TALL TALES of the unexpected
Even as a boy, Roald Dahl was a master storyteller... which is why it’s hard to trust a word he wrote of his ‘topping’ adventures in letters home to his mother
Love From Boy: Roald Dahl’s Letters To His Mother
Edited by Donald Sturrock
John Murray €26.50
It goes without saying that Roald Dahl was a fantasist. His imagination was that of a child, springing from a world where everything is an exaggerated version of itself: taller, naughtier, nastier, sillier, more disgusting. This is what made him one of the most popular children’s writers of the 20th Century, and it is also what turned him into one of our least trustworthy self-mythologisers. His two jaunty works of autobiography, Boy and Going Solo, turned out to be full of made-up stories – or lies, as they are generally known in the real world. In his clear-sighted 2010 biography of Roald Dahl, Donald Sturrock pinpointed the lifelong disparity between what Dahl said happened and what really happened. In Going Solo, for instance, Dahl writes of a close encounter in Africa with a man-eating lion, but Sturrock suggests it was what he calls a ‘flight of pure fancy’. Again, in Going Solo, Dahl describes having to round up German nationals in Tanganyika in 1939. In his version, one angry German thrusts a Luger pistol in his chest, at which point an African guard shoots the German through the face. ‘His head seemed to splash open and little soft bits of grey stuff flew out in all directions,’ he writes. But it was all baloney: the Germans had all given themselves up without a fight. Sturrock has now edited a fascinating collection of Roald Dahl’s 600-odd letters home to his beloved mother, spanning a period of 40 years from 1925, when he was first sent to boarding school, aged nine. In them you can see the seeds of his future career. Dahl was his mother’s only son. She so adored him that his three sisters nicknamed him ‘apple of the eye’. His letters home from his prep school are full of enjoyment. ‘We had a lovely time on Thursday,’ he writes in an early letter, going on to give a vivid picture of a fireworks display – ‘the prettiest of my fireworks was the snow storm, it lit up the whole place’. He had also loved a talk on owls, particularly relishing the way they ate mice. ‘They eat the whole mouse, skin and all, and then all the skin and bones goes into a sort of little parcel inside him.’ Often he sounds just like Molesworth: ‘Thanks awfully for the roller skates, they are topphole’ (sic). There is no suggestion that he is miserable. Even when there is grim news to impart – ‘There are exactly 23 !!!!!!!! boys with the measles!’ – he makes it all sound the most tremendous fun. Yet, 60 years later, Dahl painted a very different picture, suggesting his prepschool days were as grim as can be, and that his letters home had been composed under terrible constraints. ‘If we thought the food was lousy, or if we hated a certain master, or if we had been thrashed for something we did not do, we never dared say so in our letters. In fact we often went the other way. In order to please the dangerous Headmaster who was leaning over our shoulders and reading what we had written, we would say splendid things about the school and go on about how lovely the masters were.’
So who is telling the truth – the young Dahl or the old Dahl? I don’t doubt that there was censorship. I vividly remember writing my first letters home from prep school in 1965: our form teacher Miss Beck assured us that we could write whatever we wanted, and that she would just cast an eye over our letters for spelling and grammar. Taking her at her word, the class joker, Charlie Russell, began his letter: ‘Miss Beck is horrid.’ Miss Beck immediately tore it up and made him write it again without the offending sentence.
But even allowing for censorship, the young Dahl’s letters home still overflow with merriment. And was he really, as Donald Sturrock suggests, ‘profoundly unhappy’ at his public school, Repton? Should we really take the older Dahl’s word for it? His first letter from Repton begins ‘It’s topping here’, his subsequent letters are full of high jinks, and he looks very cheerful watching a school cricket match in a photo taken when he was 16.
‘There is no suggestion he is miserable even when there is grim news to impart’
He offers vivid, delighted descriptions of catching crayfish, of being chased by a bull – ‘the worst of it was that we couldn’t run very fast because we were laughing so much’ – and of an overweight teacher falling through the ice. He doesn’t sound ‘profoundly unhappy’ to me.
Perhaps he was putting on a brave face and trying to stop his mother from knowing how he really felt. But most boarding schools, then and now, are bounded by extremities of light and dark, and Dahl was never the type to acknowledge the subtler shades in between.
In one letter he describes his form master, Mr Wall, ‘the most bad-tempered man on the staff’ who ‘kicks all the furniture in the room as hard as he can and especially his grandfather clock, which is gradually ceasing to exist. He shouts and yells, rushes round the room, and on Wednesday he nearly threw himself out of the window! I’ve never seen anything so funny in my life’. His laughter sounds authentic, Dahl’s sense of humour perfectly adapted to the grotesque characters thrown up by the English public-school system.
Oddly enough, a teacher, also called Mr Wall, joined my prep school in 1968. He wore pink socks and struck us as very droll. ‘I
have only one rule,’ he told us, ‘and that is Don’t Piss in the Inkwells.’ We thought he was a hoot. A few weeks later he disappeared midterm and was never heard of again. Rumour had it he had been caught offering a cigarette to a boy with glasses called Norton. Dahl would have loved him, regardless of what he might have told his mother in that week’s letter home, or his readers, decades later.
After school he went to Africa to work for an oil company. Even by today’s standards his letters to his mother from Africa are notably racy, abounding in dirty jokes and tales of drunken debauchery. War is on the horizon – he calls his pet lizards Hitler and Mussolini – and he joins the RAF. In a poignant note, Sturrock points out only three of the 16 young men with whom he trained survived the war.
‘I’ve never enjoyed myself so much,’ Dahl writes to his mother when he is learning to fly, and for once we can take him at his word. But in October 1940, on the way to his first day on active service, he lost his way at night, crashlanded in the Libyan desert and nearly died. In his later account of the incident, he pretended that he had been shot down by the enemy rather than having messed up. And to his mother he omitted any mention of the heroic comrade who nursed him through the night and probably saved his life. ‘Even for her, perhaps particularly for her, he needed to maintain that façade of strength,’ writes Sturrock. But was his real motivation rather less noble? Might he not have preferred to portray himself as the self-sufficient hero, the man who single-handedly saved himself?
Invalided out of the RAF in 1942, he was posted to the British Embassy in Washington, where, an inveterate social climber, he hobnobbed with President Roosevelt (‘lots of fun’) and a galaxy of stars including Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Cagney, Paul Robeson (‘a fantastic type’) and Ginger Rogers (‘a very nice girl’). By all accounts he was also an energetic Lothario – in Sturrock’s biography, a contemporary says ‘he slept with everybody on the West and East Coasts who had more than 50,000 a year’ – but, once again, he spared his mother such details. Instead, he portrayed himself as the eternal schoolboy: ‘Seeing Niagara Falls made me want to pee.’
His mother died in 1967, but by then Dahl’s letters to her had grown duller and more grownup, free of what Sturrock calls ‘the famous Dahl imagination, the sense of wonder and fantasy, the madcap humour, the naughtiness’. His creative energy sprang from arrested development; whenever he tried to grow up, something special vanished.