LITMIR.BIZ

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you seldom knew their names.”⁶

      The Priory is a steeply gabled redbrick building, with turrets and Gothic chimneys, a few hundred yards down the High Street from the Arch. Constructed by Geoffrey Fisher, the headmaster between 1914 and 1932, it contained a series of small dormitories known as “bedders”, a collection of studies where boys worked in groups of five to seven, a panelled dining room, a tarmac yard at the front with fives courts, and a garden at the back called the Deer Park, in which there was a small plunge pool that was filled in the summer and in which the boys bathed naked. It also contained living quarters for the housemaster, J. S. Jenkyns, and his family.

      Jenkyns was a classic interwar schoolmaster. Bald, with toothbrush moustache, tweed jacket, and polished leather brogues, he had already been at the school for twenty-four years when Roald arrived, and he would remain on the staff there for another sixteen. Educated at Winchester and Balliol, he had fought in the trenches during the First World War and his experiences there had made him gloomy, nervous and a trifle forbidding. In photographs he looks world-weary. “Twitchy”, was how Dahl was often to describe him in his letters home. Jenkyns’s youngest daughter Nancy admitted that sometimes even his children were “a bit frightened” of their father. “He could snap your head off,” she recalled and could on occasions be “scratchy”.⁷ Yet Tim Fisher, Geoffrey Fisher’s youngest son, believed that Jenkyns — or “Binks”, as the boys called him — was adored by many of his pupils.⁸ He certainly took a liking to his young six-foot Norwegian charge, and sometimes played fives with him. Dahl liked the sport, describing it as a “subtle and crafty” game played with a small hard leather ball that is struck at great speed by gloved hands and sent shooting around a court with “all manner of ledges and buttresses”. On the fives court, his nervous housemaster could relax, “rushing about”, as Roald described it, “shrieking what a little fool he is, and calling himself all sorts of names when he misses the ball”.⁹

      Perhaps the most curious aspect to the way pastoral care worked in The Priory was that Binks and his family were usually distant from the boys. His study was part of the “house”, but his living quarters were elsewhere — in a separate wing at the top of the main staircase, where he resided with his “rather cold” wife¹⁰ and their three boisterous daughters, Peggie, Rachel and Nancy. Rachel remembered Roald Dahl as a good-looking lad, twice her age and height. However, since she only saw the boys from afar, she could recall little else about him, except that he was “Scandinavian by birth and had had an unhappy early life”.¹¹ Nancy, the youngest, a mischievous six-year-old with a shock of unruly dark hair, remembered a little more. She was fascinated by the older boys, peering over the banisters of the staircase to watch them go into the dining hall, or spying out who was being sent to her father’s study to deliver their “blue” — a form of punishment in which a boy had to write out the same line of text up to 240 times in blue ink.

      Nancy divided the house into “goodies” and “baddies” — Dahl was one of the goodies — but made clear that the opportunities for her to encounter any of them were rare. She did recall with relish one occasion, when Dahl and another goodie, Peter Ashton, were brought over to her side of the house for a few days and “put together in the spare room, which was up near the nursery”. Then she got to spend some time with them.¹² Roald, used to the company of his sisters, must have longed to entertain the Jenkyns girls, or “the Binklets”,¹³ as he called them, more often. But opportunities to do so were rare. Ten years earlier, at a different boys’ boarding school, the novelist Graham Greene had found himself in a similar situation. Greene’s predicament was even more extreme because he was both a pupil and the headmaster’s son, perhaps the most invidious situation a child could imagine. He was haunted by the green baize door which for him seemed to symbolize the division between these two worlds. Beyond the warmth and civilization of one lay “a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties; a country in which [he] was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature”.¹⁴ Emerging from Binks’s family back into the harsh environment of The Priory, Roald must have had similar feelings. And in this brutal world — which offered no privacy and where even the outside lavatories had no doors — it was not the adults who wielded day-to-day power but the boys themselves.

      Discipline was maintained by the senior boys, and in particular by four or five prefects, or “boazers”, as they were known at Repton. They wielded great power. Each house was, as Dahl put it, “actually ruled by a boy of seventeen or eighteen who was the Head of House. He himself had three or four House Prefects. The House Prefects were the Gods of the House, but the Head of House was the Almighty.”¹⁵ Power was codified into a complex system of hierarchies, of “rules and rituals”, which every new boy had to learn. Each study, for example, had at least five members. Its head was a study-holder, usually in his last year at the school. Sometimes the study-holder was also a boazer, which made him particularly “dangerous” for junior boys, because boazers had “the power of life and death” over them.¹⁶ Below him there were two or three senior boys called “seconds” and two junior boys called “fags”. The fags were treated as the study-holder’s servants, “personal slaves”, as Dahl would later call them,¹⁷and the system was justified by the rationale that it gave a new boy a sense of place and order. “He was straightaway in a study with five people,” explained Tim Fisher. “He was the bim fag, the junior fag. Then there was the tip fag, the senior fag, in his second year, who would have shown his junior the ropes and helped him to discover how the school worked.”¹⁸

      The fag’s tasks included cleaning the study, supplying it with coal for the fire, keeping the fire lit, and polishing the study-holder’s shoes, buttons, badges and buckles. The boys received regular parcels of food from home to supplement what the school provided, and once or twice a week the fags cooked meals for the other members of their study in the communal bathroom, on portable paraffin primus stoves that they brought with them from home. With ten or more fags cooking at the same time, the bathroom would quickly fill with thick black smoke. To the young Dahl, the sight was exciting, reminiscent of “a witch’s cauldron”.¹⁹ The power structure, however, lent itself easily to abuse. Boazers had only to yell “Fa-a-ag” at the top of their voice and every fag within earshot would have to drop what he was doing and run toward the needy prefect. The last to get there had to perform whatever task the senior boy required of him. There was almost no limit to what a boazer could request. One service, commonly demanded of the younger boys in winter, was to heat the wooden seats of the outside lavatories, by sitting on them, bare-bottomed, for long enough to ensure that the boazer himself did not have to place his own flesh onto an ice-cold seat. In Boy, Dahl memorably describes his first experience of doing this. “I got off the lavatory seat and pulled up my trousers. Wilberforce [the boazer] lowered his own trousers and sat down. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good indeed.’ He was like a wine-taster sampling an old claret. ‘I shall put you on my list,’ he added. I stood there doing up my fly-buttons and not knowing what on earth he meant. ‘Some fags have cold bottoms,’ he said, ‘and some have hot ones. I only use hot-bottomed fags to heat my bog seat. I won’t forget you.’ “²⁰ For the first two weeks of his time at Repton, a new boy was exempt from the rigors of fagging, but after that he bore its full force. Reading the early drafts of Boy, one senses a long-pent-up bitterness about Dahl’s years there bubbling to the surface. It was a resentment that he clearly struggled to control, and in the final version, many of his most

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