Love from Boy
Page 16
BUCKS
LISTEN IN TO WIRELESS ON THIRTEENTH FEBRUARY. CHECK UP IN PAPER
MIDDLE EAST BROADCAST BECAUSE I MAY CALL YOU.
LOTS OF LOVE
RONALD DAHL
POST OFFICE TELEGRAM
FROM A.H.E. C3 SANSORAGINE
DATED MARCH 6TH 1941
TO
DAHL
WAYSIDE COTTAGE
LUDGERSHALL
BUCKS
MESSAGE
STARTING FLYING AGAIN NOW
ADDRESS AS LAST SEPTEMBER
VERY FIT
LOTS OF LOVE
ROALD DAHL
March 7th 1941
Officers’ Mess
Royal Air Force
Ismailia
Dear Mama
It’s simply ages since I had a letter from England—although I expect you are writing quite often. I suppose the trouble is that I keep jumping around from place to place. Whenever I leave one spot I always hopefully leave my next address with them for forwarding letters, but all in vain. I don’t suppose you are getting many of mine either.
Well, as I telegraphed to you 3 days ago, here I am once more in Ismailia, getting the hang of flying once more after having been off it for over 5 months. I expect I’ll be here altogether about another 4 weeks before rejoining my squadron which is incidentally the hell of a long way away—feeling the cold. Incidentally I’m now flying a more modern type of fighter thank goodness; I don’t suppose I can mention its name, but it’s the same kind as Douglas Bader uses.
It’s very pleasant down here; warm and sunny each and every day, and once more our working dress is just khaki shirt and shorts.
Whilst I was at Heliopolis I tried in vain to find Leslie Pears, whom Alf had told me was coming out here to work for the Air Ministry. Then suddenly about 3 weeks ago she came up to me in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo one evening when I was tucking back a few quiet whiskeys with a fellow called Peter Fisher. She said aren’t you Roald and I said Yes, who the hell are you, and promptly dropped a glass full of whisky and soda all over her feet and stockings. Well, after that we got on quite well; last Saturday she had a day off so I drove her down to Alexandria in my car to see Dorothy Peel and family and also incidentally to see Alex. We drove through the hell of a sandstorm the whole way but luckily on the way back the sand went although the wind persisted. Anyway we thought you might like a photo taken on the road, so we took the enclosed awful things when we stopped for me to have a pi. There was so much wind blowing that we could hardly stand up. I like Leslie 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—trained by Alf I should imagine, and well trained at that.
Well I’m afraid I haven’t got any news for you—I haven’t heard that Else’s been married yet; has she? I got quite a lot of news about you all from Leslie, but not enough. I wish they wouldn’t lose your letters in the post.
Lots of love to all
Roald
P.S. Tell Asta she’s not allowed to marry until I come home.
[pencilled note—no date]
Handed in 12th
Many happy returns.
No letters for ages.
Rejoining Squad. imm;
northwards. A grandfather knew their language.
Love
Ron
April 12th
Officers’ Mess
Royal Air Force
Ismailia
Dear Mama
A very short note to say that I’m going north across the sea almost at once to join my squadron. I telegraphed this to you today and told you where to send my letters. You may not hear much from me for quite a long while so don’t worry.
Here are a few photos—we went on a trip in my car last weekend and took them.
Lots of love to all
Roald
TELEGRAM
POST OFFICE
R. PEEL TO MRS. DAHL
TELEGRAM ENVELOPE
DATED APRIL 29TH 1941
TO
NLT DAHL
WAYSIDE COTTAGE
LUDGERSHALL
AYLESBURY
POST OFFICE TELEGRAM
OFFICE OF ORIGIN &
SERVICE INSTRUCTIONS
ALEXANDRIA
MESSAGE
RONALD BACK SAFE LOOKING VERY WELL
STAYING WITH US
RECEIVED YOUR LETTERS OF MARCH 5TH
SEND LOVE
PEEL
The wreck of a Hurricane destroyed by German ground strafing at Argos. Roald had flown this very plane the day before.
May 6th 1941
80 Squadron
H.Q.M.E.
Cairo
Dear Mama
Thanks for your telegrams—we had great fun in Greece although I must admit I was pleased to get away safely. Once more I lost everything I had including my best camera, and arrived one evening at the Peels’ house here looking like a tramp with nothing but my flying suit and a pair of khaki shorts. They reclothed me—I had a bath and borrowed a razor to shave off my beard after which I felt normal once more. Incidentally I got three German aircraft confirmed and 2 unconfirmed.
Roald washing himself at the tented camp in Elevsis, Greece. When he returned there after the Battle of Athens, he would write: “As I made my way slowly across the grass I suddenly realized that the whole of my body and all my clothes were dripping with sweat. Then I found that my hand was shaking so much I couldn’t put the flame to the end of the cigarette.”
Lots of love to all
Roald
May 15th 1941
Alexandria
80 Squadron
R.A.F.
H.Q.M.E.
Cairo
Dear Mama
I’ve just finished my rest leave having had a lovely time staying with Dorothy and Bobby Peel and today I’m off to the place where the squadron is reassembling. It’s not the Western Desert this time—it’s very near the place we had our first big celebration after leaving Iraq about 9 months ago—you may remember. As I told you—once more I’ve lost all my kit, everything I had. I got no compensation the first time and this time I’ve so far got £12 which doesn’t go very far—in fact I hope my income tax reclaims come along soon.
Well, I don’t know what news I can give you. We really had the hell of a time in Greece. It wasn’t much fun taking on half the German Air Force with literally a handful of fighters. My machine was shot up quite a bit but I always managed to get back. The difficulty was to choose a time to land when the German fighters weren’t ground straffing our aerodrome. Later on we hopped from place to place trying to cover the evacuation hiding our planes in olive groves and covering them with olive branches in a fairly fruitless endeavour to stop them being spotted by one or other of the Germans or aircraft overhead.
Anyway I don’t think anything as bad as that will happen again.
Lots of love to all
Roald
June 20th
80 Squadron
R.A.F.
H.Q.M.E.
Dear Mama
I had to have my photo taken the other day for an RAF pass. Here’s a copy. Sorry about this note, but at present we’re operating from a very obscure place, and such things as writing paper are difficult to come by. I shot down another JU88 and a French Potez last week over the Fleet, who as you will have heard over the wireless are operating up here.
It’s pretty hot, but there’s lots of every kind of fruit about—I expect you envy us there. But what a lot of flying. For the first 3 weeks we never stopped—you see there weren’t many of us. Ground straffing, escorting, intercepting, etc. etc.
Some days we did 7 hours a day which is a lot out here, where you sweat like a pig from the moment you get into the cockpit to the moment you get out. I’m writing this in a fig grove. Have a fig—there are lots here. Hope you are all O.K. Not getting any letters.
Lots of love
Roald
June 28th 1941
80 Squadron
R.A.F. H.Q.M.E.
Cairo
Egypt
Dear Mama,
I’ve suddenly received three of your letters dated 4th January, 15th January and 4th April! also one from Asta 4th January and one from Else 27th March for all of which many thanks. They give the first details I’ve had about the wedding which seems to have been marvellous. It’ll obviously be a laud week in the history of Ludgershall and in time to come the locals will say ‘It was in the year that Else and John were married . . . etc.’
Hope you never got your Lemoine 1927 Champagne – it’s the worst year for champagne on record and is worth nothing, whereas the 1929 which Alf bought is one of the best. Still I don’t suppose you can pick and choose.
. . . We’ve been doing some pretty intensive flying just lately – you may have heard about it a little on the wireless. Sometimes I’ve been doing as much as 7 hours a day, which is a lot in a fighter. Anyway my head didn’t take it any too well, and for the last 3 days I’ve been off flying. I may have to have another medical board to see if I’m really fit to fly out here. They may even send me to England, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it? It’s a pity in a way though, because I’ve just got going. I’ve got five confirmed, four Germans and one French, and quite a few unconfirmed – and lots on the ground from groundstraffing landing grounds. We’ve lost 4 pilots killed in the Squadron in the last 2 weeks, shot down by the French. Otherwise this country is great fun and definitely flowing with milk and honey.
I sprained my ankle in the blackout yesterday!
The Germans are bombing us a bit, but they won’t come over by daylight.
The sun shines all day and we are just by the sea – wish we got time to bathe.
Lots of love to all
Roald
P.S. Cheerful news: over 30% of our Habbaniya Training course have been killed or are missing here – it may be more now. Alec Leuchars was missing but walked out of a prison camp in Abyssinia when we captured it! He had baled out O.K.
Joke for the girls:
say quickly
Man walks into Pub.
‘Give me a fucking beer fucking quick before the fucking trouble starts.’
Landlord pulls a beer and hands it over—Man drinks it.
‘Give me another fucking beer fucking quick before the fucking trouble starts.’
Imperturbable landlord pulls another beer and hands it over.
Man drinks it.
‘Give me another fucking beer fucking quick before the fucking trouble starts.’
Landlord starts to pull another beer, looks up and says, ‘’Ere, wot d’you mean, before the fucking trouble starts?’
‘Well, it’s sure to fucking well start soon because I haven’t got any fucking money.’
[written on the back and underlined]
Private
Alf—Else or Asta
POST OFFICE TELEGRAM ENVELOPE
DATE JULY 21ST 1941
ADDRESSED
DAHL
WAYSIDE COTTAGE
LUDGERSHALL
BUCKS
TELEGRAM
OFFICE OF ORIGIN
ALEXANDRIA
MESSAGE
COMING HOME VERY SOON BY SEA. VERY FIT. SYRIAN WAR FUN. CABLE BY RETURN ANY PARTICULAR MATERIALS OR ANYTHING YOU WANT. ALSO SIZES SILK STOCKINGS ALL SIX OF YOU. EVERYTHING HERE.
ADDRESS CABLE CARE PEEL ALEXANDRIA.
LOVE
RONALD DAHL
POST OFFICE TELEGRAM ENVELOPE
DATE AUGUST 27TH 1941
TO:
MRS DAHL,
WAYSIDE COTTAGE
LUDGERSHALL
BUCKS
MESSAGE
RONALD IS VERY WELL AND CHEERFUL AND
SENDS LOVE TO ALL.
The airstrip at Ramat David in Palestine, 1941. Roald was the first pilot to land there. It was a hastily prepared grass airstrip rolled out in a cornfield by residents of the nearby kibbutz.
CHAPTER 6
—
“Teeth like piano keys”
1942–1943
Early 1942 found Roald living with his mother in a thatched cottage in the small Buckinghamshire village of Grendon Underwood, planting raspberry canes and wondering what to do with himself. He had returned from Egypt via Cape Town the previous summer and was still on extended sick leave. He was also dealing with a feeling of emasculation that he was no longer a fighter pilot. The RAF dangled the possibility of a job as a flying instructor in front of him, but that was almost like torture. As he was to write the following year, “to a pilot, being alive but earthbound is worse than not being alive at all.”60
Then one evening in London, over dinner at Pratt’s, one of London’s smallest and most exclusive all-male dining clubs, his loud, raucous energy got him an unusual job offer. He was asked to work for the RAF at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., where Lord Halifax was ambassador. His job title would be Assistant Air Attaché and he would be charged with using his charisma and flying experience to bring the American public behind the Allied war effort. He accepted it with alacrity.
His first weeks in the capital were among the most astonishing in his life. He met countless celebrities, had his moment of epiphany as a writer, and got his first story published. Before long he had befriended the U.S. Vice President, Henry Wallace, and was soon hobnobbing with the Roosevelts themselves at the White House. Within months of sitting under a tree in Grendon Underwood, telling stories about gremlins—strange little elves who RAF pilots held responsible for mechanical failures in the airplanes—to the children of a pilot friend who had recently been killed, he was working with Walt Disney as a writer on a major feature film about them.
His letters home chronicle the excitement of these dizzying new encounters. There is much name-dropping, as a host of film stars, directors, and writers come into his office, all eager to support the war effort. It was the same with the many powerful and wealthy individuals he met, some of whom went on to become friends or lovers. Roald’s shock at the contrast between the austerity of life in wartime Britain and the excesses he confronted in the USA is evident too and he sent home endless gifts of butter, sugar, chocolate, Norwegian cheeses, lipstick, stockings, and other luxuries denied to his family by rationing in Britain.
There is an infectious delight in the pleasure he gets telling his mother about his literary successes, which began soon after a lunch with C. S. Forester. Forester had been commissioned to write a piece about the RAF for the Saturday Evening Post and took Roald out for a meal, so he could get some good circumstantial details for his story. Roald told him about his crash in the desert. The table was a small one and both men ordered rather messy roast duck. Forester found it difficult to eat and take notes at the same time, so Roald offered to write the story up for him when he got home that evening. He did. When Forester read the result, he was astonished. He told his newspaper editor that the story should be published pretty much exactly as Roald had written it. It was. A career had been launched.
Roald’s letters reveal how seminal this moment was for him. From now on, in spite of all his other distractions, writing was what really mattered. The letters to his mother stress the role that luck and happenstance played in this transformation. And certainly the stars were on Roald’s side. He was in the right place at the right time. But his official correspondence to agents and editors presents a contrasting picture. These letters reveal the intens
ity with which he was already practicing his craft.
Dignitaries inspecting Montgomery Blair High School Victory Corps, 1943. The program focused high-school children on skills relevant to the war effort. Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl however (fourth from the right) found it absurd. “The things we do for England” he commented to his mother. On his left is the veteran playwright and farceur Squadron Leader Ben Travers. Roald described Travers as “about the dirtiest little man I have ever met, but extremely nice and terribly funny.”
Roald did not find the embassy a convivial place to work. He thought it snobbish, humorless, and hierarchical. The Air Mission itself was looked down on by embassy figures such as Isaiah Berlin, the information officer, who recalled that his colleagues regarded it “rather as a grammar school was looked on by public schoolboys.”61 Occasionally, in his letters home, one senses Roald’s frustration with this working environment, but it is like light glimpsed through cracks in a wall. He would articulate that resentment more fully later on. “I’d just come from the war,” he told the writer William Stevenson in the mid-1970s. “People were getting killed. I had been flying around, seeing horrible things. Now, almost instantly, I found myself in the middle of a pre-war cocktail mob in America. I had to dress up in ghastly gold braid and tassels. The result was, I became rather outspoken and brash.”62
It is sometimes hard to see this frustration in the letters, because all Roald’s wartime correspondence home was censored. So there is little actual detail about his job in them. His unflattering opinion of the ambassador, Lord Halifax, is impossible to detect because Roald’s comments about him are generally limited to their time on the tennis court. His intense dislike of his immediate boss, Air Commodore Thornton, is also scarcely apparent. Yet Roald’s arrogance and intolerance was very discernible to those around him. Isaiah Berlin for example thought writing successes had turned his head. He became “extremely conceited,” Berlin recalled, believing himself “a creative artist of the highest order, and therefore entitled to respect and very special treatment.”63