Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 12

IN AUGUST 1934, WHILE the rest of his family were frolicking in the Oslo Fjord, Roald boarded the RMS Nova Scotia as a member of the Public School Exploring Society. Fifty volunteers from across Britain had each paid £35 for the dubious pleasure of a four-week trek across a remote and unexplored area of the island of Newfoundland off the coast of northern Canada. The purpose was ostensibly to map an uncharted part of what was then still a British dominion, but no one really cared very much about that. What mattered far more to the organizers of the expedition was the business of character-building: instructing young empire builders how to survive in the wild, far away from the luxuries of civilization. For twelve of the fittest (that included Dahl) the journey culminated in a twenty-day Long March through soaking mosquito-infested bogs with between 60 and 100 pounds on their backs, living under canvas on a diet that consisted essentially of pemmican (a mixture of pressed meat, fat and berries), boiled lichen, mud and reindeer moss. It was a tough undertaking. The would-be explorers waded knee-deep down the Great Rattling Brook. They trudged through desolate swamps collecting plant and insect samples. They attempted to fish for trout and trap rabbits, but had little success at either. Their tents leaked and eventually they ran out of food. For most of the time they were hungry, wet and cold. As Roald recorded plaintively in his daily journal, “honestly I don’t think any one of us has ever been so miserable”.¹

The week-long sea journey from Liverpool to St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, began in high spirits. Roald and another friend of his from Repton, the boisterous Jimmy Horrocks, got drunk and Horrocks had to be carried back to his cabin in a stupor. In between avoiding contact with a “silly little missionary” who wanted to talk about Labrador, and flirting with Ruth Lodge, a twenty-year-old actress who was also aboard the boat, Roald found time to make friends with a crew member from British Guiana called Sam. It was typical of him to look outside his immediate peer group for a kindred spirit, and Sam’s freewheeling Caribbean attitudes were much more appealing than those of most of his fellow explorers who, apart from Jimmy Horrocks, scarcely get a mention in his journal. “He’s a marvellous fellow, black curly hair & a blue beret,” Dahl wrote of Sam to his mother, adding that he had asked Sam to shave his head for him — leaving only “a tiny bit of bristle on the top”. Roald thought that he “looked fine”² with his new haircut, and Sam gave the seventeen-year-old boy his blue beret to keep his head warm. Dahl gratefully added it to a pack that, as he was the expedition’s official photographer, included a camera and eighteen rolls of film in lead cases, as well as 14 ounces of tobacco, two pipes and a mouth organ.

The expedition was led by fifty-seven-year-old Surgeon Commander “Admiral” George Murray Levick, the founder of the Public Schools Exploring Society, and a survivor of Scott’s doomed expedition to the Antarctic. Murray Levick was an eccentric British penguin expert, who advocated Spartan values in the education of young men. For many on the expedition, including one of his three assistants, a journalist called Dennis Clarke, he was tantamount to a national hero. In his official history of the trip, Clarke eulogized his leader’s asceticism as well as his obsessive desire to put his feet where no other had trod before, boasting that, “if exploring were a crime … Commander Levick would have been hanged several times over”.³ He shared his commander’s delight in the pleasures of bathing naked in ice-cold rivers, marching through unknown landscapes, and rejoiced in what we might now call the culture of male bonding. He celebrated Levick’s disgust, for example, at having to travel first class on the 250-mile train journey inland from St John’s to Grand Falls, where the expedition began, rather than “roughing it” on the third class tickets he had specifically requested. Roald too clearly enjoyed the sense of pitting himself against a hostile natural environment — though perhaps not quite to the same degree as his commander. His journal records his battle with hunger and the elements in pithy detail, with occasional forays into imaginative fantasy, when things got really tough. “That night the water … soaked into our little bog and the water level in the tent rose several inches,” he wrote one evening. “If some great giant, wandering by that night, having caught a cold in the wet the previous day had, in need of a handkerchief, seized up our tent, we would all have drifted away in our sleeping bags.”⁴

It was not long too before another characteristic Dahl trait began to reemerge: a dislike of authority. This manifested itself in a growing sense of annoyance at “Admiral” Murray Levick. Roald was already suspicious of people who inflated themselves with unnecessary rank or title, and Murray Levick, who had been a surgeon commander but was certainly no admiral, and had been retired from the Royal Navy since 1918, instantly aroused his irritation. Roald found him both absurd and bogus. And that was not all. The “Admiral” defecated publicly each morning in full view of anyone who happened to be around: “Breakfast at 6.45,” Roald noted in his journal. “The Admiral craps in the middle of the camp — quite unashamed and very successful — we all wish he wouldn’t.” And, as the Long March progressed and things started to go wrong, this distaste soon escalated into contempt. Roald began to believe that the “filthy old boy” was also a fool — albeit a tough one. He became particularly infuriated by one specific issue: Murray Levick’s insistence that his team build a makeshift raft to row across a lake, when walking round it would have both been safer and increased their chances of finding food. At this point the young explorers were not in good shape. One of them was seriously ill with mumps, while Roald’s footwear had disintegrated to such an extent that on one foot he had been forced to improvise a boot out of a canvas bucket. With their supplies of food almost exhausted, talk in his tent quickly began to get “revolutionary”.⁵ Eventually, Roald and two veterans of other Murray Levick expeditions, Michael Barling and Dennis Pearl, decided they must face the Admiral down and persuade him to return to base.

“We led a mutiny, he and I,” remembered Dennis Pearl. “It didn’t really get us very far, but it was what drew Roald and I together.”⁶ In fact, the trio made quite an impression. Even Clarke was struck by the intelligence and eloquence of their pleas, recording that although Murray Levick did not actually turn back, he did abandon his plan to cross the lake by raft. Whether he was irritated by the fact that one of his mutineers had been named after Roald Amundsen, who had triumphed over Scott in the race to the South Pole, was not mentioned. The final days of the bad-tempered journey were spent in silence as the marchers fought off their hunger pangs. Eating dominates the closing pages of Roald’s journal. “You see our only thoughts were on food, more food and even more food still.” At night, in their tents, the boys fantasized about imaginary meals in London restaurants — Simpsons, perhaps, or Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. “It really was marvellous to talk about such things and to realise that they still existed,” Dahl observed, adding that then the conversation would turn to literature or music. Those were the subjects that “gave us the greatest pleasure to talk about”.⁷ He returned to England in September, with “large side whiskers and beard”,⁸ and a new friend, Dennis Pearl. His suspicions of the pomposities and absurdities of certain elements of the British establishment had been reconfirmed, but so had his confidence that he could deal with them. He believed himself “fit and ready for anything”.⁹

A few days later, Roald took up his job as a probationary member of staff with the Asiatic Petroleum Company, later to become a part of Royal Dutch Shell. He worked at St Helen’s Court, in the heart of the City of London, and his salary was £130 per annum.* The job offered him few challenges. Commuting up each day from the family home in Bexley, he fell into a pleasurable rut of undemanding office work, punctuated by weekends playing golf, going racing, listening to Beethoven on his gramophone, and reading American crime stories. He was not a natural office worker. Bored by his time in the Accounts Department, with its chattering clerks seated on stools at their high desks,¹⁰ and uninterested in the technicalities of refining petroleum, he dreamed only of travelling abroad. Inspired by the stories of Rider Haggard and Isak Dinesen,† he had asked to be posted to East Africa, but for many months the furthest he got from his desk was to the Shell Central Laboratories in West London, where he was made to study the composition of petroleum products.¹¹ In the summer of 1936 he was despatched to a refinery and oil wharf in Essex, on the lower reaches of the Thames. There too he found little to stimulate him. “Spent most of today on top of an enormous petrol tank — very hot and nearly suffocated by the fumes,” he complained to his mother. “In the evening watched a tanker discharging a cargo of lubricating oil from Mexico.”¹² A sales trip around the West Country the following year was a little more interesting, mainly for the opportunities it gave him to take photographs.

It took almost four years for the African posting to come through. Part of the reason for this delay may have been that Dahl was not a full British national when he joined Shell and needed to secure a British passport in order to travel abroad with them.‡ He may also have been considered just too unreliable. One contemporary of his at Shell remembered thinking that Roald would not last the training course because he was such an “independent person” and “didn’t like an awful lot of direction”.¹³ Yet he was enjoying his release from the prison of school and his emergence into the longed-for sunlight of freedom. So wait he did.

If the four years in the rambling house at Bexley with his mother and sisters were without particular incident, they were perhaps as happy and carefree times as Dahl was to experience until the last decade of his life. There, he and his siblings moved gently together into adulthood. In April 1930, his chatty and intense half sister Ellen had married Ashley Miles, the talented young pathologist — later an eminent immunologist — whose pipe Roald had once filled with goat droppings on holiday in Norway. Soon the couple had settled into the comfortable professional gentility of Hampstead, in North London. The gentle Louis was more bohemian and took longer to leave the family nest. After a series of professional failures that included some months at Aadnesen & Dahl§ — where he discovered that, like his half brother, he disliked office life — and working as a jackaroo on a remote Australian sheep station, he went to London to study at St Martin’s College of Art, after which he took on a job as a commercial illustrator.¹⁴

While at St Martin’s, Louis had converted the top floor of the house in Bexley into a studio. There he spent hours painting, often to a soundtrack of Sibelius symphonies on the gramophone. Sometimes he would venture out with Alfhild in the evening to a concert in London at the Queen’s Hall. In 1936, he got engaged to a vicar’s daughter, Meriel Longland, and he married her in Cambridge later that year. The newlyweds then moved up to London, first into rented accommodation in Marylebone and then to a house in Shepherd’s Bush. Alfhild, who also aspired to be an artist, and was frustrated that Sofie Magdalene told her the family did not have enough money to send a daughter to art school,¹⁵ found solace living a rather “fast” London existence, where she had affairs with the composer William Walton and the conservative historian Arthur Bryant, as well as with Roald’s friend, Dennis Pearl. Her sister Asta recalled that she was often to be found “coming home on the milk train”.¹⁶ Else, a year younger than Roald, was shier and quieter. Initially she had refused to follow her sisters to Roedean, going briefly to Lindores College in Bex-hill¹⁷ and a “very expensive” school in Switzerland instead, both of which she left after a single term.¹⁸ “I expect she’s quite a connoisseur of schools now,”¹⁹ Roald commented wryly to his mother after the Swiss episode, where Else ate her train ticket on the station platform so she would not be able to board the train. She finally joined her younger sister, Asta, at Roedean in September 1933.

As Sofie Magdalene approached fifty, and her family responsibilities began to diminish, she was becoming increasingly arthritic, immobile and concerned with the welfare of her many animals. She had quarrelled with Oscar, her brother-in-law, over his administration of Harald’s estate, accusing him of abusing his position as a trustee and humiliating her by making her submit receipts for every purchase she made. He in turn had threatened to sue her. But her children and stepchildren, led by the vociferous sixteen-year-old Roald, had rallied round. “I should jolly well sue him, get ten thousand and not care what anyone said!”²⁰ he told her. “Get Ellen and Louis to entice him to Bexley; take him up to Dartford … and push him into that most useful and old-established institution — the Dartford Mental Home, where he could spend his time writing lavatory roll after lavatory roll of concentrated libel — for writing libel seems to be his pet hobby nowadays.”²¹ As her family grew up, Sofie Magdalene’s zest for travelling to Norway also began to wane. She preferred to take her Cairn terriers down to Tenby or to Cornwall instead, provoking her mother to accuse her of caring more for her puppies than her own parents.²² Gradually she retreated into her own space and let her children get on with their own lives. She would be there if they needed her. Otherwise, she kept herself to herself.

In Bexley, Roald had set up his own “very smart” ²³ darkroom with shuttered windows and zinc-lined sink. He spent much of his spare time there developing photographs and entering them for competitions. He also began to dabble in writing spoofs and sketches, including a short comic piece called Double Exposure which has survived as perhaps his first adult literary work. It is set in America some time in the future when the government has decreed that all couples must produce a child within five years of marriage. The plot tells of the aptly named Mrs Barren, who has failed to get pregnant and therefore faces a visit from a government official whose job it is to impregnate her — or, as Dahl puts it, to “go through the usual routine prescribed under the code” to ensure “continued propagation of the race”. The humour is built on a premise of mistaken identity. On her fifth wedding anniversary, Mrs Barren is visited not by the government stud, but by Mr Litmus F. Lenser, a photographer of children who is trying to sell his services to her. A series of lewd double entendres ensues, as Mr Lenser talks about his “baby work” and Mrs Barren becomes increasingly alarmed by the number and variety of sexual acts she imagines she will have to perform with him. “I have reduced it to a science,” says Lenser typically. “I recommend at least two in the bath tub, one or two on the couch, and a couple on the floor. You want your children natural, don’t you?”²⁴

Dahl found other outlets too for this madcap inventiveness. In Norway, in 1935, he had taken a photo of his bare-chested half brother Louis, playing a harmonica, and looking “not unlike a native of Honolulu. Brown granite looks white next to his skin”.²⁵ In September 1937, however, this same photograph appeared in a very different context: The Shell Magazine. In a section entitled “Whips and Scorpions”, the man in the photograph was identified as a Mr Dippy Dud, and Shell employees from the unlikely town of Whelkington-on-Sea were invited to rugby-tackle him to the ground when they saw him on the promenade. If they floored him while carrying a copy of The Shell Magazine, the article declared, a prize would be theirs. “Mr Dud,” the anonymous writer continued, “is a keen musician, but do not be misled if he is not playing a mouth organ when you see him. He is an equally adept performer on the harmonica, also on the harmonium, euphonium, pandemonium, saxophone, vibraphone, dictaphone, glockenspiel and catarrh … Don’t be afraid to tackle anyone you think may be Mr Dud. People who are mistaken for him enter heartily into the fun of the thing, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.” Dahl was surely the author of this piece, whose subversive tone and extravagant comic vocabulary anticipate the language of one of his most famous fictional characters: Willy Wonka.

It is hard to imagine these four years of relaxed normality — travelling up to London six mornings a week on the 8.15 train from Bexley, with trilby hat and furled umbrella, alongside a “swarm of other equally sombre-suited businessmen”²⁶ They simply do not fit in with the rest of Dahl’s extraordinarily eventful existence. Perhaps in hindsight not even Roald himself could believe it. In Boy, he telescopes these four years into two and suggests that he was in East Africa for much longer than the single year he spent there. Yet Dahl’s time in the leafy suburbs was important in forming him as a writer for it was at this time that he became a voracious reader. “The best reading times I ever had were in the 1930s,” he declared less than a year before he died, in a speech at the Sunday Express Book Awards, where he listed the novels by Waugh, Greene, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald that had thrilled him in his twenties. “We never had it so good,” ²⁷ he continued, celebrating these novels for being entertaining, well-plotted, elegant and yet serious. One story of Damon Runyon’s particularly excited him — for its terseness, its present-tense narrative and the fact that its style “broke all the rules”.²⁸ Those years in Bexley also confirmed his ideal of family life. The carefree, easygoing atmosphere of Oakwood — a huge Edwardian house on three floors with rambling gardens, studios, well-stocked wine cellar, conservatory, grotto and servants — set a kind of standard for Dahl as to what a family house should be. It was relaxed. And there were few, if any, rules. It would become a model for the kind of lifestyle Dahl tried to create for himself and his own young family in rural Buckinghamshire twenty years later.

When not in his darkroom, Dahl could often be found playing golf. He had started playing as an eleven-year-old on the beach at Weston-super-Mare,²⁹ and joined Dartford Golf Club as a Junior Member in 1927, where he went almost every day of the holidays with Alfhild.³⁰ By 1936, when he was runner-up in the Shell Championship,³¹ he had become almost a scratch player.³² If not on the golf course, he was likely to be at the races, gambling either on horses or greyhounds. Dennis Pearl remembered Roald being introduced to the world of racing greyhounds by Dick Wolsey, a wealthy bookmaker who played at Dartford Golf Club. Wolsey was from the wrong side of the tracks. He had left school aged twelve, sometimes carried £1,000 in cash in his back pocket, and kept a Rolls-Royce that he only drove at night, “in case the tax man saw him”.³³He was perhaps the first of many self-made entrepreneurs to whom Dahl found himself instinctively drawn.

Wolsey took his young friend to the newly opened Catford Stadium, nine miles away, to see his own dogs racing, and Roald was instantly hooked. From then onwards he would spend most Saturday evenings there, often wagering his week’s earnings on the races. Pearl remembered his friend’s fascination with the other gamblers too and how intrigued Dahl was by “the way in which they gambled, and the effect that gambling had on them”.³⁴ It was the beginning of a love affair with betting that would last to the end of his life. Indeed, he once told his daughter Ophelia that winning on the horses or at blackjack gave him more pleasure than receiving a royalty check from his writing.³⁵

Shell did not offer much in the way of paid holidays, but whenever he could, Roald got away. Twice he went to Norway with Michael Arnold and Dennis Pearl. There, he swam, fished, went boating, chased girls, and reconnected with his cousin Finn, the son of his uncle Truls. Once he sketched out notes for a tale about an absurd encounter with a local mechanic, which some years later, relocated to wartime Greece, would become the basis of his poignant story “Yesterday Was Beautiful”. He also indulged a sense of fun that could at times be distinctly oafish. Once on a climbing trip to Snowdonia, with Dennis Pearl and Jimmy Horrocks, Roald set fire to Dennis Pearl’s sleeping bag while he was asleep inside it. This provoked outbursts of helpless laughter from the anarchic Horrocks, whom Pearl described as “an early version of the druggy dropout”.³⁶ Next day, while taking a bath in the local hotel, Horrocks also flooded the bathroom. When the owner asked him for some money to repair the damage, Roald told his mother with delight that his friend had simply replied: “My dear sir, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I just washed your floor for you!”³⁷

On the way up to Snowdonia, Pearl also remembered his friend inventing stories about characters glimpsed through the car window, creating detailed situations and plots simply from the look on someone’s face or the way they were walking.³⁸ Most of the key threads that would characterize Dahl’s fiction were subtly coming together in his psyche: an acute observational eye for detail, a madcap relish for fantasy, a sense of the irreverent, a delight in invention and a crude, childish sense of humour. Storytelling too was becoming part of his makeup. But he was a long way from doing it in an organized manner, let alone contemplating it as a means of earning his living. It was a diversion. For the moment, he seemed quite content to remain what he was — a young professional, with a salary and private income, whose spare hours were mostly spent playing golf, gambling, listening to music and practising his seduction techniques.

“I went into oil because all girls go for oilmen,” Dahl told his Rep-tonian friend David Atkins, who sometimes had lunch with him in the City.³⁹ But if Dahl thought Shell would provide him with a glamorous social life, he was disappointed. For this, he was forced to look elsewhere, largely following in the wake of his vivacious elder sister Alfhild, and her friend the clever, larger-than-life Alfred Tregear Chenhalls, who worked as business manager for the actor Leslie Howard. “Chenny” was another misfit who became part of the Dahl clan — “a curious character,” as Alfhild would later describe him, “a bit of a womanizer, but a bit of something else as well. You never quite knew what he was.”⁴⁰ Chenny provided the Dahls with witty conversation and party opportunities in London. He taught Else and Alfhild to play piano duets and invited Sofie Magdalene, who “adored him”, on holiday to his family home in Corn-wall.⁴¹ He helped Roald to get his job with Shell.⁴² He was also “randy as hell” and liked to chase the girls. Alf had “a whale of a time” with him, but Else and Asta used to set traps for him on their bedroom doors in case he prowled the corridors when he stayed overnight.⁴³

However, while Roald enjoyed talking about sex, he was somewhat buttoned up when it came to his own love life. As far as romance was concerned, Alfhild later recalled that Roald “didn’t really discuss himself”.⁴⁴ Dennis Pearl, who had had a row with his own parents and was now living at Oakwood too, remembered that his friend’s first romances were often secretive. Several originated from his local golf club and at least two involved adultery.⁴⁵ One was with a peer’s wife (he would always be attracted to aristocrats) and another with a woman from Bexley, whom he saw only when her husband was away on business.⁴⁶ “He tended to choose something which created difficulties,” Pearl recalled. “He seemed to like mystery.”⁴⁷ By the time his posting to Africa finally came through in September 1938, Roald had been dating a girl of his own age called Dorothy O’Hara Livesay, whom he had met through Alfhild’s future husband, Leslie Hansen. “Dolly”, as she called herself, was of Belgian-Irish descent,⁴⁸ and joined Roald’s family on the pierside at London Docks to wave him goodbye on his trip to East Africa. “Look after her, Dennis,” said Roald to his friend as he boarded the SS Mantola. Pearl took the advice to heart. Not long afterwards he got her pregnant and Dolly became the first Mrs Dennis Pearl.⁴⁹

For Dahl, aged just twenty-two, a new chapter of his life was beginning. After a two-week journey on the Mantola to Mombasa in Kenya, in the company of some empire-building Englishmen and their “bright, bony little wives”,⁵⁰ he took a small coastal steamer, a “bloody little ship”,⁵¹ down the African coast to Dar es Salaam. His letters home from the voyage describe none of the eccentric passengers he would later evoke in his memoir, Going Solo (1986): the nudist athletes Major Griffiths and his wife, for example, or the rupophobic Miss Trefusis. Not even the bewigged Mr U. N. Savory gets a mention. Most of these delightful characters were almost certainly invented as an entertaining alternative to his real companions on the journey, who were dismissed in a letter to his mother as “pretty dull”. The welfare of some of the animals on board concerned him more: dogs that needed exercise and, in particular, a horse “doomed to stand in his box in which he can’t even turn round”.⁵² By the end he longed to reach Tanganyika.

Occupying more than 350,000 square miles of land between the Indian Ocean and three of the African great lakes, this territory of around 5 million inhabitants had been a German colony from the 1880s until 1919, when, following Germany’s defeat at the end of the First World War, it became a League of Nations-mandated territory, and subject to British colonial administration.¶ In 1936, Shell set up an oil terminal on the coast, in the capital, Dar es Salaam, and Dahl was appointed as the most junior of the three-man team charged with running it. Most of the company’s business there involved supplying fuel and lubricants for farm equipment, but Dahl was particularly excited that he was put in charge of “all aviation business”.⁵³ This involved meeting the flying boats that arrived in the harbour every two or three days, as well as dealing with the regular air services from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa and Nairobi. Much of the rest of the job was drudgery — a far cry from the exotic glamour of the bush evoked in Isak Dinesen’s stories — but at least there was plenty of time for leisure. “Everything is OK,” he wrote to his mother shortly after he arrived. “Life’s rather fun. Bloody hard work. Bloody hot — golf or squash or something every evening and about four baths a day.”⁵⁴ Best of all was the fact that there were new surroundings to observe and that he was no longer a commuter. “I loved it all,” he reflected later. “There were no furled umbrellas, no bowler hats, no sombre grey suits and I never once had to get on a train or a bus.”⁵⁵

Dahl spent most of his year there living with two colleagues, Panny Williamson and George Rybot. They shared a large, spacious villa called Shell House, set in lush gardens some fifty yards from the beach at Oyster Bay, just south of the centre of Dar es Salaam. Much of his spare time was spent playing squash, darts and golf at the whites-only Dar es Salaam Club, or socializing at the colonial cocktail parties. “As far as I can see,” he told his mother, “the average person … gets drunk at least twice a week out here. They have these things called ‘sundowners’ starting at about seven or eight o’clock — cocktail parties really — but no cocktails, only whisky, beer and gin … Actually it does you no harm and you never have a hangover because you sweat it all out in the night — it’s so hot! I only get drunk once a week and then not properly drunk — just merry — I think it’s good for you.”⁵⁶ As his alcohol intake increased, Roald boasted that he was developing “hollow legs”,⁵⁷ and complained about the vast amounts of money he had to spend on beer and spirits. The drunker he got, the more raucous his behaviour became, while his instinctive dislike of anything that smacked of bourgeois good taste led to clashes with the more conformist values of his peers. He dismissed most of his Shell colleagues as “either hearty or dumb”,⁵⁸ and the expatriates in general as “awful twits really, full of manners, and getting up when women come in etc. etc. I don’t do it and I’m always in the shit.”⁵⁹ He once disgraced himself at a drinks party in Government House, stealing into the bedroom and returning to the drawing room with the Governor’s chamberpot upon his head. But he found a kindred spirit in his housemate, George Rybot.

George and I were asked to go and have a drink at Mrs Wilkin’s house. Mrs Wilkin is a frightful old hag who weighs nineteen and a half stone (and is proud of it) and looks like a suet dumpling covered in lipstick & powder. Well, George went into the drawing room and I went down to the basement to have a widdle. Down there I came across the most marvellous crimson tinpi-jerry[chamberpot], so with a whoop of joy I seized it and dashed upstairs to show it to George, entering the drawing room waving the thing above my head. Well, I wasn’t to know that there were twenty other people in the room, sitting primly around sipping their pink gins. There was a horrified silence. Then George started giggling — then we both got a fit of giggling while I pushed the frightful apparition under the nearest sofa and muttered something about “what a pretty colour it was and didn’t they all think so”. ⁶⁰

Chamberpots and their contents interested him in other ways, too. Like many of his contemporaries, Roald was profoundly concerned about the frequency and quality of his bowel movements, and his letters home are full of scatological details and jokes about urination,⁶¹ enemas,⁶² and the regularity or irregularity of his motions. For a while he was taken with a contemporary bestseller his mother had sent him called Culture of the Abdomen, by Professor F. A. Hornibrook. Subtitled “The Cure of Obesity and Constipation”, Hornibrook argued that maintaining a particular exercise regime, and adopting a squatting posture when on the lavatory, were the most effective means both of thoroughly evacuating the bowel and of remaining fit and healthy. Dahl was fascinated. He quickly renamed the author “Horniblow” and persuaded his housemates to have a go at all the exercises. “Horniblow” soon became a byword for anything involved with the lower bowel at Shell House: native dancers, rhinoceros droppings, the antics of his dog Samka, all got the treatment. “We do Horniblow every morning — it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen,” he wrote to his mother, “George, Panny and I sprawling over the floor of my bedroom groaning, panting and sweating and cursing the old Professor. But I think it’s done me lots of good.”⁶³ He would remain concerned about his daily “deposit in the bank of good health”⁶⁴ until the end of his days.

For Roald as for all the Dahls, domestic life was unimaginable without pets, and so Shell House rapidly acquired a menagerie of peculiar animals. Many of these soon made regular comic appearances in his letters home. Chief among them were the tick-infested Samka, “a guard dog with the biggest tool and the longest tail (always wagging) that I’ve ever seen”,⁶⁵ and two cats, Oscar and Mrs Taubsypuss.** Dog Samka is “such an important person in this house”, Roald told his mother, “that when he is ill or off colour the whole household is disorganized”.⁶⁶ Samka’s escapades were recounted with generous dollops of picaresque detail, as the adventures of an insatiable canine Casanova, who suffered a postcoital hangover most mornings because of his propensity to “go out and roger himself silly at the slightest opportunity”.⁶⁷ At one point he disappeared and no one could find him. Eventually, after much searching, he was discovered locked in the local chemist’s shop. “We consoled ourselves,” Roald reported, “with the thought that by now he would probably have had a very good meal of vanishing cream with a dessert of orange skin food and perhaps a bottle of Nuits de Paris or Blue Grass to wash it down … They say that when he trotted out his lips were rouged and he’d powdered his balls … Interviewed later, Dog Samka was heard to remark: I found french letters fried in liquid paraffin very nourishing, I shall always carry a packet with me in future in case of emergencies.”⁶⁸

One of the reasons that Dahl took such delight in chronicling the sexual exploits of his pets was because he was finding it difficult to have any himself. He wrote enviously of his sisters “gadding about” in Paris, adding rather dolefully that “there’s no-one here worth gadding about with”.⁶⁹ A week later, his mood was more humorous. Describing how the damp made everything rot, he told his mother: “Golf balls go yellow, but that’s nothing — mine do too, like everything else that’s not used.”⁷⁰ This was typical of the ribald detail Roald adored and which was enthusiastically lapped up by Sofie Magdalene and his three sisters. Dirty jokes abound in almost every letter. Some of these were quite straightforward, but others already verged on the surreal. When his mother was recovering from dental surgery, for example, Roald asked his sisters to “tell her the joke about the person who had all teeth out & couldn’t be fed through the mouth. So the doctor said — I’ll have to feed you with a tube through your anus — what would you like for your first meal? A cup of tea please doctor — Right, here goes. Hi, stop doctor, stop what’s the matter, what’s the matter, is it too hot? No, there’s too much sugar in it.”⁷¹ His sisters, particularly Alfhild, usually responded in kind. And Roald often complimented them on how well their own jokes had been received at the club. Nevertheless, there was much more to Dahl’s time in Africa than playing the fool. If he was not getting the Out of Africa experience of which he had dreamed, he was seeking out its equivalent secondhand among the characters he encountered in Dar es Salaam, be they Brahmin Shell employees, a septuagenarian orchid collector whom he nicknamed “Iron Discipline”, or the servants in Shell House.

Shell House had its own cook and gardener and each of its three white residents had their own personal servant, or “boy”. Roald’s was called Mdisho. He was about nineteen, just three years younger than his master. “I get woken up by my boy at 6.30,” Roald wrote to his mother shortly after his arrival. “He brings tea and an orange — a marvellous orange tasting quite different to anything you’ve ever had … I eat my orange and drink my tea that is after the boy has removed the enormous mosquito net that is suspended about six feet above you.” Mdisho would then run his morning cold bath and lay out all Roald’s clothes for the day ahead. Initially, Dahl enjoyed this power over “the natives”,⁷² but soon he became fascinated by the “tall and graceful and soft-spoken” ⁷³ Mdisho, who was from a tribe of “magnificent fighters”.⁷⁴ Mdisho travelled everywhere with him, showing “absolute loyalty” to his “young white master”.⁷⁵ In turn, Roald looked after Mdisho, advising him on his finances, teaching him to read and write, and even acting as his banker when he wanted to save money to buy a wife.⁷⁶ Mdisho’s lack of guile and his simple, honest view of the world resonated with Dahl, who was also impressed when Mdisho boasted that his tribe had been the only ones ever to defeat the much-feared Masai.†† Dahl evoked him with respect and affection in Going Solo, and celebrated their friendship.⁷⁷ Mdisho’s innocent loyalty and toughness may even have helped inspire the hero of Dahl’s most famous children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For when Dahl first sketched out the story, he made his young hero a black boy, drawing a little picture of him and describing him as “the tiniest seven-year-old that you could ever find anywhere … as bright and clever as any other boy of his age in the town, and as brave as a lion and as kind and nice and cheerful as anyone you could meet”.⁷⁸

As a young man in Tanganyika, Dahl was guilty of making largely unflattering generalizations either about the native Africans, or the Indians, who made up a large part of the professional classes in Dar es Salaam. His endlessly feuding Goanese clerks, Carrasco and Patel, provoked him to complain that “they’re all the same, these bloody Hindus”, and to assert that their minds “grind exceedingly low”. When his shipping clerk invited him to his house, he was appalled by the family’s cramped and filthy living conditions, “their thousands of bloody relations” and “no less than eight horrible little naked children”.⁷⁹ While he may have been repelled by their living conditions, Dahl was nevertheless curious about the lives of nonwhites and seized with enthusiasm the rare opportunities that occurred to explore their world. On one occasion, he and George Rybot stopped their car to help another car that had broken down at the side of the road. The occupants turned out to be “an educated native all done up in smart suit & trilby hat, his two wives & two children aged about 4 & 7”. By way of thanks, they took Dahl and Rybot to “a bloody great native fair” that was celebrating “the big Mahomedan holiday of Id Ul Haj”. Roald told his mother he found the experience “damn’d interesting.”

There were lots of frightful old hand-operated roundabouts … made out of coconut trees etc, slip ways down which you slid on coconut matting finishing up amidst a throng of yelling blacks; the most frightful sort of swing boats which were made, by some means or other to revolve round an enormous coconut tree, and at full speed they stood out (that’s the wrong word) parallel to the ground. Then there were native bands, with the players getting drunker & drunker on that frightful brew of theirs called Pombe, and beating the drums in the most weird fashion. But the best thing of all were the native dances. We saw the real thing — these blokes with nothing on except a bit of coconut matting & masses of white & red paint, yelling & swaying their hips in a manner which would make Mae West look like a fourth-rate novice. As each dance progresses, the dancers got more & more worked up, & yelled & shouted & leapt about until they just couldn’t go on any longer and another tribe came on and took their place. The way they wobbled their tummies would have earned for them the fullest approval of our friend Professor [sic] Horniblow.⁸⁰

This response may have been unsophisticated and naive, but it was much more tolerant and embracing than that of many other whites around him. And as he grew older, Dahl became increasingly critical of his own youthful attitudes. In a speech at Repton in 1975, he described himself in Dar es Salaam as “a ridiculous young pukka-sahib”, and in his last year of life, he admitted that he was “mildly ashamed” by his tacit acceptance of certain British imperial attitudes while he was in Tanganyika, regretting his failure at the time to see that the whole colonial situation was just “not right”. He blamed it on the values he saw around him and on the fact that he had not yet learned to think independently. “When you’re very young, you just swim along with what everyone else is doing,” he told an Australian radio interviewer. “You can’t buck the tide. It was the last days of the British Empire.”⁸¹

Over forty years earlier, in his short story “Poison”, he had been even more forthright, revealing a surprising empathy for the Indians he had once dismissed as “bloody fools”. The tale is set in India. There, a white man, Harry Pope, lies in bed, sweating with fear because he believes a krait, a venomous nocturnal snake, has slithered under the sheets and curled up on his stomach. The narrator, discovering his terrified friend, sends for the local Indian medic, Dr Ganderbai, who eventually pumps chloroform under the covers in an attempt to anaesthetize the deadly creature. In an atmosphere of tense drama the sheet is eventually removed to reveal: nothing. The snake has been a figment of Pope’s imagination. Humiliated, Pope turns on Ganderbai, shouting at him and calling him a “dirty little Hindu sewer rat” and other “terrible things”, as the embarrassed narrator thanks the doctor for his trouble and ushers him apologetically toward his car. As published, it was clear that Dahl (in the person of the narrator) is totally on the side of Ganderbai. However, an earlier incarnation of the tale included a paragraph (later removed) that was even more overt in its condemnation of British colonial snobbery:

Dr Ganderbai was worried about his reputation and I must say I couldn’t blame him. It was probable that he had never 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?” ⁸²

Dahl’s own encounters with venomous snakes were few and far between. Once he encountered one outside his home. “These black mam-bas are real bastards,” he told his mother. “Not only are they one of the few snakes that will attack without provocation, but if they bite you, you stand a jolly good chance of kicking the bucket in a few hours unless you receive treatment at once.” This one was reportedly “eight feet long and as thick as my arm and as black as soot”.⁸³ Roald killed it with his hockey stick. Another time he saw one through the window of his car driving back from a cricket match in Morogoro.⁸⁴ In Going Solo, however, he recounts a host of exotic African animal adventures, including a close encounter with another mamba at the home of a customs official in Dar es Salaam and one with a man-eating lion, who steals into the garden of the District Officer’s homestead and abducts his cook’s wife. None of these incidents is recorded in his letters home. Aside from the snakes, and a glimpse of a “bloody great leopard”⁸⁵ in his back garden, his letters chronicle much more mundane experiences, such as climbing up trees to pick coconuts,⁸⁶ Dog Samka’s attempts to impersonate the Empress of Australia in a swimming costume,⁸⁷ and countless visits to the club for a “snifter”.⁸⁸ His life frustrated as much as it exhilarated and Dahl was clearly often bored with an existence that was often little more than one “long string of sundowners”.⁸⁹ Trips into the interior were extremely rare and a lot of the time he was forced to admit that there was “bugger all to do except sweat”,⁹⁰ complaining that, even with his car (a Ford 10 that he bought for £40), “you can’t go up country more than a few miles, the roads are too bad”.⁹¹ The more exotic tales recounted in Going Solo are likely either to be compelling recreations of stories heard from others or just flights of pure fancy, written in the manner of his heroes Rider Haggard and Isak Dinesen.

These African experiences did fire his imagination, however, and give him the feeling that he had something special to write about. One of his earliest short stories, “An Eye for a Tooth”, eventually published in 1946 as “An African Story”, used a plot device that hinged upon another snake, a black mamba, which had learned to suckle milk from a cow. It was a bizarre and unlikely idea. Concerned that the tale was implausible, his literary agent at the time, Ann Watkins, contacted a certain Dr Bogert, an expert at the Museum of Natural History in New York, to ascertain whether such a thing might indeed be possible. Assured by Dr Bogert that it was not, a potential publisher rejected the story. This irritated Dahl, not only because he had lost a sale but also because he believed the event to have been entirely credible. In his own mind, he now saw himself as an expert on Africa and, in any event, it was quite against his nature to admit that he could ever be in the wrong. Writing to Ann Watkins, he acknowledged that perhaps as far as strict accuracy was concerned, he had indeed “slipped up”. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “I still maintain that if Dr Bogert or any of his learned friends go to Africa and talk to some of the native tribes there, they will tell them they have seen that sort of thing happen. But let us forget it. Send me back the story and I will keep it to read to my children.”⁹² To his mother, a week later, he wrote that, though the story had been declined, “morally and metaphorically I count it a sale”.⁹³

His time in Tanganyika was also formative in other ways. He learned to run a house, adopting the role of housekeeper and “holding court” each morning with Mpishi the cook and Mwino the head boy; paying wages, deciding menus, planning recipes and devising social events. He also indulged himself in the role of present giver and treatmaker, regularly sending back ornate jewellery, unusual furs and curios to his family. Hardly a letter goes by without mention of a gift he is seeking out or having made for one of them.‡‡ His love of classical music deepened, as did his pleasure in listening to his records at a very high volume. He sent long and detailed lists of exactly what he wanted to his family back in Bexley, declaring that listening to his music gave him “a hell of a kick”.⁹⁴ His taste for his own company intensified as well. A few months before Dahl left Dar es Salaam, he chose to rent a remote house on his own rather than live in the club or share with others. “It’ll be rather fun living there alone,” he wrote, “plus wireless and gramophone and about three boys for whom incidentally there are special quarters built beyond the house. The rent is bloody high … but the rest of the blokes would give me piles to live with.”⁹⁵ One evening, listening to Beethoven symphonies, he studied the antics of two transparent lizards hunting on the ceiling of his sitting room. It was “very exciting”, he told his mother, watching the gecko “fixing his unfortunate victim — often a small moth — with a very hypnotic eye”.⁹⁶ He nicknamed the two reptiles “Hitler” and “Mussolini”.

Those two names were frequently on his lips during his year in East Africa, for the political background to his time there was one of increasing certainty of war between Britain and Germany. As Roald set sail on the Mantola, German troops were occupying the disputed Sudetenland territory on the border with Czechoslovakia. By the time he arrived in Dar es Salaam, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich and announced to the world that he had won peace for his time. Dahl was one of many who did not believe it. He sided with the outsider Winston Churchill, who argued that Britain had suffered an “unmitigated defeat”, that it had succumbed to a bullying German regime, and that soon all of Czechoslovakia would be “engulfed in the Nazi regime”.⁹⁷ Two years earlier, Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had occupied Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, with little international opposition. Now, it seemed to Dahl, Hitler was being allowed to do the same. Listening to the BBC’s Empire Broadcasts on his short-wave radio in Shell House, he kept abreast of the growing international crisis. Sometimes he tried to make light of it, wishing that Mussolini would take up a useful hobby like “collecting bird’s eggs instead of countries”, but adding ruefully that the Italian dictator would “probably say it was cruel”.⁹⁸

In March 1939, Churchill’s predictions were realized when the German Army occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. It left Chamberlain’s “peace with honour” exposed as empty rhetoric. From then onwards, Dahl was convinced that war was inevitable. Repeatedly he urged his mother to get out of their house in Bexley, which he rightly believed would be directly under the flight path of any German bombers attacking London. He hoped that his mother and sisters would move to their holiday haunt on the Welsh coast in Tenby. There he believed they would be safe. “If war breaks out you’ve jolly well got to go to Tenby otherwise you’ll be bombed,” he wrote. “None of you must stay in London … Don’t forget, you’ve got to go if war breaks out.”⁹⁹ But Sofie Magdalene was stubborn. She did not want to move. And neither did her daughters, who were enjoying their social life in London too much and had no desire to relocate to the remote Welsh seaside. They elected to stay on, believing that Oakwood’s large cellar would make an effective air-raid shelter against any attack.

Roald was infuriated by his mother’s refusal to bend to his logic and repeatedly tried to make her change her mind. But mother and son were as obstinate as each other. By the end of September, the Germans had invaded Poland, Britain was formally at war, and Roald was desperate. “I say once more,” he wrote, certain that the Luftwaffe raids were about to begin, “that you’ve no right to be sitting in one of the most dangerous places in the world at the moment, quite happy in the mere thought that you’ve got a cellar — That cellar’s no good once the real raids start, which presumably they must before very much longer.”¹⁰⁰ Roald’s fears, though amply justified, would prove somewhat premature, as his family got a stay of execution from the bombs for another year. The “Phoney War” continued for another eight months, until May 1940, when Germany invaded France, while air raids on London did not begin in earnest until four months after that, in September 1940.

The impending war in Europe may have been thousands of miles away, but it had an immediate manifestation in Tanganyika, where the majority of white settlers were still German nationals. By the summer of 1939, significant tensions had already begun to develop with the British. Never the diplomat, Dahl’s unbridled sense of mischief soon got him into trouble. One day at the Gymkhana Club, he and two of his friends drew a picture of a naked Hitler on a blackboard and spent an hour throwing darts at it. He described the game in some detail: “Hitting his balls with a dart counted 10, hitting his tool counted 15, his navel counted 5, his moustache 20 etc.” A German member of the club made a formal complaint. “There was a frightful show … the little bugger whipped straight off to the German Consulate … and the Club Committee were called to an extraordinary General Meeting and all that sort of bullshit … There’s one hell of a showdown — you see there are so many Germans in this place and everything is rather on the boil,” he told his mother. Dahl was formally reprimanded, but he didn’t care. The only lesson he had learned was: “Don’t throw darts at Hitler’s balls in public. They’re private parts.”¹⁰¹

By the late summer of 1939, the British authorities were preparing internment camps across Tanganyika for all German nationals should war be declared. On September 1, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, to whom Britain was pledged as an ally, appeared to make that declaration inevitable. Roald had enlisted as a Special Constable. He was given a platoon of native soldiers to command and charged with guarding a stretch of road running south from Dar es Salaam to the border with Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique. His job was to arrest any escaping German nationals and escort them to one of these internment camps. “If war breaks out it’ll be our job to round up all the Germans,” he had written to his mother on August 27, adding that he hoped they “would allow themselves to be rounded up quietly”.¹⁰² According to the report which Sir Mark Young, the Governor of Tanganyika, sent back to Whitehall almost two weeks after war was eventually declared, that is exactly what happened. Sir Mark told Malcolm MacDonald, the secretary of state for the colonies, that, despite his anxieties, the local Nazis under their leader Herr Troost had been unexpectedly cooperative, urging German nationals to submit to arrest and bear their fates with dignity and honour. “No resistance was offered by any enemy national and for the most part they submitted cheerfully and good-humouredly,” Sir Mark noted. “In no single case was opposition reported.”¹⁰³

On September 2, Dahl and his six armed native Askaris from the King’s African Rifles spent the night sleeping rough in the bush by the road from Dar es Salaam to Portuguese East Africa. Shortly after one o’clock the following afternoon, the field telephone rang and Dahl heard a “grim voice” announcing: “War has been declared — arrest all Germans attempting to leave or enter the town.” His own account of the ensuing events, in a letter written a few days later, concurred with the Governor’s report that the Germans offered no resistance, though he gave few specific details in case the “ruddy censor” held up the letter.¹⁰⁴ His early short story “The Sword” painted a similar picture: “The Germans started coming … as fast as they could. Some were in trucks and some were in private cars, Fords and Chevrolets mostly, and we rounded them up bit by bit without much difficulty. They saw our machine-gun and very quickly gave themselves up.”¹⁰⁵ A later story, “Lucky Break” (1977), was more expansive, but also followed a similar pattern. There, Dahl described how he marched about two hundred German civilians back to Dar es Salaam, “where they were put into a huge camp surrounded by barbed wire … There was no battle. The Germans, who after all, were only civilian townspeople, saw our machine-guns and our rifles and quickly gave themselves up.”¹⁰⁶ Less than ten years later, in Going Solo, Dahl was to embellish the story grandly. Now an angry bald German, whose movements are “full of menace”, threatens him by the roadside. In a style reminiscent of Ian Fleming, he describes how the man points a Luger pistol to his chest and how one of his own Askari guards shoots the German through the face: “It was a horrible sight. His head seemed to splash open and little soft bits of grey stuff flew out in all directions. There was no blood, just the grey stuff and fragments of bone. One lump of the grey stuff landed on my cheek. More of it went all over my khaki shirt. The Luger dropped onto the road and the bald man fell dead beside it.”¹⁰⁷

This is the first of two unlikely deaths that conclude the African adventures in Going Solo. The second comes later that night when Dahl discovers that his good-natured servant Mdisho, excited by the declaration of war, has run off into the bush and murdered a rich local German landowner with an eighteenth-century ceremonial Arab sword that Dahl kept hanging on his wall. Running several miles through the night, Mdisho arrived at the homestead of this “unpleasant bachelor”, who was rumoured to beat his employees with a whip made from rhinoceros hide, and sliced his head off as he stood in his back garden throwing pieces of paper onto a fire. Dahl recounts with relish Mdisho’s proud but grisly description of his deed. “Bwana, it is a beautiful sword. With one blow it cut through his neck so deeply that his whole head fell forward and dangled down onto his chest, and as he started to topple over I gave the neck one more quick chop and the head came right away from the body and fell to the ground like a coconut and the most enormous fountains of blood came spurting out of his neck.” Dahl then explains to the uncomprehending young man that he has committed a crime and must keep quiet about it or risk arrest. Mdisho is dumbfounded, but thrilled when Dahl presents him with the sword as a gift for his bravery. He concludes that the two men are now “exactly equal”,¹⁰⁸ as both have been involved in killing a German.

This story was in essence a reworking of “The Sword”, where Mdisho is replaced by an older boy called Salimu. That was presented as fiction. In Going Solo, it is presented as fact. In each case, however, the symbolism is clear. A rite of passage has been enacted. By killing a man, as young Masai warriors traditionally kill a lion, the two men have left their youth behind and become adults. They have grown up. It was a powerful fable and one that clearly resonated with Dahl himself. Whether it was presented as fact or fiction was of little interest to him. In much the same way as he had done at Repton, he simply constructed for himself a world that evolved naturally from his impulse to tell a story. As time went by, that imaginary world, revisited, relished and refined in storytelling, gradually became more real and more alive than the reality it had replaced. Sitting in his writing hut in the English countryside in the early 1980s, his interest was not with facts, but rather with visceral memories and narrative possibilities.

Unlike the early drafts of Boy, those of Going Solo are not tortured with changes and emendations. They flow with ease and speed. Occasionally one even senses Dahl dropping his entertainer’s mask and pausing for a moment almost to moralize. The tale of Mdisho and the sword, for example, serves as a poignant curtain-raiser to the violence and absurdity of the coming war. There normal values will be turned on their heads and a single comprehensible killing, like Mdisho’s of the brutal German, will be replaced by something much more faceless and inhuman. The little parable seems to be telling us something important — about life and death, about masters and servants, about whites and blacks, about innocence and experience, about youth and adulthood. Perhaps it also tells us something about the author himself. For Mdisho’s viewpoint, even if fictional, was one to which Dahl himself was powerfully drawn. He too saw himself trapped by English values and manners to which he did not entirely relate and which he did not completely understand. The loner listening to Beethoven and watching geckos, the scatological humorist, the fantastical chronicler of Dog Samka’s amorous adventures — all of these set him apart and, despite his efforts to fit in, compounded his reputation as the club’s subversive misfit. Mdisho’s fictional predicament was thus rather like his own. “I looked at him and smiled. I refused to blame him for what he had done. He was a wild Mwanumwezi tribesman who had been moulded by us Europeans into the shape of a domestic servant, and now he had broken the mould.”¹⁰⁹

Within days of the outbreak of war, Dar es Salaam began to fill up with soldiers. Dahl instinctively disliked the army, and described the new arrivals with thinly disguised contempt: “Fellows in uniform and cockade hats all over the place and a frightful lot of snobbishness. All bullshit.” Joining this invasion of khaki did not appeal to him at all. Its regulations and pomposities reminded him only of school. Pointedly, he told his mother he had invented an “oxometer” designed to measure “the amount of bullshit talked and written by the military”.¹¹⁰ He had another plan. Inspired by his friend the pilot Alec Noon, who flew small commercial aeroplanes out of Dar es Salaam, Dahl had decided how he would finally see the Africa of which he had long dreamed, but which his job in Shell had largely denied him. He would join the Royal Air Force and become a pilot.

It was a fateful decision, perhaps the most important he ever made. That October, Noon had taken him on a patrol flight along the Tanganyikan coast to Mafia Island. Dahl was thrilled, writing home lyrically of the views and the “long, long line of sandy beach with palm trees on it and an endless white surf breaking”.¹¹¹ A few days later he went up to Nairobi for his RAF medical, which he passed “with flying colours” despite the disadvantage of being just over six foot five inches tall. Reassuring his mother not to be alarmed by “this flying business”, he told her it was all just “very good fun”,¹¹² that he would get £1,000 worth of flying lessons for free, and that it would be “a bloody sight better than joining the army out here and marching about in the heat from one place to another doing nothing special”.¹¹³

Dahl returned to Dar es Salaam, packed most of his clothes into mothproof trunks, paid his bills, resigned from his club, and wrote to his mother asking her not to send him a luxury Christmas hamper “because it will be difficult to eat those things … in an airmen’s mess. I can imagine a pot of pate de foie gras going in one meal, and someone who’s never had it before saying they prefer bloater paste.”¹¹⁴ Two weeks later, in a large three-seater Chevrolet, he drove 900 miles north to Nairobi. The journey gave him time to contemplate the glories of the African landscape and ponder what the future had in store for him and his family. He talked to giraffes, crossed fast-running rivers on wooden rafts, watched Masai warriors demonstrating their skill with bows and arrows, and reflected philosophically on the gentle beauty of a family of elephants. “They are better off than me,” he mused, “and a good deal wiser. I myself am at this moment on my way to kill Germans or be killed by them, but those elephants have no thought of murder in their mind.”¹¹⁵

In Nairobi, Dahl was one of sixteen pilots enrolled in the Initial Training School. Only three would survive the next two years. Yet thoughts of death were far from his mind as he squeezed into his tiny two-seater Tiger Moth and someone chased the grazing zebra off the airfield. Nonetheless, he faced one significant problem. At six foot five, perched on top of his parachute, Dahl’s head stuck so far over the top of the windshield that once the plane was airborne, its powerful slipstream made it almost impossible for him to breathe. Every few seconds he had to duck down behind the shield just in order to take a breath. Characteristically, he soon devised a solution: a thin cotton cloth tied over his nose and mouth allowed him to avoid being choked while flying. His love affair with this new element was immediate and intense. “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much,”¹¹⁶ he wrote his mother. After seven hours and forty minutes, he went solo and was soon flying alone over the wide African savanna, soaring high through the Great Rift Valley and around Mount Kenya, then swooping down to only 60 or 70 feet above the ground, causing giraffes to look up in amazement and herds of wildebeest to stampede. He felt at one with his aeroplane and took an intense delight in the experience of being alone in the vast open spaces of the sky, from where he could view the landscapes about which he had fantasized for so long, from the vantage point of a god. He learned to navigate, to loop the loop, and make forced landings with his engine cut.

Then, after eight weeks, and with about fifty hours’ flying time in their logbooks, the young pilots were all put on a train to Kampala in Uganda, where “bursting with energy and exuberance and perhaps a touch of self-importance as well, because now we were intrepid flying men and devils of the sky”,¹¹⁷ they went, via Cairo, to complete their flying training in Iraq — at a vast base called Habbaniya. After six months there in the fierce desert heat, “the worst climate in the world,” where they were to live “only for the day we will be leaving”,¹¹⁸ in September 1940 Dahl found himself heading for action in the Western Desert of North Africa, ferrying an out-of-date and unfamiliar biplane toward a camouflaged airstrip just behind the Allied front line.

^*The equivalent of about £25,000 in 2010.

^†His sister Alfhild maintained that it was principally the tales of the Danish Karen Blixen that made her brother long to go to East Africa — Conversation with author, 08/07/92.

^‡Letter from Asiatic Petroleum Company Ltd. to Roald Dahl, 07/16/34 — RDMSC RD 13/1/9/53. This letter, reminding Dahl that he could not take up a foreign posting with Shell without having British citizenship, suggests that at that point he may have had a Norwegian passport. The possibility that Roald was not a UK citizen until at least 1934 is reinforced by the fact that his sister Alfhild remembered none of the girls could join the British Forces until after Norway entered the war, and that, although they were British-born, they were treated as “foreigners and spies” — Conversation with the author, 08/07/92.

^§Aadnesen & Dahl continued in existence until the late 1950s, but by 1930, Ludvig Aadnesen “Parrain” was spending much of his time travelling in Norway and France. A bon viveur, without children of his own, he was a generous and supportive godfather to the Dahl children, who always spoke of him with enormous warmth and affection.

^¶Originally known as German East Africa, Tanganyika finally became independent in 1961. In 1964 it merged with the neighbouring island of Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania.

^**Thirty-four years later, Mrs Taubsypuss would also make a cameo appearance as the US president’s cat in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

^††In Going Solo, Dahl describes Mdisho as coming from the nonexistent Mwanumwezi tribe. It is likely he intended to write Nyamwezi — the main tribe from the area in northwest Tanzania where Mdisho was born.

^‡‡"I’ve got a present in the offing for you,” he told his mother in May 1939. “It’s a large unlined fur made of a special rare & very beautiful kind of rabbit which is found only on the lower slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro. It would make a lovely coat — or otherwise a car rug. The deal is not yet completed” — Dahl, Letter to his mother, 05/07/39 — RDMSC RD 14/3/36.