Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  It was only a couple of weeks since Dahl had left Alexandria, and he was able to introduce David Coke and his other exhausted friends to an English couple, Major and Mrs. Peel, with whom he had convalesced and who now gave them the run of their bathrooms and larder.46 From Alexandria, he and another pilot officer were ordered to Haifa, on the northwestern coast of Palestine, where they were to take temporary command of a detachment preparing for the arrival of half the partially re-equipped 80 Squadron. Having a few days to spare, Dahl decided to explore. While in Iraq in 1940, he had traveled with three friends to the deserted ancient city of Babylon—an experience he never forgot.47 This time, having made his way to the British air base at Abu Suweir, in eastern Egypt, he drove on alone in a Morris Oxford across the Sinai Desert. During the journey he encountered a group of Jewish children and their leader, refugees from Germany. In Going Solo, Dahl says that they were the first people from whom he had heard anything of the Holocaust, or of Zionism.48

  The reason for the squadron’s new posting was that a pro-Axis coup in Iraq had been supported by the Vichy French in Syria, where Wavell in consequence decided to invade. Within four days of Dahl’s arrival at Haifa, the attack was launched. 80 Squadron strafed Vichy French airfields and patrolled the coast in protection of the Royal Navy, which was giving artillery support to the advancing infantry.

  Between the lines of the squadron history one can read a mild tussle between official skepticism and the extravagant claims of the now battle-hardened but far from subdued Dahl. Most pilots’ combat reports were written in the laconic, understated, passive voice on which the RAF prided itself: an enemy aircraft was seen and engaged, shots were fired, the outcome awaited confirmation by other witnesses. Roald Dahl’s entries are egotistical, vivid, and enthusiastically speculative: “I followed for approx. 3 mins. after the two others had broken off,” he writes, of an encounter with a German reconnaissance plane on the first day of the campaign, “and left it with Port engine smoking and probably stopped. Rear gunner ceased fire … It is very unlikely that this Potez got home, unless it could have done so on one engine, which I understand is not so. The rear gunner was probably wounded.”49 The starboard engine of a Junker 88 “burst into black smoke” before the plane “pancaked on the sea.… Having attacked my aircraft, I was chased for at least 4 minutes by 2 more Ju 88’s in the most persistent manner. They were faster than me, but missed.”50

  Dahl had a right to boast, and his having been a war hero was to be important to him for the rest of his life. “Tap” Jones, despite Dahl’s ungenerosity about his performance as the squadron’s leader,51 says, “There is no doubt in my mind that ‘Lofty’… was a very good fighter pilot and very gallant.”52 Even in the cautious official accounts, he is confirmed as having shot down five enemy airplanes, although he had many fewer opportunities to do so than some of his fellow pilots. Discounting his period in hospital, and the jaunt from Alexandria to Haifa, Dahl was active in the squadron for a total of only five furious weeks before he was grounded by blackouts and headaches resulting from his earlier injuries. It was no longer considered safe for him to fly, and he was invalided home.

  If exaggeration wasn’t the RAF’s style, it was always Dahl’s, both in conversation and in his fiction. One friend sums up his attitude: “If you lost fifty dollars at poker, say you lost five hundred, it is more dramatic.”53 “Roald made a meal of everything,” says another—partly apropos of his stories about his schooldays. “The advent of a spider on the table would become a great event. If Roald thought there was somebody gullible enough, he would say, ‘That is a steptocorus polycorus, which is the only highly poisonous spider in the U.K. Don’t worry, because it will not ever bite unless it starts to jump …’ Total invention.”54 The short stories he wrote about the war are a striking exception. The only truly introspective work he ever did (not excluding his autobiographies), they divert his natural extravagance into a glum kind of spirituality. They are sentimental, even biblical (“what was below me was neither mountains nor rivers nor earth nor sea and I was not afraid”), and often repetitious. Despite but also partly because of all this, they give as good a sense as anything written at the time of what it was like to be a young English fighter pilot.

  “Death of an Old Old Man” begins as the vivid first-person account of a pilot who can scarcely control his terror in the mess just before a sortie. After takeoff, the narrative switches to the third person for a coolly controlled drama in which the Englishman fights a German thousands of feet above Holland, only to be drowned by him in a pond after their planes have collided and both have bailed out. Returning to the pilot’s own thoughts as he dies, the story invests this ignominious ending with romantic desirability: “I think I’ll stay here for a bit. I think I’ll go along the hedges and find some primroses, and if I am lucky I may find some white violets. Then I will go to sleep. I will go to sleep in the sun.”55

  “They Shall Not Grow Old” (the title is another echo from the Remembrance Day services of his schooldays) is set in Haifa, and the first part of the story is closely based on his own experiences in June 1942: the sorties described are ones which he flew. The men are waiting for a pilot called Fin to return from a patrol over Beirut harbor. The Scandinavian-sounding hero is a Hollywood version of Dahl himself: “tall and full of laughter … with black hair and a long straight nose which he used to stroke up and down with the tip of his finger.” He doesn’t return—or at least, not for forty-eight hours. Mysteriously, he is convinced that his mission has taken only an hour. His friends offer him various ready-made excuses for his absence, but he insists that he is right.

  The explanation, when it comes, is a mixture of science fiction and school-chapel mysticism. Fin is subsequently jolted by the death of another pilot into remembering what had happened. He had suicidally plunged through cloud into what should have been the ground and seen a vision of a kind of Celestial Flypast, in which friends and enemies flew in line together to what might have been Bunyan’s notion of the Eternal Airfield: a great green plain bathed in a transcendent blue light. Here, however, Fin’s own aircraft would not permit itself to be landed. He returns, forty-eight hours delayed, to tell the story, before going out to repeat the experience, this time without coming back.

  One of Dahl’s concerns in the story is with different kinds of credibility. “There is never any doubting of anything that anyone says when he is talking about his flying,” the narrator says; “there can only be a doubting of one’s self.” “They Shall Not Grow Old” is an attempt to balance the prosaic, fact-bound world of the aerodrome, with its official reports and regulations and timetables, against the otherworldly, hallucinatory aspects both of flying (with its multiple horizons and the blackouts to which any pilot, but particularly the injured Dahl, was susceptible) and of living so close to death.

  It was inevitable that Dahl’s later stories for children would also often involve flight. It is by air that James escapes on the expanding peach from his tyrannical aunts (and sees mysterious beings in the clouds). The BFG seems to Sophie to fly, as he carries her to London on their life-saving mission against the giants—a mission in which the RAF plays a part. And in Dahl’s last story, Billy flies through flames on a swan’s back in order to free the dragon-oppressed Minpins, and returns home safely to his mother.

  Dahl himself went home in the summer of 1941. Sofie had belatedly left Kent, driven out by the German bombing, and had moved to the village of Grendon Underwood, between Aylesbury and Bicester, about fifty miles northwest of London. Dahl knew nothing of his family’s movements and found it difficult to trace them when he docked in Liverpool. He had made a hazardous voyage in convoy from Suez, around the Cape and up the west coast of Africa. This was his first sight of England in almost three years. He had sent a telegram from Alexandria saying that he was on his way, in excellent health, and that the war in Syria had been “fun.” The message did not arrive, so no one was expecting him. At last, he made contact by telephone and was
on his way.

  There is an intense intimacy in the description of his homecoming at the end of Going Solo, which comes partly from its stylistic simplicity and awkwardness, and partly from Dahl’s concentration on Sofie’s feelings about him, as well as his about her:

  I caught sight of my mother when the bus was still a hundred yards away. She was standing patiently outside the gate of the cottage waiting for the bus to come along, and for all I know she had been standing there when the earlier bus had gone by an hour or two before. But what is one hour or even three hours when you have been waiting for three years?

  I signalled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.

  As in his story “Only This,” the son imagines the mother imagining him, and in the process they merge. Yet what Dahl still needed was a father, or fathers. That autumn, he tracked one down.

  4

  Disney

  The only delicate colors in paintings by Matthew Smith are used for flowers. They are signs that this pupil of Matisse was English. His nudes, on the other hand, sprawl in a palette of crimson, green, and bright blue, their big yellow-cream breasts and thighs luminous against a thundery background. Francis Bacon thought him “one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting,” in the sense that “the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in.”1 Whether or not you find him as original as this makes him sound, there is no question that, like Bacon’s own, Smith’s work caused a shock.

  Some of these erratic, unforgettable canvases looked out from gallery windows into the austerity of wartime London. They ignored the blitz and rationing: Smith had painted most of them in France between the end of the First World War, in which he was wounded at Ypres, and the new German invasion in 1940.

  It was now the autumn of 1941, and Dahl had been back in England since July. There was money in his bank account, but he found himself at loose ends. In North Africa, there had been few opportunities to spend his salary, and since coming home, he had been promoted from pilot officer to flying officer. He had saved four hundred pounds (in today’s terms, about £10,000).2 Wandering around the West End of London that autumn, he was struck by Matthew Smith’s vivid paintings and wanted to see more. But Smith had moved studios, and the gallery owners had lost touch with him.

  Dahl’s years abroad had fostered an appetite for challenges and a questing, obsessive kind of thoroughness in meeting them. He pursued Matthew Smith through a thicket of forwarding addresses—the Fulham Road, Edith Grove, Dawes Road, Redcliffe Gardens—finally reaching a hotel near Hyde Park. From a first-floor room he heard one of the Brandenburg Concertos on a gramophone. A pale, scared old man in his socks answered the door and gazed through thick spectacles at an RAF officer in uniform.

  Matthew Smith was hiding because both of his sons had recently been killed: Dermot that same year, soon after winning a DSO; Mark the year before. They had been in the RAF. Dermot, the younger, was the same age as Dahl. The father, now in his early sixties, was almost crushed by their deaths—Cyril Connolly talks of frequent meals with him and their friend Augustus John, at which Smith sat speechless with grief.3 The artist himself was lucky to be alive: recently Connolly had recommended a hotel to him, but when he went there, it had no vacancies; that night it was almost obliterated by a bomb. Dahl’s arrival was one of the pieces of good fortune that came to Smith at this unhappy time. Another was meeting the beautiful waifish Mary Keene, a slightly crippled, uneducated but intelligent blonde from the East End of London who was cutting a swathe through wartime Fitzrovia. She was to become his most lasting mistress and, later, a close friend of Dahl’s, too.

  Since his sons’ deaths, Smith had more or less stopped painting, but these new friends stirred him up and he began work on their portraits. Dahl sat for him in uniform, a heavy orange drape behind his tanned head, the red chairback giving its color to his full mouth. He looks away to his left, but without focusing, like someone sad or apprehensive, or scheming.

  If Dahl’s pursuit of Matthew Smith showed his determination, the relationship also, over the years, revealed another trait, one which he had inherited from his father. He was intensely acquisitive. Helped by what he learned from the painter, he was to build up over the years a valuable collection of modern art. He bought the less expensive work of already-established modern masters—Matisse drawings, Picasso lithographs, Rouault watercolors—and became one of the earliest collectors of the Russian Constructivists, especially Popova, as well as of British artists such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, and Matthew Smith himself. Dahl had a good eye: it was as a lover of pictures, not an incipient collector-dealer, that he tracked Smith down. But he was also greedy and regarded expertise itself as a form of possession. Having missed a university education, he was untouched by the skepticism and intellectual modesty which it might have brought: suspicion of fact learning, consciousness of unreachable horizons. Art, to him, like many other interests, quickly became a matter not only of beauty, not only even of collectibility, but of information: names, places, dates, prices. These were hard assets, chips to stack against other people’s. It was the same, at other stages in his life, with birds’ eggs, music, women, wine, orchids, edible fungi. They were all things you could enjoy for themselves, but even more for the part that your knowledge about them might play in a socially competitive game.

  Matthew Smith was the first established artist in any medium whom Dahl came to know well. The contact widened his horizons, but was also to be of practical use to him in his next posting. According to his own account, during the winter of 1941–42 a friend took him to dinner at Pratt’s, one of the grander London men’s clubs, off St. James’s Street.4 At the common table he found himself sitting next to either the Under Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, or, in another version, the Secretary of State himself, Sir Archibald Sinclair.5 Whoever it was, he was taken with this cultivated, forceful young injured pilot, who seemed able to talk about anything—even modern art—and also played a perfectly good hand of bridge. The United States had just come into the war, but the British still needed to press their own cause there. In this, Dahl might have something to offer.

  He was ordered to Glasgow, to embark on a Polish ship in a convoy bound for Canada. The crossing lasted two weeks, during which he took his turn on the watch for U-boats and made friends with another RAF pilot, Douglas Bisgood, with whom he swapped versions of the air force myth of the gremlins, a race of supernatural elves blamed for everything that went mechanically wrong on flying missions.6 Bisgood was heading for the east coast of Canada as an instructor in an officer training unit. Dahl went south to Washington, to join the British Embassy as assistant air attaché.

  He found himself in some ways back at school, just as he had at Shell. In the view of one of his more important Washington colleagues, Isaiah (now Sir Isaiah) Berlin, “Everywhere the British go, they impose the pattern of the public school.” The country’s representatives in wartime Washington were no exception. Berlin recalls:

  At the top was Halifax, who was a kind of Provost, and had some disdain for the officials of the Embassy and the Missions. Very grand, very viceregal. The Headmaster was Sir Ronald Campbell, who was a very nice man. Then the Head of Chancery, Michael Wright, who was an Old Boy: totally devoted to the school, thought about nothing but the school, came back to it with enthusiasm as a housemaster, a rigid disciplinarian with little humour—charmless, with something fanatical about him.… Then there were the other Missions. They were looked on rather as a grammar school was looked on by public-schoolboys, at least in those days.7

  The senior boys were sober, industrious, high-flying career diplomats like William Hayter, a future ambassador to Moscow, and Paul Gore-Booth, who would become High Commissioner to India. Young Dahl saw little of them, because his desk was not in the Chancery but at t
he Air Mission, in an annex. The missions shared a canteen with the main Embassy, and sometimes he and Isaiah Berlin lunched together there. But more of the assistant air attaché’s time was spent in the company of the future advertising mogul David Ogilvy, with whom Dahl shared a house in Georgetown, and his friend Ivar Bryce, a handsome Etonian playboy who was in turn friendly with the journalist and future thriller writer Ian Fleming.

  All three were members of the British intelligence services, to which Dahl himself soon became loosely attached. As allies, the British and the Americans weren’t officially supposed to spy on one another, but of course they did. Dahl was encouraged to get close to as many well-placed people as he could, and to listen. The gossip columnist Drew Pearson was one target. Another was the influential reporter Ralph Ingersoll, who had covered the Battle of Britain in 1940, interviewed Stalin in 1941, and was the author of Report on England and America Is Worth Fighting For. A third was Vice President Wallace’s newspaper-owning friend, Charles Marsh.

  To Marsh, as to many people in the social world to which he gave Dahl an entree, the young pilot was unusually attractive. He had all the spiritedness of the RAF, heightened by his early release from the fighting. He was inquisitive and sure of himself, in a way that made him seem exceptionally intelligent. And—unlike most of his compatriates, but acceptably enough in Washington, and particularly to Marsh—he was a stupendous braggart.

  From the point of view of the British war effort, all these characteristics could be made use of, particularly the last. Every diplomat is involved in creating a national fiction, and during the early months of America’s direct involvement in the war, the Allies’ many reverses—in North Africa, in Singapore, and at sea—were in need of a coat of gloss. Even among American supporters of Britain (by no means an overwhelming majority), plenty of people thought that the Brits were asking for too much, and making a mess of what they were given. Since there was little in the current news that could be used to British advantage, the Embassy decided that propaganda efforts should concentrate on past glories, and especially those of the Royal Air Force.