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he was also prone to respiratory problems. His letters home are filled with requests for a huge variety of medications for everything from corns on his toes to headaches and constipation. With Heath and Heather lozenges, Mistol, Nostroline, Lynol, Kalzana, Ostelin and Radiostoleum, the letters can sometimes read like a 1930s pharmacology handbook. These illnesses, which are clearly catalogued in his letters, and which do not feature at all in Boy, make a poignant appearance in Galloping Foxley. There the narrator bemoans the many colds he caught on his long walks around Orange Ponds, in the rain, gathering wild irises for his tormentor Middleton.

Dahl’s school reports also suggest that he was miserable. “Rather dazed”, “curiously dense and slow”, exhibiting “fits of childishness” and “fits of the sulks” are just some of the many negative descriptions that characterize the way he was perceived there. His academic record was poor. “A persistent muddler, writing and saying the opposite of what he means” was his English teacher’s verdict halfway through his first term. Eighteen months later, little had changed. His mathematics master is dismissive: “He has very little ability and is inclined to be childish.” The following year is no better. Dahl is accused of “idleness”, “apathy”, and “stupidity”; he is “lethargic”, “languid”, and “too pleased with himself”. His housemaster also notices “a vein of obstinacy in him”,³⁶ which he compliments, but his pupil’s happiness or unhappiness never appears to be an issue. Partly this was because these issues were just not considered important and also partly because Roald hid his feelings well from those around him. Constructing a protective facade of indifference, he both preserved his sanity and avoided appearing like a potential victim. The same is true of his letters home, which give absolutely no indication of the melancholy he evoked in his first draft of Boy, and which are packed instead with amusing anecdotes and descriptions. It is as if the letter writing itself had become a means of escape from the greyness of school life. As if, out of the gloom, he had constructed a sunnier alternative reality, which not only reassured his family back in Bexley but entertained the writer at the same time.‡

      By the age of fifteen, Roald was a sophisticated humorist and entertainer as well as a skilled and dextrous narrator. The exuberance of St Peter’s has given way to a more jaundiced and critical view of the world, where he enjoys finding fault and making negative judgements. For example, though he proudly describes The Priory as “easily the nicest house”,³⁷ the others are dismissed as “nasty little dirty looking hovels”. His sharp eye takes pleasure in the discomfiture of the masters, who are “awfully nervous and dithering” ³⁸ when school inspectors arrive to vet the lessons, and when Matron Malpas leaves, her replacement is described as having “hair like a fuzzie-wuzzie, and two warts on her face … I think I shall offer her my corn paint”.³⁹ Yet he can be sensitive and empathetic, too. When an opponent’s cap falls off in a hockey match to reveal “an absolutely bald head, his wig remaining in his cap”, Dahl, like his teammates, feels only sympathy toward the “wretched fellow”.⁴⁰ At other times he recounts escapades, in language reminiscent of the adventure books he enjoyed reading, and often with unexpected comic detail. Tobogganing, rioting on a train,⁴¹ powder fights in his “bedder”,⁴² firing pencils out of his rifle,⁴³ and climbing illicitly up the tower of Repton Church to make the bells ring⁴⁴ all get this treatment.

      But, as he comes to the end of his second year at Repton, he is already longing to live his life on a bigger canvas, and he seizes eagerly on anything dramatic. The inevitable fire that destroyed his study was the kind of thing that really gave him a chance to flex his writing muscles:

      The flames were enormous and the heat was colossal. The whole place stank of burning … and it got in your throat. I coughed all night. However we got to our bedrooms, which the firemen assured us were safe, but to us they looked as though they were being held up by two thin planks. We picked our way gingerly up the stairs (which were black and charcoaly) of course all the electric light had fused long ago. We got into our beds which were brown and nasty and I don’t know how but I managed to get some sleep. The place looked grimmer than ever by daylight. All the passage was black and in our study absolutely nothing was left. ⁴⁵

      In his second year at Repton, Dahl also formed an important friendship, with Michael Arnold, a boy a year and a half older than he was, and two years above him academically. Arnold was something of a celebrity at Repton. He was quick-witted, subversive, and highly intelligent. In his first term, Dahl described him to his mother as a “very clever boy”, who was “going to make the house a three-valve wireless”.⁴⁶ By the following year, he was hailing him proudly as “the cleverest boy in England”.⁴⁷ In house photographs, Arnold stares out confidently, casually, hands in his pockets or arms folded, his hair slicked back in the manner of a young W. H. Auden. Like Dahl he despised the school and saw himself as an outsider. According to their contemporary, Ben Reuss, Arnold had no friends at all until Dahl “took him up”. Reuss found their friendship “a little bit strange”.⁴⁸ But Dahl and Arnold were very much kindred spirits. Arnold’s son Nicholas observed that both of them were “independent and individualistic”.⁴⁹ They were also both profoundly curious about the natural world, and enjoyed searching the countryside for fruit, hunting crayfish in Orange Ponds, and conducting crazy experiments. Once they put an unopened tin of pea soup in front of the fire, then, when it was superheated, they punctured the can. From behind the shelter of an unfurled Repton umbrella, they watched with delight as the hot soup sprayed all over the study. The can, Dahl observed with relish, “continued to shoot for about two minutes”.⁵⁰ Together they also obtained the key of the school darkroom and began to print photographs.⁵¹ Soon Arnold became Michael — the only boy Roald ever referred to by his first name. He even wrote specifically to his mother to make sure she did the same. Roald invited Michael to Norway with his family in 1932, the summer before Arnold was scheduled to take the scholarship examination to Magdalen College, Oxford. “I expect he’ll get it,”⁵² Roald wrote confidently to his mother in December. He did. That Christmas he came down to Bexley to stay with the Dahls. Michael had become family.

      Roald’s friendship with Michael and the fact that he was no longer a fag began to make Repton more tolerable, as did the fact that he had successfully smuggled one of his pet rats into the school to keep him company. He told his shocked friend Ben Reuss that there was “no animal more intelligent or cleaner”.⁵³ His fascination with photography deepened. Increasingly he spent hours on his own in the school darkroom. “I was the only boy who practised it seriously,” ⁵⁴ he would later write, and after the summer of 1931, the subject dominates his letters home. His mother is bombarded with a stream of requests for lenses, photographic films and paper, while his latest set of prints — mostly of buildings, landscapes and the occasional botanical specimen — are usually enclosed for comments. “I’ve got a marvellous one of the baths, with reflection in it, so that you can hardly tell which way up it is,” he writes in June 1931. “Dr Barton the science master is going to give me eight shillings for it.”⁵⁵Two years later, Dahl was winning competitions.

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