Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  There was one place where Dahl eventually found he could get away: a cramped room at the end of a brick outbuilding, cut off from the rest of the school, on a small traffic island in a side street, between the cricket-field wall and a village pub, the Boot. This secret room was a prototype of the famous garden hut at Great Missenden in which he later wrote. Here, in the middle of Repton, surrounded by the school yet as remote from it as could be, he lurked every Sunday—when, so long as they had attended the early-morning Communion service, everyone was free for the rest of the day. It was an airless, evil-smelling place, used as a photographic darkroom, which was Dahl’s excuse for being there. Later, he was joined by a younger photographer in the same house, David Sells. The door was locked and no one could see in, so they could smoke. Sometimes they heard voices in the road outside. If the headmaster went by, Dahl, with silent ostentation, lit another cigarette.

  Photography was a serious hobby. Sells remembers Dahl’s skill with the enlarger, and still has some of the pictures they took and developed. There are snapshots, too, in an album kept at Priory House: fire practice; the annual Cadet Force camp; the portly, mustached housemaster in his shiny shoes, best foot forward; Dahl and others in their uniform black jackets, striped trousers, and straw hats. Dahl’s great friend Michael Arnold is there, bespectacled, looking out a window, his hair parted neatly at the center, wearing a wide silk tie.

  Arnold went on to Oxford and a successful, if checkered, scientific career with Imperial Chemical Industries.42 In the sixth form at Repton, he stood for the truculent imaginative heterodoxy to which Dahl aspired, and which—despite its critics—the school at its rare best still occasionally encouraged. Not all the staff were subservient to the regime. In his early years as headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher had quarreled with a brilliant and enthusiastic young socialist called Victor Gollancz, who with another master had started an innovative class on politics and current affairs.43 Anticipating his later career as a publisher, Gollancz based an unofficial but widely read magazine on the proceedings of this group: A Public School Looks at the World. In due course, Fisher got rid of him, but the ideas he put around continued to be aired at Repton. Two notable left-wing writers of the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, had been pupils there; and in Dahl’s day, a decade later, visiting speakers included the pacifist Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a pioneer of the League of Nations.

  If the young Dahl himself was at all touched by the political climate of the 1930s, he didn’t show it until a good many years later, immediately after the Second World War, when a mood of depressed utopian internationalism briefly overcame him. He was much more lastingly influenced by Michael Arnold’s own form of rebellion: individualist, attention-seeking, conservative, anarchic. Arnold was a leading figure in the Debating Society, where, as the school magazine records, he spoke against feminism but defended both Hollywood (except for its “objectionable women”) and, “in an off-hand manner,” capital punishment. On one occasion, the motion was Delenda est Chicago:44 the boys were displaying their feelings of superiority about America, as well as their classical education. During the debate, Arnold, “largely enveloped in a yellow muffler,” dismissed Stuart Hampshire’s speech in support of American energy and vividness, but argued that Chicago should nevertheless be left intact, if only as “a polyglot collection of dregs.” The Americans “were foul, anyway,” he concluded.45

  Dahl occasionally took part in these performances, but without making much impression. Nor, any more than at St. Peter’s, was he doing well at his academic subjects. This increased his intense competitiveness in other areas, particularly games. At the age of nine, he had already taken up golf, which he could continue to play on the holidays.46 He became captain of the Repton Fives team, played hockey for the school, and football and cricket for his house, swam and played golf. In his final year, without any special preparation but with the advantage of his long reach, he won the boxing competition. And he was becoming hooked on bridge, poker, and other forms of gambling: games in which, to those who played with him, he seemed to be pitting himself, not only against others, but against “the system” as a whole.47

  In old age, perhaps in oblique response to being frustrated of the knighthood he longed for, Dahl lamented that he had never become a prefect at Repton. Wasn’t he a sergeant in the Corps? Hadn’t he won two prizes for photography? Some of his contemporaries point out that he was young for his year, that he did become a (notably nondictatorial) “studyholder,” and that in any case the Captain of Fives was, ex officio, one of the sixteen “School Officers”: it wasn’t necessary to make him a prefect. But one Priory House contemporary takes Dahl’s side in this ancient grudge: “The powers-that-were mistrusted him and he got no promotion at all in a very hierarchical society. Probably a great mistake; no doubt it was feared he would be subversive, but in these cases the poachers generally make the best gamekeepers.”48

  In his last term, the subversive seventeen-year-old drove an old motorbike, a 500 cc Ariel, to Derbyshire and kept it in Wilmington, a few miles from Repton. “It gave me,” he later wrote with revealing grandiosity, “an amazing feeling of winged majesty and of independence.”49 Dahl relished obscuring his face with goggles and scarf and racing through Repton into the neighboring countryside. As with much that he did, the pleasure largely depended on the antiauthoritarian fantasies he built around it. On one vengeful occasion, driving past the school and seeing the headmaster on his way to chapel, he roared as close as he dared to that “terrifying figure” who, until the end of his life, he wrongly believed was Geoffrey Fisher.

  3

  Flying

  “Sometimes there is a great advantage in traveling to hot countries, where niggers dwell,” the young Roald Dahl wrote in a prep-school essay. “They will give you many valuable things.”1 There was even, he continued, the outside chance of discovering a gold mine. It’s a fair precis of what many British people at the time believed. It could almost have been the unofficial policy statement of multinational enterprises like Shell, where, on leaving Repton, Dahl was taken on as a trainee.

  His mother had wanted him to try for Oxford or Cambridge, but Repton made it clear that, given his academic record, this wasn’t an option.2 In any case, what he most wanted to do was to travel. He spent the summer before his eighteenth birthday with fifty or so other young men on a joint public-school expedition to Newfoundland. There, he lived under canvas, supplemented his pemmican diet with wild bilberries and whatever fish could be caught, and undertook various challenges designed to inculcate qualities of leadership and endurance.

  One of these was a twenty-day march, exploring an unmapped region in the center of the island, south of Grand Falls. The journey was led by a man who had been medical officer on Captain Scott’s tragic expedition to the Antarctic in 1910–12, and who had founded the Public Schools Exploring Society3 two years earlier, Surgeon Commander George Murray Levick. His young explorers believed that, in the blank space on the relevant part of their map of Newfoundland, “there might be anything, mountains, forests, rivers, Indians, gold.”4 Forests there were, in plenty, and also bogs. The party struggled along in the rain, collecting specimens of the region’s flora and fauna, which they were to take back to the British Museum. According to their meticulously kept records, birds and lepidoptera were surprisingly uncommon, but they found an abundance of insects, ferns, and mosses. The main object of the march, however, as the expedition’s historian, Dennis Clarke, recorded, was to provide an exercise in “the survival of the fittest.”5 Someone who developed mumps was forced to carry on despite various protests, Dahl and the others sharing his load. One of Dahl’s boots later disintegrated, but he repaired it by encasing it in a canvas bucket, the rope handle tied around his ankle.

  None of this dampened his enthusiasm for travel, and once he had returned home and joined Shell in September 1934, he hoped for an early posting to Africa or the Far East. For the moment, the farthest east the job took
him was to his mother’s house in Bexley, where he lived while he learned “all about fuel oil and diesel oil and gas oil and lubricating oil and kerosene and gasoline.”6 He spent six months working in a refinery and some enjoyable weeks driving a truck in the West Country, but for the most part was based in London, commuting daily to Shell’s office in St. Helen’s Court, Leadenhall Street, near the Bank of England.

  When they arrived in the morning, employees signed their name in a book. At nine, the office manager drew a red line across the page, so that he could tell at a glance who was late.7 After signing, Dahl and the others went out of the back door to a nearby Italian café for bacon and eggs. There wasn’t a lot to do: much of the training seemed to consist of sorting letters and drafting replies. Besides, according to Antony Pegg—a fellow Eastern Staff trainee who spent his whole life in Shell—Dahl was “a very independent person. He didn’t like an awful lot of direction and that kind of thing. That’s why I was never surprised when he left Shell. If he was told to do things—bah!—he wasn’t interested.”

  Not that he didn’t try to be a good company man. Shell was a world in itself—in some ways not unlike a vast school. There were interesting and likable people in the office: Douglas Bader, for example, the future Second World War hero, who had joined the company as a clerk a year earlier, after losing his legs in a flying accident. Dahl played golf in the company tournament (he was runner-up in June 1936) and entered his photographs in the annual art exhibition—matters reported in the Shell Magazine, alongside accounts of a Shell amateur dramatic performance near Calcutta and a Shell cocktail party in Rio, and articles on new directions in gas-station architecture.8 In the September 1937 issue, the magazine’s humorous gossip column, “Whips and Scorpions,” which was compiled in the St. Helen’s Court office, parodied a currently popular News Chronicle competition in which readers could win prizes by recognizing and challenging a representative of the newspaper, who toured British seaside resorts under the name Lobby Lud. The spoof was illustrated by a photograph taken by Dahl of a bare-chested man on a beach playing the mouth organ. It all reads as if it could have been dreamed up, and possibly even written, by Dahl himself:

  The idea is that, upon recognizing Mr. Dud, you should floor him with a Rugger tackle, sit firmly upon his chest, and shout into his left ear: “You are Mr. Dippy Dud. I claim THE SHELL MAGAZINE prize,” at the same time brandishing a copy of the current issue.

  “It will be noticed,” the piece warned, “that Mr. Dud is a keen musician, but do not be misled if he is not playing a mouth-organ when you see him”:

  He is an equally adept performer on the … harmonium, euphonium, pandemonium … dictaphone, glockenspiel and catarrh.…

  Don’t be afraid to tackle anyone you think may possibly be Mr. Dud, unless he is very much bigger than yourself. People who are mistaken for him enter heartily into the fun of things, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.

  Mr. Dud’s next visit would be to “Whelkington-on-Sea,” where his itinerary was planned to include a lunchtime tour of “places of interest, including The Red Lion, The Where’s George, The Bookmakers’ Arms, and The Slap and Tickle,” followed by a two-minute visit to the municipal museum and art gallery, and an hour’s “Demonstration of three-card trick in Municipal Fun Fair,” before another pub crawl.

  In this lighthearted atmosphere, and with home to escape to, Dahl found it easier to make friends than at school. In the evenings, he played poker with people from the office, or went greyhound racing with them. He also often saw a young Cambridge undergraduate, Dennis Pearl, whom he had met on the Newfoundland expedition and who spent many weekends at Bexley. Pearl liked both Dahl and his sisters—“a very lively, bright lot.” Alfhild was the most attractive and most sought-after—her admirers included the composer William Walton. Else was quieter, with a full figure and sleepy eyes. (Much later, divorced from his first wife, Pearl would marry one of Else’s daughters.) Asta, angular and very tall, was still at Roedean, and Pearl was once both startled and flattered when her mother, who hadn’t expected him to stay the night, directed him with a Scandinavian disregard for sexual complexity to the same room as the sixteen-year-old, where a spare bed happened to be already made up.

  Pearl remembers these weekends as idylls. The pattern was usually the same: horse racing or greyhounds with Roald and other male friends on Saturday; golf on Sunday morning; and then an afternoon spent lazing around, listening to Alfhild and Else playing Beethoven piano duets, or reading aloud the latest Damon Runyon story published in the Evening Standard.9 Pearl was an insatiable reader, and often recommended books to his friend: R. H. Mottram’s First World War trilogy, The Spanish Farm; Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey; novels by another American writer, Christopher Morley. Dahl shared many of his friend’s enthusiasms, and Damon Runyon in particular gave him a taste for American crime fiction which lasted for the rest of his life. (The year before he died, 1989, he urged Pearl to read Thomas Harris’s newly published novel, The Silence of the Lambs.) But he was too active to give much of his time to reading, and his tastes were less sophisticated and “literary” than Pearl’s. Besides, he was always busy with a game or hobby of some kind. Sports apart, photography still absorbed him—one of the bedrooms at Bexley had been converted into a darkroom—and he spent hours making model aircraft. He was also developing an increasingly complicated and secretive sex life. He had some single girlfriends of his own age, including for a short time a Belgian-Irish girl named Dorothy O’Hara Livesay, who later became Pearl’s first wife. But Dahl was particularly attracted, and attractive, to older women, especially if they were married. In Pearl’s words, he “tended to choose something which created difficulties—he seemed to like mystery,” so the details are hazy. But among his affairs was one with a baronet’s wife, and another with a local woman in Bexley whom Dahl kept separate from his friends and saw only on nights when her husband was away on business.

  Some of these liaisons were organized by telephone from the office—as, also, were his dealings with the bookmakers. He regularly slipped out in the middle of the afternoon to buy an evening paper for the racing results.10 Although his salary as a trainee was only £130 a year—today, about £4,000—he had no living expenses. To Antony Pegg, whose wages were entirely used up by the rent for his lodgings and who was dependent on his parents for spending money, Dahl seemed to have much more to spare for gambling than the rest of them.

  Meanwhile, the would-be traveler watched impatiently as other Shell staff went to and from Latin America, Australia, Africa, Eastern Europe. On his desk sat a ball which, when he joined the company, he had begun making from the silver wrappings of his daily post-lunch chocolate bar (and which he kept, along with other relics and fetishes, for the rest of his life).11 Already it was as big as a tennis ball. At his desk, Dahl fantasized about Africa, while more realistically planning holidays closer to home: a trip to Norway with his old school friend Michael Arnold, now at Oxford, and Dennis Pearl; or a climbing expedition in Snowdonia, where he and Pearl took along another Reptonian called Jimmy Horrocks, who had been on the Newfoundland trip with them and had recently quarreled with his parents. In the conventionally minded view of Pearl, who was then a law student and later a successful colonial administrator, Horrocks was “a complete and utter dead loss from every point of view—an early version of the druggy dropout.” Pearl noticed that Dahl was often drawn to outsiders.

  Eventually, in the autumn of 1938, his posting came through: to Dar es Salaam, in what is now Tanzania, was then Tanganyika, and from 1887 until the First World War had been German East Africa.

  European imperialism had brought European technological “needs” to East Africa. Suddenly the nights had come to seem too dark without kerosene lamps, cooking too laborious without kerosene stoves. The first oil storage tank which Shell built in East Africa went up in 1900 in Zanzibar, along with a factory for making cans.12 Trucks, cars, and oil-driven ships soon requir
ed more and bigger tanks: in Mombasa, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam. Deep harbors were built, with pipelines to draw oil from the ocean tankers. New offices served these installations, and from 1930, there was a club in Nairobi for those who worked in them.

  Dahl lived with two other young Englishmen in a company house in Dar es Salaam, on the cliffs above the Indian Ocean.13 Between them, they ran the business in Tanganyika—a country four times the size of Great Britain, one and a half times that of Texas—sharing their somewhat awed sense of power and freedom with the colonial administrators who accommodated them on their travels. Dahl greatly admired the way the District Officers lived, combining the roles of judge, political adviser, and doctor. Their Africa wasn’t the aristocratic twenty-four-hour nightclub of Kenya’s “Happy Valley.” It was a more conscientious society, and its excitements were more indigenous: a tarantula in a friend’s shoe; a green mamba sliding into the living room of a customs officer and killing the dog; a lion carrying off the wife of the district officer’s cook, while the D.O. and his family sat with Dahl listening to Beethoven on the gramophone.