LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

— while he was also a fan of the black American bass, Paul Robeson and opera arias sung by Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini. His art master, Arthur Norris, encouraged his interest in painting, too, and particularly the works of the French Impressionists.

      Bizarrely for a school that was so brutal, by the 1920s Repton had also developed quite a reputation for the arts and literature. The novelists Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward were pupils during the First World War, while Isherwood’s friend, the poet W. H. Auden, had been named by his father — an Old Reptonian — after the local church, St Wystan’s. Dahl absorbed these literary values — even if Auden and Isherwood would never be his favourite writers. He never acknowledged it, but his English teacher, the war poet and cricketer John Crommelin-Brown, was another early influence, encouraging him to use imaginative language, but expressed correctly and elegantly. A contemporary, David Atkins, recalled “Crummers” repeatedly urging his pupils never to use a long word where a short one would do, and always “to keep your sentences free of froth”.⁵⁶ Roald too would later recall that his education was “relentlessly directed” toward writing short, clear sentences that “said precisely what one meant them to say”.⁵⁷ Sometimes this was achieved with puzzles, such as this example of why one needs to punctuate properly:

       If you go to the zoo you will see elephants playing the saxophone you first take a breath and swallow the mouthpiece is then taken between the lips and firmly to boot polish people are proud to be or not to be is what Hamlet said when bathing the baby care must be taken to clean up his sparking plugs should be the regular practice of every driver who wants easy running does are female wives may forgive husbands never tell took a bow and shot the apple through the inside left raced down the field and shot a gaol civilisation being what it is is still necessary for locking up the undesirable flies fly and pigs don’t brown is a dentist and can be seen any day drawing stumps is a sign that the match is over. ⁵⁸

      Roald sent it on to his mother, with a sealed, correctly punctuated version, in case she could not work it out.

      His surviving school essays are notable for their celebration of the imagination. Many already display an acute use of dialogue and a delight in the possibilities of the unexpected. Some anticipate his children’s writing forty or fifty years later. In an essay on Nursery Rhymes, Dahl writes of a child wandering into a vegetable garden, “enchanted to think that Jack is probably hiding up one of those large beanstalks”. Similarly, he describes another child, Little Jill, climbing out of bed at night and tiptoeing to the window “to peep through a chink in the curtains, at the cows in the field below. Oh when, oh when, would she see one jump over the Moon …” He contrasts Little Jill’s sense of fantasy scornfully with a “detestable” boy called Pip, who is “self-centred and unimaginative, with no vestige of excitement about him”.⁵⁹ And his most striking Repton essay is about dreaming itself. A series of interrupted poetic reveries that remind his teacher of Tennyson also reveal a more modern, sometimes Wildean sensibility. An iceberg, “hard and cold, like some great fragment of an icy coast, far away, Northward” gives way to a scene where a tap drips onto a delicate crane fly. Its drops “welled limpid, on the lip, and fell with a little splash upon the insect below”. Then waves like a “wounded tiger” boil over in “a turmoil of green and white”, while overhead hang “wet black clouds, heavy with rain, like airships of paper filled with oil”.⁶⁰ One by one the images tumble onto each other in a kaleidoscope of colour and sensation before they finally shatter, as Dahl is roughly awakened. Four boys have lifted up his bed and are trying to tip him out of it onto the cold floor of the dormitory.

      Roald’s unexpected similes reinforce David Atkins’s memories of competing with Dahl for a school poetry prize. The subject apparently was “The Evening Sky”. Atkins’s attempt was romantic and constructed in formal metric rhyme. Dahl’s apparently was bitter and anarchic, beginning: “Evening clouds, like frog spawn, spoil the sky.” Atkins recalled playing fives with Dahl afterwards and taking him to task for his sourness, whereupon Dahl confessed to him that “Life isn’t beautiful and sentimental and clear. It’s full of foul things and horrid people, and incidentally, rhyming is old hat.”⁶¹ It was a rare moment of openness from a writer who had already learned to keep his emotional cards close to his chest. However, his main weapon for keeping “foul things and horrid people” at bay was not his sullenness, but a wicked, quirky and decidedly vulgar sense of humour — one which he retained well into old age, describing himself with great pride on a number of occasions as a “geriatric child”.⁶² "Laughter temporarily prevents gloomy thinking and melancholy brooding,” he wrote in a schoolboy essay that concluded anarchically, “What an infinitely superior animal a dog would be if he laughed aloud when his master fell off a ladder.”⁶³ Roald himself was proud of his skills as a humorist and enjoyed sharpening his talents in his letters to his mother, who shared his taste for absurdist comedy. In an exchange about whether dried figs were flattened by being trodden down, for example, her son wrote home one day with an exciting new development: “One fellow in my study, who claims to have licked an Arab’s foot, said he recognised the taste on the surface of his fig. I said, ‘Not really?’ and he answered, ‘No, on second thoughts, perhaps they are Italians’ feet!’”⁶⁴

      Sport was another refuge. Dahl was a competent footballer and cricketer, but he excelled at squash and fives, rapidly becoming the best player in the school. And, despite his delight in the luxuries of life, such as good food and beautiful flowers, he was not without a fascination for Spartan values. In training for a football match, he tells his mother proudly he has to observe the following rules: “No eating between meals, except fruit which you may eat as much as you like. No fizzy drinks. A certain amount of ‘charged’ exercise every day. Skipping after prayers in the evening. No soaking in hot baths. A cold shower after baths. No playing on the yard. A good walk on Sunday afternoon.”⁶⁵

      His height and size — he was six foot five by his mid-teens — also meant that for his final two years at Repton he was largely left alone. David Atkins, though from a different house, felt that even when Dahl was a junior boy there was something intimidating about him.⁶⁶ Roald certainly learned to enjoy this sense of otherness and isolation, and his long walks through the countryside gave him ample opportunity to indulge his imagination. In his very first letter home he wrote that “the best bit [of life at Repton] is we are allowed to go anywhere we like when nothing is happening”,⁶⁷ while in the first draft of Boy he described himself simply as “rather dreamy”.⁶⁸ It was while he was out walking on his own, smoking his pipe,⁶⁹ fishing, collecting bird’s eggs, berries or crab apples, that he honed his observations of the natural world. These country walks were a constant feature of his life at Repton. They kept him sane and gave him a context both to watch and to dream. It was the same for another unhappy contemporary of his at school, the artist and writer Denton Welch.

      Welch had arrived in September 1929, a term before Roald. Though they were not in the same house and did not become friends, they were certainly aware of each other. Both loathed the school, but while Dahl toughed it out, Welch caused a scandal by running away. In the first draft of Boy, Dahl wrote admiringly of his contemporary: “There was another boy in the school while I was there who was later to become a writer like me. His name was Denton Welch, and a fine writer he became. He wasn’t in the same house as me, so I never got to know him, but every day I used to see Denton Welch walking to class all on his own, a tall frail bespectacled boy who looked totally miserable. He must

Скачать книгу