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even more draconian than the one in Llandaff.

The journey was taken on a paddle-steamer that “sloshed and churned” its way through the water from Wales to England for twenty-five minutes, before a taxi ferried boys to the school, which lay just outside the “slightly seedy” Somerset seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare. It was a typical English prep school of the period, as Dahl described it, “a purely money-making business owned and operated by the headmaster”, educating about seventy boys,* aged between eight and thirteen, in a three-storey, ivy-clad Victorian Gothic mansion, surrounded by playing fields, tennis courts and allotments. In hindsight the school was to remind Dahl of “a private lunatic asylum”,²⁰ an opinion corroborated by another celebrated St Peter’s alumnus, some twenty years Dahl’s junior, the writer and comedian John Cleese.²¹ Looking at a faded postcard of the school dining room as it was, one might think it a civilized place. Light floods in through high sash windows onto tables laid with starched white tablecloths. Portraits of notables hang on the walls. Vases of fresh flowers even decorate the tables.

      But, if Dahl and his contemporaries are to be believed, this was all a terrible illusion — a temporary image thrown up to persuade potential clients to part with both their offspring and their cash. For, once the parental back was turned, the picture became much uglier. Douglas Highton, Dahl’s best friend for the last two of his four years at the school, agreed with Roald that it was a grim place, describing the headmaster, Mr Francis, as a “beastly cane-happy monster” with a “nasty collection” of rods on top of his bookshelves, who “seemed to enjoy beating little boys on the slightest pretext”. It was an almost entirely male environment. The headmaster kept his “finicky and fussy”²² wife and two unattractive daughters under lock and key, away from the eyes of the boys, and so the only feminine presence was a “female ogre” — the Matron, who “prowled the corridors like a panther” and obviously “disliked small boys very much indeed”.²³

      Each boy was assigned one of four curiously named houses into which the school was divided: Duckworth Butterflies, Duckworth Grasshoppers, Crawford Butterflies and Crawford Grasshoppers. Dahl was a Duckworth Butterfly. Competition was encouraged at all levels, as each house vied with the others in both work and games to see who would come out top. Every boy in the school received either stars or stripes for successes or failures in the schoolroom or playing field and these were tallied up at the end of each term, when winners and losers were declared. Three times a year, a twenty-page magazine was professionally published, which formally chronicled and categorized these achievements, listing each boy’s scores in a series of tables. It was taken very seriously. “Congratulations to you all, Butterflies, for you have this term risen from bottom place to second, and you were very nearly top,” declares Duckworth Butterfly housemaster Mr Valentine Corrado in the December 1927 issue, adding grandly, as if reflecting on the outcome of a military battle, “to the very end it was uncertain whether you or the Duckworth Grasshoppers would triumph”.

      Corrado, who taught Latin when he was not trying to seduce the school matron,²⁴ was just one of the motley band of five or six schoolmasters who taught there. Most had fought in the First World War, many still hung on to their army rank, and some of them still bore the mental and physical scars of that conflict. All were eccentrics. They stare out of the school photographs that have immortalized them with a melancholy confidence — garbed in heavy tweed, moustaches trimmed, hair slicked back, jaws thrust forward. There is something untrustworthy yet forlorn about them. The shell-shocked grunting bully Captain Lancaster, for example, renamed Captain Hardcastle in Boy, whose thick orange moustache constantly twitched and bristled, or timid Mr S. K. Jopp, nicknamed “Snag” because that was one of his favourite words, who had only one hand and whose face had been deformed by an RAF flying accident.²⁵ It was to this peculiar collection of men, whose pleasures included stamp collecting,²⁶ and chasing the boys around the school on tea trolleys,²⁷ that Sofie Magdalene entrusted her nine-year-old son. Odd though they seemed, they instilled a sense of self-discipline and self-protection into their young charges. “They were tough, those masters,” Roald wrote in Boy, “and if you wanted to survive, you had to become pretty tough too.”²⁸

      The boys slept in dormitories. Between fifteen and twenty uncomfortable iron beds were lined up against the walls of each room, and Roald’s first letter home mournfully reported that none of the mattresses had springs.²⁹ Under each was a bedpan (you were not allowed to go to the lavatory at night unless you were ill), and in the middle of the dormitory, a huddle of basins and jugs filled with cold water, for washing. It was a terrible shock for a young boy, used to a warm, comfortable and largely female environment, and Roald was initially homesick. He slept in his bed the wrong way round, facing the window that looked out toward the Bristol Channel, across which lay his home and his family, tantalizingly close, yet completely out of reach. He feigned appendicitis (having seen his half sister operated on at home a few months earlier, he knew the symptoms) and was sent home, where the local doctor in Llandaff quickly discovered his ruse. Another advocate of hardship as essential to the empire-building spirit, he too reinforced Dahl’s survival mentality. “‘I expect you’re homesick,’ he said. I nodded miserably. ‘Everyone is at first,’ he said. ‘You have to stick it out. And don’t blame your mother for sending you away to boarding school. She insisted you were too young, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it, the better for you.’”³⁰ They struck a deal. In return for the doctor pretending he had a severe stomach infection and giving him an extra three days at home, Roald promised him he would go back to St Peter’s and that he would never try the same trick again.

      When he returned to Weston-super-Mare, Roald gradually began dealing with his homesickness. His main salvation was sport, something which the boys did almost every day and at which he showed a natural talent. His height and ranginess made him a good rugby player and a competent footballer, cricketer and boxer, though his school report for the summer of 1926 describes him as “overgrown” and “slow”.³¹ His weekly letters home to his mother, however, are brimful of his sporting exploits: swimming lengths of the pool underwater, learning to ride horses, scoring goals in soccer and striking boundaries in cricket. “I hit two sixes,” he writes at one point, explaining dramatically to his mother that “you get a six when the ball goes full pitch into the boundary. One hit the pavilion with a tremendous crash and just missed a window.”³²His height was blamed for a “ponderous” ³³ boxing technique, as were a number of other problems. Sent to a local optician because of recurrent headaches, he was told that there was nothing wrong with his eyes, but that he was “run down, due to growing too quickly”.³⁴

The academic standards at St Peter’s were high and, initially, Roald was thrown in with a group of boys, including Douglas Highton, who were mostly a year and a half older than he was. He struggled to keep up, finding arts subjects — particularly languages — difficult. A report from Easter 1927 described him as “a little on the defensive” and exhorted him “to have more confidence”. “He imagines he is doing badly,” the report continued, “and consequently does badly.”³⁵ So in September 1927 he stayed down in the 4th Form for a term, regaining his self-esteem and earning a record number of stars for Duckworth Butter-flies. Скачать книгу