This year is one for reading off my shelves. I've resolved to buy no more books until our financial pinch has eased off. Because Roald Dahl has been in the media lately, regarding sensitivity editors sensoring his books, his two memoirs of his early life caught my eye. My elder son recommended Boy years ago when he was just 10 or 11 years old. I'm finally taking it up way down the track, since that son is now 28. But better late than never.
Boy
When Roald Dahl's mother died in 1967, he discovered she'd kept all the 600+ letters he'd ever written her from the time he was a little boy at boarding school. That unexpected gift provided him with great fodder to begin the task of writing his two-part memoir. This first part, 'Boy' was first published in 1984 when Dahl was 68.
Being born in 1916 and raised in the harshness of the 20th century shaped him into the humorous writer we know so well. He'd observe the gross unfairness of authority figures, and being restricted from any form of come-back, he'd lampoon them instead, with his carefully crafted caricatures.
Brutal school canings take up a fair amount of space, which Dahl justifies by describing the traumatic mark they left on their impressionable minds, even more so than their burning bottoms. I now suspect many British gentlemen from 1940 onwards must've walked around with permanently scarred buttocks. (Roald says, 'Even today when I have to sit for any length of time on a hard bench or chair, I begin to feel my heart beating along the old lines that the cane made on my bottom some 55 years ago.') It's appalling and atrocious, but Roald, or rather 'Boy' gets the last word.
He spills the beans on one cruel and dour headmaster of Repton School who became Archbishop of Canterbury and officiated at Queen Elizabeth's coronation. Even though Dahl doesn't mention Geoffrey Fisher by name, a quick google leaves readers in no doubt who he was talking about. The Dahl family's local doctor justifies hated boarding school by saying, 'Life is tough, and the sooner you learn to cope with it, the better for you.' Some may argue our 21st century pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, with students' paths being padded to a detrimental effect for the real world beyond. But after reading some of Roald's harrowing experiences, I can see why that was deemed necessary. Oh man!
Reading between the lines, I get the impression Roald was a bit of a rascal. Not a vicious, bullying one, but a mischievous, pushing-the-envelope type of imp. He was the brains behind a couple of hilarious practical jokes I won't spoil for you. (The chapter entitled Goat Tobacco really tickles my fancy.) The fact that some of Roald's schoolmasters had it in for him, 'for no apparent reason' is suggestive. When Dahl became captain of his school sports team, they refused to make him a prefect, although other school captains all automatically became prefects. It makes me suspect a cheeky demeanour sparkling through the outward conformity. And I say all power to him, for maintaining his inner comic throughout years of put-downs and beatings.
We learn many other interesting details about living in the early 20th century. Two half hour lessons were considered sufficient in 1925 for Dahl's older half-sister to decide she was ready to drive the family car. Tests to earn your license were way in the future. 'You were your own judge of competence,' Roald says. And he nearly had his nose knocked off by his sister's bad and reckless driving.
'My nose had been cut almost clean off my face as I went through the rear windscreen and now it was hanging on only by a small thread of skin.'
He describes how Dr. Dunbar, their local GP, taped his nose in place, then sewed it back on in a home operation of the Dahls' nursery table. Perhaps there was a little poetic license. Are we really to believe that this humble medical man from the mid-1920s pulled off a job worthy of a 21st century plastic surgeon?
Kudos to Roald's plucky widowed mother Sofie too. She elected to stay back in England after her husband's death, with her two step kids and four of her own, rather than return to her family in Norway. It was purely to honour his wishes, as Harald Dahl thought British schools were the best the world had to offer, and wanted his children educated there. His son didn't agree with him about the sterling character of British schools, and I'm willing to accept Roald's opinion as the more accurate one, since he formed it from bitter experience.
Overall, Dahl makes seemingly chance and random recollections both meaningful and entertaining. That's something I guess requires years of retrospective thinking backwards to pull off. Perhaps that's partly why some studies suggest seniors are happier people than their more youthful counterparts.
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Going Solo
This second memoir tackles a dramatic slab of Dahl's early twenties. When he leaves school, he works with the Shell Company, where he's stationed in deepest, darkest Africa. Home base is the tiny town of Dar Es Salaam, which teems with colourful, lethal jungle animals. There are also black and green mambas, both equally deadly.
Then suddenly the danger factor of Roald's life revs up a hundredfold. War breaks out when he's 23, and he's thrown straight in the deep end, assigned the formidable task of stopping resident Germans swarming out of town to send them to prison camp. Next, Dahl enlists for training to be a fighter pilot, although at 6 feet 6 inches tall, he can barely squeeze his lanky frame into the tiny cockpits.
One incident retells a serious accident in which Dahl was victim of a logistical cock-up. He was following wrong directions given by a superior officer in total good faith. The outcome is a forced crash landing where his head is thrown forward on collision causing a fractured skull, temporary blindness and totally compressed nose.
Whoa, Roald's nose cops another blow!! (See the childhood incident above in Boy, where it was almost severed.)
This time, at least, a qualified field plastic surgeon is on hand to operate, although ineffective anesthesia makes it a bit scary. Back on his feet, Dahl is off again, with further flying adventures taking him to Greece and Palestine.
I'm sure many modern day gamers like my sons might relate to his descriptions of flying his planes and engaging in battle, because the panels and controls sound quite rudimentary by today's standards. Thank heavens the stakes for our millennial boys are so much lower. Dahl reveals many of the campaigns he's involved in as panicked, reactive, spur-of-the-moment craziness and often expresses surprise that he managed to survive.
(Think of all those zany kids' classics of his never having been written! The world must have missed a wealth of creative genius that was never delivered by young men with great potential, whose lives were cut far too short. War takes a horrific toll which we'll never realise in our lifetime.)
Of course, it wouldn't be a Roald Dahl book without some moments of light relief. He still takes every opportunity to satirize folk, including U.N. Savory, the guy with his collection of different length wigs. Other moments are touching, such as his encounter with a community of Jewish refugees he had no idea was being persecuted. That part of Hitler's regime hadn't made it to the news Dahl and his pilot friends were hearing.
I don't usually enjoy war stories or detailed description of combat, but this one drew me in. It's well told in his up-close-and-personal style. I wish there'd been more memoirs.
The photo above was taken in June 1941, a few months after that second serious accident to his nose. Hats off to the doctors of the day, who obviously did excellent patchwork in both cases, as he was clearly pretty handsome.
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