Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock

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      In fact, Welch did come back but only for a few weeks, before his father secured a passage for his son to join him in Shanghai. By the time he was in his sixties, Roald had forgotten this detail. Fifty years earlier he had told his mother precisely what happened. He could not possibly admit to her that he too longed to escape — after all, he had made his promise to the doctor in Llandaff — so his tone remained, as always, positive and upbeat. “There are two Brothers in Brook House called Welch,” he wrote, “and one did not want to come back to school, so at the station he told his bro. that he was going to buy a paper. But he didn’t return. And no one knew where he was. The truth of the matter was he had bottled & taken a train to Salisbury, where he went to a cousin aged 63 & told him a pack of lies. The next day, he went to Exeter. He had to pawn his watch to get money & was found by a Policeman wandering about in the streets of Exeter at midnight with tenpence in his pocket. He slept the night in a cell. He is now back at school, & seems quite happy!!!!”71

      Ironically, in Maiden Voyage, Welch’s own account of life at Repton, this “escape” turned him into something of a celebrity, and on his return, he was treated with new respect by many of the boys and the masters. “‘Good God, Welch, have you come back?’” one boy exclaims. “‘I heard that you had got hold of forty pounds and gone off to France, and someone else told me that Iliffe had taken you to Italy.’” Iliffe, Welch adds, was an older boy who “had shown a frank interest in people younger than himself”. Welch’s Repton memoir was, in many respects, a twin of Dahl’s. Both shared a horror of the open lavatories and of the school’s many tortures, which included boys being stripped naked and having chewing gum rubbed into their pubic hair, or an initiation procedure where a child was forced to hang from a wooden ceiling beam and kiss a set of lips that had been painted onto the timber, while his naked body was flicked at with wet towels. “I had been told that you could lift the skin off someone’s back in this way,” Welch wrote. “I always waited, half in horror, to see a ribbon of flesh come off.”72

      Dahl seldom publicly discussed his own sexual experiences, although when he did, it was usually to a humorous end. The tale of his housemaster’s explanation of the perils of masturbation, which alluded to a torch with a limited power supply and concluded with the stern advice “not to touch it — or the batteries will go flat” was honed to comic perfection over many years of public speaking. But that, it seems, was as far as Dahl’s sex education went at school. Charles Pringle, who overlapped with Roald in his first year at The Priory and who was his fag for a term, similarly remembered how uncomfortable J. S. Jenkyns was discussing sex, although he could not recall the story of the torch.74 And, despite the permissive atmosphere at Oakwood, Sofie Magdalene did not think this was part of her maternal responsibilities either. Roald’s sister Else told her daughter Anna that her mother had done nothing to prepare her for her first period. In pain and frightened by the bleeding, Else went to Sofie Magdalene for reassurance and was given short shrift. “Go and talk to your sister,” was her response. Alfhild was apparently no more helpful. “It was Birgit [the nanny] who told everyone the facts of life,” Else recalled. “Extremely inaccurately”.75 By the summer of 1933, Roald was longing for contact with girls outside his family. Having taken a course of dancing lessons, the sixteen-year-old was eager to monopolize Kari, a Norwegian friend of his sisters, at the school’s end-of-year dance. Louis, his twenty-seven-year-old half brother, had also been invited to the event, and Roald was desperately concerned that Kari would find him more attractive. He told his mother that Louis should stick to dancing with Ma Binks.76

      There were girls in the village, and others in Derby, who formed friendships with Repton boys. Some were even jokingly referred to as “so-and-so’s wife”.77 However, it’s likely that Dahl’s own adolescent sexual desires were largely unfulfilled until he left the school. His stature and aloofness probably made him immune to the sexual advances of older boys such as the dandy Middleton with his silk cravats, or the bully W. W. Wilson, with his exotic hybrid chrysanthemums, nor is there much evidence that he had close friendships with younger boys. David Atkins recalled that Roald had had more than the distant contact he admitted with Denton Welch. Atkins wrote that he remembered them in English lessons together, the six-five Dahl, “voice already broken”, playing Romeo to Welch’s Juliet in a reading of the Shakespeare play, and that a “romantic friendship” formed between the two boys.78 Atkins even re membered Dahl making a “determined grab” for Welch’s private parts on the first day of term.79 “Welch was a natural target for cruelty,” he wrote elsewhere, “and Dahl was sometimes protective, but also enjoyed hurting him. Welch, surely a masochist, would pretend to run away; Dahl would catch him and twist his arm behind his back until tears came. He also applied Chinese burns to the skin of Welch’s wrist. The rest of us stood and watched; we were all a little frightened of Dahl.”80

      That Dahl and Welch might have been drawn to one another is not surprising. Welch, like Michael Arnold, was an outsider. But he was gone by the summer of 1932. Nor would Michael Arnold survive his full term at Repton. The circumstances of Arnold’s departure reveal again how much Dahl kept from his mother, and how much his letters are to some degree early essays in fiction. It all began when “Binks” brought Arnold, the subversive, into the fold and made him a boazer, with all the powers that entailed. In January 1933, during a “devilishly cold” spell of weather, Roald told his mother that he and Michael had been out illicitly skating. “But he must be careful what he does now,” he added, “as he’s just been made a house prefect.”81 Things soon began to go wrong for Arnold. Not that there is any trace of this in Roald’s letters home, which continue as ever in their chatty, upbeat descriptions of pike fishing, fox-hunting, and killing rooks with a catapult.82 On May 7, he told his mother that he was in Michael’s study again this term,83 regaling her with details about a photograph of a grasshopper he was enlarging and requesting her to send patent leather shoes for a dancing lesson. But the following week he delivered a bombshell:

       Do you know what has happened; Michael has had a severe mental breakdown and has had to go away for the rest of the term before he goes to Oxford. He is staying

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