LITMIR.BIZ

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in a tiny flat, and to his brother Truls, who had taken over the family business as pork butcher and sausage maker, he left nothing. Almost all of his wealth was left to his children.

      One might have thought that the income from the modern-day equivalent of £5 million would have been enough for the Dahl family to go on living in Radyr, but it was not, and their life as rural landowners was abruptly terminated soon after Asta — “Baby”, as she became known — was born in the autumn of 1920. By Christmas, the beloved farm was put on the market, the animals auctioned off, and the servants dismissed. From that moment onward, Radyr, with its turrets and fields, occupied an idealized place in the minds of the Dahl children, and the house came to embody a kind of paradise, irretrievably taken from them at a very young age. This sense of loss is echoed in many of Roald Dahl’s books, most strikingly perhaps in James and the Giant Peach, where, on the very first page “the perfect life for a small boy” — which in this instance involved beaches, sun and sand rather than horses, fields and servants — comes to an abrupt end. James’s parents had been up to London to go shopping (always a mistake in Dahl’s eyes) and there they met a terrible, if hilarious fate — “eaten up in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street, by an enormous angry rhinoceros that had escaped from London Zoo”. Though this was “a rather nasty experience” for them, Dahl reflects, “in the long run it was far nastier for James”. His parents’ end had been swift and relatively painless. Their son, on the other hand, was left behind, cut off from everything familiar and everyone he loved: “alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world”.¹²

      So Radyr was sold. The family, with Birgit the nanny and a couple of maids, moved back to Llandaff, into a “pleasant medium-sized suburban villa” ¹³ called Cumberland Lodge, now part of Howell’s School, which was also near the home of Ludvig Aadnesen. It was a comfortable existence, if less grand than life in Radyr. But there were consolations for a young boy. Its principal attraction was a large garden, with a swing and some rudimentary cricket nets, where Roald, already a keen sportsman, could practise his batting. Even more important than the garden was the man who worked there — a fellow whose real name was Jones, but whom the children called Joss or Spivvis. “Everyone loved him,” Dahl would later recall, “but I loved him most of all. I adored him. I worshipped him, and whenever I was not at school, I used to follow him around and watch him at his work and listen to him talk.” Every Saturday in the winter, when there was a home match, Joss would take young Roald to Ninian Park, to see Cardiff City, the local football team. Roald was already tall enough to see over many people’s heads and clearly relished the experience of being away from a house full of women. “It was thrilling to stand there among those thousands of other men,” he later wrote, “cheering our heroes when they did well and groaning when they lost the ball.” The experience gave him “an almost unbearable sense of thrill and rapture”, and contrasted with his feelings toward his first school: a local kindergarten called Elm Tree House, run by two sisters, Mrs Corfield and Miss Tucker. Their “sweet and smiling” faces made little impression on him and few memories of his short time there would linger in his brain.¹⁴ One alone remained fresh. The swashbuckling thrill of riding his new tricycle down the road to school and leaning into the corners so steeply that only two of the cycle’s three wheels touched the ground.

      Roald’s next school would be much more memorable. Llandaff Cathedral School, an elegant three-storey Georgian building, constructed in the shadow of a medieval cathedral, is an educational institution with a pedigree that dates back to the ninth century. Roald’s elder brother Louis had been sent there, and though Sofie Magdalene was already planning a move to England, she was not yet quite ready to leave Wales. The school was also a stone’s throw from Cumberland Lodge and so it was the natural place to send Roald after his year with the smiling sisters. He went there in 1923, at the age of seven, and stayed for two years. Of all the incidents he would later recall there, one adventure stood out above the others. It was both exciting and traumatic, and contained three ingredients that would come to characterize his later children’s fiction: a sweetshop; a foul old hag; and violent retribution. In Boy, he introduces the story with a fanfare that is both swaggering and yet deliciously ironic. “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful,” he begins. “Truth is more important than modesty. I must tell you therefore, that it was I and I alone who had the idea for the great and daring Mouse Plot. We all have our moments of brilliance and glory,” he concludes, “and this was mine.” ¹⁵

      The story is a simple one. A boy finds a dead mouse under the floorboards at school. Along with a group of friends, Roald decides to use it to play a trick on the ugly and bad-tempered proprietor of the local sweetshop, Mrs Pratchett. He takes the dead mouse into the shop and when she is not looking, drops the mouse into a glass jar of sweets. Mrs Pratchett is so shocked when she opens it and finds the dead rodent that she drops the jar to the ground, where it shatters in pieces. Furious, she tracks down the offenders and takes revenge on them by ensuring they are ferociously beaten. A simple enough tale of a schoolboy prank that goes wrong, you might think. But not for Roald Dahl. For his sensitive child’s antennae, this is an adventure story of grandiose proportions — enacted with buccaneering style and panache. Its setting, a sweetshop, is the centre of the universe. It is “what a bar is to a drunk, or a church is to a Bishop” — the most important place in town. Despite the suspicion that the tasty liquorice bootlaces may be made from rat’s blood, or that the Tonsil Ticklers are infused with chloroform, the contents of its jars and boxes are objects of reverence and profound fascination. Dahl and his young accomplices are a “gang of desperadoes”, locked in mortal combat with the hideous villain of the piece, Mrs Pratchett, a comic distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life.¹⁶ She is “a small, skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry”. She has “goat’s legs” and “small malignant pig-eyes”. Her “grimy hands” with their “black fingernails”¹⁷ dig horrifyingly deep into the fudge as she scoops it out of the container. She is a typical Dahl enemy — cruel, bony, repulsive and female — and she wreaks a savage revenge on her five child tormentors, insisting that they are each caned by their headmaster while she sits in a chair, enthusiastically egging him on to greater violence.

      Dahl’s description of corporal punishment and adult unkindness in Boy is memorable and utterly convincing. It is the first time that any of the five boys have been beaten, so the tension is tremendous, as they venture ever deeper into the adult world, arriving at the inner sanctum of the enemy, the headmaster’s study, with its forbidding smell of tobacco and leather. Mr Coombes, the headmaster, has so far seemed comic — a sweating, pink-faced buffoon. No longer preposterous, however, he is now transformed into a chilling agent of retribution: a giant, dangerously flexing his curved yellow cane. Roald’s friend Thwaites is the first to feel its sting. As he bends over and touches the carpet with his fingers, Roald cannot help noticing “how small Thwaites’ bottom looked and how very tight it was”.¹⁸ Each stroke of the cane is exaggerated, as the rod cracks “like a pistol shot” and boys shoot into the air, straightening up “like elastic”.

      But when Roald’s own turn comes, the tone loses all comedy. The pain of the first stroke causes him to gasp so deeply that it “emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them”. Aiming the strokes of the rod so that they come down in the same place has been a source of abstract comment, even admiration for the young boys. Now it is revealed as an act of cruel brutality. “It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin,” he declares, “but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.”¹⁹ No surprise then to find that when his mother sees “the scarlet stripes” that evening at bathtime, she marches over to the school to give the headmaster a piece of her mind. No surprise either that, a term later, she takes Roald away from the school. But the outraged Sofie Magdalene does not then

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