Roald Dahl (5 page)

This is clearly the man whom Dahl misremembered as Fisher. And Wollheim confirms that “Christie rejoiced in beating boys”:

He beat boys for a number of offences. He beat them for cheating, and he beat them for sex. Two boys, whom we all knew he wanted to beat for other reasons, he beat for what was regarded in the school as an act of heroic frivolity—stealing the batteries out of his wireless set.… Some selected offenders he invited to pray with him before he beat them. One, to my knowledge, refused.

For all this, as Dahl makes clear, most of the violence at Repton (like other schools) was administered not by the masters but by the boys. Tall and good at games—especially squash—Dahl wasn't an obvious target of the system. Some who knew him dismiss the sufferings described in
Boy
as having been worked up to generate sales. They say that in his early days at the school, while Dahl had “difficulty settling in” and made few close friends, he wasn't particularly unpopular, and that he passed some of the more arcane social tests, such as being chosen to act in the house play. One gratefully remembers that he found a patent ointment that cured the impetigo by which everyone was afflicted (they blamed the compulsory outdoor plunge bath, with its mantle of green slime).
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Others were amused when he rigged up a mousetrap made of a collapsible jetty over a basin of water and was bitten by its victim.
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He invented a slogan for the device, “Catch as Cats Can't.”
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Still, he was often miserable. He was growing fast, missing his friend Highton, and missing the father he had hardly known. He got into a serious fight with a boy who was rude about Norwegians.
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He wanted to be at home, with his mother, his Meccano,
and his growing collection of birds' eggs.
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You can't calibrate psychological suffering any more than physical pain. To say that Dahl exaggerated is, at least partly, to point to the subjectivism of experience—and to the particular varieties of subjectivism which can turn people into writers of fiction. To Dahl, his experiences seemed real enough, and it is clear that he was lonely and insecure. None of the things which isolated him would have been decisive in itself: other boys had foreign names, or were very tall or unexpectedly sensitive, or had an arrogant, teasing, domineering manner, or were unsuccessful in the classroom. But all these were true of Dahl.

His accounts of childhood, both autobiographical and fictional, are dominated by bullies: schoolboy bullies in “The Swan,” the aunts in
James and the Giant Peach
, the hostile giants in
The BFG
, the father and headmistress in
Matilda
, the dragon in
The Minpins
. About a tenth of
Boy
is taken up with beatings and other forms of physical punishment. Just how traumatic were the memories involved is clear from a story for adults, “Galloping Foxley,” which he first published in his thirties.
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The narrator, an elderly commuter, becomes obsessed by the intrusion of a newcomer who has begun to travel regularly in the same train compartment. Gradually he remembers the source of his anxiety: the man tormented him at school. (Dahl transferred these passages of the story more or less intact into
Boy
.
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) After some days of increasingly indignant silence, the former victim introduces himself. He has been mistaken. The intruder is much younger and was at a different school.

Perhaps Dahl didn't have to look far to understand a bully. Most of the men who knew him, then or later, seem to find it hard not to use the word of him eventually. A contemporary from a different house, David Atkins, has written that he remembers Dahl physically tormenting the older Denton Welch,
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but most say that his was a verbal, rather than a physical, kind of sadism. At Repton, he was good at inventing, and persisting with, cruel nicknames. He mercilessly teased a boy who developed
breasts. It was unpredictable whom he would pick on and why.

Whether the victim was Dahl himself or someone else, or both, without taking Welch's own tack and running away altogether, he had few chances of escape. The boys had very little free time. They took all their meals and recreation in the house. The housemaster assigned them to their dormitories and their shared studies, each occupied by about five boys. The “studyholder”—a senior boy—ruled. Two or three others awaited their turn in power, while the remainder served the fagmaster's whims. Fags, Dahl's contemporary Jim Furse recalls—confirming Dahl's own, more savage, onslaught on the system—“were the body servants and, for all intents and purposes, the slaves of the studyholder. They were at his beck and call at all times; they kept his shoes, clothes, the buttons on his OTC uniform and his study clean and tidy, they made his toast and ran his errands, and they laid, lit, and attended to the fire every night in winter—there was no other heating.”
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If any too intensely consoling friendship was formed, it could soon be discouraged; sharing arrangements were reshuffled every term. Meanwhile, Repton as a whole was run by its prefects, known—in a throwback to their Tudor precursors—as “beausieurs.” (Dahl wrote them phonetically, “boazers.”) Under them and the various sporting commissars, everyone was forced to take part in corporate activities, from organized games and the Officers' Training Corps to the lugubrious Inter-House Singing Competition for Broken Voices.

There was one place where Dahl eventually found he could get away: a cramped room at the end of a brick outbuilding, cut off from the rest of the school, on a small traffic island in a side street, between the cricket-field wall and a village pub, the Boot. This secret room was a prototype of the famous garden hut at Great Missenden in which he later wrote. Here, in the middle of Repton, surrounded by the school yet as remote from it as could be, he lurked every Sunday—when, so long as they had attended the early-morning Communion service, everyone was
free for the rest of the day. It was an airless, evil-smelling place, used as a photographic darkroom, which was Dahl's excuse for being there. Later, he was joined by a younger photographer in the same house, David Sells. The door was locked and no one could see in, so they could smoke. Sometimes they heard voices in the road outside. If the headmaster went by, Dahl, with silent ostentation, lit another cigarette.

Photography was a serious hobby. Sells remembers Dahl's skill with the enlarger, and still has some of the pictures they took and developed. There are snapshots, too, in an album kept at Priory House: fire practice; the annual Cadet Force camp; the portly, mustached housemaster in his shiny shoes, best foot forward; Dahl and others in their uniform black jackets, striped trousers, and straw hats. Dahl's great friend Michael Arnold is there, bespectacled, looking out a window, his hair parted neatly at the center, wearing a wide silk tie.

Arnold went on to Oxford and a successful, if checkered, scientific career with Imperial Chemical Industries.
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In the sixth form at Repton, he stood for the truculent imaginative heterodoxy to which Dahl aspired, and which—despite its critics—the school at its rare best still occasionally encouraged. Not all the staff were subservient to the regime. In his early years as headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher had quarreled with a brilliant and enthusiastic young socialist called Victor Gollancz, who with another master had started an innovative class on politics and current affairs.
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Anticipating his later career as a publisher, Gollancz based an unofficial but widely read magazine on the proceedings of this group:
A Public School Looks at the World
. In due course, Fisher got rid of him, but the ideas he put around continued to be aired at Repton. Two notable left-wing writers of the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, had been pupils there; and in Dahl's day, a decade later, visiting speakers included the pacifist Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a pioneer of the League of Nations.

If the young Dahl himself was at all touched by the political
climate of the 1930s, he didn't show it until a good many years later, immediately after the Second World War, when a mood of depressed utopian internationalism briefly overcame him. He was much more lastingly influenced by Michael Arnold's own form of rebellion: individualist, attention-seeking, conservative, anarchic. Arnold was a leading figure in the Debating Society, where, as the school magazine records, he spoke against feminism but defended both Hollywood (except for its “objectionable women”) and, “in an off-hand manner,” capital punishment. On one occasion, the motion was
Delenda est Chicago:
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the boys were displaying their feelings of superiority about America, as well as their classical education. During the debate, Arnold, “largely enveloped in a yellow muffler,” dismissed Stuart Hampshire's speech in support of American energy and vividness, but argued that Chicago should nevertheless be left intact, if only as “a polyglot collection of dregs.” The Americans “were foul, anyway,” he concluded.
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Dahl occasionally took part in these performances, but without making much impression. Nor, any more than at St. Peter's, was he doing well at his academic subjects. This increased his intense competitiveness in other areas, particularly games. At the age of nine, he had already taken up golf, which he could continue to play on the holidays.
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He became captain of the Repton Fives team, played hockey for the school, and football and cricket for his house, swam and played golf. In his final year, without any special preparation but with the advantage of his long reach, he won the boxing competition. And he was becoming hooked on bridge, poker, and other forms of gambling: games in which, to those who played with him, he seemed to be pitting himself, not only against others, but against “the system” as a whole.
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In old age, perhaps in oblique response to being frustrated of the knighthood he longed for, Dahl lamented that he had never become a prefect at Repton. Wasn't he a sergeant in the Corps? Hadn't he won two prizes for photography? Some of his contemporaries point out that he was young for his year, that he did
become a (notably nondictatorial) “studyholder,” and that in any case the Captain of Fives was,
ex officio
, one of the sixteen “School Officers”: it wasn't necessary to make him a prefect. But one Priory House contemporary takes Dahl's side in this ancient grudge: “The powers-that-were mistrusted him and he got no promotion at all in a very hierarchical society. Probably a great mistake; no doubt it was feared he would be subversive, but in these cases the poachers generally make the best gamekeepers.”
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In his last term, the subversive seventeen-year-old drove an old motorbike, a 500 cc Ariel, to Derbyshire and kept it in Wilmington, a few miles from Repton. “It gave me,” he later wrote with revealing grandiosity, “an amazing feeling of winged majesty and of independence.”
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Dahl relished obscuring his face with goggles and scarf and racing through Repton into the neighboring countryside. As with much that he did, the pleasure largely depended on the antiauthoritarian fantasies he built around it. On one vengeful occasion, driving past the school and seeing the headmaster on his way to chapel, he roared as close as he dared to that “terrifying figure” who, until the end of his life, he wrongly believed was Geoffrey Fisher.

3

Flying

“Sometimes there is a great advantage in traveling to hot countries, where niggers dwell,” the young Roald Dahl wrote in a prep-school essay. “They will give you many valuable things.”
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There was even, he continued, the outside chance of discovering a gold mine. It's a fair precis of what many British people at the time believed. It could almost have been the unofficial policy statement of multinational enterprises like Shell, where, on leaving Repton, Dahl was taken on as a trainee.

His mother had wanted him to try for Oxford or Cambridge, but Repton made it clear that, given his academic record, this wasn't an option.
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In any case, what he most wanted to do was to travel. He spent the summer before his eighteenth birthday with fifty or so other young men on a joint public-school expedition to Newfoundland. There, he lived under canvas, supplemented his pemmican diet with wild bilberries and whatever fish could be caught, and undertook various challenges designed to inculcate qualities of leadership and endurance.

One of these was a twenty-day march, exploring an unmapped region in the center of the island, south of Grand Falls. The journey was led by a man who had been medical officer on Captain Scott's tragic expedition to the Antarctic in 1910–12, and
who had founded the Public Schools Exploring Society
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two years earlier, Surgeon Commander George Murray Levick. His young explorers believed that, in the blank space on the relevant part of their map of Newfoundland, “there might be anything, mountains, forests, rivers, Indians, gold.”
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Forests there were, in plenty, and also bogs. The party struggled along in the rain, collecting specimens of the region's flora and fauna, which they were to take back to the British Museum. According to their meticulously kept records, birds and lepidoptera were surprisingly uncommon, but they found an abundance of insects, ferns, and mosses. The main object of the march, however, as the expedition's historian, Dennis Clarke, recorded, was to provide an exercise in “the survival of the fittest.”
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Someone who developed mumps was forced to carry on despite various protests, Dahl and the others sharing his load. One of Dahl's boots later disintegrated, but he repaired it by encasing it in a canvas bucket, the rope handle tied around his ankle.