Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  His mother apart, any woman might be a witch in the subculture in which Dahl was soon to be enrolled. It had always been Harald Dahl’s intention to send his children to English “public” schools, and his widow was sure that Roald needed the influence of men. If he was to get into public school, he would have to be prepared for the Common Entrance exam. He was moved briefly from Elm Tree House to the Cathedral School on the green in Llandaff. There, he was a day boy, but at the age of nine he arrived with his trunk in the long corridors of St. Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare. You can just see the town from Cardiff’s docks, on the muddy far bank of the Severn.

  Extinct today, St. Peter’s had been founded in 1900. It was unusual in having been purposely built as a prep school: a long building from whose spinal corridor branched six classrooms, above which were six dormitories, each housing a dozen boys. At one end of the building, in a part strictly out of bounds to them, lived the headmaster, his wife, and their two daughters. These girls were objects of a fascination not much calmed by their father’s pedagogical approach to the Facts of Life.

  In later life, Roald Dahl would describe his sex education in a comic set piece with which he regaled family parties, booksellers’ conferences, and publishers’ gatherings, and even the Prize Days of schools. According to one who heard it, it went roughly like this:18 The headmaster told the boys, “You have about your body a certain organ. I think you know what I’m talking about.” (Dahl would say, “And I think we did know what he was talking about.”) “Well, I want you to realize that it’s like a torch. There’s a sort of bulb on the end of it. If you touch it, it will light up. And if it lights up, your batteries will go flat.” That was all. Except that afterward, according to the story, Roald didn’t dare touch his penis. Even drying himself after a bath was a source of anxiety, until one holiday when a sister acquired a hair dryer and his problem was solved.

  St. Peter’s itself, if we are to believe Dahl’s description in Boy, was a cross between Dotheboys Hall and Llanabba Castle, the gothic prep school in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Waugh’s louche master, Captain Grimes, in particular, has his Dahl counterpart in “Victor” Corrado, in love with the sadistic school matron. Dahl had to concede to his St. Peter’s friend Highton that Boy was “coloured by my natural love of fantasy”: Highton himself found the school ordinary enough. He now thinks that in its attempt to instill integrity and qualities of leadership in a pack of unregenerate seven-to-thirteen-year-olds, the regime was “a bit strict,” but he remembers most of the staff—including the matron—as having been perfectly normal, capable and kind. “None of it was as grim as in Boy.” But he recalls one Dahl-like streak of waywardness, when a master became keen on the mother of a pupil and gave the boy an enviably large model racing car. The man later turned up under a pseudonym, seemingly as a spy, at the headquarters of a secret experimental armored division where Highton was a security officer in the Second World War. Knowing that the background he claimed was false, Highton had him removed by MI5.

  Dahl himself, to eyes other than his own, seems to have passed his four years at St. Peter’s unexceptionally. He was tall, soft-faced, neither especially popular nor unpopular, although very close to the few boys who became his friends. (Douglas Highton still has the presents Dahl brought him back from holidays in Norway: a model seal, itself made from sealskin; a paper knife carved from part of a reindeer’s antler; a sketchy carving of a reindeer pulling a sleigh.) Dahl’s letters home, meanwhile, were routinely full of football and stamp collecting, Bonfire Night fireworks and the finer points of conkers.19 He was good at games, promising well at cricket (the school magazine said, “We expect great things in the future”20), and winning prizes for swimming. Like everyone, he marched in crocodile fashion on Sundays to All Saints Church, Weston-super-Mare, and called it All Stinks because of the incense. Like everyone, he made tobacco out of the Virginia creeper on the school wall and smoked it sickeningly in a clay pipe.

  Academically, he was weak: toward the bottom of his form of thirteen boys in Latin and math, and only slightly better at English. This must have been a blow to a child who was the center of attention at home, and of whom, since his father’s death, so much was expected. And however understandable, practically speaking, he found his mother’s decision to send him away to school, it still bewildered and hurt him. In his first term, in an instinctively well-aimed bid for her attention, he faked the symptoms of the appendicitis from which Astri had died, and won a short reprieve. But as time went by, and as he adapted himself to the inevitable, Dahl found other routes of escape.

  In particular, he lost himself in stories. He remembered any narrative he read or was told. In his earliest letters home, he relates verbatim a dramatized reading from Dickens and a school lecture on bird legends—he particularly admired the “fine” story in which the King of the Birds is whichever bird can fly highest and the wren wins by hiding in the feathers of the eagle.21 And as time went by, he read avidly among the novelists of exploration and military adventure popular among boys at the time: Kipling, Captain Marryat, H. Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty, writers whose emphasis on heroism and masculinity was to influence his life, as well as his books.

  He seems, sometimes, to have believed in stories more than he believed in people. If Boy is enjoyable for its violence—macabre episodes involving dentistry, car accidents, school beatings, the lancing of a friend’s boil—the main dramatis personae are correspondingly worked up into caricatures. In a few cases Dahl thought it best to change names. In others, he simply misremembered them: Victor for Valentine, Braithwaite for Blathwayt, Wragg for Ragg. He was sixty-seven when he wrote the book, and his spelling was always erratic. But it seems not to have troubled him, as he conjured these people up, that they were real and independent, not simply characters in a world of his own invention. This was to become a controversial issue because of some of the things he wrote in Boy about his next school.

  St. Peter’s sent its pupils on to good, sound, middling public schools: Blundell’s, Charterhouse, Cheltenham, Radley. Highton won a scholarship to Oakham. Dahl got into Repton.

  A rural midland village, seven miles south of Derby, Repton is a dour little sprawl of blackened stone and red brick, overlooking the featureless Trent valley. Nothing much is there except the school. Priory House, where Dahl was to spend the next four-and-a-half years, appears from the outside pleasantly domestic. A tile-hung Victorian villa with a corner turret, bay windows, and an enclosed garden, it could have been his old home in Llandaff. Yet inside, day and night, week in, week out, the older boys of the house were licensed to terrorize the younger. Repton “was a tough place,” one Priory contemporary recalls: “rules and discipline tight, living really spartan, enforced by boys who did 90 percent of the beating, of which there was a lot.”22

  The family had recently moved close to London, to a comfortable eight-bedroom house in Bexley, Kent, which was more convenient for trains to the school attended by all of Dahl’s sisters, Roedean, in Sussex. With its tennis court, its Ping-Pong table in the conservatory and huge breakfasts ready in the dining room on little flame heaters,23 Oakwood, the new family home, could not have contrasted more sharply with the rigors of school.

  Repton, according to another of Dahl’s contemporaries, the philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire, had “all the worst features of Marlborough or Eton, without any of the sophistication. It was full of heavy plutocratic boys from the North.”24 Not so full that it didn’t find room at the same time for the future novelist Denton Welch. It is the fate of all schools that some of their liveliest pupils grow up to revile them. Repton has been unluckier in this respect than most. Welch’s classic autobiography, Maiden Voyage, begins with his attempt not to return to the school in the autumn of 1931 (when Dahl had been there for five terms). Much of what Welch ran away from corresponds with Dahl’s account in Boy: fagging, beatings, the torture of new boys, and other miseries common to many, although not all, boys’ boarding schools of
the time. There are other, more pleasant memories, including some peculiar to Repton, such as the market research done there by Cadbury’s, described in Boy. A plain cardboard box full of new types of chocolate was given to every boy, with a checklist on which he had to award marks to each.25 Dahl’s taste for High Street brands of chocolate was already well established. The Cadbury’s blind tastings turned it into a lifelong addiction.

  If chocolate was one form of consolation, both boys were to find another in art: in Welch’s case, life drawing; in Dahl’s, photography. And since Welch’s book, unlike Dahl’s, was intended for adults, there was less to discourage him from writing about that other consolation, sex.

  Boy is the cartoon-strip version of Maiden Voyage, Dahl’s lurid episodes ringing with Billy Bunterish yells, where Welch scrutinizes his world with a sly, sensual eye: “The next day the House began to fill up with ‘old boys,’” Welch writes. “They were everywhere, standing in the corridors and studies, smoking pipes and cigarettes. Two even followed me down to the lavatory and asked me for a first-hand account of my adventures when I ran away.” Given Dahl’s more exaggerated style, some readers will be grateful that, when he writes about school lavatories, all that concerns him is keeping them warm for a prefect. But in one respect, while there is no reason to think he was himself actively involved, Dahl’s reticence about schoolboy homosexuality adds to, rather than moderates, his distortions. Boy caused a minor sensation when it first appeared in 1984, because of its allegation that a former headmaster of Repton, Geoffrey Fisher, who had subsequently become Archbishop of Canterbury, was a sadistic flogger. An episode is related in some detail in which the victim was Dahl’s best friend. Fisher is described prolonging the ordeal with lengthy pauses to fill and light his pipe, and “to lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing.”26 At the end, he produces a basin and a sponge and tells him to wash away the blood.

  According to Dahl, the episode made him have doubts about the organization of English society, and even about the existence of God. It was Fisher, after all, who, twenty years later, crowned Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey. How could his ecclesiastical position be reconciled with the behavior Dahl described? While Fisher had been at Repton,

  he was an ordinary clergyman … as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.27

  Dahl was right about having been confused. The truth is different and more complicated. The beating he describes did take place, but in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster concerned was Fisher’s successor, J. T. Christie. If Dahl got his sadists mixed up, he also gives the impression that the beating was purely arbitrary—a matter of “flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.” In fact, the offender, who was almost eighteen and a house prefect, had been caught in bed with a younger boy.28

  However sympathetic modern readers may be to Dahl’s views on corporal punishment and—implicitly—on schoolboy homosexuality, his combination of instant moral outrage with a more general irresponsibility still gives offense. Lord Fisher had died in 1972, twelve years before Boy appeared, so there was no risk of libel action, but the archbishop’s family and numerous Reptonians complained. Dahl was absolutely unrepentant, and it is one of the complications of the episode that, in one sense, he was right. While some of his contemporaries remember Fisher as a great and good man who was “liked and admired by all the boys, and certainly not sadistic,”29 others say that even by the standards of the day he was a severe head. “Pretty crisp” was his own version of his regime at Repton.30 That is how he is remembered, too, by Stuart Hampshire. Fisher was very strict, Hampshire says, if not abnormally so, judged by the standards of the time. “He was very unfeeling and illiberal,” and he certainly beat boys excessively—“by which I don’t mean too often but too hard.”31

  So does it matter that it wasn’t Geoffrey Fisher who beat Dahl’s friend? It mattered to the boy. For the man who actually did beat him was, according to Hampshire, “much worse. He was famous for saying, ‘Those who live by the flesh will perish by the flesh.’” J. T. Christie carried this fame with him to Westminster, to which he moved on, still in his thirties, in 1937. There, he is remembered for his learning, his piety, and his savagery. Another philosopher, Richard Wollheim, has written a vivid description of him:

  He read with us some of the Lesbia poems, not all. He compared Catullus to Burns, and again he tried to convince us of the torments of unsanctified love. When he spoke of such topics he wriggled in his chair. We used to see him wriggle in much the same way in his pew when he came in early to the school service for private prayer. In both cases, he wrestled with some part of himself he did not like, and I cannot help feeling that he, and we, and the school as a whole, would have been happier if he had sometimes emerged the loser.32

  This is clearly the man whom Dahl misremembered as Fisher. And Wollheim confirms that “Christie rejoiced in beating boys”:

  He beat boys for a number of offences. He beat them for cheating, and he beat them for sex. Two boys, whom we all knew he wanted to beat for other reasons, he beat for what was regarded in the school as an act of heroic frivolity—stealing the batteries out of his wireless set.… Some selected offenders he invited to pray with him before he beat them. One, to my knowledge, refused.

  For all this, as Dahl makes clear, most of the violence at Repton (like other schools) was administered not by the masters but by the boys. Tall and good at games—especially squash—Dahl wasn’t an obvious target of the system. Some who knew him dismiss the sufferings described in Boy as having been worked up to generate sales. They say that in his early days at the school, while Dahl had “difficulty settling in” and made few close friends, he wasn’t particularly unpopular, and that he passed some of the more arcane social tests, such as being chosen to act in the house play. One gratefully remembers that he found a patent ointment that cured the impetigo by which everyone was afflicted (they blamed the compulsory outdoor plunge bath, with its mantle of green slime).33 Others were amused when he rigged up a mousetrap made of a collapsible jetty over a basin of water and was bitten by its victim.34 He invented a slogan for the device, “Catch as Cats Can’t.”35

  Still, he was often miserable. He was growing fast, missing his friend Highton, and missing the father he had hardly known. He got into a serious fight with a boy who was rude about Norwegians.36 He wanted to be at home, with his mother, his Meccano, and his growing collection of birds’ eggs.37 You can’t calibrate psychological suffering any more than physical pain. To say that Dahl exaggerated is, at least partly, to point to the subjectivism of experience—and to the particular varieties of subjectivism which can turn people into writers of fiction. To Dahl, his experiences seemed real enough, and it is clear that he was lonely and insecure. None of the things which isolated him would have been decisive in itself: other boys had foreign names, or were very tall or unexpectedly sensitive, or had an arrogant, teasing, domineering manner, or were unsuccessful in the classroom. But all these were true of Dahl.

  His accounts of childhood, both autobiographical and fictional, are dominated by bullies: schoolboy bullies in “The Swan,” the aunts in James and the Giant Peach, the hostile giants in The BFG, the father and headmistress in Matilda, the dragon in The Minpins. About a tenth of Boy is taken up with beatings and other forms of physical punishment. Just how traumatic were the memories involved is clear from a story for adults, “Galloping Foxley,” which he first published in his thirties.38 The narrator, an elderly commuter, becomes obsessed by the intrusion of a newcomer who has begun to travel regularly in the same train compartment. Gradually he remembers the source of his anxiety: the man tormented him at school. (Dahl transferred th
ese passages of the story more or less intact into Boy.39) After some days of increasingly indignant silence, the former victim introduces himself. He has been mistaken. The intruder is much younger and was at a different school.

  Perhaps Dahl didn’t have to look far to understand a bully. Most of the men who knew him, then or later, seem to find it hard not to use the word of him eventually. A contemporary from a different house, David Atkins, has written that he remembers Dahl physically tormenting the older Denton Welch,40 but most say that his was a verbal, rather than a physical, kind of sadism. At Repton, he was good at inventing, and persisting with, cruel nicknames. He mercilessly teased a boy who developed breasts. It was unpredictable whom he would pick on and why.

  Whether the victim was Dahl himself or someone else, or both, without taking Welch’s own tack and running away altogether, he had few chances of escape. The boys had very little free time. They took all their meals and recreation in the house. The housemaster assigned them to their dormitories and their shared studies, each occupied by about five boys. The “studyholder”—a senior boy—ruled. Two or three others awaited their turn in power, while the remainder served the fagmaster’s whims. Fags, Dahl’s contemporary Jim Furse recalls—confirming Dahl’s own, more savage, onslaught on the system—“were the body servants and, for all intents and purposes, the slaves of the studyholder. They were at his beck and call at all times; they kept his shoes, clothes, the buttons on his OTC uniform and his study clean and tidy, they made his toast and ran his errands, and they laid, lit, and attended to the fire every night in winter—there was no other heating.”41 If any too intensely consoling friendship was formed, it could soon be discouraged; sharing arrangements were reshuffled every term. Meanwhile, Repton as a whole was run by its prefects, known—in a throwback to their Tudor precursors—as “beausieurs.” (Dahl wrote them phonetically, “boazers.”) Under them and the various sporting commissars, everyone was forced to take part in corporate activities, from organized games and the Officers’ Training Corps to the lugubrious Inter-House Singing Competition for Broken Voices.