Roald Dahl - Boy - Tales of Childhood

review by Ro Bennett on show 26th May
From the back of the book: BOY is the story of Roald Dahl's very own boyhood, including tales of sweet shops and chocolate, mean old ladies and a Great Mouse Plot - the inspiration for some of his most marvellous story books in the years to come. These tales are full of exciting and strange things - some funny, some unpleasant, some frightening, all are true.

Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents. He was educated in England before starting work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa. He began writing after a ‘monumental bash on the head’ sustained as an RAF fighter pilot during the Second World War. Roald Dahl is one of the most successful and well known of all children’s writers. His books, which are read by children all over the world include, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.
Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74.

The book begins with very interesting descriptions of his father’s background and early life leading up to his marriage to his first wife Marie who sadly died giving birth to their second child. In 1911 he met and married Roald’s mother, Sofie who bore him four children. Dahl says of his father: ‘He was a tremendous diary writer. I still have one of his many notebooks from the Great War of 1914-18. Every single day during those five war years he would write several pages of comment and observation about the events of the time...and although Norwegian was is mother tongue, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.’

His father also had a curious theory about how to develop a sense of beauty in the minds of his children. Each time his wife was six months pregnant he would take her on ‘glorious walks’ to places in the countryside for about an hour each day, because he believed that as she was observing the beauty of nature, it would somehow become transmitted to the mind of the baby in the womb so it would grow up to love beautiful things.

Despite this, however, Dahl experienced a lot of heartbreak and tragedy in his life. His seven year old sister and father died within weeks of each other when he was only three. Dahl’s own daughter Olivia died of measles also at age seven, forty two years later.

Suddenly his mother, a young Norwegian in a foreign land and seven months pregnant, had a family of five children to rear on her own.
She stayed in England because her husband had always stated most emphatically that he wished all his children to be educated in English schools. So the rest of the book deals with Dahl’s experiences from Kindergarten until he is twenty. He was sent to Prep school when he was seven and to St Peter’s boarding school when he was just nine.

I found the stories of his experiences at school appalling and very sad. I could have wept when I read about him being caned when he was only eight years old and his description of what he had to endure at the boarding schools at the hands of despicably unkind teachers and an uncaring matron. His description of the horrible tradition of fagging at Repton, which allowed and indeed encouraged the bullying hierarchy of beastly prefects called Boazers also left me feeling infuriated and upset.

The sadistic Headmaster of Repton who Dahl describes as ‘a rather shoddy bandy-legged little fellow with a big bald head and lots of energy but not much charm... who, in all those years I was at school, I doubt whether he addressed more than six sentences to me altogether,- this man who used to deliver the most vicious beatings to the boys under his care’ ... later became the Archbishop of Canterbury who presided at the Coronation of our present Queen. Dahl found this a great puzzle. He could never understand how masters and senior boys were allowed to wound other boys, sometimes quite severely. He was puzzled how the headmaster could be preaching about mercy and forgiveness in the school chapel whilst the night before had shown no forgiveness or mercy whilst flogging some small boy who had broken a rule until he bled. ‘It made me have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesman on earth, then there must be something very wrong with the whole business.

Besides the grim stories of his school life, there were wonderful and amusing descriptions of the family holidays in Norway, his love of games and photography which kept him sane at school. When his mother asked if he wanted to go on to Oxford or Cambridge he replied, ‘ I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China.’ and this he did until war broke out in 1939 and he went to join the RAF. And this is where the story ends.

Roald Dahl’s books continue to be bestsellers, despite his death in 1990, and total UK sales are 55 million worldwide!
Ro Bennett