Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  Much of the life was routine. In Dar es Salaam, he spent his days sitting in the office in his white suit, at a desk partitioned off from the clerks, who were mostly Indians and whose obsequiousness, he told his mother, made him feel “like a bloody king.”14 He played a lot of sports, mainly through the club: sailing, swimming, golf, tennis, squash, hockey, and soccer, often in temperatures of 90 degrees. The social highlight was the annual dinner of the Caledonian Society. But he often had to make long circular safaris on business, taking his servant, Mdisho, with him. They traveled west to Lake Tanganyika, south to the borders of Nyasaland (Malawi) and back toward Mozambique, visiting customers who ran mines and plantations and supplying them with fuel and lubricants for their machinery. In Going Solo, Dahl colorfully describes the wildlife he saw on these trips and his relations with Africans and white settlers. As a writer, he was no Isak Dinesen—he lacked her experience of African life, her patience, and her subtlety. But he had read her book Out of Africa,15 published the year before he left England, and respected her interest in non-European ways of thought and her impatience with the unimaginativeness of many settlers. In old age, Dahl confessed to feeling “mildly ashamed” of his youthful acceptance of British imperialism in Africa, and of the social inequalities on which it was based: “It was only comfortable because we had masses of servants, which is not right, of course it’s not right.”16 But even while he was still fairly young, he became more critical of colonial attitudes than perhaps he later recalled. The point is worth making because—as we shall see—Dahl was accused of racism in the 1970s, when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was attacked for its somewhat unthinkingly Victorian treatment of the “Oompa-Loompas”: cheerful factory laborers who, until he was persuaded to revise the book, were depicted as Congolese pygmy slaves.17

  Dahl himself satirized racism in his story “Poison,” a psychological thriller which he first published in 1950. The plot was suggested to him by a friend in Washington,18 but it fitted some of his own African experiences.

  A white settler in India is trapped in bed by a deadly snake, a krait.19 Harry Pope’s friend finds him paralyzed with terror and fetches the local native doctor. During a scene drawn out over nine sweat-drenched pages, Dr. Ganderbai first injects Pope with serum and then pumps chloroform into his bed, to immobilize the krait. But when at last they pull back the sheet, nothing is there. In the story’s fierce final twist, Dr. Ganderbai asks whether his patient has been dreaming, and Pope turns on him: “Are you telling me I’m a liar?… Why, you dirty little Hindu sewer rat!… You dirty black—” The friend, who is also the narrator, apologetically hurries Ganderbai out.

  “You did a wonderful job,” I said. “Thank you so very much for coming.”

  “All he needs is a good holiday,” he said quietly, without looking at me, then he started the engine and drove off.

  Ganderbai’s dignity, here, makes its own quiet point, but in the original version, Dahl included a more plainly anti-racist paragraph which was obviously based on his time in Tanganyika. The passage both interrupts the tension and, by overanticipating Harry’s behavior at the end, weakens its impact. Presumably that is the reason why, although it appeared in the version published by Collier’s magazine,20 Dahl later removed it:

  [Dr. Ganderbai] was worried about his reputation and I must say I couldn’t blame him. It was probable that he had never before been called in to attend a European. None of them bothered with him much, except perhaps the British upon whom, in those days, his job depended, and who noticed him only in order to be politely offensive—as only the British can be. I imagined that even now little Ganderbai could hear the thick fruity voice of Dr. James Russell in the lounge at the club, saying, “Young Pope? Ah, yes, poor fellah. Not a nice way to go. But then if people will call in a native witch doctor, what can they expect?”

  In the late 1930s, racists did not always confine the expression of their views to the club, in Europe any more than in Africa. In Dar es Salaam, Dahl followed the news on his Philips ten-valve radio, and mockingly named the lizards in his living room after the leaders of Fascism: Hitler and Musso.21 The leader whom Dahl himself unfashionably favored was a British politician whose bellicose arguments against appeasement had left him, for now, in the wilderness: Winston Churchill.22 Of Mussolini, Dahl wrote to his mother, saying that the dictator ought to adopt a harmless pastime like making a collection of birds’ eggs, rather than of people’s countries—although “he’d probably say that it was cruel.”23

  Mussolini’s Italy already ruled Libya and had invaded Ethiopia in 1935. For Germany, too, Africa was vital, especially in the north, where it gave access to the Mediterranean and to the oil fields of the Middle East. National pride was at stake, as well as economic interest: Germany had been deprived of its imperial “possessions”—among them Tanganyika—by the punitive Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War. Its principal rivals in the region were France in most of the northwest, including in Algeria; Belgium in the Congo; and, of course, Great Britain. The British Empire at the time still included Nigeria and the Gold Coast (now Ghana); much of East Africa including Kenya, Tanganyika, and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe); territories on both sides of the Gulf of Aden at one end of the Red Sea; and, at its other end, Palestine. Britain also remained powerful in, and on the outbreak of war quickly occupied, both Egypt and Iraq.

  To Dahl, at the age of twenty-two, the buildup to war came as an exciting change in a routine which, however exotic, had begun to turn stale. He had ordered thirty-five records through the HMV agents in Dar es Salaam—popular classics for the most part (the Hungarian Rhapsodies, Peer Gynt, the Brandenburg Concertos), but also Gershwin and Paul Robeson. And his childhood interest in flowers had been reawakened by a septuagenarian colonel who had been to South America in search of orchids. (Dahl nicknamed him “Iron Discipline,” after his favorite nostrum.) But his social circle was extremely small; there were few single European girls around, and on many evenings, he wrote to his mother, there was “bugger all to do except sweat.”24

  Throughout 1939, as the inevitability of war became clear, Dahl urged his mother and sisters to leave Kent, which he rightly thought was bound to be bombed, and move back to Wales. He was enlisted by the colonial authorities as a special constable with “batons, belts & all sorts of special instructions.”25 The last were contingency plans for helping to organize Askari troops in the arrest and internment of German nationals around Dar es Salaam. When the time came, this work exempted him from conscription in the Kenyan Army, which took most eligible Englishmen in the region. Emergency restrictions on movement prevented him from leaving East Africa, and he toyed with the idea of joining the King’s African Rifles. But the Royal Air Force was recruiting in Nairobi, and sounded, he wrote, “fairly exciting and interesting and a bloody sight better than joining the army out here and marching about in the heat from one place to another and doing nothing special.”26 Besides, the RAF would teach him to fly, free, when he would normally, he said, have had to pay about £1,000 for the lessons which would get him a license. He hitched a ride on a Shell coastal tanker to Mombasa, changed to a train from which he saw antelope, ostrich, buffalo, and giraffe with their young, and early in November 1939 submitted himself to a medical selection board.

  With his school cadet corps training, his individualism, and his aptitude for games—particularly, his squash player’s reflexes—Dahl was a stereotypical fighter-pilot recruit. He was too tall to fit comfortably into a cockpit (his inventive fellow trainees gave him his RAF nickname, Lofty), but told his mother that apart from that and the fact that he missed having servants, he had never enjoyed himself so much as during these weeks, flying Tiger Moths over the Kenyan Highlands. From there he moved to the bleaker surroundings of Habbaniya, in the Iraqi desert, where he spent six months learning to shoot, to dive-bomb, to navigate, and to fly at night, before being passed on to a pilots’ pool in Ismailia, Egypt.27 In mid-September 1940, his orde
rs came through to join 80 Squadron in western Egypt, near the frontier with Libya.

  Italy had formally entered the war in June, effectively closing the Mediterranean and cutting off much of the British land forces. Since then, the Italians had been building up their strength in eastern Libya.28 The expected push into Egypt began on September 13, when a large Italian army began a sixty-mile advance across the border, halting at Sidi Barrani on September 18.

  In all this, 80 Squadron had been kept busy and was forced to move both its main headquarters and its landing grounds frequently. September 19 was quiet. The squadron’s officers organized a cricket match with the senior NCOs; 350 miles to their east, Dahl took off from Abu Suweir, in a Gloster Gladiator—a kind of airplane he had not flown before. He stopped twice to refuel, the second time at Fouka, where he was given directions that may have been confused by events. 80 Squadron was not where he expected to find it, and as dusk gathered over the North African desert and his fuel gauge fell, he decided to try to land.

  Dahl described the crash in Going Solo,29 as well as in “Shot Down Over Libya” and its subsequent, less heroic version, “A Piece of Cake.”30 The squadron’s own report the next day was typically low-key:

  Weather—wind N.W.—visibility good. A patrol was carried out over Mersa Matruh with 6 Gladiators from 1645 hours to 1800 hours. No enemy aircraft were sighted. P/O Dahl posted to this squadron from T.U.R.P. for flying duties w.e.f. 20th September. This pilot was ferrying an aircraft from No. 102 M.U. to this unit, but unfortunately not being used to flying aircraft over the Desert he made a forced landing 2 miles west of Mersa Matruh. He made an unsuccessful forced landing and the aircraft burst into flames. The pilot was badly burned and he was conveyed to an Army Field Ambulance Station.31

  It was seven months before anyone in 80 Squadron saw Dahl again. Anyone, that is, who lived that long.

  On landing, the Gladiator had hit a boulder and lurched forward into the sand. In the collision, Dahl’s skull was fractured by hitting the metal reflector sight, and his nose was driven back into his face. Before the aircraft’s gas tanks caught fire, he managed to extricate himself from his seat belt and parachute harness, crawl from the cockpit, and roll out of danger, to be picked up, bleeding profusely, by British soldiers patrolling nearby.

  The squadron report was wrong about his burns, which were only slight,32 but his face was so swollen with bruises that he was blind for several weeks, and the injuries to his head, nose, and back were such that it was almost two months before he was sufficiently recovered to get out of his hospital bed in Alexandria. On November 20, he wrote to his mother, from whom he had just received eight letters. With the bravado he always put on for her, he said that, apart from persistent headaches, he was feeling fine. The weather was like an English summer. He had been visited by some Norwegian expatriates, and would be convalescing with wealthy local volunteers who took in wounded officers. Later, when his nose had been rebuilt, he was offered a berth home on the next convoy, but was afraid that it would mean no more flying, so declined.

  The decision took some courage. While he was in the hospital, Italy invaded Greece, which Britain, jointly with France, had before the war promised to defend. Since France had by now fallen, Britain could have argued that she was no longer bound by an agreement which, given the reversals of the North African campaign and the dangers of a German invasion at home, she couldn’t have been worse placed to fulfill. The British Commander in Chief in the Middle East, General Wavell, warned Churchill that his forces were already overstretched, and that if they managed to secure an Italian withdrawal from Greece, the Germans would inevitably be drawn in through the Balkans. With the encouragement of American material aid, and buoyed up by what the historian John Terraine calls the “strategic fantasies” of Churchill, the pro-Greek arguments prevailed. In November and December of 1940, British aircraft badly needed in North Africa were sent to the peninsula, including three squadrons of Blenheim bombers and two of Gladiator fighters: Squadrons 80 and 112.

  As Terraine observes, “From bad beginnings, things went from worse to worse.” Aircraft and spares were in short supply in Britain, let alone in the Middle East. Winter brought thick mists and low cloud cover to the mountains of Greece, and earthquakes destroyed two airfields. The Greek High Command vacillated in its strategy and in the demands it made of its allies. As Wavell had predicted, Italian failures brought German reinforcements. By the time the British Army’s expeditionary force arrived on March 5, its air support consisted of 200 aircraft (including reserves), against 800 German aircraft on the eastern front, 160 Italian in Albania, and a further 150 based in Italy, but within range of Greece. Two days earlier, Churchill had told his Foreign Secretary, “We do not see any reasons for expecting success.”

  During this time, while Dahl was still in Alexandria, 80 Squadron took heavy losses, of both pilots and aircraft. There were some triumphant days, including one at the beginning of March, when members of the squadron—including its most famous pilot, Thomas Pattle, and the commanding officer, “Tap” Jones—claimed over twenty Italian bombers and fighters shot down for no loss: a figure made much of in British and Greek propaganda. But Tap Jones himself, who ended up as an air marshal (and whom Dahl later falsely maligned as never flying in combat33), remembers it all as “a most horrid campaign” in which the RAF were outnumbered, frustrated by both bad weather and inadequate equipment, and losing pilots sometimes at the rate of three or four a day.34

  On April 6, Germany invaded, and within ten days the 60,000 men of the British Army in Greece were in full retreat. This was the situation when Dahl arrived from Egypt, flying another unfamiliar airplane, one of the much-needed Hurricanes with which 80 Squadron’s Gladiators were being replaced. He would be in Greece for less than two weeks, but it was to be one of the most intense periods of his life, and the most dangerous.

  In Going Solo, Dahl talks of having “come home to my squadron at last,” ready for the “next round.”35 He was eager for action, and for a chance to make good what he must have felt was an ignominious and wasteful mistake. If others had once seen his accident this way, it was by now long forgotten. To the present members of his squadron, he was a complete stranger and one who, far from fighting a new round, hadn’t yet been in the ring. People were too busy anyway, too combat-shocked and too scared to take much notice of each other. One of the squadron’s engine fitters at the time says he has little memory of any of the pilots, because “we used to see them come and go so quick.”36 Dahl was found a tent and given some rudimentary advice by the Battle of Britain survivor with whom he shared it—the Earl of Leicester’s younger son, David Coke, whose older brother (although he seems not to have told this to Dahl)37 was Wavell’s ADC. The next morning Dahl went up on patrol.

  If the squadron history is reliable, it was an uneventful outing. Dahl makes it more dramatic in Going Solo, saying he immediately shot down a Junker 88 on both that day and the next, where the official account lists no claim by him for almost a week.38 But it is impossible to make an accurate reconstruction of this hectic period. Some of the squadron’s records were destroyed as a security precaution before the evacuation of Greece, and the surviving pilots’ memories—including, as Dahl says in Going Solo,39 his own—are inevitably blurred. His account often differs from that of the official history, particularly over who was killed and when: a confusion which, compounded by Dahl’s casualness about names, sometimes produces Catch-22-like situations in which dead pilots turn up in later air battles.40

  Everything was chaos. The RAF campaign history records: “Our fighters were only able to perform their task by continually taking to the air in aircraft riddled with bullets and in a condition that would normally have been considered quite unserviceable.”41 On April 19 and 20, all the Hurricanes that were available, Dahl’s among them, were sent to meet a succession of large raids over Athens. In one dogfight, nine fighters from 80 Squadron and six from 33 Squadron claimed between them at least fift
een enemy aircraft, and possibly three times as many as that,42 one or two of them credited to Dahl, who evidently fought with courage and skill.43 When he got back, he learned that among the British pilots who had been killed was the legendary Thomas Pattle.

  What followed was a rout. The army was evacuated from the Peloponnese: a minor Dunkirk, in which many more lives would have been lost but for the Germans’ mistake in not closing down the narrow road and railway through the Isthmus of Corinth, which everyone had to pass. Such aircraft as remained were sent to Argos, in the eastern Peloponnese, to do what they could to cover the retreat, and were joined there by five new Hurricanes from Crete. No sooner had these landed than thirty or forty Messerschmitts appeared and, according to the senior officer, “after silencing the Bofors guns … subjected the north and south landing grounds and the olive tree aircraft park to the most thorough low flying attack I have ever seen.” The onslaught lasted three-quarters of an hour. At the end of it, fourteen Hurricanes had been destroyed. It was the last scene in a tragedy which cost the British 209 aircraft, and all that they might have contributed to the long struggle in North Africa.

  Dahl fictionalized this episode in one of his first stories, “Katina,” published early in 194444—a propagandist tragedy in which the orphaned little Greek girl of the title, who has been adopted by an RAF squadron, runs amid blazing Hurricanes, shaking her fists at the German aircraft, one of which implacably guns her down. In Going Solo, he is more factual, but cannot resist claiming to have predicted the raid in every detail, including its timing, only to have had his warnings dismissed by a complacent adjutant.45 Whatever the prediction, the outcome was that there were now more pilots in Argos than airplanes. Some went with the army to Crete, where they faced an even more desperate battle. Others, Dahl among them, were flown back to Egypt in a Lockheed on April 24.