Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 11

ON A CHILLY JANUARY morning in 1930, Roald Dahl set off for his first day at Repton School. He had bidden farewell to his pet mice, Montague and Marmaduke, at home, and to his mother and sisters at Bexley Station, where he caught the train for London. At Charing Cross, he loaded his luggage aboard a taxi and crossed the city, arriving at the neoclassical grandeur of old Euston Station, through its magnificent Doric arch — the largest ever built — and into the spectacular Great Hall, with its galleries, murals, gilded ceilings and the awe-inspiring double staircase, which swept down from the gallery level to the bustling station floor below. Gaggles of Reptonians, all immediately recognizable by their distinctive uniform of pinstripe trousers and long black tailcoats, chattered and joked as they waited to board the Derby train. A porter loaded Roald’s trunks, each stamped with his name, onto the train, and an hour later it steamed out of the station on the 130-mile journey north.

On board, Roald struck up a conversation with one of his fellow pupils, Ben Reuss. He was a year older than Roald and had already been at the school for a term. He was a good ally for a new boy. Despite natural first-day nerves, Reuss was struck immediately by Dahl’s “unconventional” manner¹ and his madcap sense of humour. By midafternoon, as the train pulled into Derby Station, the light was already fading. Roald then boarded one of a series of taxis that drove the boys and their luggage out of the grimy city and into a damp and dismal surrounding countryside. After about ten miles his cab drifted past St Wystan’s Church, whose honey-coloured stone seemed dark grey in the dim light and whose tall spire, “as slender as a sharpened pencil”,² to use a simile of one of his contemporaries, looked down upon the twelfth-century arch, where the main school buildings of Repton lay. A minute or so later, it came to a halt outside the doors of Priory House, the building that was to be Roald’s home during term time for the next four years. He was thirteen years old.

Repton is a dour place. Squatting in the foothills of the Peak District, and sandwiched into a strip of countryside between the industrial towns of Derby and Burton-on-Trent, its stone and Victorian redbrick buildings cluster together in a tight huddle alongside Repton Brook, as if sheltering from the fierce winds that whistle down off Darley Moor to the north. Now, as in the 1930s, the town is dominated by the presence of the school, whose buildings lie scattered around its centre, but Repton itself has an ancient history, which goes back well over 1,500 years. It was once an early centre for English Christianity. An abbey was founded there and two Anglo-Saxon kings, Ethelbald and Wiglaf, were buried in the crypt, before the Vikings sailed down the Trent and destroyed the abbey in 873. In the twelfth century a magnificent priory was founded on the Saxon ruins, but this too was destroyed during the Reformation, in a spasm of Puritan zeal. Secretly, however, the old religion lingered on, and in 1553 Popish prayers were answered when the Catholic Mary Tudor acceded to the throne.

Three years later, a rich and devout local Catholic, Sir John Port, died. In his will, he set aside money to found a school in Repton, stipulating that its headmaster should be a priest. To this end, his executors purchased what remained of the old Priory and set about creating the college. Port’s charity had an element of self-interest. He wanted a chantry founded at the school so that schoolboys could sing masses daily to speed his soul to heaven — a practice that had been outlawed the previous decade, but which under Mary was now legal again. His wishes were thwarted. In 1558, Mary died and her half sister, Elizabeth, a Protestant, ascended the throne. Thus Repton was established as an Anglican school. In the subsequent four and a half centuries, it experienced many ups and downs. By the late eighteenth century, one corrupt headmaster and his staff were employed to teach just a single pupil. Fifty years later, Repton was remodelled to conform to the values of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School and one of the founding fathers of the Victorian ethos of hard work, discipline and duty. Arnold placed the cultivation of religious and moral principles above academic instruction, defining his object at Rugby as being “to form Christian men — for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make”.³ His implication, that boys were naturally wild and undisciplined and that schooling was about creating a training ground where rigorous moral values might be instilled within them, resonated at one level with Roald Dahl. He too believed that children were born savage, but he would celebrate the innocent anarchic attitudes of each “uncivilised little grub”.⁴ For Arnold, however, as for many of the staff at Repton in 1930, the opposite was true. They viewed that youthful freedom of spirit as something subversive that needed to be crushed.*

Sofie Magdalene had promised her dying husband that their children would all be educated in England, but precisely why she chose Repton for Roald is not immediately clear. The son of a family friend in Radyr was already there, and Captain Lancaster, the twitching orange-haired terror from St Peter’s, was also an alumnus, or “Old Reptonian”. One might think that this connection would have deterred young Roald. But it does not seem to have done, although the elaborate uniform put him off a bit. The stiff butterfly collar, attached to a starched shirt with studs, pinstripe trousers, twelve-button waistcoat, tailcoat and straw boater struck him as entirely ludicrous. He later described the tailcoat as “the most ridiculous garment I had ever seen”; he thought the costume made him look “like an undertaker’s apprentice in a funeral parlour”.⁵ However, it was thus attired, with accompanying umbrella to keep the Peak District rain off the vulnerable boater, that Roald arrived for his first night at The Priory — one of nine boarding houses that were scattered around the town. Each house was a community of around fifty boys, about twelve from each year. Apart from some team sports and lessons, which were taught in forms drawn from the entire school, the house was the focus of a boy’s discipline, loyalties and social life. It was where he ate, slept, studied, and where he made friends. Dahl himself described that existence as “a curious system … you never walked to class with a boy from another House. You rarely spoke to boys from other houses and you seldom knew their names.”⁶

The Priory is a steeply gabled redbrick building, with turrets and Gothic chimneys, a few hundred yards down the High Street from the Arch. Constructed by Geoffrey Fisher, the headmaster between 1914 and 1932, it contained a series of small dormitories known as “bedders”, a collection of studies where boys worked in groups of five to seven, a panelled dining room, a tarmac yard at the front with fives courts, and a garden at the back called the Deer Park, in which there was a small plunge pool that was filled in the summer and in which the boys bathed naked. It also contained living quarters for the housemaster, J. S. Jenkyns, and his family.

Jenkyns was a classic interwar schoolmaster. Bald, with toothbrush moustache, tweed jacket, and polished leather brogues, he had already been at the school for twenty-four years when Roald arrived, and he would remain on the staff there for another sixteen. Educated at Winchester and Balliol, he had fought in the trenches during the First World War and his experiences there had made him gloomy, nervous and a trifle forbidding. In photographs he looks world-weary. “Twitchy”, was how Dahl was often to describe him in his letters home. Jenkyns’s youngest daughter Nancy admitted that sometimes even his children were “a bit frightened” of their father. “He could snap your head off,” she recalled and could on occasions be “scratchy”.⁷ Yet Tim Fisher, Geoffrey Fisher’s youngest son, believed that Jenkyns — or “Binks”, as the boys called him — was adored by many of his pupils.⁸ He certainly took a liking to his young six-foot Norwegian charge, and sometimes played fives with him. Dahl liked the sport, describing it as a “subtle and crafty” game played with a small hard leather ball that is struck at great speed by gloved hands and sent shooting around a court with “all manner of ledges and buttresses”. On the fives court, his nervous housemaster could relax, “rushing about”, as Roald described it, “shrieking what a little fool he is, and calling himself all sorts of names when he misses the ball”.⁹

Perhaps the most curious aspect to the way pastoral care worked in The Priory was that Binks and his family were usually distant from the boys. His study was part of the “house”, but his living quarters were elsewhere — in a separate wing at the top of the main staircase, where he resided with his “rather cold” wife¹⁰ and their three boisterous daughters, Peggie, Rachel and Nancy. Rachel remembered Roald Dahl as a good-looking lad, twice her age and height. However, since she only saw the boys from afar, she could recall little else about him, except that he was “Scandinavian by birth and had had an unhappy early life”.¹¹ Nancy, the youngest, a mischievous six-year-old with a shock of unruly dark hair, remembered a little more. She was fascinated by the older boys, peering over the banisters of the staircase to watch them go into the dining hall, or spying out who was being sent to her father’s study to deliver their “blue” — a form of punishment in which a boy had to write out the same line of text up to 240 times in blue ink.

Nancy divided the house into “goodies” and “baddies” — Dahl was one of the goodies — but made clear that the opportunities for her to encounter any of them were rare. She did recall with relish one occasion, when Dahl and another goodie, Peter Ashton, were brought over to her side of the house for a few days and “put together in the spare room, which was up near the nursery”. Then she got to spend some time with them.¹² Roald, used to the company of his sisters, must have longed to entertain the Jenkyns girls, or “the Binklets”,¹³ as he called them, more often. But opportunities to do so were rare. Ten years earlier, at a different boys’ boarding school, the novelist Graham Greene had found himself in a similar situation. Greene’s predicament was even more extreme because he was both a pupil and the headmaster’s son, perhaps the most invidious situation a child could imagine. He was haunted by the green baize door which for him seemed to symbolize the division between these two worlds. Beyond the warmth and civilization of one lay “a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties; a country in which [he] was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature”.¹⁴ Emerging from Binks’s family back into the harsh environment of The Priory, Roald must have had similar feelings. And in this brutal world — which offered no privacy and where even the outside lavatories had no doors — it was not the adults who wielded day-to-day power but the boys themselves.

Discipline was maintained by the senior boys, and in particular by four or five prefects, or “boazers”, as they were known at Repton. They wielded great power. Each house was, as Dahl put it, “actually ruled by a boy of seventeen or eighteen who was the Head of House. He himself had three or four House Prefects. The House Prefects were the Gods of the House, but the Head of House was the Almighty.”¹⁵ Power was codified into a complex system of hierarchies, of “rules and rituals”, which every new boy had to learn. Each study, for example, had at least five members. Its head was a study-holder, usually in his last year at the school. Sometimes the study-holder was also a boazer, which made him particularly “dangerous” for junior boys, because boazers had “the power of life and death” over them.¹⁶ Below him there were two or three senior boys called “seconds” and two junior boys called “fags”. The fags were treated as the study-holder’s servants, “personal slaves”, as Dahl would later call them,¹⁷and the system was justified by the rationale that it gave a new boy a sense of place and order. “He was straightaway in a study with five people,” explained Tim Fisher. “He was the bim fag, the junior fag. Then there was the tip fag, the senior fag, in his second year, who would have shown his junior the ropes and helped him to discover how the school worked.”¹⁸

The fag’s tasks included cleaning the study, supplying it with coal for the fire, keeping the fire lit, and polishing the study-holder’s shoes, buttons, badges and buckles. The boys received regular parcels of food from home to supplement what the school provided, and once or twice a week the fags cooked meals for the other members of their study in the communal bathroom, on portable paraffin primus stoves that they brought with them from home. With ten or more fags cooking at the same time, the bathroom would quickly fill with thick black smoke. To the young Dahl, the sight was exciting, reminiscent of “a witch’s cauldron”.¹⁹ The power structure, however, lent itself easily to abuse. Boazers had only to yell “Fa-a-ag” at the top of their voice and every fag within earshot would have to drop what he was doing and run toward the needy prefect. The last to get there had to perform whatever task the senior boy required of him. There was almost no limit to what a boazer could request. One service, commonly demanded of the younger boys in winter, was to heat the wooden seats of the outside lavatories, by sitting on them, bare-bottomed, for long enough to ensure that the boazer himself did not have to place his own flesh onto an ice-cold seat. In Boy, Dahl memorably describes his first experience of doing this. “I got off the lavatory seat and pulled up my trousers. Wilberforce [the boazer] lowered his own trousers and sat down. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good indeed.’ He was like a wine-taster sampling an old claret. ‘I shall put you on my list,’ he added. I stood there doing up my fly-buttons and not knowing what on earth he meant. ‘Some fags have cold bottoms,’ he said, ‘and some have hot ones. I only use hot-bottomed fags to heat my bog seat. I won’t forget you.’ “²⁰ For the first two weeks of his time at Repton, a new boy was exempt from the rigors of fagging, but after that he bore its full force. Reading the early drafts of Boy, one senses a long-pent-up bitterness about Dahl’s years there bubbling to the surface. It was a resentment that he clearly struggled to control, and in the final version, many of his most traumatic memories were expunged or watered down. Even so, the book caused considerable controversy amongst Old Reptonians when it was published in 1984. But the first draft was far rawer and more contentious. It painted a portrait of a profoundly melancholy boy, for whom the pleasures of youth had been stifled by an unfair system that was devoid of affection and feeling, and whose chief memories of his time there seem to have been those of loneliness and fear. “Four years is a long time to be in prison,” Dahl writes. “It becomes twice as long when it is taken out of your life just when you are at your most bubbly best and the fields are all covered with daffodils and primroses…. It seemed as if we were groping through an almost limitless black tunnel at the end of which there glimmered a small bright light, and if we ever reached it we would be eighteen years old.”²¹ He continues with a description of “plodding endless terms”, “grey classrooms” and “incredibly dull teachers … who never stopped to talk to you”.²² The images of isolation and misery are relentless. “At Repton the teachers gained no respect from us nor did they try to. As for the senior boys, they were so busy acting the part of being senior and so conscious of the power they wielded that they never bothered to be friendly. They didn’t have to be. They ruled us by fear.”²³ Independence of spirit and wit in the younger boys was stamped on and regarded as “side”. And being “sidey” to a boazer was unthinkable. “You hardly dared speak to him, let alone be sidey.”²⁴ Roald then recounts an incident that could have come straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Once, during my second year when I was fifteen, I was “sidey” to a boy called W. W. Wilson, who was sixteen. W. W. Wilson wasn’t even a study-holder. He was just a second, but he didn’t like what I had said, and at once he rounded up half-a-dozen seconds his own age and they hunted me down. I ran into the yard where they cornered me and grabbed hold of my arms and legs and carried me bodily back into the “house”. In the changing room they held me down while one of them filled a bath brimful of icy-cold water, and into this they dropped me, clothes and all, and held me in there for several agonising minutes. “Push his head under water!” cried W. W. Wilson. “That’ll teach him to keep his mouth shut!” They pushed my head under many times, and I choked and spluttered and half-drowned, and when at last they released me and I crawled out of the bath, I didn’t have any dry clothes to change into. ²⁵

Thankfully, Dahl’s friend Peter Ashton gives this episode a redemptive twist, providing a spare suit for the soaking Roald, who is deeply grateful for this rare “act of mercy” in a world that was filled almost entirely with loneliness and terrors.

Repton also boasted an entrenched system of corporal punishment for offences as minor as forgetting to hang up your football kit in the changing room. In the 1930s, the cane or the strap were, as Tim Fisher described it, “an automatic and assumed part of the growing up process …”²⁶ They were part of a culture of toughening children up that would survive in England well into the 1950s and 1960s. As an adult, Dahl too did not see any particular harm in boys having their bottoms “tickled” from time to time, if only the human dimension of the beater could be removed. He once even playfully speculated to me that a beating machine, “with knobs on it, like boiled eggs, for hard, medium or soft”, might be a solution.²⁷ But he objected profoundly to the culture of violence he felt existed at Repton and most of all to the fact that the great majority of beatings there were performed by other boys. “Our lives at school were quite literally ruled by fear of the cane,” he wrote. “We walked, with every step we took, in the knowledge that if we put a foot wrong, the result would be a beating.”²⁸

The white-gloved boazer Carleton, searching his study for the speck of dust that would justify a thrashing was typical. In Dahl’s eyes, he was simply a sadistic thug, with a licence to inflict pain, in search of an easy victim. Carleton (actually a boy called Hugh Middleton) was perhaps the worst of Nancy Jenkyns’s “baddies” and the most dreaded of Dahl’s boazers. He was a “supercilious and obnoxious seventeen-year-old”, with a cane that became an object of fetishistic interest to the other boys. His “creamy-white monster about four feet long with bamboo-like ridges all along its length and a round bobble the size of a golf-ball where the handle would have been” struck terror into a fag’s heart. “Other Boazers used their OTC (Army) swagger-sticks when they beat the Fags, but not Middleton.”²⁹

The beatings were usually performed in the boazer’s study shortly before going to bed. The victim had a choice between whether to have fewer strokes with his dressing gown off or more with it on. The latter was generally believed to be the less painful alternative. Afterwards the boy had to thank the boazer for his thrashing and return to his dormitory, where he would undergo a ritual inspection of his wounds. In Boy, Dahl describes such an occasion. The ace cricketer, Jack Mendl, had just beaten him, delivering four strokes, “so fast it was all over in four seconds”.³⁰ Now back in the “bedder”, his fellows insist Roald take down his trousers to show them his damaged buttocks. Dahl does not dwell on the “excruciating burning pain” ³¹ he is suffering. Instead, he recalls the boys’ detailed analysis of Mendl’s handiwork. “Half a dozen experts would crowd around you and express their opinions in highly professional language. ‘What a super job.’ ‘He’s got every single one in the same place!’ ‘Boy that Williamson’s [Mendl] got a terrific eye!’ ‘Of course he’s got a terrific eye! Why d’you think he’s a Cricket Teamer?’ “³²

The scene is comic. At the end, the self-satisfied Mendl himself even appears slyly in the dormitory, “to catch a glimpse of my bare bottom and his own handiwork”. However, the first draft of Boy also contains a piece of psychological analysis, unusual in Dahl’s writing, that reveals much about his own state of mind: “It is clear to me now, although it wasn’t at the time, that these boys had developed this curiously detached attitude towards these vile tortures in order to preserve their sanity. It was an essential defensive mechanism. Had they crowded round and commiserated with me and tried to comfort me, I think we would all have broken down.”³³ Among its other influences Repton was conditioning Dahl to suppress many of his own fundamental emotional responses and to find consolation in disconnection and standing apart.

Mendl’s beatings, though fierce, were clinical and dispassionate. With Middleton, it was different. Middleton was not simply the real Carleton, he was also the model for the bully, Bruce Foxley, in Dahl’s adult short story “Galloping Foxley”, which he wrote in 1953. This was the first time Dahl had revisited his schooldays in fiction, and his descriptions of the fagging and corporal punishment there are strikingly similar to those he later penned in Boy. Middleton is evoked more deftly perhaps in the earlier story, with his pointed Lobb shoes, his silk shirts, his “arrogant-laughing glare”, his “cold, rather close eyes”, and his hair, “coarse and slightly wavy, with just a trace of oil over it, like a well-tossed salad”. But the events and settings are the same. Foxley’s specialty is to bound down the corridor at full tilt before inflicting each blow. The actual gallop down the changing rooms, “cane held high in the air”, may be an exaggeration, but what are we to make of the narrator’s admission that his schooldays at Repton made him “so miserable” that he had contemplated suicide?³⁴Hardened by his experiences at St Peter’s, Dahl was already a survivor. He does not seem a likely candidate for suicide. However, it is also possible that the loneliness and the bullying might have led him to consider this option, if only briefly.

On top of it all, he was frequently unwell. As his sister Alfhild put it, Roald “caught everything” at Repton.³⁵ Apart from growing pains, for which he took calcium supplements to strengthen his bones, and a heart condition that required him to visit specialists,† he was also prone to respiratory problems. His letters home are filled with requests for a huge variety of medications for everything from corns on his toes to headaches and constipation. With Heath and Heather lozenges, Mistol, Nostroline, Lynol, Kalzana, Ostelin and Radiostoleum, the letters can sometimes read like a 1930s pharmacology handbook. These illnesses, which are clearly catalogued in his letters, and which do not feature at all in Boy, make a poignant appearance in Galloping Foxley. There the narrator bemoans the many colds he caught on his long walks around Orange Ponds, in the rain, gathering wild irises for his tormentor Middleton.

Dahl’s school reports also suggest that he was miserable. “Rather dazed”, “curiously dense and slow”, exhibiting “fits of childishness” and “fits of the sulks” are just some of the many negative descriptions that characterize the way he was perceived there. His academic record was poor. “A persistent muddler, writing and saying the opposite of what he means” was his English teacher’s verdict halfway through his first term. Eighteen months later, little had changed. His mathematics master is dismissive: “He has very little ability and is inclined to be childish.” The following year is no better. Dahl is accused of “idleness”, “apathy”, and “stupidity”; he is “lethargic”, “languid”, and “too pleased with himself”. His housemaster also notices “a vein of obstinacy in him”,³⁶ which he compliments, but his pupil’s happiness or unhappiness never appears to be an issue. Partly this was because these issues were just not considered important and also partly because Roald hid his feelings well from those around him. Constructing a protective facade of indifference, he both preserved his sanity and avoided appearing like a potential victim. The same is true of his letters home, which give absolutely no indication of the melancholy he evoked in his first draft of Boy, and which are packed instead with amusing anecdotes and descriptions. It is as if the letter writing itself had become a means of escape from the greyness of school life. As if, out of the gloom, he had constructed a sunnier alternative reality, which not only reassured his family back in Bexley but entertained the writer at the same time.‡

By the age of fifteen, Roald was a sophisticated humorist and entertainer as well as a skilled and dextrous narrator. The exuberance of St Peter’s has given way to a more jaundiced and critical view of the world, where he enjoys finding fault and making negative judgements. For example, though he proudly describes The Priory as “easily the nicest house”,³⁷ the others are dismissed as “nasty little dirty looking hovels”. His sharp eye takes pleasure in the discomfiture of the masters, who are “awfully nervous and dithering” ³⁸ when school inspectors arrive to vet the lessons, and when Matron Malpas leaves, her replacement is described as having “hair like a fuzzie-wuzzie, and two warts on her face … I think I shall offer her my corn paint”.³⁹ Yet he can be sensitive and empathetic, too. When an opponent’s cap falls off in a hockey match to reveal “an absolutely bald head, his wig remaining in his cap”, Dahl, like his teammates, feels only sympathy toward the “wretched fellow”.⁴⁰ At other times he recounts escapades, in language reminiscent of the adventure books he enjoyed reading, and often with unexpected comic detail. Tobogganing, rioting on a train,⁴¹ powder fights in his “bedder”,⁴² firing pencils out of his rifle,⁴³ and climbing illicitly up the tower of Repton Church to make the bells ring⁴⁴ all get this treatment.

But, as he comes to the end of his second year at Repton, he is already longing to live his life on a bigger canvas, and he seizes eagerly on anything dramatic. The inevitable fire that destroyed his study was the kind of thing that really gave him a chance to flex his writing muscles:

The flames were enormous and the heat was colossal. The whole place stank of burning … and it got in your throat. I coughed all night. However we got to our bedrooms, which the firemen assured us were safe, but to us they looked as though they were being held up by two thin planks. We picked our way gingerly up the stairs (which were black and charcoaly) of course all the electric light had fused long ago. We got into our beds which were brown and nasty and I don’t know how but I managed to get some sleep. The place looked grimmer than ever by daylight. All the passage was black and in our study absolutely nothing was left. ⁴⁵

In his second year at Repton, Dahl also formed an important friendship, with Michael Arnold, a boy a year and a half older than he was, and two years above him academically. Arnold was something of a celebrity at Repton. He was quick-witted, subversive, and highly intelligent. In his first term, Dahl described him to his mother as a “very clever boy”, who was “going to make the house a three-valve wireless”.⁴⁶ By the following year, he was hailing him proudly as “the cleverest boy in England”.⁴⁷ In house photographs, Arnold stares out confidently, casually, hands in his pockets or arms folded, his hair slicked back in the manner of a young W. H. Auden. Like Dahl he despised the school and saw himself as an outsider. According to their contemporary, Ben Reuss, Arnold had no friends at all until Dahl “took him up”. Reuss found their friendship “a little bit strange”.⁴⁸ But Dahl and Arnold were very much kindred spirits. Arnold’s son Nicholas observed that both of them were “independent and individualistic”.⁴⁹ They were also both profoundly curious about the natural world, and enjoyed searching the countryside for fruit, hunting crayfish in Orange Ponds, and conducting crazy experiments. Once they put an unopened tin of pea soup in front of the fire, then, when it was superheated, they punctured the can. From behind the shelter of an unfurled Repton umbrella, they watched with delight as the hot soup sprayed all over the study. The can, Dahl observed with relish, “continued to shoot for about two minutes”.⁵⁰ Together they also obtained the key of the school darkroom and began to print photographs.⁵¹ Soon Arnold became Michael — the only boy Roald ever referred to by his first name. He even wrote specifically to his mother to make sure she did the same. Roald invited Michael to Norway with his family in 1932, the summer before Arnold was scheduled to take the scholarship examination to Magdalen College, Oxford. “I expect he’ll get it,”⁵² Roald wrote confidently to his mother in December. He did. That Christmas he came down to Bexley to stay with the Dahls. Michael had become family.

Roald’s friendship with Michael and the fact that he was no longer a fag began to make Repton more tolerable, as did the fact that he had successfully smuggled one of his pet rats into the school to keep him company. He told his shocked friend Ben Reuss that there was “no animal more intelligent or cleaner”.⁵³ His fascination with photography deepened. Increasingly he spent hours on his own in the school darkroom. “I was the only boy who practised it seriously,” ⁵⁴ he would later write, and after the summer of 1931, the subject dominates his letters home. His mother is bombarded with a stream of requests for lenses, photographic films and paper, while his latest set of prints — mostly of buildings, landscapes and the occasional botanical specimen — are usually enclosed for comments. “I’ve got a marvellous one of the baths, with reflection in it, so that you can hardly tell which way up it is,” he writes in June 1931. “Dr Barton the science master is going to give me eight shillings for it.”⁵⁵Two years later, Dahl was winning competitions. Music too — mostly in the form of the gramophone — was another escape. Roald’s taste was largely classical — the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber was a favourite — while he was also a fan of the black American bass, Paul Robeson and opera arias sung by Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini. His art master, Arthur Norris, encouraged his interest in painting, too, and particularly the works of the French Impressionists.

Bizarrely for a school that was so brutal, by the 1920s Repton had also developed quite a reputation for the arts and literature. The novelists Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward were pupils during the First World War, while Isherwood’s friend, the poet W. H. Auden, had been named by his father — an Old Reptonian — after the local church, St Wystan’s. Dahl absorbed these literary values — even if Auden and Isherwood would never be his favourite writers. He never acknowledged it, but his English teacher, the war poet and cricketer John Crommelin-Brown, was another early influence, encouraging him to use imaginative language, but expressed correctly and elegantly. A contemporary, David Atkins, recalled “Crummers” repeatedly urging his pupils never to use a long word where a short one would do, and always “to keep your sentences free of froth”.⁵⁶ Roald too would later recall that his education was “relentlessly directed” toward writing short, clear sentences that “said precisely what one meant them to say”.⁵⁷ Sometimes this was achieved with puzzles, such as this example of why one needs to punctuate properly:

If you go to the zoo you will see elephants playing the saxophone you first take a breath and swallow the mouthpiece is then taken between the lips and firmly to boot polish people are proud to be or not to be is what Hamlet said when bathing the baby care must be taken to clean up his sparking plugs should be the regular practice of every driver who wants easy running does are female wives may forgive husbands never tell took a bow and shot the apple through the inside left raced down the field and shot a gaol civilisation being what it is is still necessary for locking up the undesirable flies fly and pigs don’t brown is a dentist and can be seen any day drawing stumps is a sign that the match is over. ⁵⁸

Roald sent it on to his mother, with a sealed, correctly punctuated version, in case she could not work it out.

His surviving school essays are notable for their celebration of the imagination. Many already display an acute use of dialogue and a delight in the possibilities of the unexpected. Some anticipate his children’s writing forty or fifty years later. In an essay on Nursery Rhymes, Dahl writes of a child wandering into a vegetable garden, “enchanted to think that Jack is probably hiding up one of those large beanstalks”. Similarly, he describes another child, Little Jill, climbing out of bed at night and tiptoeing to the window “to peep through a chink in the curtains, at the cows in the field below. Oh when, oh when, would she see one jump over the Moon …” He contrasts Little Jill’s sense of fantasy scornfully with a “detestable” boy called Pip, who is “self-centred and unimaginative, with no vestige of excitement about him”.⁵⁹ And his most striking Repton essay is about dreaming itself. A series of interrupted poetic reveries that remind his teacher of Tennyson also reveal a more modern, sometimes Wildean sensibility. An iceberg, “hard and cold, like some great fragment of an icy coast, far away, Northward” gives way to a scene where a tap drips onto a delicate crane fly. Its drops “welled limpid, on the lip, and fell with a little splash upon the insect below”. Then waves like a “wounded tiger” boil over in “a turmoil of green and white”, while overhead hang “wet black clouds, heavy with rain, like airships of paper filled with oil”.⁶⁰ One by one the images tumble onto each other in a kaleidoscope of colour and sensation before they finally shatter, as Dahl is roughly awakened. Four boys have lifted up his bed and are trying to tip him out of it onto the cold floor of the dormitory.

Roald’s unexpected similes reinforce David Atkins’s memories of competing with Dahl for a school poetry prize. The subject apparently was “The Evening Sky”. Atkins’s attempt was romantic and constructed in formal metric rhyme. Dahl’s apparently was bitter and anarchic, beginning: “Evening clouds, like frog spawn, spoil the sky.” Atkins recalled playing fives with Dahl afterwards and taking him to task for his sourness, whereupon Dahl confessed to him that “Life isn’t beautiful and sentimental and clear. It’s full of foul things and horrid people, and incidentally, rhyming is old hat.”⁶¹ It was a rare moment of openness from a writer who had already learned to keep his emotional cards close to his chest. However, his main weapon for keeping “foul things and horrid people” at bay was not his sullenness, but a wicked, quirky and decidedly vulgar sense of humour — one which he retained well into old age, describing himself with great pride on a number of occasions as a “geriatric child”.⁶² "Laughter temporarily prevents gloomy thinking and melancholy brooding,” he wrote in a schoolboy essay that concluded anarchically, “What an infinitely superior animal a dog would be if he laughed aloud when his master fell off a ladder.”⁶³ Roald himself was proud of his skills as a humorist and enjoyed sharpening his talents in his letters to his mother, who shared his taste for absurdist comedy. In an exchange about whether dried figs were flattened by being trodden down, for example, her son wrote home one day with an exciting new development: “One fellow in my study, who claims to have licked an Arab’s foot, said he recognised the taste on the surface of his fig. I said, ‘Not really?’ and he answered, ‘No, on second thoughts, perhaps they are Italians’ feet!’”⁶⁴

Sport was another refuge. Dahl was a competent footballer and cricketer, but he excelled at squash and fives, rapidly becoming the best player in the school. And, despite his delight in the luxuries of life, such as good food and beautiful flowers, he was not without a fascination for Spartan values. In training for a football match, he tells his mother proudly he has to observe the following rules: “No eating between meals, except fruit which you may eat as much as you like. No fizzy drinks. A certain amount of ‘charged’ exercise every day. Skipping after prayers in the evening. No soaking in hot baths. A cold shower after baths. No playing on the yard. A good walk on Sunday afternoon.”⁶⁵

His height and size — he was six foot five by his mid-teens — also meant that for his final two years at Repton he was largely left alone. David Atkins, though from a different house, felt that even when Dahl was a junior boy there was something intimidating about him.⁶⁶ Roald certainly learned to enjoy this sense of otherness and isolation, and his long walks through the countryside gave him ample opportunity to indulge his imagination. In his very first letter home he wrote that “the best bit [of life at Repton] is we are allowed to go anywhere we like when nothing is happening”,⁶⁷ while in the first draft of Boy he described himself simply as “rather dreamy”.⁶⁸ It was while he was out walking on his own, smoking his pipe,⁶⁹ fishing, collecting bird’s eggs, berries or crab apples, that he honed his observations of the natural world. These country walks were a constant feature of his life at Repton. They kept him sane and gave him a context both to watch and to dream. It was the same for another unhappy contemporary of his at school, the artist and writer Denton Welch.

Welch had arrived in September 1929, a term before Roald. Though they were not in the same house and did not become friends, they were certainly aware of each other. Both loathed the school, but while Dahl toughed it out, Welch caused a scandal by running away. In the first draft of Boy, Dahl wrote admiringly of his contemporary: “There was another boy in the school while I was there who was later to become a writer like me. His name was Denton Welch, and a fine writer he became. He wasn’t in the same house as me, so I never got to know him, but every day I used to see Denton Welch walking to class all on his own, a tall frail bespectacled boy who looked totally miserable. He must have had more courage than me, or possibly less tolerance, because he refused to put up with it all. One day he escaped and ran away and never came back.”⁷⁰

In fact, Welch did come back but only for a few weeks, before his father secured a passage for his son to join him in Shanghai. By the time he was in his sixties, Roald had forgotten this detail. Fifty years earlier he had told his mother precisely what happened. He could not possibly admit to her that he too longed to escape — after all, he had made his promise to the doctor in Llandaff — so his tone remained, as always, positive and upbeat. “There are two Brothers in Brook House called Welch,” he wrote, “and one did not want to come back to school, so at the station he told his bro. that he was going to buy a paper. But he didn’t return. And no one knew where he was. The truth of the matter was he had bottled & taken a train to Salisbury, where he went to a cousin aged 63 & told him a pack of lies. The next day, he went to Exeter. He had to pawn his watch to get money & was found by a Policeman wandering about in the streets of Exeter at midnight with tenpence in his pocket. He slept the night in a cell. He is now back at school, & seems quite happy!!!!”⁷¹

Ironically, in Maiden Voyage, Welch’s own account of life at Repton, this “escape” turned him into something of a celebrity, and on his return, he was treated with new respect by many of the boys and the masters. “‘Good God, Welch, have you come back?’” one boy exclaims. “‘I heard that you had got hold of forty pounds and gone off to France, and someone else told me that Iliffe had taken you to Italy.’” Iliffe, Welch adds, was an older boy who “had shown a frank interest in people younger than himself”. Welch’s Repton memoir was, in many respects, a twin of Dahl’s. Both shared a horror of the open lavatories and of the school’s many tortures, which included boys being stripped naked and having chewing gum rubbed into their pubic hair, or an initiation procedure where a child was forced to hang from a wooden ceiling beam and kiss a set of lips that had been painted onto the timber, while his naked body was flicked at with wet towels. “I had been told that you could lift the skin off someone’s back in this way,” Welch wrote. “I always waited, half in horror, to see a ribbon of flesh come off.”⁷²

Welch’s ability to catch the child’s fear of uncertainty, the dread of what may happen next, is something that he shared with Dahl.§ But, unlike his contemporary, what he also explores is a sexual dimension to life at Repton. Welch’s own burgeoning homosexuality may have made the all-male environment of a public school more immediately charged in this respect than it was for Roald, but it’s interesting that the latter, who was later to take some pleasure in tales of sexual perversity, never mentioned this aspect of his schooldays. Welch’s description of a Repton beating evokes Galloping Foxley in its bounding assailant, its descriptive detail and its economy of style. But it also addresses the adolescent sexual confusion that these beatings provoked. “‘Bend over the desk please.’ The moment had come. I held my tongue between my teeth, biting on it, trying to make it hurt; then I put my hands over my eyes and burrowed inwards to myself. My eyes bored down long passages of glittering darkness as I waited. I heard Newman’s feet shuffle lightly on the boards, then the faint whine of the cane in the air. There were two bars of fire eating into the ice, then nothing…. Through the pain that was biting into me I felt a surge of admiration for Newman, yet I hated myself for liking him. The other part of me wanted to smash his face into a pulp. My mind was rocking about like a cart on a rough road.”⁷³

Dahl seldom publicly discussed his own sexual experiences, although when he did, it was usually to a humorous end. The tale of his housemaster’s explanation of the perils of masturbation, which alluded to a torch with a limited power supply and concluded with the stern advice “not to touch it — or the batteries will go flat” was honed to comic perfection over many years of public speaking. But that, it seems, was as far as Dahl’s sex education went at school. Charles Pringle, who overlapped with Roald in his first year at The Priory and who was his fag for a term, similarly remembered how uncomfortable J. S. Jenkyns was discussing sex, although he could not recall the story of the torch.⁷⁴ And, despite the permissive atmosphere at Oakwood, Sofie Magdalene did not think this was part of her maternal responsibilities either. Roald’s sister Else told her daughter Anna that her mother had done nothing to prepare her for her first period. In pain and frightened by the bleeding, Else went to Sofie Magdalene for reassurance and was given short shrift. “Go and talk to your sister,” was her response. Alfhild was apparently no more helpful. “It was Birgit [the nanny] who told everyone the facts of life,” Else recalled. “Extremely inaccurately”.⁷⁵ By the summer of 1933, Roald was longing for contact with girls outside his family. Having taken a course of dancing lessons, the sixteen-year-old was eager to monopolize Kari, a Norwegian friend of his sisters, at the school’s end-of-year dance. Louis, his twenty-seven-year-old half brother, had also been invited to the event, and Roald was desperately concerned that Kari would find him more attractive. He told his mother that Louis should stick to dancing with Ma Binks.⁷⁶

There were girls in the village, and others in Derby, who formed friendships with Repton boys. Some were even jokingly referred to as “so-and-so’s wife”.⁷⁷ However, it’s likely that Dahl’s own adolescent sexual desires were largely unfulfilled until he left the school. His stature and aloofness probably made him immune to the sexual advances of older boys such as the dandy Middleton with his silk cravats, or the bully W. W. Wilson, with his exotic hybrid chrysanthemums, nor is there much evidence that he had close friendships with younger boys. David Atkins recalled that Roald had had more than the distant contact he admitted with Denton Welch. Atkins wrote that he remembered them in English lessons together, the six-five Dahl, “voice already broken”, playing Romeo to Welch’s Juliet in a reading of the Shakespeare play, and that a “romantic friendship” formed between the two boys.⁷⁸ Atkins even re membered Dahl making a “determined grab” for Welch’s private parts on the first day of term.⁷⁹ “Welch was a natural target for cruelty,” he wrote elsewhere, “and Dahl was sometimes protective, but also enjoyed hurting him. Welch, surely a masochist, would pretend to run away; Dahl would catch him and twist his arm behind his back until tears came. He also applied Chinese burns to the skin of Welch’s wrist. The rest of us stood and watched; we were all a little frightened of Dahl.”⁸⁰

That Dahl and Welch might have been drawn to one another is not surprising. Welch, like Michael Arnold, was an outsider. But he was gone by the summer of 1932. Nor would Michael Arnold survive his full term at Repton. The circumstances of Arnold’s departure reveal again how much Dahl kept from his mother, and how much his letters are to some degree early essays in fiction. It all began when “Binks” brought Arnold, the subversive, into the fold and made him a boazer, with all the powers that entailed. In January 1933, during a “devilishly cold” spell of weather, Roald told his mother that he and Michael had been out illicitly skating. “But he must be careful what he does now,” he added, “as he’s just been made a house prefect.”⁸¹ Things soon began to go wrong for Arnold. Not that there is any trace of this in Roald’s letters home, which continue as ever in their chatty, upbeat descriptions of pike fishing, fox-hunting, and killing rooks with a catapult.⁸² On May 7, he told his mother that he was in Michael’s study again this term,⁸³ regaling her with details about a photograph of a grasshopper he was enlarging and requesting her to send patent leather shoes for a dancing lesson. But the following week he delivered a bombshell:

Do you know what has happened; Michael has had a severe mental breakdown and has had to go away for the rest of the term before he goes to Oxford. He is staying in a lonely inn, up in Westmoreland all alone + perfect quiet, which is essential for him to have. I don’t think he’ll mind it, because he rather enjoys tramping about on moors & things alone all day. I have had quite a lot to do arranging all his things, returning all his books to the masters from whom he had borrowed them, packing a crate full of his books, & putting everything else

in his trunk. I’m very sorry he’s gone, but now I go about with Smith, that fellow from Bromley. To show how darned popular he was — half the house has written to him already.

As if deliberately to play down what he has just told her, he adds a comic footnote:

Last night after lights I was shaving in the dark, when Palairet, whose bed was within reach of my basin, said, I’ll strike a match for you, so you can see. I had my back to him, & when he struck the match, as it was still fizzing he pushed the end against my bottom, burnt a hole in both me & my pyjamas. He had to be sat on? ⁸⁴

But horseplay was something of a cover story. And the “character” Dahl had created for his mother since his first letters home at St Peter’s was about to be exposed as something of a fake. After receiving Roald’s letter, a sympathetic Sofie Magdalene suggested to her son that she invite Michael to come and stay at Bexley. Roald replied that he thought this was not a good idea, but did not explain why.⁸⁵ Sofie Magdalene, ignoring her son’s advice, must then have written to Michael’s parents and from them, or from Michael himself, learned the truth: that he had been expelled for homosexual activity with younger boys. Shocked less by Michael’s behaviour than by the fact that Roald had not been honest with her, she then wrote to her son, accusing him of being a liar and implicating him in what had been going on. In a panic, Roald went to his housemaster for advice. Binks wrote Sofie Magdalene the following letter:

Dear Mrs Dahl,

Roald came to me last night in considerable distress, because you thought that he must have been concerned in the unfortunate events which led to Michael Arnold leaving Repton.

He had not told you about that, because he did not want to

distress you; but owing to the turn that events have taken, I think I had better tell you about it. Early this term it came out that Arnold had been guilty of immorality with some small boys last term. As he was a prefect and in a position of trust in the house, and as his acts had been quite deliberate, we decided that he must go. It was a very unpleasant business for everybody and especially for Roald; not only because he lost his chief friend, but also because people were likely to think that he was implicated. But as a matter of fact there was no sort of suspicion attaching to him, in fact I am convinced that he had done his best to make Arnold give up his bad ways; but the latter is very obstinate and would not listen to him.

When boys are sent away for this sort of thing, there is naturally some difficulty in accounting to their acquaintances for their leaving school. As a matter of fact Roald consulted me at the time about what he should say. I did not think it necessary to tell you about it — as he was not himself implicated — at least not at present, when he could only communicate by letter. So when Arnold’s father ascribed it to a mental breakdown, I thought he had better use that explanation.

I may have been wrong in this — if so, I am sorry. But in any case you may set your mind at ease about Roald. I am convinced that he is perfectly straight about it all and has not been concerned in Arnold’s misdeeds.

As to the letter: Some of these very clever boys have an abnormality in their minds, which makes them resentful of authority, and difficult to deal with, and may lead to disaster as in his case. Arnold was apparently convinced (quite wrongly) that he was not appreciated at his true worth here, and took up a defiant and revolutionary attitude to assert his independence. It was of course a very wicked and selfish method of doing so, as he deliberately tried to start small boys off wrong. It is a sad business, as he has many good qualities: I only hope he will be able to control his “complex” in future.

But my chief object in writing is to set your mind at rest about Roald — I’m sure he is straight and I hope you will tell him that you

trust him to go right. It is of great importance that he should feel you believe in him.

Yours sincerely SS Jenkyns ⁸⁶

The letter clearly reassured Sofie Magdalene, and Roald added his own gloss later the same day when he wrote to her:

Yes, I knew Michael had been expelled, and had asked Binks what I should say to you about it, and he said that it would be by far the best for all concerned to conceal the fact under a pretext of mental breakdown. But please don’t think that I had anything to do with him in that way at all. I was his friend and I knew that he had a kink about immorality. I had tried to stop him, as Binks knew, but it was no good. I have asked Binks, who knows my character here a good deal better than most, to assure you that I had nothing to do with it at all. By your letter I concluded that you thought I had been behaving badly and might be expelled if I was not careful. Well, please believe me when I tell you that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. But it was for the sake of everyone’s feelings that Binks and I thought it best to conceal the fact of his expulsion. The Boss [the Headmaster] told me that it was not homosexuality, but merely the natural outlet for a rather over-sensuous mind, often met hand in hand with great brain. He has asked him to come down to the school again in a year’s time. ⁸⁷

Ben Reuss thought Roald was lucky to avoid being expelled himself. “He was terribly clever at sliding out of problems and trouble,” he remembered. “He always got away with it.”⁸⁸ But whatever Roald’s own involvement, the episode probably ensured that he would remain anti-establishment, outside the fold. Michael Arnold, on the other hand, went to Oxford and became a respected industrial scientist, marrying before the war and fathering three sons, one of whom he sent to Repton. He never told his children that he had been expelled and seems quickly to have put the incident behind him. For Dahl, it was more complicated. The incident lingered in his subconscious and it subtly altered his relationship with his mother. His letters to her became more factual, less self-consciously effervescent because the happy-go-lucky mask he had created for both of them had been damaged. The make-believe alternative Repton he had constructed was now tainted.

Surprisingly, the episode did not adversely affect Roald’s affection for Michael Arnold. It almost seems to have reinforced it. The two men remained in regular contact for the next fifty years — one year Dahl and Arnold took their young families away to Norway on holiday together — until a violent argument in old age finally put an end to the friendship.⁸⁹ Roald however continued to believe that his friend had been badly treated by Repton — not so much because he had been expelled, but because he had been brutally beaten beforehand. This punishment affected him more deeply than any injury he himself received — perhaps because the beater in this instance was not a boazer, but his headmaster, “the Boss”. By the time he came to write Boy, his memories of that beating surged back with some ferocity. And this was one incident from the initial draft that he did not censor. His final account is almost entirely as he first described it. “Michael was ordered to take down his trousers and kneel on the Headmaster’s sofa with the top half of his body hanging over one end of the sofa,” he wrote. In between each “tremendous crack administered upon the trembling buttocks”, the Boss would light his pipe and “lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing”.⁹⁰ Arnold, Dahl remembered, was subjected to ten strokes, although Ben Reuss recalled that there were twelve, six with a “heavy cane” and six with a “whippy one”.⁹¹

“At the end of it all,” Roald continued, “a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers.”⁹² Ben Reuss corroborated Dahl’s memory of the bloody “mopping up operations” and added that the beating made a considerable impression on everyone in the school.⁹³ And, although both his sisters Else and Asta maintained that the Dahls had all been “brought up with no religion whatsoever”,⁹⁴ Roald would later claim that the incident made him begin “to have doubts about religion and even about God”.⁹⁵ In his mind, it was all the more shocking and hypocritical because the perpetrator was Geoffrey Fisher, the man who later went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

Unfortunately, Roald had made a mistake. Not for the first time, he sounded off before he had fully checked his facts. For the culprit was not Fisher at all, but his successor John Christie. The beating happened in the summer of 1933, a year after Fisher, as Dahl records in his own letters home, had left Repton to become Bishop of Chester.⁹⁶ More than fifty years later, however, Dahl blamed the “shoddy bandy-legged” Fisher for the caning, and painted him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. “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.”⁹⁷ That description was exaggerated. Beatings such Michael Arnold’s were unusual. Arnold himself was not a small boy, but an eighteen-year-old who had abused younger boys.¶ Moreover it was a surprising case of mistaken identity. For there is no evidence that Roald particularly disliked Fisher — either while he was at school or after he left it.

Indeed, in many of his letters, his headmaster comes across as an object of affection. In the summer of 1931, for instance, Roald took a photo of the Boss laughing uproariously during a cricket match. Thirty years later, he sent Fisher a copy of his collection of short stories Kiss Kiss. He enclosed a copy of that photograph and alluded with warmth to the same incident. On the first page he wrote:

The headmaster was roaring with laughter. There was a “click” behind him. He looked round and saw the thin boy holding a camera in his hands. “Dahl,” the headmaster said sternly, “if it is ribald you will

suppress it!” Today, thirty-two years later, the boy is a little frightened that the headmaster will feel the same way about these stories. But he offers them, nevertheless, with gratitude and affection? ⁹⁸

The inscription is dated December 1962. It was sent shortly after Roald had turned to his headmaster for consolation after the death of his seven-year-old daughter Olivia. Returning to Repton in the 1970s, to give a generally lighthearted and entertaining speech to the pupils, he described his former headmaster as a “thoroughly good” man, although “not guiltless” when it came to inflicting violence on younger boys.⁹⁹ By contrast, Christie made little impression, except as something of a Christian zealot. In the summer of 1932, Roald wrote to his mother explaining why he had not invited her to his confirmation and telling her that there was no question he would ever become seriously devout. “Talking about religious fanatics,” he continued, “this new Boss is one. He’s most frightfully nice, but he’s a religious fanatic. Far too religious for this place.” ¹⁰⁰

It has been suggested that when Dahl published Boy, he deliberately falsified the truth about Michael Arnold’s beating in order to create a sensation. Fisher went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, crowning Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation in 1953, while Christie was simply a public school headmaster who later became principal of Jesus College, Oxford. However, there is no evidence at all that this mistake was anything other than a lapse of memory. Dahl had already mistaken the identity of Michael Arnold’s assailant eight years earlier, when he recounted the story of his friend’s beating on his visit to Repton in 1975. There, on home turf as it were, he told the tale as vividly as he was to do in Boy, describing the flogging in terms of a “medieval religious inquisitorial exercise”.¹⁰¹ Strangely, perhaps, on this occasion it caused no stir. Moreover, Dahl also related “an interesting sequel” to this story, explaining that when he had been to visit the now ennobled Lord Fisher in Sherborne eleven years earlier, the Boss, who he declared had “an astonishing memory”, could remember nothing of the beating. Perhaps this should have flashed a warning light that something was wrong. It didn’t. And so the error became set in stone.

But when Boy was published in 1984, there was a furore. Family and former students rushed to Fisher’s defence. Dahl’s final head of house, John Bradburn, summed up their feelings when he wrote: “The Boss was a wise and stern headmaster … but always fair; and in general held in great respect, admiration and indeed affection.”¹⁰² It was curious that no one at the time stumbled on the fact that Dahl had simply accused the wrong man. Michael Arnold, presumably, could have set the record straight, but chose not to. Why he did not do so, we will probably never know.

From that incident onward, Dahl’s final months at Repton were a kind of holding pattern. He had lost his soul mate. He was not made a prefect. So his energies turned even further inward. As he wrote slightly resentfully in Boy, “the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable…. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them.”¹⁰³He also had another secret consolation: his motorbike. For Christmas 1932 his mother had bought him a 500cc Ariel. He hid it in the barn of a local farm and it gave him a huge sense of independence and freedom. At weekends he would take it out and ride through the Derbyshire countryside, sometimes venturing into Repton itself and annoying masters and boazers, as he whizzed noisily past them, incognito beneath his old overcoat, rubber waders, helmet and goggles. He got a summons for speeding, but managed to keep that secret as well.¹⁰⁴

Eventually, he took his School Certificate exam in the summer of 1933, passing with credit in Scripture Knowledge, English, History, French, Elementary Mathematics and General Science. He had already decided that he neither wanted to go to university nor to do “missionary work or some other fatuous thing”.¹⁰⁵ His father’s trust would provide him with a modest income from the age of twenty-five, so there was no immediate pressure to find a job. What he desired was adventure. So he chose to join an oil company and go to work abroad.** His mother, “desperate” at what she saw as his lack of ambition, sent off to have his horoscope professionally read. Years later she told her daughter Else that the psychic predicted Roald was going to be a writer.¹⁰⁶

His final weeks at the school were spent building gigantic fire-balloons, which he and his friends constructed out of tissue paper, wire and paraffin. The biggest, he claimed, was 18 feet high.¹⁰⁷ Making these fire-balloons was something he would do on and off for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the thrill of seeing them rise up into the night sky and would chase them for miles across the countryside to see where they landed. At that point in his life they must also have seemed a symbol of freedom and escape. Because he had not become a boazer, he was leaving Repton uncorrupted and with his rebellious nature uncurbed. He may have been occasionally cruel — giving Denton Welch Chinese burns, or teasing an elder boy whom he dubbed “The Vapour” because he farted a lot¹⁰⁸ — but he had never wielded the force of school authority. And he had never beaten anyone. Had he been given an official position, perhaps it would all have been different, although, as his daughter Ophelia observed, “the typically English ‘it happened to me, so it will happen to you’ attitude was never part of his mentality”.¹⁰⁹ His schoolfriend Ben Reuss was not so sure. “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 that he would be subversive,” Reuss concluded, “but in these cases the poachers generally make the best gamekeepers.”¹¹⁰ So, just as the photograph is fixed in the darkroom, Dahl was “fixed” at Repton. Already immensely self-reliant, he now further turned his back on English protocol and pecking orders. From now on, where possible, he resolved to control his own destiny. John Christie, his headmaster, concluded Dahl’s final school report with these words: “He has ambition and a real artistic sense … If he can master himself, he will be a leader.”¹¹¹

^*In many respects, Repton was the archetypical contemporary British public school. As such it was chosen as the setting for the classic movie version of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), with Robert Donat and Greer Garson.

^†Dahl told his mother in 1931 that he had been made to go to see the school doctor about his heart despite the fact that he had already been to a number of specialists. Hodie, the school medic, apparently “said the same as Dr Goodall.” What that was he did not specify — Letter to his mother, 09/31 — RDMSC RD 13/1/7/2.

^‡Sofie Magdalene seems to have had little inkling of what torments lay behind the wild irises she saw in her son’s bedder. Visiting Roald during his first summer at the school, she wrote to her daughter Else that she was “very pleased with Repton…. It is much nicer than I expected it to be … Roald’s study was absolutely crammed with flowers” — Sofie Magdalene Dahl, Postcards to Else Dahl, 06/27/30 — RDMSC RD 20/9/2 and RD 20/9/3.

^§Curiously, when John Betjeman wrote to Dahl in 1961 to congratulate him on his collection of stories Kiss Kiss, he also made that comparison. He described the book as “a triumph of humour, poetry, the macabre, the unexpected — as though Denton Welch had become H. C. Anderson” — Betjeman, Letter to Roald Dahl, 01/01/61 — RDMSC RD 16/1/2.

^¶Probably both out of respect for Arnold’s privacy and because Boy was directed at young readers, Dahl failed to mention the nature of Arnold’s offence in his book. The reader is consequently left rather in the dark as to why his friend has been treated so savagely.

^**In eschewing university, Dahl was doing the same as most of his fellows. According to the Repton archivist, of the eighteen pupils who arrived with Dahl in January 1930, only two were listed in the school register as going on to university when they left. Of the thirty-four pupils who left with him in July 1934, ten went on to get a university education.