Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 14

IN ONE OF THE drawers of a cabinet in his writing hut, Roald Dahl kept a battered black Herculex address book. Purchased in 1941, and used for more than thirty years, it contains many a famous name: Walt Disney, Hoagy Carmichael, Max Beaverbrook, Ginger Rogers, Lillian Hellman, Ben Travers and Ian Fleming are just a few of the well-known figures from show business, politics and the arts who played bit parts in Dahl’s life and whose contact details ornament the book’s yellowing pages. The scruffy, tattered little volume is more than a testament to his fascination with celebrity: it offers a number of clues to his personality and tiny insights into his life in the 1940s and 1950s. On one page are scribbled memories of a lunch with Noel Coward. On another, a betting forecast. Most intriguingly, on the inside front cover is a list of names. These run in an irregular column down the right-hand side and there are no related addresses or telephone numbers. A corner of the address book is water-damaged and the ink has run off the page, so some of the names are indecipherable. Several are misspelled. Most however are still clearly legible: Tap Jones, Oofy Still, Timber Woods, Trolly Trollip, Pat Pattle, Bill Vale, Keg Dowding, Jimmy Kettlewell, Doc Astley, Hugh Tulloch, George Westlake, David Coke. A digit is scrawled beside each of them and against several Dahl also marked an X. At the end of the list, the writing curling away toward the bottom of the page, he added: “Self 5”. Above all these names, underlined and in capitals, is the heading: “80 SQUADRON, GREECE”.¹

When the Italian Army opportunistically entered the northern Greek province of Epirus in late October 1940, it did not expect to encounter any significant resistance. But despite inferior firepower and an air force that consisted of outdated planes, the Greeks had fought back with unexpected tenacity, and by mid-November the Italians had been forced back into Albania. Great Britain, a guarantor of Greek independence, had responded to an immediate call for air support by despatching two squadrons of fighters, one of Gladiators (80 Squadron) and another mixed squadron of Blenheims (112 Squadron) from their already overstretched operations in North Africa. Based initially in the northern Greek airfields of Larissa, Trikkala and Ioannina, 80 Squadron’s twelve Gloster Gladiators provided support for the Greek ground forces and made several “kills” of enemy aircraft in the border area, before winter rains waterlogged the grass airfields and forced the squadron to return south, to Elevsis, on the coast, a few miles west of Athens.

Six weeks later, in February 1941, an Allied Expeditionary Force, made up largely of Australians and New Zealanders, was sent from Egypt to bolster the Greek resistance. Then, as the weather improved, 80 Squadron — assisted by reinforcements from 33 Squadron — moved north again toward the Albanian border to support them. Under the command of South African-born Marmaduke “Pat” Pattle, the RAF’s top fighter ace in the war, and flying largely in outdated biplanes, they scored a remarkable series of victories, destroying over a hundred Italian aircraft, against the loss of eight British fighters and two pilots. On one memorable day at the end of February, the RAF destroyed twenty-seven enemy planes without a single loss of their own. It was 80 Squadron’s finest hour, and their victories were celebrated across Greece, with the pilots feted as heroes by the grateful locals. Their successes were rewarded with the arrival of six brand-new Mark I Hawker Hurricanes, a single-engined, highly manoeuvrable fighter, whose fuselage, though still covered with doped linen, was constructed from modern high-tensile steel rather than the wood of the Gladiators. Each was equipped with eight wing-mounted Browning machine guns which fired simultaneously when the pilot’s thumb depressed his gun button. Pattle himself claimed the new plane’s first victim over Greece, a Fiat G.50, which exploded before his eyes in a spectacular fireball with his first touch of the button. Beyond the mountains to the east that separated Greece from Yugoslavia, however, lurked vast numbers of the German Luftwaffe, who were advancing south through the Balkans. As their Italian allies struggled to hold the Greek counterinsurgents, it became inevitable that they would soon be drawn into the conflict.

On April 6, 1941, the Nazi invasion of Greece began. It was a ruthlessly effective assault. Within two days the Germans had occupied the northeastern city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki), and soon the Allied forces were in full retreat. While 80 Squadron withdrew south to Elevsis to be refitted entirely with Hurricanes, the inspirational Pat Pattle was despatched from 80 Squadron to the front line to command 33 Squadron, which — alongside 112 Squadron — was now bearing the brunt of the German offensive. Eighty Squadron remained behind at Elevsis to defend Athens. The odds against the British and Greek pilots were enormous: approximately 800 German and 300 Italian planes against a motley force of 192 British and Greek machines — or, as one the pilot described it, “a pleasant little show. All the wops in the world and half the Jerries versus two men, a boy and a flying hearse.”² The mountainous terrain and the thick clouds and driving rain ensured that there were occasional lulls in the fighting. One lasted almost a week. But the calm was only temporary. And everyone was aware of it. It was into this gloomy mind-set that Dahl was despatched from Egypt on April 14. He evoked its awful fatalism in an early short story, “Katina”; “The mountains were invisible behind the rain, but I knew they were around us on every side. I had a feeling they were laughing at us, laughing at the smallness of our numbers and at the hopeless courage of our pilots.”³

As he climbed into his Hurricane at Abu Suweir, once again Dahl felt that the military establishment were being reckless both with human life and with their own machinery. “I had no experience at all flying against the enemy,” he was later to write. “I had never been in an operational squadron. And now they wanted me to jump into a plane I had never flown in before and fly it to Greece to fight against a highly efficient air force that outnumbered us by a hundred to one.”⁴ He may have exagger ated the odds, but his scepticism was more than justified. Dahl was entering a conflict where the only possible outcome was defeat. The cockpit of his Hurricane was cramped and uncomfortable, particularly for someone of his height. He was also carrying gallons of extra fuel in tanks strapped to the wings just so he could complete the journey without refuelling. For nearly five hours he flew over the Mediterranean, contorted into “the posture of an unborn baby in the womb”.⁵ When he landed on “the red soil of the aerodrome at Elevsis”, dotted with tents, temporary latrines, washbasins, and grey corrugated iron hangars along one side,⁶ he was suffering from “excruciating cramp” and could not climb out of the plane. He had to be lifted out by ground crew.⁷

In Going Solo, Dahl dwells on the pointlessness of the Greek campaign. His spanking new plane “won’t last a week in this place”, declares one of the men who help him out of the cockpit, while explaining the full extent of the awesome opposition the squadron is facing. Half an hour later, a fellow pilot confirms the situation, telling Roald that their position is “absolutely hopeless”. None of this unduly worried him, he claimed. “I was young enough and starry-eyed enough to look upon the Grecian escapade as nothing more than a grand adventure. The thought that I might never get out of the country alive didn’t occur to me. It should have done, and looking back on it now I am surprised that it didn’t.” He was surely being disingenuous. Naturally he felt a sense of triumph that he had overcome his injuries and made it to the front line. He was a member of his squadron at last — even if, as his commanding officer Edward “Tap” Jones sarcastically noted, he was reporting for duty “six months late”.⁸*

Yet, since his crash, Dahl had also lost the young pilot’s protective sense of invulnerability. Walking across the airfield, with its myriad wildflowers “blossoming blue and yellow and red”,⁹ he must have pondered with foreboding what the future held in store. In the desert he had brushed against death and lived to fight another day. Now, in the ancient blue skies of the Mediterranean, once again he had to face its cold, silent whisper. That sense of dread, of death as a character, haunts many of his early short stories.

Each time now it gets worse. At first it begins to grow upon you slowly, coming upon you slowly, creeping up on you from behind, making no noise, so that you do not turn round and see it coming. If you saw it coming, perhaps you could stop it, but there is no warning … It touches you gently on the shoulder and whispers to you that you are young, that you have a million things to do and a million things to say, that if you are not careful you will buy it, that you are almost certain to buy it sooner or later, and that when you do you will not be anything any longer; you will just be a charred corpse. It whispers to you about how your corpse will look when it is charred, how black it will be and how it will be twisted and brittle, with the face and the fingers black and the shoes off the feet because the shoes always come off the feet when you die like that. ¹⁰

It was not an easy situation for the young pilot. He was joining a squadron at the end of a campaign which many of his fellow pilots had been fighting for almost six months and which was now falling apart. By the time he got to Elevsis, the remains of 112 Squadron had abandoned its northern bases and retreated south to join 80 Squadron there. The following day, 33 Squadron did the same, merging to fight the unhappy endgame of a campaign that could only have one outcome. It was hardly surprising then that on his first evening Dahl found most of his eighteen fellow pilots uncommunicative. An exception was David Coke, a son of the Earl of Leicester, who took Dahl “under his wing” and gave his tentmate some useful tips on how to shoot at the kind of German planes he was likely to be facing the following day. The rest kept themselves to themselves. “They were all very quiet. There was no larking about. There were just a few muttered remarks about the pilots who had not come back that day. Nothing else.” ¹¹

The next morning, at 10 a.m. on April 15, Dahl’s logbook indicates that he went out on his first patrol and intercepted a German plane attacking shipping coming into the harbour at Piraeus, just outside Athens. Next day near Khalkis, some 40 miles north of the airfield, he chased six Junkers 88 bombers back into the mountains and downed one of them. He did not actually see the aircraft hit the ground, but he saw all three crew bale out and abandon their machine to its fate. He had shot down his first enemy plane.† However, when he returned to Elevsis, his sense of triumph was swiftly stifled by the discovery that one of his small band of pilots, Frankie Holman, had been killed. And the manner of Holman’s death must have been particularly chilling for Roald because it was so familiar: a crash-landing. Hitting a rock at around 100 mph, his plane turned over on itself. There was no fire. But Holman was found lifeless, hanging upside down in his straps with no visible wounds. He had broken his neck.¹²

On April 17, the sense of impending defeat was reinforced by the departure of the remaining RAF bombers from Elevsis to Crete. It seemed to the fighter pilots and their maintenance crews that everyone was getting out except them. The local Greeks were dejected. In an attempt to boost Athenian morale, the British sent their sixteen serviceable Hurricanes up together to make a low pass over the city. It was an impressive sight and Dahl himself revelled in his dramatic proximity to one of the ancient cradles of civilization. But this stirring exercise in formation flying could not disguise the fact that, further north, the Allies were now completely on the run. The following day, on patrol near Khalkis, Dahl passed yet another combatant’s milestone. He intercepted a Junkers 88 that was attacking a Greek ammunition ship. Diving down from above over the brilliant blue waters of Khalkis Bay, Dahl shot at the German plane and sent it plunging headfirst into the sea, in full view of the ships below. He had claimed his second victim. This time, however, the pilot did not bale out. This time it was not just a machine he had destroyed. This time he had killed someone.

Did he realize the significance of what he had done? It is hard to say. The high sides of the Hurricane cockpit gave it a womblike feeling that made a pilot feel strangely secure — both separated and protected from the outside world. Another pilot later remarked that it was hard to believe that only a few pieces of plywood stood between you and a 20mm bullet, so there was already a detachment to the killing.¹³ Moreover, the “kill” had been detached and cold-blooded — an exercise in aerial skill and accurate marksmanship rather than a bloody close-up combat. Nonetheless, the issue of taking a life, the question “Whom shall I kill tonight?” would doubtless go on to haunt him, as it haunted the pilot protagonist of his 1945 short story “Someone Like You”. For the moment, however, he and other pilots adopted a manner that was terse and matter-of-fact. Little was discussed or overtly reflected upon. Particularly death. “Formalities did not exist,” Dahl later wrote. “Pilots came and pilots went. The others hardly noticed my presence. No real friendships existed.” Each man was just another flyer, “wrapped in a cocoon of his own problems”.¹⁴This situation caused a certain coolness to develop in his own personality that created a tension with his own natural exuberance. Writing in 1945 to an American friend, he tried to analyse where this indifference “to going home, to losing large sums of money … to everything else which men usually care about” had come from. In a strikingly honest, almost tormented letter, Dahl explained how easily young fighter pilots could become detached from almost everything. “Think,” he wrote, “if you learn to be indifferent to death, sudden death, or if you learn to pretend to be indifferent to it, then you must surely first learn to be indifferent to everything else which is less important. To young people nothing is less important than death because there is very little philosophy in them.” ¹⁵As Dahl grew older, and reflected more, that attitude would soften, but the strange disconnection would never completely leave him.

On April 18 he went up on patrol three times without great incident, noting in his logbook that southern Greece was now within range of the versatile and dangerous Messerschmitt 109 fighters. This was a sure sign that the German Army was not far away and that Athens itself would shortly come under attack. That same day, 80 Squadron also lost the happy-go-lucky, ginger-haired pilot Oofy Still. This smiling, freckled flyer would become a curious kind of literary everyman for Roald, who wrote him memorably into an early draft of his very first story, “A Piece of Cake”. His description was so vivid it provoked his hard-nosed New York agent Harold Matson to declare that it made him feel he knew Oofy personally.‡ When Roald proposed another story, this time set in Greece, he told Mat-son that “Oofy unfortunately got killed over there tackling about thirty Messerschmitt 109s single-handed. I loved him dearly”.¹⁶ His demise left just fifteen Allied pilots in Elevsis to greet the dawn of April 20, a day that would witness the climactic finale of 80 Squadron’s “Greek Adventure”.

Dahl described the Battle of Athens as “a long and beautiful dogfight in which fifteen Hurricanes fought for half an hour with between one hundred and fifty and two hundred German bombers and fighters”.¹⁷That description for once corresponds with the operations record book, which details a series of “confused” encounters fought against “overwhelming odds”, as three fragmented squadrons faced an opposition that outnumbered them by ten to one. For over half an hour these opposing forces engaged one another in a series of memorable aerial combats. It was David against Goliath. The underdog against the bully. However, far from being afraid, Dahl — like many of his pilot comrades — was thrilled by the intensity of the drama in which he found himself.

It was truly the most breathless and exhilarating time I have ever had in my life. I caught glimpses of planes with black smoke pouring from their engines. I saw planes with pieces of metal flying off their fuselages. I saw the bright red flashes coming from the wings of the Messerschmitts as they fired their guns, and once I saw a man whose Hurricane was in flames, climb calmly out onto a wing and jump off. I stayed with them until I had no ammunition left in my guns. I had done a lot of shooting, but whether I had shot anyone down or had even hit any of them I could not say. I did not dare to pause for even a fraction of a second to observe results}¹⁸

In clear blue skies over the harbour at Piraeus, the battered British planes, riddled with bullet holes and in a state that would normally have rendered them unserviceable, achieved twenty-two confirmed “kills”, at least one of which was later credited to Dahl. But they incurred heavy casualties. Five of their own machines were destroyed, and three of their pilots died. South African Harry Starrett tried to get his damaged Hurricane back to Elevsis, but it blew up on landing and he was consumed in the flames, dying of burns two days later. “Timber” Woods was attacked by what a fellow combatant, the Canadian Vernon Woodward, described as “a swarm of Ju88s protected by masses of Messerschmitt 110s”.¹⁹ Woods was an experienced pilot who had been flying since the summer of 1940. But he did not have a chance. Not even his trusty silver medallion of St Christopher could protect him against such overwhelming numbers. Woods and his blazing Hurricane vanished into the deep waters of Elevsis Bay.²⁰

Moments later, the twenty-six-year-old wizard Pat Pattle, stricken with influenza and flying his third sortie of the day, also perished. He had been trying to protect Woods when his plane was hit simultaneously by two German Messerschmitts. The Hurricane exploded in midair, tumbling into the waves to join that of Timber Woods in the depths. Pattle had just registered what was perhaps his fiftieth kill — an extraordinary record, made even more remarkable by the fact that for much of the time he had been flying antiquated biplanes. Dahl shared his fellow officers’ profound admiration for his commanding officer, recalling him in Going Solo as “very small … and very soft-spoken”, with “the deeply wrinkled doleful face of a cat who knew that all nine of its lives had already been used up”.† Only twelve pilots returned to the aerodrome at Elevsis, soaked in sweat and with their Hurricanes riddled with bullet holes. Dahl was one of them. Years later, he would reflect bitterly on the unnecessary loss of life he had witnessed that day, but his foremost emotion remained one of pride in the part he played in that gallant, if Pyrrhic, Athenian victory. Indeed, many years later he quietly drew Ophelia’s attention to the verdict of the campaign’s historian, Christopher Buckley. “In terms of heroism in the face of odds,” Buckley wrote, “the pilots of these fifteen fighters deserve to rank with the heroes of the Battle of Britain.”²¹

Early that evening, when the battered Hurricanes had returned to Elevsis and been patched up, some were deposited in hangars on the edge of the airstrip. The Germans had not attacked the corrugated iron buildings in their previous raids and it was felt it might be safer to put some of the planes there rather than leaving them out in the open where they were obvious targets. It was an error of judgement. Just before dusk there was a huge German raid and the hangars were targeted. Four Hurricanes were destroyed.¶Elevsis was now clearly an untenable base, and on April 22, all remaining British and Greek aircraft were evacuated — initially to Megara a few miles down the coast, and a day later to Argos on the Peloponnese peninsula, the most southerly region of mainland Greece. At Megara, Dahl and the seven remaining pilots of 80 Squadron encountered Air Commodore Grigson, the man in charge of the retreat. There, Dahl remembered, the pilots protested the absurdity of their situation. Greece was being abandoned, they told him, and they felt like sitting targets. Their aircraft were needed elsewhere. They urged him to let them fly their planes to North Africa, where they could play a more effective part in the desert war. But Grigson did not listen. He told them they were there to defend shipping and gave Dahl a package — presumably the records of the campaign — which he wanted delivered to a mysterious stranger, who would be waiting for him back at Elevsis. On no account, he told Dahl, was the package to fall into enemy hands.**

The air commodore’s unresponsive manner touched Dahl’s anti-authoritarian nerve. Perhaps it even reminded him of “Admiral” Murray Levick in Newfoundland. This time, however, there was no mutiny. Only bitter incomprehension. “I stared at him,” he wrote. “If this was the kind of genius that had been directing our operations, no wonder we were in a mess.”²² He got back into his Hurricane, took off, delivered the parcel, and rejoined his comrades. Twenty minutes later, they landed at Argos. Dahl described the landing ground there as “just a kind of small field … surrounded by thick olive groves into which we taxied our aircraft for hiding”.²³It had no defences and “the narrowest, bumpiest, shortest” landing strip any of the pilots had ever seen.²⁴ Their living quarters, white tents dotted about the olive groves, were easily visible from the air. To compound the absurdity of their situation, next morning five new Hurricanes arrived from Crete as reinforcements. Within hours, a German reconnaissance plane had spotted them, and after that, it was only a matter of waiting for the inevitable.

The Luftwaffe attack came shortly after 6 p.m., while Dahl and four other pilots were on patrol, searching for nonexistent Allied ships to defend. They returned two hours after the attack to find the olive grove shrouded in a thick cloud of black smoke. Using the large rock that marked the end of the landing strip as a guide, the five planes plunged into the gloomy haze, each pilot wondering what vision of destruction he would find if he managed to land successfully. The runway, it transpired, was clear of debris, but Dahl alighted from his machine to discover that the Germans had destroyed thirteen Hurricanes and a huge number of the “peculiar, ancient” ²⁵ Greek planes that had been parked with them in the olive groves. From the deep slit trenches where they had run for cover, those on the ground had been reduced to using rifles to defend themselves against the ground-strafing Messerschmitts.²⁶††

A few hours later, the Greek “fiasco” was officially over. The most se nior pilots ferried the five serviceable Hurricanes that remained back to Crete. Dahl was among those evacuated back to Egypt in a light bomber with nothing but their logbooks and the clothes they were wearing. He had been in Greece barely ten days.

The Lockheed plane landed in a remote part of the Western Desert in the early hours of the morning. The passengers disembarked: filthy, tired and without any Egyptian money. Dahl hitched a ride into Alexandria and went straight to the home of Teddy and Dorothy Peel. In Going Solo, he claims that he also took the other eight pilots there, but his letter to his mother makes no mention of this. He simply says that he arrived on the doorstep “looking like a tramp with nothing but my flying-suit and a pair of khaki shorts”.²⁷ This is the more plausible image. For, despite occasional attempts to suggest otherwise, Dahl, like many successful fighter pilots, was essentially a loner who kept himself to himself. He had come late to his squadron, when its winter glory days were over, arriving just in time to witness its rout and the death of two of its most senior pilots.²⁸On top of this, he was still struggling to keep his persistent headaches at bay and needed to conserve his energies, to concentrate on survival. He wrote to his mother a few days later from the Peels’ garden, summarizing his time in Greece, and reassuring her he was in good health. He tried to make light of it all, to reconnect with the swashbuckling schoolboy optimism of ten years before. But he could not do it. He simply concluded: “I don’t think anything as bad as that will happen again.”²⁹

While 80 Squadron was being re-formed in Palestine, Dahl spent almost a month relaxing as a house guest of the Peels. His mother had arranged for him to be sent some money. With it he bought a small car, which in early June he drove across the Sinai peninsula and up toward Haifa (now in Israel), where the squadron was now based. “I loved that journey,” he wrote later. “I loved it, I think, because I had never before been totally without sight of another human being for a full day and night.” The harsh magnificence of the desert inspired him. He revelled in the sense of solitude it gave him. It was an interlude in sharp contrast to the three weeks that followed. In Haifa, his squadron’s task was to provide support for an expeditionary force of British and Australian troops whose aim was to occupy Syria and Lebanon, where planes from Vichy French air bases had been regularly attacking Allied shipping. Dahl reserved a particular venom for these “disgusting pro-Nazi Frenchmen”. In his eyes, not only had they willingly acquiesced to the occupation of their homeland, but he blamed their “fanatical loyalty” to the pro-German Vichy regime in France for the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.³⁰

When he got to Haifa, he found some familiar faces — including David Coke’s — and twelve new pilots.‡‡The biblical landscape around the air base excited him and he delighted in the proximity of a warm sea and in the many orange, grapefruit and lemon groves that lay scattered across the rolling hillsides. It was, as he told his family, a land “definitely flowing with milk and honey”.³¹ But he had little time to enjoy it. Though the campaign, which began in early June, was ultimately successful, the flying was intense and also dangerous. In the course of the first three weeks, Dahl shot down two French planes, while his squadron lost four more of its pilots. “What a lot of flying,” he told his mother. “We never stopped — you see there weren’t many of us. Ground-strafing, escorting, intercepting etc. etc. Some days we did seven hours a day which is a lot out here, where you sweat like a pig from the moment you get into the cockpit to the moment you get out.”³² In fact, the pressure was too intense. As he wrote that letter, the headaches from which he had been suffering in Greece began to become unbearable. He described them later as like having a knife driven into your forehead. Then the blackouts started. Five days later, he was suspended from flying. A few days after that an RAF medical board examined him, declared him no longer fit to fly, and sent him home. His days as a combatant were over.

Before Dahl departed from Palestine, he was involved in one other curious incident. He was sent to report on the viability of an alternative landing ground, in the event that the runways at Haifa were bombed. This potential airstrip was at a small village called Ramat David. It had been cut in a field of maize that was part of one of the earliest kibbutzes — one named after the British prime minister David Lloyd George, whose government had issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration that Great Britain “viewed with favour” the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Quite ignorant of this background, Dahl was startled to encounter a Zionist settler and a group of Jewish orphans when he landed there. The settler, a bearded man with a strong German accent, who, Dahl remembered, “looked like the prophet Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler”, tried to explain to the naive RAF pilot the need for a Jewish homeland. Dahl was unconvinced, but also fascinated by the settler’s quiet sense of conviction and particularly by his startling eyes, whose pupils “seemed larger and blacker and brighter than any I had ever seen”. “‘You have a lot to learn,’” the man told Dahl as he got back into his Hurricane. “‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.’”³³

Dahl, who later in life became publicly anti-Zionist, returned to Haifa and reported to his commanding officer only that the landing strip was “quite serviceable” and that there were “lots of children for the pilots to play with” should the squadron need to relocate there.³⁴ They did. Within days, Haifa had been attacked and 80 Squadron, following Dahl’s advice, decamped to the kibbutz, to live once more among tents and olive groves. But by this time Dahl himself had moved on.

Dahl profoundly regretted the fact that he was no longer able to fly. “It’s a pity,” he commented when he told his mother the news, “because I’ve just got going.”³⁵ Alfhild also later recalled that being invalided out of the war “hit him hard”.³⁶ From now on he would no longer be in the thick of the battle. That solitary joy of being a flyer — of swooping, diving and floating in the air — would be his no more. He would miss it for the rest of his life. Combat, however, had altered him and made him more reflective, more inclined to relax and to celebrate life. “All the dreadful masculine aggressions of youth” had been “squeezed out” of him. From now on, Roald would live his life in a “lower gear”.³⁷

And he was going home. He drove back to Egypt, sold his car, and two weeks later boarded a troop ship, travelling back to England around the coast of Africa, stopping at Durban, Cape Town and Freetown in Sierra Leone, where he indulged himself buying presents for his family: sackfuls of citrus fruit, chocolate, marmalade and expensive silks for his sisters. On the final leg of the journey, the convoy in which he was sailing was attacked by German bombers and U-boats and three ships were sunk. After disembarking at Liverpool, Dahl took a train to London, where he spent a night with his half sister Ellen and her husband Ashley Miles. In the morning he travelled by train and bus to Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire, where his mother was now living. She was waiting for him by the roadside. “I signalled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.”³⁸ He had been away from home for almost three years.

That is where Dahl himself left off his memoirs. But Going Solo ends as it begins — with a liberal measure of embroidery and fabrication. Not satisfied with the relief of an ordinary homecoming, Dahl could not stop himself injecting an extra measure of tension for his readers: he tells us that he has heard nothing from his family for months, that he has no idea they have moved from Bexley, and that he is haunted by the fear that they have all been killed by a stray bomb. A disconnected phone line at his former home seems to confirm his anxieties, while a helpful telephone operator searches through phonebooks for other Dahls. An S. Dahl in Grendon Underwood is ignored because he has never heard of the village. All of this was untrue. Dahl was quite aware his house in Bexley had been bombed, and that his family was safe. He also knew exactly where his mother was living. He had been writing to her there ever since he recovered from his crash in the desert. Yet just as tales of lions and snakes animated the reality of endless sundowners in Dar es Salaam, so here, in war-torn London, he used these invented details to heighten a mood he wanted to create.

It was about coming home. Coming home to his sisters, to his beloved mother and to the Buckinghamshire countryside that he had yet to taste, but which would become his own favourite landscape. His sisters Else and Asta described this false ending as “slushy” and “sentimental”.³⁹ Yet those closing pages of Going Solo are charged with genuine emotion. An emotion so powerful that when, shortly after they were written, Dahl read them in public, to an audience at the National Theatre in London, his daughter Ophelia remembered him crying.⁴⁰ It was perhaps the only time he ever showed emotion like that in public. His tears were testimony to the power of his relationship with his mother, and of the emotion of homecoming itself after three years away in which he had tasted the strange, exhilarating and disturbing experiences of war. “They never recede with time,” he once wrote of these tumultuous events. “They were so vivid and violent that they remain etched on the memory like something that happened last month.”⁴¹

Dahl’s time as an active fighter pilot lasted barely a month, but those thirty-two days reconfirmed him both as a loner and as a survivor. They gave him the need to write as well as something to write about. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine any of Dahl’s first stories being written without his experience as a flyer. All of them are intimately bound up with it. Many touch on the ecstasy of flying itself. Others deal with the confused tangle of human emotions he experienced in that short but intense four weeks in Greece. Most reveal a deeply fatalistic streak, so much so that one is tempted to wonder whether writing them may initially have been a kind of therapy, a way of making some sort of sense out of the muddle of conflicting emotions to which he had been exposed. Later, that act of writing would become habitual, a necessary escape from another reality. Then his claustrophobic, dark writing hut itself became a surrogate cockpit — a place where, in “tight, warm, dark” ⁴² surroundings, he could reconnect with that potent mixture of excitement, fear, beauty, horror, humour, wonder and exaltation that he had felt as a fighter pilot and that first animated his desire to tell stories. There, he could let his guard down. There, he surely penned that list of pilots in his address book, with the number of kills beside each name and an X against those who had died in combat.

Each name must have reminded him of the hard reality that lay behind so much of his literary fantasy. Some were the briefest imaginable record of a human life that had been extinguished in a random and unnecessary manner, perhaps by the tiniest jink on an aerial turn or the slightest misjudgement of pressure from a foot on the rudder bar. The list may even have become a kind of talisman. A covenant, almost, between the writer and his past; between Roald and those who had not been so fortunate as he. In that sense it may even represent the very germ of his literary imagination.

^*With his broad shoulders and bushy moustache, Tap Jones was clearly the model for Monkey, the squadron leader in Dahl’s unpublished short story, “The Ginger Cat”. There Dahl describes him as “a big fine man with a black moustache” — RDMSC 5/14/1—3.

^†These “kills”, reported in Going Solo and confirmed in Dahl’s logbook whose entries were signed off by “Tap” Jones, are not mentioned in 80 Squadron’s operations record book, which credits all nine confirmed successes on those days to other pilots. Yet in this instance Dahl’s own account is probably the more reliable. The squadron’s own records were destroyed before they left Greece, so reconstructing what actually happened there relied largely on intelligence summaries and on the vagaries of human memory. Individual logbooks were rarely used, although these often provided the most accurate firsthand evidence of events.

^‡ Harold Matson, Letter to RD, 18/05/42 — RDMSC RD 1/1/1/4. Dahl later rewrote “A Piece of Cake”, removing Oofy completely, and replacing him with another pilot alter ego called Peter, who was based on Douglas McDonald. One senses that many of the characters in his early stories — Fin, Stuffy, the Monkey, and the Stag, for example — were based on pilots he had met during his short time in 80 Squadron.

^§Though he regularly misspells Pattle’s name in his logbook, Dahl agreed with those who hailed the South African ace as the “top-scoring” RAF pilot of the war — See Christopher Shores, Brian Cull and Nicola Malizia, Air War for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete 1940—1941 (London: Grub Street, 1987).

^¶Shores, Hill and Malizia describe the raid as taking place on the following morning, but Dahl’s logbook makes clear it happened that evening.

^**Interestingly, Dahl recounts this story the other way round in his short story “Katina”. There he is given the package in Elevsis by a man “in civilian clothes” and carrying “a revolver in one hand and a small bag in the other” — Collected Stories, p. 42.

^††Perhaps Dahl remembered this detail and used it as the inspiration for the child Katina, who at the climax of the short story he named after her stands amidst the flames at Argos and shakes her fist in anger at the attacking German planes. Ironically, Dahl was probably unaware that John Grigson, the pompous air commodore who had asked him to fly back to Elevsis with that secret package, was also identified by Bill Vale as the symbol of this futile resistance. In the centre of the field, with rifle to shoulder and aircraftman to load for him, the two men stood “as calmly as if they were on the grouse moors, while the 109s fairly plastered the place” — Wisdom, Wings Over Olympus, p. 199.

^‡‡Coke was “almost inevitably” killed in action later that year — Going Solo, p. 201.