Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1984)

Born in 1916, Roald Dahl had his first short text (an account of crashing his RAF plane in the desert) published in 1942 i.e. aged 26.

As we all know, this marked the start of a long and stunningly successful career during which he wrote over 60 (increasingly macabre and gruesome) short stories, brought together in a series of collections for adults, most successfully under the brand name ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ to tie in with the 1970s TV adaptations – but more famously, from 1961 onwards, a series of books for children which made him one of the best selling and best known authors in the world.

Forty-two years after that first published piece, at the age of 68, Dahl published this, the first part of his autobiography. Except it isn’t a continuous and comprehensive autobiography at all. Instead it is, as he carefully explains in the preface, a series of memorable incidents and events which have stuck with him since boyhood. It is more like a series of episodes, hence the subtitle ‘Tales of Childhood’.

Boy follows a chronological order and is divided into sections mostly named after the teaching institutions he progressed through:

Family background
Kindergarten
Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)
St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)
Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

The first sentence sets the tone:

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

So this, also, is a book for children, pitched to, what age group would you say? 7? 11?

Taken in the way it is intended, it is a brilliant read. Why? For its wide-eyed, childlike candour. For his tremendous excitement about everything he describes. Everything is the best, everything is vivid with excitement and enthusiasm. Everything overflows with child-like glee.

Looking a bit more closely, every sentence says something interesting. There’s no padding or fat. People and places are summed up with skill and economy. This gives the narrative tremendous pace because things are always moving on, stuff is always being discovered and described, and all with the winning enthusiasm of boyhood.

1. Family background

When his father, Harald, was 14 he fell off the roof while fixing some tiles and broke his arm. A drunk doctor injured it further and it had to be amputated.

His father and brother, Oscar, decided they had to leave the small Norwegian town they’d grown up in so they left for France. Uncle Oscar ended up in La Rochelle, a fishing port, where he ended up owning the biggest fishing fleet and canning factory.

Harald moved to Paris and set up a shipbroking company. The main fuel for shipping was coal. Where was the biggest coal port in the world, Cardiff, so Harald moved there with his young wife, Marie. Here Harald’s business thrived and he bought a big house at Llandaff, just outside Cardiff. Marie bore him two children but died soon after giving birth to the second. Heartbroken, Harald went back to Norway and found a second wife, Sofie, who bore him 4 children, one of whom was Roald.

Business boomed and in 1918, when he was 2, the family moved to a grand house in the village of Radyr. It had a small farm attached and was full of servants. Harald led a vigorous life, mountaineering and was an expert wood carver.

In 1920, when Roald was 3, his sister Astri died from appendicitis, aged 7. She was his father’s favourite and when Harald went down with pneumonia he didn’t put up much of a fight and died.

This left Sofie without a husband and provider and father to the remaining five children, and pregnant again. She could have sold up and gone back to Norway, where her father, mother and unmarried sisters would have helped out.

2. Kindergarten

Instead she sold the big house, bought a smaller one and, a few years, later, sent Roald, aged 6, to his first school, a kindergarten run by two old ladies. He remembers vividly the excitement of travelling there in his brand new tricycle!

3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)

Two memories: one is of seeing an older boy cycle past him, taking his hands off the handlebars and crossing them on his chest. Oh how he wanted to be that boy!

Second memory is the sweetshop where he and his friends bought sherbet suckers and liquorice bootlaces, gobstoppers and tonsil ticklers. Unfortunately this sweetshop is kept by Mrs Pratchett who is ‘a skinny old hag’ with a moustache on her top lip and a terrible temper.

The Great Mouse Plot

He and his friends discover a dead mouse and conceive the wicked idea of slipping it into one of Mrs Pratchett’s big sweetjars. And that’s what they do, while his friend Thwaites distracts her, Roald lifts the lid of the gobstopper jar and drops the dead mouse into it, quietly replacing the lid. What an achievement!

Mr Coombes

Next day they walk past the sweetshop to discover it closed. At school the headmaster calls the boys to an identity parade where, to their horror, Mrs Pratchett identifies them.

Mrs Pratchett’s revenge

Mr Coombes then canes them while Mrs Pratchett looks on approvingly. Worth quoting in full:

As the first stroke landed and the pistol-crack sounded, I was thrown forward so violently that if my fingers hadn’t been touching the carpet, I think I would have fallen flat on my face. As it was, I was able to catch myself on the palms of my hands and keep my balance. At first I heard only the crack and felt absolutely nothing at all, but a fraction of a second later the burning sting that flooded across my buttocks was so terrific that all I could do was gasp. I gave a great gushing gasp
that emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them.

It felt, I promise you, as though someone had laid a red-hot poker against my flesh and was pressing down on it hard.

The second stroke was worse than the first and this was probably because Mr Coombes was well practised and had a splendid aim. He was able, so it seemed, to land the second one almost exactly across the narrow line where the first one had struck. It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin, but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.

The third one seemed even worse than the second. Whether or not the wily Mr Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke, I do not know. I am inclined to doubt it because he must have known that this was a practice much frowned upon by Headmasters in general in those days. It was not only regarded as unsporting, it was also an admission that you were not an expert at the job.

By the time the fourth stroke was delivered, my entire backside seemed to be going up in flames. (p.50)

Roald’s mother discovered the welt marks at that evening’s bath time and went straight round to the school to complain. Roald stayed till the end of that term but then his mother took him out of the school.

Going to Norway

From 1920 to 1932, from the ages of 4 to 17, the family spent every summer holiday in Norway. The many islands and the freedom and innocence remind of Tove Jansson’s memoirs.

Roald gives an exciting account of the complexities of packing all the baggage and travelling first to London, then by train to Newcastle, then by boat to Oslo where his grandparents lived.

He loved his Bestepapa and Bestemama, they always hosted a celebration feast when he and his family arrived, which features ‘a mountain of ice cream’. See what I mean by the way everything sounds brilliant, the sweets, the food the family, the journey, everything!

The magic island

Day after the feast the Dahl family caught a steamer to the magic island. Like everything, it is the bestest of the best!

Late in the afternoon, we would come finally to the end of the journey, the island of Tjöme. This was where our mother always took us. Heaven knows how she found it, but to us it was the greatest place on earth. (p.61)

And:

Breakfast was the best meal of the day in our hotel, and it was all laid out on a huge table in the middle of the dining-room from which you helped yourself. There were maybe fifty different dishes to choose from on that table. There were large jugs of milk, which all Norwegian children drink at every meal. There were plates of cold beef, veal, ham and pork. There was cold boiled mackerel submerged in aspic. There were spiced and pickled herring fillets, sardines, smoked eels and cod’s roe. There was a large bowl piled high with hot boiled eggs. There were cold omelettes with chopped ham in them, and cold chicken and hot coffee for the grown-ups, and hot crisp rolls baked in the hotel kitchen, which we ate with butter and cranberry jam. There were stewed apricots and five or six different cheeses including of course the ever-present gjetost, that tall brown rather sweet Norwegian goat’s cheese which you find on just about every table in the land.

Yummy! Then they’d take the small boat and go exploring the islands, hundreds of them, looking for ones with a little sandy back when he and his sisters were small, later on rocky ones which they could jump off into the sea. In the evenings they went fishing for mackerel and cooked them fresh.

I tell you, my friends, those were the days. (67)

A visit to the doctor

When he was 8, a gruesome trip to a local doctor who takes out his adenoids with no anaesthetic, slashing inside his mouth and extracting great clumps of flesh covered in blood. The child-focused nature of the text is made explicit:

That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today. (p.71)

4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)

First day

This was in Weston-super-Mare, from which you can look across the Bristol Channel and see Wales. Every boy had a Tuck Box containing all his treasures. Boarding schools were money-making machines and fed the boys as little as possible while encouraging them to write to their parents for ‘treats’. The school is long and low sitting in front of its sports pitches and the headmaster is a giant with a grin like a shark.

Writing home

Every Sunday morning every boy had to write a letter home. With Dahl the habit stuck and he wrote his mother at least one letter a week for the next 20 years, from 1925 to 1945, and she kept them all. When she died, in 1957, she left him a huge bundle of his letters, some 600 in total.

The matron

The dormitories are ruled with a rod of steel by the matron who is an ogre. One boy has a bright idea of scattering castor sugar along the corridor so they can hear the crunch-crunch of her arrival. This drives her into a fury and she calls the headmaster who goes red in the face with anger and confiscates all their Tuck Boxes with the result that the boys go hungry for the last 6 weeks of term.

Young Roald is terrified. He sleeps facing the Bristol Channel and therefore his family. It is a great comfort.

A boy called Tweedie snores in his sleep. the matron hears, is disgusted and tips soap shavings into his mouth, so he wakes up blowing bubbles. You can see where all the vicious tyrants in Dahl’s children’s fiction come from.

Homesickness

He is so homesick he decides to fake appendicitis to escape. The matron and headmaster fall for it so he is put on the paddle steamer across the channel to Cardiff, collected by his mother and taken to the family doctor who immediately realises that he’s faking it. He is kind, though, and tells Dahl that it was his (the doctor’s) idea to send him to boarding school. It will toughen him up and get him ready for life.

A drive in the motor-car

Home for the holidays and a hilarious account of a drive in the family’s new car, a De Dion-Bouton, with his eldest step-sister driving, which ends in quite a bad crash, with the glass windscreen half slicing Dahl’s nose off, hanging by ‘a single small thread of skin’ (p.103)! His mother sticks it back in place and they hurry as fast as the unnerved sister can drive, to the doctor’s, Dr Dunbar.

Here he has another operation, this time with a primitive chloroform cotton wool mask to knock him out. The doctor sewed his nose back on and it took. His mother hives him a gold sovereign for being so brave.

Captain Hardcastle

The stock monster teacher, Captain Hardcastle is short and wiry with vermillion hair drenched in brilliantine and parted in the middle. He has a giant orange moustache, teaches Latin and football, and has it in for Roald from day one.

The disaster comes during evening Prep (all the boys sit at desks in the big hall for exactly one hour in complete silence doing whatever task is assigned them) when the nib on Roald’s pen breaks halfway through writing an essay and he incautiously asks his neighbour for a spare. Hardcastle spots this and goes mad.

(This all occurs in 1926, the same year Evelyn Waugh was struggling to be a teacher at a boys preparatory school in Wales, the unfortunate experience which became the basis of his first novel, Decline and Fall.)

Dahl is given a slip to take to the headmaster who, despite all his attempts to explain, gives him six of the best. For the second time he gives a really super-vivid description of the different stages and level of agonising pain which result from caning.

Little Ellis and the boil

Roald is in the sick room with flu when he observes the doctor ‘treating’ the only other boy, young Ellis who has a huge boil on his inner thigh. The doctor throws a towel over Elli’s face and stabs the boil, turning the blade, so that Ellis screams his lungs out. Hardly anybody used anaesthetic on those days, even for dental procedures.

Goat’s tobacco

His eldest half-sister, the one he calls the ancient sister, starts dating an Englishman who accompanies them on their big family holiday. The entire family is irritated by his manly behaviour and poses and way of talking, and particularly by the way that he never removes the manly pipe he smokes from his mouth. So Roald plays a prank. The manly man has just stuffed his perishing pipe when the ancient sister asks him to go for a swim. He does at which Roald, in full sight of the rest of the family, tips the tobacco out and replaces it with goat pellets which he breaks up with his fingers and stuffs in the pipe before putting a thin layer of tobacco back over the top, with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

Getting dressed for the big school

By now the family has moved to Bexley in Kent. His mother asks whether he’d rather go to Repton or Marlborough, two grand public schools. He chooses Repton because it’s easier to pronounce. It was September 1929 when, aged 13, he went off to boarding school. The entire chapter is devoted to the ridiculous school uniform he had to wear.

Boazers

Repton slang for ‘prefects’. These big boys could cane the small ones for almost any infringement. Yet again Dahl describes the mechanics of caning and the different techniques of the different ‘boazers’.

The headmaster

Dahl takes malicious pleasure in explaining that the headmaster of Repton, a charmless ‘shoddy bandy-legged person’, was later selected to be Bishop of Chester, and then Bishop of London, and then Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was none other than he who crowned Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

For he was a notorious deliverer of phenomenally painful and sadistic canings. Roald’s best friend, Michael, describes how the victim had to take down his trousers, kneel on the sofa in the head’s study with their head over one end, and then the head delivered ten severe strokes, in between filling his pipe and delivering a rambling lecture about sin and punishment.

On chapel the head maundered on about forgiveness but showed no forgiveness whatsoever when it came to caning young boys’ buttocks so hard that they bled – at which he handed over a basin, sponge and towel and told them to clean up the blood before leaving.

That this man was a vicar, and then a bishop, and then the Archbishop of Canterbury goes a long way to explaining Dahl’s lifelong atheism.

Chocolates

Surprisingly, boys at Repton were used as guinea pigs for new ranges of chocolates by Cadbury. they were sent boxes containing one standard and nine new experiments, and then asked to fill out forms. In a characteristically enthusiastic chapter he recalls this as the basis of his second children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Corkers

There were about thirty or more masters at Repton and most of them were amazingly dull and totally colourless and completely uninterested in boys. But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes. He wore creaseless flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with patches all over it and bits of dried food on the lapels. He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be. His lessons consisted of an endless series of distractions all invented by him so that the subject of mathematics would never have to be discussed. (p.151)

These distractions involved getting the whole class to help him with the Times crossword or bringing in some live snakes to hand round.

Fagging

The humiliations of fagging including being one of the three fags who, every Sunday morning, had to clean Carleton’s study until it was as clean as an operating theatre. And he actually performed the cliché task of sitting on a freezing toilet seat in an outhouse to warm it up ready for a senior boy, Wilberforce, to use. In fact he becomes Wilberforce’s favourite bog seat warmer.

Games…

Dahl turns out to be brilliant at fives, a public school ball game quicker than squash. He becomes captain of fives which entitles him to wear a special colour on his straw hat and braid round his blazer etc. He ought to have been made a prefect or ‘boazer’ on account of this eminence but:

But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. (p.162)

…and photography

Dahl turned out to be a very gifted photographer. He got permission to construct his own dark room and took it very seriously. The sensitive art teacher helped him organise a final year exhibition of his work. When still only 18 he won prizes from the Royal Photographic Society in London.

Goodbye school

He doesn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge but to get a job in as remote and magical a distant land as he can. To his own astonishment he gets a job with Shell. He leaves school in July 1933 and starts the new job in September, just as he’s turning 18.

In his last term he’d bought a motorbike, stashed it in a garage up the road from school, and used to go out for wild rides around Derbyshire disguised in helmet and goggles. On the last day he hurtles away from Repton with no regrets.

He goes on a public school outward bound adventure to Newfoundland, which he discovers to be inhospitable and cold, but returns fit and resilient.

Two years as a trainee with Shell in Britain and then several months in head office learning the business. He commuted in from the family home in Bexley. And here he makes some quotable remarks about the appeal of a regular job, salary, predictable commute etc as against the commitment needed to be a fiction writer, worth quoting in its entirety.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. (p.171)

Then Dahl gets his first placement abroad. To the managing director’s amazement Roald turns it down because it is Egypt. Flat and desert and sand and old relics – Dahl wants lions and tigers and excitement! To his surprise the managing director gives into his wish, gives Egypt to another intern, and a week later gets in touch to say Dahl’s posting will be to East Africa. He jumps up and down with excitement.

And that is where this book ends and its sequel, Going Solo begins.

Thoughts

A masterpiece of children’s storytelling, the book is notable for what it leaves out such as:

puberty and sex
friendships
intellectual development, discussion and debate
or even the basic central aspect of school, which is the subjects and the exams – none of these make an appearance

Old man blues

All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whopping their way to school in the centre of the highway. (p.23)

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous any more. (p.166)

But he’s right, of course. Cars have destroyed childhood and anyone can go anywhere now, often at Ryan Air prices, so that everywhere feels like the same huge shopping mall.

Credit

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984. References are to the 1986 Penguin paperback edition.