LITMIR.BIZ

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a portrait of a profoundly melancholy boy, for whom the pleasures of youth had been stifled by an unfair system that was devoid of affection and feeling, and whose chief memories of his time there seem to have been those of loneliness and fear. “Four years is a long time to be in prison,” Dahl writes. “It becomes twice as long when it is taken out of your life just when you are at your most bubbly best and the fields are all covered with daffodils and primroses…. It seemed as if we were groping through an almost limitless black tunnel at the end of which there glimmered a small bright light, and if we ever reached it we would be eighteen years old.”²¹ He continues with a description of “plodding endless terms”, “grey classrooms” and “incredibly dull teachers … who never stopped to talk to you”.²² The images of isolation and misery are relentless. “At Repton the teachers gained no respect from us nor did they try to. As for the senior boys, they were so busy acting the part of being senior and so conscious of the power they wielded that they never bothered to be friendly. They didn’t have to be. They ruled us by fear.”²³ Independence of spirit and wit in the younger boys was stamped on and regarded as “side”. And being “sidey” to a boazer was unthinkable. “You hardly dared speak to him, let alone be sidey.”²⁴ Roald then recounts an incident that could have come straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

       Once, during my second year when I was fifteen, I was “sidey” to a boy called W. W. Wilson, who was sixteen. W. W. Wilson wasn’t even a study-holder. He was just a second, but he didn’t like what I had said, and at once he rounded up half-a-dozen seconds his own age and they hunted me down. I ran into the yard where they cornered me and grabbed hold of my arms and legs and carried me bodily back into the “house”. In the changing room they held me down while one of them filled a bath brimful of icy-cold water, and into this they dropped me, clothes and all, and held me in there for several agonising minutes. “Push his head under water!” cried W. W. Wilson. “That’ll teach him to keep his mouth shut!” They pushed my head under many times, and I choked and spluttered and half-drowned, and when at last they released me and I crawled out of the bath, I didn’t have any dry clothes to change into. ²⁵

      Thankfully, Dahl’s friend Peter Ashton gives this episode a redemptive twist, providing a spare suit for the soaking Roald, who is deeply grateful for this rare “act of mercy” in a world that was filled almost entirely with loneliness and terrors.

      Repton also boasted an entrenched system of corporal punishment for offences as minor as forgetting to hang up your football kit in the changing room. In the 1930s, the cane or the strap were, as Tim Fisher described it, “an automatic and assumed part of the growing up process …”²⁶ They were part of a culture of toughening children up that would survive in England well into the 1950s and 1960s. As an adult, Dahl too did not see any particular harm in boys having their bottoms “tickled” from time to time, if only the human dimension of the beater could be removed. He once even playfully speculated to me that a beating machine, “with knobs on it, like boiled eggs, for hard, medium or soft”, might be a solution.²⁷ But he objected profoundly to the culture of violence he felt existed at Repton and most of all to the fact that the great majority of beatings there were performed by other boys. “Our lives at school were quite literally ruled by fear of the cane,” he wrote. “We walked, with every step we took, in the knowledge that if we put a foot wrong, the result would be a beating.”²⁸

      The white-gloved boazer Carleton, searching his study for the speck of dust that would justify a thrashing was typical. In Dahl’s eyes, he was simply a sadistic thug, with a licence to inflict pain, in search of an easy victim. Carleton (actually a boy called Hugh Middleton) was perhaps the worst of Nancy Jenkyns’s “baddies” and the most dreaded of Dahl’s boazers. He was a “supercilious and obnoxious seventeen-year-old”, with a cane that became an object of fetishistic interest to the other boys. His “creamy-white monster about four feet long with bamboo-like ridges all along its length and a round bobble the size of a golf-ball where the handle would have been” struck terror into a fag’s heart. “Other Boazers used their OTC (Army) swagger-sticks when they beat the Fags, but not Middleton.”²⁹

      The beatings were usually performed in the boazer’s study shortly before going to bed. The victim had a choice between whether to have fewer strokes with his dressing gown off or more with it on. The latter was generally believed to be the less painful alternative. Afterwards the boy had to thank the boazer for his thrashing and return to his dormitory, where he would undergo a ritual inspection of his wounds. In Boy, Dahl describes such an occasion. The ace cricketer, Jack Mendl, had just beaten him, delivering four strokes, “so fast it was all over in four seconds”.³⁰ Now back in the “bedder”, his fellows insist Roald take down his trousers to show them his damaged buttocks. Dahl does not dwell on the “excruciating burning pain” ³¹ he is suffering. Instead, he recalls the boys’ detailed analysis of Mendl’s handiwork. “Half a dozen experts would crowd around you and express their opinions in highly professional language. ‘What a super job.’ ‘He’s got every single one in the same place!’ ‘Boy that Williamson’s [Mendl] got a terrific eye!’ ‘Of course he’s got a terrific eye! Why d’you think he’s a Cricket Teamer?’ “³²

      The scene is comic. At the end, the self-satisfied Mendl himself even appears slyly in the dormitory, “to catch a glimpse of my bare bottom and his own handiwork”. However, the first draft of Boy also contains a piece of psychological analysis, unusual in Dahl’s writing, that reveals much about his own state of mind: “It is clear to me now, although it wasn’t at the time, that these boys had developed this curiously detached attitude towards these vile tortures in order to preserve their sanity. It was an essential defensive mechanism. Had they crowded round and commiserated with me and tried to comfort me, I think we would all have broken down.”³³ Among its other influences Repton was conditioning Dahl to suppress many of his own fundamental emotional responses and to find consolation in disconnection and standing apart.

      Mendl’s beatings, though fierce, were clinical and dispassionate. With Middleton, it was different. Middleton was not simply the real Carleton, he was also the model for the bully, Bruce Foxley, in Dahl’s adult short story “Galloping Foxley”, which he wrote in 1953. This was the first time Dahl had revisited his schooldays in fiction, and his descriptions of the fagging and corporal punishment there are strikingly similar to those he later penned in Boy. Middleton is evoked more deftly perhaps in the earlier story, with his pointed Lobb shoes, his silk shirts, his “arrogant-laughing glare”, his “cold, rather close eyes”, and his hair, “coarse and slightly wavy, with just a trace of oil over it, like a well-tossed salad”. But the events and settings are the same. Foxley’s specialty is to bound down the corridor at full tilt before inflicting each blow. The actual gallop down the changing rooms, “cane held high in the air”, may be an exaggeration, but what are we to make of the narrator’s admission that his schooldays at Repton made him “so miserable” that he had contemplated suicide?³⁴Hardened by his experiences at St Peter’s, Dahl was already a survivor. He does not seem a likely candidate for suicide. However, it is also possible that the loneliness and the bullying might have led him to consider this option, if only briefly.

On top of it all, he was frequently unwell. As his sister Alfhild put it, Roald “caught everything” at Repton.³⁵ Apart from growing pains, for which he

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