in his family household inclined him to support others, to be the paterfamilias. In this narrative, there was little place for weakness and incapacity. Consequently, “Shorty” or “Peter” soon disappeared from his retelling of the events of the crash. Yet in a remarkable letter written to Douglas McDonald’s widow, Barbara, in 1953—not long after her husband’s death in a plane crash in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro—Roald offered a tiny glimpse of just how exposed he felt that evening and how much he had needed the simple consolation of human warmth and company:

  I expect he’s told you a little of what happened that evening in the desert when we both came down, and I crashed. But I doubt he explained how really marvellous he was to me, and looked after me and tried to comfort me, and stayed with me out there during a very cold night, and kept me warm. Well, he did. And I shall always remember it most vividly, even some of the things he said (because I was quite conscious) and most of all how, when he ran over and found me not dead, he did a sort of dance of joy in the sand and it was all very wonderful, because after all we were not very far away from the Italians and he had a great many other things to think about.30

  The letter is significant not just because it makes plain exactly what happened that night, but also because it also gives us a rare insight into Roald’s sense of vulnerability. This was not a side of his personality that he normally disclosed to the world, preferring to present in its place the image of the stalwart problem solver or the ebullient humorist. These of course were real enough qualities as well, but sometimes they served also to mask feelings of inadequacy or weakness. The pattern had started in his youth. For his mother’s sake, he had cultivated a stiff upper lip and taken pains to conceal his own suffering. This attitude would continue throughout his life. His earliest short stories about flying do reveal occasional cracks in the facade, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in his earlier versions of the immediate aftermath of the crash, where in the “bitter cold” of the desert, “Peter lay down close alongside so we could both keep a little warmer. … I do not know how long we stayed there. … Later I remember hot thick soup and one spoonful making me sick. And all the time the pleasant feeling that Peter was around, being wonderful, doing wonderful things and never going away.”31

  Before he left the Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Roald spent all of the money that had accumulated in his bank account buying a gold watch for each of the three nursing sisters who had looked after him. It was an act of characteristic generosity. Giving presents had been and would always be an essential part of his psychological makeup. Within the family, this could sometimes be interpreted as reinforcing his position as the dominant successful male, but with others the impulse was usually entirely altruistic. It was an attitude that would soon be echoed in the behavior of others toward him—most strikingly, a wealthy English couple, Major Teddy Peel and his wife Dorothy. Following a new set of medical examinations, Dahl was sent back to Alexandria to convalesce at their home. Like many of the wealthier British inhabitants of Alexandria, the Peels made a point of visiting injured officers in hospital, and Dorothy had taken a particular liking to the charming, fragile giant, persuading him to abandon his plans to recuperate in the Kenyan Highlands and insisting that he stay as a guest in their spacious villa on the rue des Ptolemées. There, Roald told his mother that he spent most of his time “doing practically nothing at all with the greatest possible comfort.” Dahl, of course, had been raised without financial worries. He was used to servants and now had a small private income from his father’s trust. Nevertheless, he was amazed by the lavish expatriate Alexandrian lifestyle, noting—perhaps a little critically—that even in wartime, everyone there seemed to have “pots of money.”32

  His hosts were admiringly described as “probably the nicest and richest people” in town, with five cars, a large motor yacht, and a twin-engined aeroplane of their own.33 In their house he slept on silk and linen sheets, often for twelve hours at a stretch, listened to Beethoven, Brahms and Elgar on the gramophone, made occasional conversation, and tried to regain some of the 30 pounds he had lost since the accident. Once or twice he even ventured out to play a few holes of golf. But his recovery was slow. He tired easily, his mind often felt sluggish, and he suffered from severe and prolonged headaches. He complained that he could not even concentrate sufficiently to play a hand of bridge and was prone to blackouts—particularly when he went out of the house.

  After a month with the Peels, Dahl’s headaches had become less frequent, and in February 1941, he was sent to RAF Heliopolis, near Cairo, where he was put on “light duties,” looking after air force pay packets and ferrying messages across town in a chauffeur-driven car. One day, on a trip into Cairo, he accidentally ran into Lesley Pares, a friend of Alfhild’s, who was working for the Air Ministry. Lesley was immediately struck by Roald’s good looks and rakish charm. In our conversations, she recalled him nonchalantly performing Beethoven’s three-minute bagatelle, Für Elise, in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo as if he was an accomplished pianist, then later confessing to her privately that it was the only thing he could play. She found him unpredictable, attractive and compelling. But she also found him indiscreet, which unsettled her, as did the fact that he could be argumentative and dogmatic. She tried to avoid encounters between him and another friend of hers who was a conscientious objector, because Roald was “rather fierce” on the subject of pacifism.34

  For his part, Roald took an immediate liking to Lesley, describing her to his mother as “much nicer than the average Judy one meets here—most of them are bloody awful.”35 Her forthrightness, lack of pretension and disregard for unnecessary politesse reminded him of his family. “I like Lesley because she’s the first woman I’ve met since I left home to whom I can swear or say what I bloody well like without her turning a hair,” he wrote, adding humorously that she had probably been “well-trained” by his sister Alfhild.36 She became a regular companion. They went on picnics into the desert together, where they talked about his family, argued about politics (she remembered him being quite socialist), and discussed poetry.

  Wartime Egypt had a thriving British expatriate social scene, and a fertile literary subculture that included the writers Elizabeth David and Lawrence Durrell, who both moved there in 1941, after the Nazis invaded Greece. Lesley Pares would get to know them both and come to be extremely close to Elizabeth David. But Dahl was concentrating on his recovery and literary soirées held little interest for him. He preferred listening to his gramophone, animated only by occasional forays into the routine colonial existence of golf clubs, cocktails, dinner parties, and games of bridge. His contribution to Egyptian artistic life was limited to exhibiting two of the Iraqi photographs that had survived the destruction of his kit at an exhibition in Cairo, organized by a friend of his mother’s from London, Dr. Omar Khairat. One of them, an aerial photograph of the mighty 2,000-year-old Arch of Ctesiphon, won him a silver medal. He had taken it from the cockpit of his plane while flying from Habbaniya. However, his head injuries remained slow to heal and a return to the air was beginning to seem increasingly unlikely
. Blinding headaches could still force him to abandon the simplest of tasks and retire to his room, and he was dogged by a sense of lethargy and lightheadedness. So he waited, hoping that his health would improve and that he would be able, at last, to fly in action. For, despite the doctors’ pessimistic prognosis about his head injuries, his “one obsession was to get back to operational flying.”37

  “A monumental bash on the head” was how Dahl once described his accident in the Western Desert, claiming that it directly led to his becoming a writer.38 This was not just because his first published piece of writing was a semifictionalized account of the crash, but also because he suspected that the brain injuries which he received there had materially altered his personality and inclined him to creative writing. His daughter Ophelia recalled her father’s fascination with tales of people who had experienced dramatic psychological and physiological changes—such as losing or recovering sight—after suffering a blow to the head. He also told her that he was convinced something of this sort had happened to him, as it explained why a budding corporate businessman, without any particular artistic ambition, was transformed into someone with a burning need to write and tell stories.39 This hypothesis was doubtless attractive too because it pushed potentially more complex psychological issues about the sources of his desire to write into the background.

  Nowadays doctors might well have diagnosed Dahl as suffering from what is called postconcussive syndrome.40 The initial symptoms of this condition are normally forgetfulness, irritability, an inability to concentrate and severe headaches. Dahl suffered from all of these. In some patients the symptoms disappear, but leave behind longer-lasting behavioral changes, which are usually associated with mood swings and an increased lack of inhibition. In some cases, too, it can also result in a fundamental alteration of the perception of the self. With Dahl, these alterations were marginal, but they were nonetheless significant. His sense of embarrassment—already minimal—was further diminished, his sense of fantasy heightened, while his desire to shock became even more pronounced. He emerged from his crisis more confident, more determined to make a mark. His first brush with death doubtless also played a significant part in this change in his own perception of himself, making him more aware of his vulnerability, more reflective, yet also intensifying the sense of himself as a survivor, as a figure of destiny.