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they accused of coarseness and vulgarity, or when it was manifested personally in boastfulness, bragging or contentiousness. Yet, what came with it was an ever present sense of wonder. This imaginative verve was essential to his nature and in many ways, the keystone of all his writing — both for adults and children. It could result in the grotesque and repulsive, for which he would become notorious, but it could also be tender and elegiac, dark and mysterious. Expressed in spare, simple prose that sometimes verged on the poetic, Dahl’s sense of the child’s perspective was always sure-footed, and often immensely powerful. “I cannot possibly describe to you what it felt like to be standing alone in the pitchy blackness of that silent wood in the small hours of the night,” he wrote in Danny the Champion of the World, describing a child who has got lost in the forest. “The sense of loneliness was overwhelming, the silence as deep as death, and the only sounds were the ones I made myself…. I had a queer feeling that the whole wood was listening with me, the trees and the bushes, the little animals hiding in the undergrowth and the birds roosting in the branches. All were listening. Even the silence was listening. Silence was listening to silence.”⁹²

^*Not 150, as Dahl recalls in Boy, p. 72.

^†This was equivalent to year four in current UK educational practice and sixth grade in the United States and Canada.

^‡In the traditional form of the game, as played by generations of schoolchildren, the seed of a horse chestnut, a conker, is suspended on a string and then used to strike another conker similarly suspended. When one of the two is destroyed, the survivor is declared victorious. A winning conker assumes the score of all its victim’s preceding foes.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Foul Things and Horrid People

      ON A CHILLY JANUARY morning in 1930, Roald Dahl set off for his first day at Repton School. He had bidden farewell to his pet mice, Montague and Marmaduke, at home, and to his mother and sisters at Bexley Station, where he caught the train for London. At Charing Cross, he loaded his luggage aboard a taxi and crossed the city, arriving at the neoclassical grandeur of old Euston Station, through its magnificent Doric arch — the largest ever built — and into the spectacular Great Hall, with its galleries, murals, gilded ceilings and the awe-inspiring double staircase, which swept down from the gallery level to the bustling station floor below. Gaggles of Reptonians, all immediately recognizable by their distinctive uniform of pinstripe trousers and long black tailcoats, chattered and joked as they waited to board the Derby train. A porter loaded Roald’s trunks, each stamped with his name, onto the train, and an hour later it steamed out of the station on the 130-mile journey north.

      On board, Roald struck up a conversation with one of his fellow pupils, Ben Reuss. He was a year older than Roald and had already been at the school for a term. He was a good ally for a new boy. Despite natural first-day nerves, Reuss was struck immediately by Dahl’s “unconventional” manner¹ and his madcap sense of humour. By midafternoon, as the train pulled into Derby Station, the light was already fading. Roald then boarded one of a series of taxis that drove the boys and their luggage out of the grimy city and into a damp and dismal surrounding countryside. After about ten miles his cab drifted past St Wystan’s Church, whose honey-coloured stone seemed dark grey in the dim light and whose tall spire, “as slender as a sharpened pencil”,² to use a simile of one of his contemporaries, looked down upon the twelfth-century arch, where the main school buildings of Repton lay. A minute or so later, it came to a halt outside the doors of Priory House, the building that was to be Roald’s home during term time for the next four years. He was thirteen years old.

      Repton is a dour place. Squatting in the foothills of the Peak District, and sandwiched into a strip of countryside between the industrial towns of Derby and Burton-on-Trent, its stone and Victorian redbrick buildings cluster together in a tight huddle alongside Repton Brook, as if sheltering from the fierce winds that whistle down off Darley Moor to the north. Now, as in the 1930s, the town is dominated by the presence of the school, whose buildings lie scattered around its centre, but Repton itself has an ancient history, which goes back well over 1,500 years. It was once an early centre for English Christianity. An abbey was founded there and two Anglo-Saxon kings, Ethelbald and Wiglaf, were buried in the crypt, before the Vikings sailed down the Trent and destroyed the abbey in 873. In the twelfth century a magnificent priory was founded on the Saxon ruins, but this too was destroyed during the Reformation, in a spasm of Puritan zeal. Secretly, however, the old religion lingered on, and in 1553 Popish prayers were answered when the Catholic Mary Tudor acceded to the throne.

Three years later, a rich and devout local Catholic, Sir John Port, died. In his will, he set aside money to found a school in Repton, stipulating that its headmaster should be a priest. To this end, his executors purchased what remained of the old Priory and set about creating the college. Port’s charity had an element of self-interest. He wanted a chantry founded at the school so that schoolboys could sing masses daily to speed his soul to heaven — a practice that had been outlawed the previous decade, but which under Mary was now legal again. His wishes were thwarted. In 1558, Mary died and her half sister, Elizabeth, a Protestant, ascended the throne. Thus Repton was established as an Anglican school. In the subsequent four and a half centuries, it experienced many ups and downs. By the late eighteenth century, one corrupt headmaster and his staff were employed to teach just a single pupil. Fifty years later, Repton was remodelled to conform to the values of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School and one of the founding fathers of the Victorian ethos of hard work, discipline and duty. Arnold placed the cultivation of religious and moral principles above academic instruction, defining his object at Rugby as being “to form Christian men — for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make”.³ His implication, that boys were naturally wild and undisciplined and that schooling was about creating a training ground where rigorous moral values might be instilled within them, resonated at one level with Roald Dahl. He too believed that children were born savage, but he would celebrate the innocent anarchic attitudes of each “uncivilised little grub”.⁴ For Arnold, however, as for many of the staff at Repton in 1930, the opposite was true. They viewed that youthful freedom of spirit as something subversive that needed to be crushed.*

      Sofie Magdalene had promised her dying husband that their children would all be educated in England, but precisely why she chose Repton for Roald is not immediately clear. The son of a family friend in Radyr was already there, and Captain Lancaster, the twitching orange-haired terror from St Peter’s, was also an alumnus, or “Old Reptonian”. One might think that this connection would have deterred young Roald. But it does not seem to have done, although the elaborate uniform put him off a bit. The stiff butterfly collar, attached to a starched shirt with studs, pinstripe trousers, twelve-button waistcoat, tailcoat and straw boater struck him as entirely ludicrous. He later described the tailcoat as “the most ridiculous garment I had ever seen”; he thought the costume made him look “like an undertaker’s apprentice in a funeral parlour”.⁵ However, it was thus attired, with accompanying umbrella to keep the Peak District rain off the vulnerable boater, that Roald arrived for his first night at The Priory — one of nine boarding houses that were scattered around the town. Each house was a community of around fifty boys, about twelve from each year. Apart from some team sports and lessons, which were taught in forms drawn from the entire school, the house was the focus of a boy’s discipline, loyalties and social life. It was where he ate, slept, studied,

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