Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 13

ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1940, a tiny aircraft landed at a remote military airfield in northern Egypt. It was just after 5 p.m. and the sun was already falling low in the Western sky, causing the small machine to cast distorted shadows on the bright blue sea as it came in on its final approach. There was a light wind from the northwest. Visibility was good. The Gloster Gladiator, barely 27 feet long, touched down on the primitive airstrip and taxied rapidly to a standstill. The pilot switched off the single 830hp Bristol Mercury radial engine and all was silent. A couple of engineers approached the aircraft. As they did so, the canopy tilted backwards and a tall, gangly figure emerged from the tiny cockpit. He was wearing a light cotton flying suit. A route map was strapped to his knee. Pilot Officer Roald Dahl was just twenty-four years old and he was understandably nervous, for it was his first venture into a field of war. He had been in the air for much of the afternoon, ferrying the new Gladiator from an airstrip on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron at a secret location somewhere in the North African desert. At Amiriya, near Alexandria, where he had stopped to refuel an hour earlier, he had landed in a sandstorm. Now he was tired. He had yet to discover his final destination, which was still confidential. In a few moments’ time, the airstrip’s commanding officer would tell him its coordinates and he could depart. He asked directions to the CO’s tent, hoping the end of his journey would not be far away.

The tiny coastal airstrip at Fouka was no more than a huddle of tents and parked aircraft — around it sand and water stretched as far as the eye could see. Less than 100 miles west was the front line. The invading Italian Army, which had crossed over from Libya the week before, was now encamped further down the coast at Sidi Barrani. Fouka was the last place of safety. Beyond it lay the real war — a war for which Dahl knew he was largely unprepared. He was flying a plane with which he was relatively unfamiliar and had received no air-to-air combat practice during his six months of advanced training. The sand blew against the tents, making the canvas rustle and sometimes flap violently. Inside one of them, the commanding officer made a phone call. He asked the pilot for his map. “Eighty Squadron are now there,” the officer declared, pointing to a spot called Sidi Heneish in the middle of the Libyan Plateau 30 miles south of Mersah Matruh, another small coastal town on the edge of the Mediterranean. “Will it be easy to see?” Dahl asked. He knew the airstrip was camouflaged and it was already beginning to get dark. “You can’t miss it,” was the reply.

At 6.15 p.m. the aeroplane took off from the landing strip at Fouka and headed southwest. The windsock by the runway stood out straight like a signpost. Dahl estimated the journey would take fifty minutes at most. It would not be properly dark until seven-thirty, so he should just have time to get to there before night fell. He had calculated his bearings carefully, but navigating across desert was always dangerous. He flew low, at about 800 feet, but now he was travelling away from the coast. Now, the reassuring white foamy guideline, running between blue sea and yellow sand, was no longer there to keep him on track. The terrain below him was quite different. It offered no visual landmarks to help him on his way, and dusk was the most difficult time to fly. With no cloud cover, the winds could suddenly change direction, sometimes even by 180 degrees, as the temperatures over the sand plummeted. He might easily be thrown off course. An error of 1 degree would leave him a mile away from his destination; an error of more than 5 or 10 would be disastrous. He began to wonder if he should not have stayed overnight at Fouka and joined his squadron early the following morning instead.

As the minutes passed, the ground beneath him became a mottled canvas of browns, yellows and reds, shifting and darkening as the sun moved toward the horizon. The desert seemed to stretch away forever, featureless and hostile. He felt lonely, but protected, within the tight womb of the cockpit. Sometimes he wondered if he was the only living thing left in the world. The Gladiator’s engine whirred away in front of him, but its deep song no longer delighted his ear. Fifty minutes was up. And now, as the sun began to set, the young man began to sweat. There was no sign of an airstrip anywhere — just an endless vista of boulders, ruts and dried-out gullies. Had he been given the wrong coordinates? Had he miscalculated his bearings? Or become a victim of a sudden change in wind direction? He circled the area — scouring the ground below for aircraft, tents, any signs of human habitation. He flew around to the north, south, east and west, but all he could see was sand, rock and camel-thorn.

The last rays of the setting sun illuminated the desert with a fierce red glow. Soon it would be really dark. His fuel was low. Going back to Fouka was not an option. He had only one possibility left — a forced landing. That was what he had been trained to do in these circumstances. He would land in the desert and spend the night there. Tomorrow morning a search party would be sent to find him. It was not the way he had planned to arrive at his squadron for his first day in action, but now there was no alternative. Desperately, he looked for somewhere to land the tiny craft. He skimmed low over the bumpy ground but could find nothing suitable. The sun disappeared behind the horizon and he knew his time had run out. He must land the plane immediately. He took a chance, throttling back and touching down at about 80 miles an hour, praying the wheels would not strike a rock. But luck was not on his side. The undercarriage hit a boulder and collapsed instantly into a pile of twisted metal and rubber, burying the nose of the plane into the ground. He was thrown violently forward against the front of the canopy. His nose was driven back into his face, his skull was fractured, and he was knocked unconscious.*

It was a humiliating start to a flying career that had promised great things. Dahl had been one of the top trainees on his training course in Iraq, finding “great joy”¹ in all the flying exercises undertaken there, despite the fact that he thought the station at Habbaniya — “Have a Banana”, as it was known in RAF slang — tedious and enervating.² Later he recalled it as “an abominable, unhealthy, desolate place … a vast assemblage of hangars and Nissen huts and brick bungalows set slap in the middle of a boiling desert on the banks of the muddy Euphrates river miles from anywhere”.³ Nevertheless, at least initially, he was awestruck by the sheer size of this city in the sand, constructed 60 miles away from Baghdad and boasting as many as 10,000 inhabitants. Cataloguing its many buildings, which included churches, a cinema, a dental hospital and a mineral water factory, Dahl added ruefully to his mother that “women do not come this way, so amongst numerous other things … they will have to be forgotten. But that will not be difficult because we are working and flying so hard.”⁴ The trainees flew almost every day, mostly in the mornings. There were navigational, technical and meteorological classes in the afternoons. His instructors had praised Dahl’s flying skills as “well above average”, judging his aerobatic skills “exceptional”.⁵ His written tests too had been excellent and he was an assiduous student — although he did occasionally find time to venture out into the surrounding territory. Once he went to see the ruins of Babylon and several times he went to bandit-infested Baghdad, shopping in the street markets and playing poker with the infamously knife-wielding, gun-toting natives. They were, he reported, “a treacherous crowd”.⁶

Dahl’s response to the locals had initially been one of interest and wonder. The Bedouin tribesmen he encountered in Palestine on the way to Habbaniya had fascinated him with their “huge sheepskin coats and furry hats”.⁷ But in Iraq it was a different matter. There the first responses to the RAF airmen were almost invariably hostile. Iraqis hurled stones at the planes and took potshots at the pilots with their rifles. Dahl’s trips into the capital, to haggle with the coppersmiths and the silversmiths, excited him, and he was filled with admiration for the skills of the jewellers and craftsmen, but he was also horrified by the squalor he found there and revolted by the “horde of horrible little boys” who always followed him around. He described Baghdad as “a bloody awful town. Easily the dirtiest I’ve been to yet. The whole place is literally falling down. On either side of most of the streets you have mud brick ruins, in which people live, with the most loathsome smells issuing from their doorways. The pavements are simply packed with every conceivable kind of person — Arabs, Syrians, Jews, Negroes, Indians and the majority who are just nothing at all, with faces the colour of milk chocolate, and long flowing, but very dirty robes.” After driving back through bandit country, and being chased by pariah dogs, cackling Bedouin hags, and “blokes with guns and knives who don’t think twice about cutting your balls out for the sake of getting your brass fly buttons”,⁸ he was probably more relieved than he admitted to get back to the air-conditioned tedium of RAF Habbaniya.

“Lucky Break” (1977), and “Going Solo” (1986). Eighty Squadron’s own accident report is brief, noting drily that “Pilot Officer Dahl was ferrying an aircraft from No. 102 Maintenance Unit to this unit, but unfortunately not being used to flying aircraft over the desert he made a forced landing two miles west of Mersah Matruh. He made an unsuccessful forced landing and the aircraft burst into flames. The pilot was badly burned and he was conveyed to an Army Field Ambulance station” — PRO Air 27, 669.

Named after the Arabic word for the oleanders that had been planted along its avenues, in a futile attempt to soften the ferocity of the desert sun, Habbaniya may have been dull, but its conveniences made the harsh desert conditions tolerable. While Dahl was there, however, it was also to prove unexpectedly vulnerable to the elements. The camp had been constructed on a location that was prone to flooding, and that spring, when a swollen Euphrates threatened to burst its banks, thousands of inhabitants were forced to abandon their duties for six weeks, and build themselves a tented city on higher ground nearby. It was a miserable task, made worse by heat, scorpions, flies, sand vipers, and incessant 40mph sandstorms. Eventually the danger passed, everyone returned to the relative luxury of their messes and Nissen huts, and flying training resumed once more. The sandstorms ground down everyone’s spirits. But they also brought out the Stoic in Dahl. “It’s an excellent thing,” he wrote his mother, “to experience discomforts which are so intense that you can be tolerably certain that you will never have to experience ones which are worse.” He concluded that when, if ever, his flying training resumed, he would probably be “a sort of fossilised sand mound”.⁹

In high summer, as temperatures soared to over 50 degrees Celsius in the shade, the pilots were only able to train between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. The rest of the day was spent skulking indoors, avoiding the heat. Then the boredom was acute and Dahl could not wait to get away. “All we do is to fly in the early mornings, sleep and sweat in the afternoons, and listen to the news on the wireless for the rest of the time,” he told his mother. “And anything more dismal than listening to the wireless these days it would be hard to find.”¹⁰ He likened the heat to that of a Turkish bath, joking that if he got through the war, he would be “well-qualified to become an attendant in one”.¹¹ He was now flying Hawker Harts and Audaxes, light bombers armed with machine guns, in which he had his first lessons in how to shoot down other planes. He found these experiences “exhilarating”.¹² By mid-August 1940, with more than 150 hours in his logbook, he had been made a pilot officer, passing out, he told his mother, with “Special Distinction” and being assessed as having “exceptional” flying ability.¹³

In his final exams, Dahl passed out third out of forty. The only two men to pass with higher marks had already flown as civilian pilots before the war.¹⁴ Now, proudly wearing his RAF flying badge, he returned to Egypt, to the RAF station in Ismailia, where he was posted to 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. But he never arrived there. Instead, on the eve of his first day as a combat pilot, he destroyed his own plane, crashing it in the desert, before he had fired a shot in anger.

The smell of petrol stirred his consciousness. He tried to open his eyes, but he could see nothing. Moments later both the Gladiator’s fuel tanks exploded and the craft itself caught fire. Blinded and numb, Dahl contemplated what seemed to be a certain death. “All I wanted was to go gently off to sleep and to hell with the flames,”¹⁵ he wrote later. But something forced him to act, to extricate his damaged body from its parachute straps, push open the cockpit canopy, and drop out of it onto the sand beneath. His overalls were burning too, but he put out the fire by rolling on the ground. It was not bravery, Dahl later noted, simply a “tendency to remain conscious”¹⁶ that saved him from being burned to death. “All I wanted was to get away from the tremendous heat and rest in peace. The world about me was divided sharply down the middle into two halves. Both these halves were pitch black, but one was scorching hot and the other was not.”¹⁷ In terrible pain, Dahl crawled slowly away from the burning wreckage. But he was not yet out of danger.

My face hurt most. I slowly put a hand up to feel it. It was very sticky. My nose didn’t seem to be there. I tried to feel my teeth to see if they were still there, but it seemed as though one or two were missing. And then the machine guns started off. I knew right away what it was. There were about fifty rounds of ammunition left in each of my eight guns and, without thinking, I had crawled away from the fire out in front of the machine, and they were going off in the heat. I could hear them hitting the sand and stones all round, but I didn’t feel like getting up and moving right then, so I dozed off. ¹⁸

All the bullets missed him. Later that night, three infantrymen from the Suffolk Regiment, who had seen the plane come down some two miles west of their base in Mersah Matruh, went out to inspect the wreckage and found the injured pilot, barely conscious, but still alive. His flying overalls were so burnt and his face so disfigured that he was almost unrecognizable as an RAF officer. The soldiers carried him back to the underground Army Field Ambulance Station in Mersah, where one of the army doctors initially mistook him for an enemy Italian.¹⁹Eventually, he was patched up, sedated, and sent by train to the Anglo-Swiss Hospital in Alexandria, where he was treated for burns, severe concussion and spinal trauma. Initially, his face was so swollen that he could not open his eyes and it was impossible to assess whether the accident had blinded him. The doctors did not know whether he would ever see again.

For Dahl, it was a time of existential crisis. For almost a month he inhabited a hazy world of total darkness, uncertain of time or surround ings.†Concussed, blind and isolated from family and friends, he was disoriented and helpless. His imagination ran wild. It was a situation he recreated in an early short story, “Beware of the Dog”;

The whole world was white and there was nothing in it. It was so white that sometimes it looked black, and after a time it was either white or black, but mostly it was white. He watched it as it turned from white to black, then back to white again, and the white stayed a long time, but the black lasted only a few seconds. He got into the habit of going to sleep during the white periods, of waking up just in time to see the world when it was black. The black was very quick. Sometimes it was only a flash, a flash of black lightning. The white was slow, and in the slowness of it, he always dozed off. ²⁰

Dahl later wrote that the possibility of losing his sight did not frighten or depress him and that “blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important … the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past was to accept all the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.”²¹ As he lay in his bed, he also learned that the family house in Bexley had been hit by German bombers (his mother and sisters had survived, but had been forced to evacuate the property) and that the tent in Ismailia, where his air force kit, including camera and photographs, was being kept, had also been destroyed in an air raid. It was a low point, but it confirmed in him the sense that — despite the pleasure that the good things in life could bring — all material possessions were ultimately transitory. He and his family had survived. That was what mattered.

Gradually, his condition began to improve. The cranial swelling subsided and he was able to see again. Nevertheless, he was still sleeping more than sixteen hours a day and would remain immobilized for more than another month. His features were reconstructed by a Harley Street plastic surgeon, now working for the army, who Dahl later claimed had modelled his new nose on the movie star Rudolph Valentino’s.²² But his first letter back home to his mother, written almost two months after the accident, was probably closer to the truth, as he described how the ear, nose and throat surgeon “pulled my nose out of the back of my head and shaped it”. He added that his new nose looked “just as before except that it’s a little bent about”.²³ His injuries were sufficiently severe that his doctors suggested Dahl be invalided back to England on the next convoy, but he resisted their advice, because he had been told that he might yet fly again, and if that were possible, he wanted to remain close to his squadron. It cannot have been an easy decision. He was in great pain. He had not seen his family for more than two years. And, as he had yet to meet any of his fellow pilots from 80 Squadron, which had by that time moved from North Africa to Greece, where it was engaged in a successful counterattack against the invading Italians, he had no real comrades to rejoin. But Dahl was brave, stubborn and eager for action. Moreover, although the RAF had concluded that he was “not to blame” for destroying the Gladiator and that pilot inexperience had caused his accident,²⁴ he wanted to prove his fighting skills, and put behind him what had been an ignominious beginning to his career as a fighter pilot.

Dahl later claimed that an RAF inquiry had revealed that the commanding officer at Fouka had given him the wrong coordinates and that 80 Squadron’s desert airstrip was actually 50 miles further south of the place where he had crashed his plane.²⁵ Now we will only ever have his word for it, as the official records of that inquiry were destroyed in the 1960s.²⁶ Dahl also implied that the crash was partly due to systemic planning failures within the RAF itself, maintaining that he was quite unused to flying Gloster Gladiators and that he only saw one for the first time less than twenty-four hours before he was due to ferry it from Ismailia into the desert. He added that when he had asked for some training, a “supercilious” officer pointed out to him that, as there was only one cockpit, he would have to teach himself. “This was surely not the right way of doing things,” he concluded.²⁷ The aviation writer and historian Derek O’Connor has subsequently observed that what Dahl failed to mention in that context was that he had spent the preceding two weeks at Ismailia learning how to fly an almost identical aircraft: the Gloster Gauntlet. According to O’Connor, the Gladiator was essentially “an improved version of the Gauntlet with an uprated Bristol Mercury engine and an enclosed cockpit”.²⁸ Dahl’s need to rewrite history here speaks of more than a great STORYTELLER embellishing the truth to entertain his reader. It suggests instead the intensity of his need to tell the story of the crash in a way that exonerated him of any slur of incompetence. The RAF records were not enough. He also needed a version of events that absolved him from responsibility and pointed the finger of blame elsewhere. Inevitably, it contributed to his later repeated fiction that instead of wrecking his plane, he was “shot down” in combat over the desert.

These was one final piece of mythmaking. On almost every occasion that he retold the events of that evening in the last forty years of his life, Dahl recounted them as if he was entirely on his own. But there was another pilot involved. This man flew with him from Fouka in a different Gladiator, safely put his machine down on the sand close by the wreckage of Dahl’s plane, and comforted the burned and bleeding Roald through the long cold desert night. And in Dahl’s earliest versions of these events, “Shot Down Over Libya” and “A Piece of Cake”, both of which were written in wartime, he too is present in the narrative. In fiction, this man was called “Shorty” or “Peter”. In reality, he was Douglas McDonald. McDonald, who had grown up in Kenya and learned to fly before the war at the Aero Club of East Africa, saw his friend “Lofty” that night in extremis — demoralized, tortured by pain and profoundly physically vulnerable. So vulnerable indeed that until, fifty years later, when he had to face the final days of his own terminal illness, he would always recall it as the worst moment of his life.²⁹ Dahl had always liked to appear strong. His position, since childhood, as the dominant male in his family household inclined him to support others, to be the paterfamilias. In this narrative, there was little place for weakness and incapacity. Consequently, “Shorty” or “Peter” soon disappeared from his retelling of the events of the crash. Yet in a remarkable letter written to Douglas McDonald’s widow, Barbara, in 1953 — not long after her husband’s death in a plane crash in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro — Roald offered a tiny glimpse of just how exposed he felt that evening and how much he had needed the simple consolation of human warmth and company:

I expect he’s told you a little of what happened that evening in the desert when we both came down, and I crashed. But I doubt he explained how really marvellous he was to me, and looked after me and tried to comfort me, and stayed with me out there during a very cold night, and kept me warm. Well, he did. And I shall always remember it most vividly, even some of the things he said (because I was quite conscious) and most of all how, when he ran over and found me not dead, he did a sort of dance of joy in the sand and it was all very wonderful, because after all we were not very far away from the Italians and he had a great many other things to think about? ³⁰

The letter is significant not just because it makes plain exactly what happened that night, but also because it also gives us a rare insight into Roald’s sense of vulnerability. This was not a side of his personality that he normally disclosed to the world, preferring to present in its place the image of the stalwart problem solver or the ebullient humorist. These of course were real enough qualities as well, but sometimes they served also to mask feelings of inadequacy or weakness. The pattern had started in his youth. For his mother’s sake, he had cultivated a stiff upper lip and taken pains to conceal his own suffering. This attitude would continue throughout his life. His earliest short stories about flying do reveal occasional cracks in the facade, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in his earlier versions of the immediate aftermath of the crash, where in the “bitter cold” of the desert, “Peter lay down close alongside so we could both keep a little warmer … I do not know how long we stayed there … Later I remember hot thick soup and one spoonful making me sick. And all the time the pleasant feeling that Peter was around, being wonderful, doing wonderful things and never going away.”³¹

Before he left the Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Roald spent all of the money that had accumulated in his bank account buying a gold watch for each of the three nursing sisters who had looked after him. It was an act of characteristic generosity. Giving presents had been and would always be an essential part of his psychological makeup. Within the family, this could sometimes be interpreted as reinforcing his position as the dominant successful male, but with others the impulse was usually entirely altruistic. It was an attitude that would soon be echoed in the behaviour of others toward him — most strikingly, a wealthy English couple, Major Teddy Peel and his wife Dorothy. Following a new set of medical examinations, Dahl was sent back to Alexandria to convalesce at their home. Like many of the wealthier British inhabitants of Alexandria, the Peels made a point of visiting injured officers in hospital, and Dorothy had taken a particular liking to the charming, fragile giant, persuading him to abandon his plans to recuperate in the Kenyan Highlands and insisting that he stay as a guest in their spacious villa on the rue des Ptolemees. There, Roald told his mother that he spent most of his time “doing practically nothing at all with the greatest possible comfort”. Dahl, of course, had been raised without financial worries. He was used to servants and now had a small private income from his father’s trust. Nevertheless, he was amazed by the lavish expatriate Alexandrian lifestyle, noting — perhaps a little critically — that even in wartime, everyone there seemed to have “pots of money”.³²

His hosts were admiringly described as “probably the nicest and richest people” in town, with five cars, a large motor yacht, and a twin-engined aeroplane of their own.³³ In their house he slept on silk and linen sheets, often for twelve hours at a stretch, listened to Beethoven, Brahms and Elgar on the gramophone, made occasional conversation, and tried to regain some of the 30 pounds he had lost since the accident. Once or twice he even ventured out to play a few holes of golf. But his recovery was slow. He tired easily, his mind often felt sluggish, and he suffered from severe and prolonged headaches. He complained that he could not even concentrate sufficiently to play a hand of bridge and was prone to blackouts — particularly when he went out of the house.

After a month with the Peels, Dahl’s headaches had become less fre quent, and in February 1941, he was sent to RAF Heliopolis, near Cairo, where he was put on “light duties”, looking after air force pay packets and ferrying messages across town in a chauffeur-driven car. One day, on a trip into Cairo, he accidentally ran into Lesley Pares, a friend of Alfhild’s, who was working for the Air Ministry. Lesley was immediately struck by Roald’s good looks and rakish charm. In our conversations, she recalled him nonchalantly performing Beethoven’s three-minute bagatelle, Fur Elise, in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo as if he was an accomplished pianist, then later confessing to her privately that it was the only thing he could play. She found him unpredictable, attractive and compelling. But she also found him indiscreet, which unsettled her, as did the fact that he could be argumentative and dogmatic. She tried to avoid encounters between him and another friend of hers who was a conscientious objector, because Roald was “rather fierce” on the subject of pacifism.³⁴

For his part, Roald took an immediate liking to Lesley, describing her to his mother as “much nicer than the average Judy one meets here — most of them are bloody awful”.³⁵ Her forthrightness, lack of pretension and disregard for unnecessary politesse reminded him of his family. “I like Lesley because she’s the first woman I’ve met since I left home to whom I can swear or say what I bloody well like without her turning a hair,” he wrote, adding humorously that she had probably been “well-trained” by his sister Alfhild.³⁶ She became a regular companion. They went on picnics into the desert together, where they talked about his family, argued about politics (she remembered him being quite socialist), and discussed poetry.

Wartime Egypt had a thriving British expatriate social scene, and a fertile literary subculture that included the writers Elizabeth David and Lawrence Durrell, who both moved there in 1941, after the Nazis invaded Greece. Lesley Pares would get to know them both and come to be extremely close to Elizabeth David. But Dahl was concentrating on his recovery and literary soirees held little interest for him. He preferred listening to his gramophone, animated only by occasional forays into the routine colonial existence of golf clubs, cocktails, dinner parties, and games of bridge. His contribution to Egyptian artistic life was limited to exhibiting two of the Iraqi photographs that had survived the destruction of his kit at an exhibition in Cairo, organized by a friend of his mother’s from London, Dr Omar Khairat. One of them, an aerial photograph of the mighty 2,000-year-old Arch of Ctesiphon, won him a silver medal. He had taken it from the cockpit of his plane while flying from Hab-baniya. However, his head injuries remained slow to heal and a return to the air was beginning to seem increasingly unlikely. Blinding headaches could still force him to abandon the simplest of tasks and retire to his room, and he was dogged by a sense of lethargy and lightheadedness. So he waited, hoping that his health would improve and that he would be able, at last, to fly in action. For, despite the doctors’ pessimistic prognosis about his head injuries, his “one obsession was to get back to operational flying”.³⁷

“A monumental bash on the head” was how Dahl once described his accident in the Western Desert, claiming that it directly led to his becoming a writer.³⁸ This was not just because his first published piece of writing was a semifictionalized account of the crash, but also because he suspected that the brain injuries which he received there had materially altered his personality and inclined him to creative writing. His daughter Ophelia recalled her father’s fascination with tales of people who had experienced dramatic psychological and physiological changes — such as losing or recovering sight — after suffering a blow to the head. He also told her that he was convinced something of this sort had happened to him, as it explained why a budding corporate businessman, without any particular artistic ambition, was transformed into someone with a burning need to write and tell stories.³⁹ This hypothesis was doubtless attractive too because it pushed potentially more complex psychological issues about the sources of his desire to write into the background.

Nowadays doctors might well have diagnosed Dahl as suffering from what is called postconcussive syndrome.⁴⁰ The initial symptoms of this condition are normally forgetfulness, irritability, an inability to concentrate and severe headaches. Dahl suffered from all of these. In some patients the symptoms disappear, but leave behind longer-lasting behavioural changes, which are usually associated with mood swings and an increased lack of inhibition. In some cases, too, it can also result in a fundamental alteration of the perception of the self. With Dahl, these alterations were marginal, but they were nonetheless significant. His sense of embarrassment — already minimal — was further diminished, his sense of fantasy heightened, while his desire to shock became even more pronounced. He emerged from his crisis more confident, more determined to make a mark. His first brush with death doubtless also played a significant part in this change in his own perception of himself, making him more aware of his vulnerability, more reflective, yet also intensifying the sense of himself as a survivor, as a figure of destiny.

This heightened sense of self was closely linked to the very act of flying. From its ecstatic beginnings, swooping over the Kenyan bush, the sense of being alone and free in an unfamiliar element stimulated Roald’s sense of the mystical. It reinforced his sense of isolation. The sky became an alternative world: a place of tranquillity and gentle beauty, a refuge either from the horrors of war or the cruelties of human behaviour that could be magical, transformative, even redemptive. Most of his early adult stories are profoundly connected to this spiritual dimension of flying, and it is also a feature of many of Dahl’s most well loved children’s books. In the first of these, James and the Giant Peach, the child protagonist, James, who has escaped from his cruel aunts to find shelter inside an enormous peach, stands at night on the surface of the giant fruit, accompanied by a group of equally outsize bugs. They are all flying high above the Atlantic Ocean because the peach has been borne aloft by a flock of seagulls. Contemplating the heavens above him, James is filled with an overpowering sense of mystery and wonder. “Clouds like mountains towered over their heads on all sides, mysterious, menacing, overwhelming …,” Dahl writes. “The peach was a soft, stealthy traveller, making no noise at all as it floated along. And several times during that long silent night ride high up over the middle of the ocean in moonlight, James and his friends saw things that no-one had seen before.”⁴¹ It is a sense of epiphany similar to that which affects Charlie Bucket, the hero of Dahl’s next children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when, flying high over the factory inside a great glass elevator, Willy Wonka hands over his world to the young boy.

The glory of flight also suffuses Dahl’s last book, The Minpins, in which a small boy, Little Billy, flies on the back of a swan into a dark and magical nocturnal landscape, filled with extraordinary natural wonders. Here, fifty years after he himself last flew on his own, Dahl powerfully evokes that sense of separation between the solitary flyer and the rest of humanity that he had felt when launching his schoolboy fire-balloons, and which, through flying a fighter plane, had been fixed at the centre of his psychology. Boy and bird, moving as one, witness things that neither will ever be able to understand or explain. And what they see is theirs alone. “They flew in a magical world of silence, swooping and gliding over the dark world below, where all the earthly people were fast asleep in their beds.”⁴² This mystical connection between boy and bird was familiar territory for Dahl, who had explored it fifteen years earlier in one of his cruellest and most powerful tales, “The Swan”. Here, another small boy is hunted and bullied by a ruthless pair of child tormentors. They torture him and deliberately kill the nesting swan he has been watching with their rifle. Cutting the wings off the dead bird, they strap them to the terrified boy and force him to climb high up a nearby tree. Then they dare him to fly. When he refuses, they shoot him in the thigh in an attempt to make him jump. Wounded and bleeding, the boy spreads his wings and dives off the branch. However, he does not fall to the ground. Instead, he soars into safety toward “a light … of such brilliance and beauty he was unable to look away from it”.⁴³ Dahl viscerally understood that situation: the dazzling bright aviator’s light, the fine thread that separates life from death. He had experienced that, too.

In March 1941, after five weeks in Heliopolis, he was surprisingly declared fit enough to be sent up to RAF Ismailia on the banks of the Suez Canal for some further training, prior to joining his squadron. There, he was relieved to discover that the outdated Gloster Gladiators had now been replaced by “a much more modern type of fighter”⁴⁴ — a Mark I Hurricane. But he was also shocked again at how little time he was given to learn to fly it and prepare for aerial combat.‡ His accident was now seven months in the past. But in early April 1941, he once again found himself in almost exactly the same position as he had been in September 1940 — ferrying an unfamiliar aircraft into alien territory. Only this time he was going to Greece rather than Libya. Another thing had changed as well. The pilot. He was no longer the nervous youth flying recklessly into the desert night. He had passed though a marking point, a division between innocence and experience, between a kind of happy-go-lucky view of life and a darker, more critical view of human nature. He had not yet flown a sortie in anger, but the crash and his months in hospital had brought him face-to-face with death and had caused him to reflect on the reasons for living. The next two weeks would only intensify this sensation, as each new day brought with it the imminent prospect of his own demise.

^*I have pieced these events together as accurately as I can from Roald Dahl’s own pilot’s logbook, RAF records, interviews with other pilots, and Dahl’s many written descriptions of the events of that day, principally in “Shot Down Over Libya” (1942), “Missing: Believed Killed” (1944), “A Piece of Cake” (1942—46),

^†Although he told his mother he was only blind for a week, he later told his editor at Farrar, Straus, Stephen Roxburgh, that he had “said that so as not to alarm her. It was much, much longer …” — Letter to Stephen Roxburgh, undated, FSG.

^‡In Going Solo, Dahl claims he was given just a “couple of days” to master the Hurricane and fly it to Greece. Yet in Ismailia, after a refresher course flying Miles Magisters and Gloster Gauntlets, Dahl had been sent on a two-week Hurricane conversion course. As Derek O’Connor commented, this was not “an immense amount of time to come to terms with a monoplane equipped with retractable landing-gear and a variable-pitch propeller, but there was a war on” — O’Connor, “Roald Dahl’s Wartime Adventures”, p. 47.