LITMIR.BIZ

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I don’t think he’ll mind it, because he rather enjoys tramping about on moors & things alone all day. I have had quite a lot to do arranging all his things, returning all his books to the masters from whom he had borrowed them, packing a crate full of his books, & putting everything else

       in his trunk. I’m very sorry he’s gone, but now I go about with Smith, that fellow from Bromley. To show how darned popular he was — half the house has written to him already.

      As if deliberately to play down what he has just told her, he adds a comic footnote:

       Last night after lights I was shaving in the dark, when Palairet, whose bed was within reach of my basin, said, I’ll strike a match for you, so you can see. I had my back to him, & when he struck the match, as it was still fizzing he pushed the end against my bottom, burnt a hole in both me & my pyjamas. He had to be sat on? ⁸⁴

      But horseplay was something of a cover story. And the “character” Dahl had created for his mother since his first letters home at St Peter’s was about to be exposed as something of a fake. After receiving Roald’s letter, a sympathetic Sofie Magdalene suggested to her son that she invite Michael to come and stay at Bexley. Roald replied that he thought this was not a good idea, but did not explain why.⁸⁵ Sofie Magdalene, ignoring her son’s advice, must then have written to Michael’s parents and from them, or from Michael himself, learned the truth: that he had been expelled for homosexual activity with younger boys. Shocked less by Michael’s behaviour than by the fact that Roald had not been honest with her, she then wrote to her son, accusing him of being a liar and implicating him in what had been going on. In a panic, Roald went to his housemaster for advice. Binks wrote Sofie Magdalene the following letter:

       Dear Mrs Dahl,

       Roald came to me last night in considerable distress, because you thought that he must have been concerned in the unfortunate events which led to Michael Arnold leaving Repton.

       He had not told you about that, because he did not want to

       distress you; but owing to the turn that events have taken, I think I had better tell you about it. Early this term it came out that Arnold had been guilty of immorality with some small boys last term. As he was a prefect and in a position of trust in the house, and as his acts had been quite deliberate, we decided that he must go. It was a very unpleasant business for everybody and especially for Roald; not only because he lost his chief friend, but also because people were likely to think that he was implicated. But as a matter of fact there was no sort of suspicion attaching to him, in fact I am convinced that he had done his best to make Arnold give up his bad ways; but the latter is very obstinate and would not listen to him.

       When boys are sent away for this sort of thing, there is naturally some difficulty in accounting to their acquaintances for their leaving school. As a matter of fact Roald consulted me at the time about what he should say. I did not think it necessary to tell you about it — as he was not himself implicated — at least not at present, when he could only communicate by letter. So when Arnold’s father ascribed it to a mental breakdown, I thought he had better use that explanation.

       I may have been wrong in this — if so, I am sorry. But in any case you may set your mind at ease about Roald. I am convinced that he is perfectly straight about it all and has not been concerned in Arnold’s misdeeds.

       As to the letter: Some of these very clever boys have an abnormality in their minds, which makes them resentful of authority, and difficult to deal with, and may lead to disaster as in his case. Arnold was apparently convinced (quite wrongly) that he was not appreciated at his true worth here, and took up a defiant and revolutionary attitude to assert his independence. It was of course a very wicked and selfish method of doing so, as he deliberately tried to start small boys off wrong. It is a sad business, as he has many good qualities: I only hope he will be able to control his “complex” in future.

       But my chief object in writing is to set your mind at rest about Roald — I’m sure he is straight and I hope you will tell him that you

       trust him to go right. It is of great importance that he should feel you believe in him.

       Yours sincerely SS Jenkyns ⁸⁶

      The letter clearly reassured Sofie Magdalene, and Roald added his own gloss later the same day when he wrote to her:

       Yes, I knew Michael had been expelled, and had asked Binks what I should say to you about it, and he said that it would be by far the best for all concerned to conceal the fact under a pretext of mental breakdown. But please don’t think that I had anything to do with him in that way at all. I was his friend and I knew that he had a kink about immorality. I had tried to stop him, as Binks knew, but it was no good. I have asked Binks, who knows my character here a good deal better than most, to assure you that I had nothing to do with it at all. By your letter I concluded that you thought I had been behaving badly and might be expelled if I was not careful. Well, please believe me when I tell you that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. But it was for the sake of everyone’s feelings that Binks and I thought it best to conceal the fact of his expulsion. The Boss [the Headmaster] told me that it was not homosexuality, but merely the natural outlet for a rather over-sensuous mind, often met hand in hand with great brain. He has asked him to come down to the school again in a year’s time. ⁸⁷

      Ben Reuss thought Roald was lucky to avoid being expelled himself. “He was terribly clever at sliding out of problems and trouble,” he remembered. “He always got away with it.”⁸⁸ But whatever Roald’s own involvement, the episode probably ensured that he would remain anti-establishment, outside the fold. Michael Arnold, on the other hand, went to Oxford and became a respected industrial scientist, marrying before the war and fathering three sons, one of whom he sent to Repton. He never told his children that he had been expelled and seems quickly to have put the incident behind him. For Dahl, it was more complicated. The incident lingered in his subconscious and it subtly altered his relationship with his mother. His letters to her became more factual, less self-consciously effervescent because the happy-go-lucky mask he had created for both of them had been damaged. The make-believe alternative Repton he had constructed was now tainted.

      Surprisingly, the episode did not adversely affect Roald’s affection for Michael Arnold. It almost seems to have reinforced it. The two men remained in regular contact for the next fifty years — one year Dahl and Arnold took their young families away to Norway on holiday together — until a violent argument in old age finally put an end to the friendship.⁸⁹ Roald however continued to believe that his friend had been badly treated by Repton — not so much because he had been expelled, but because he had been brutally beaten beforehand. This punishment affected him more deeply than any injury he himself received — perhaps because the beater in this instance was not a boazer, but his headmaster, “the Boss”. By the time he came to write Boy, his memories of that beating surged back with some ferocity. And this was one incident from the initial draft that he did not censor. His final account is almost entirely as he first described it. “Michael was ordered to take down his trousers and kneel on the Headmaster’s sofa with the top half of his body hanging over one end of the sofa,” he wrote. In between each “tremendous crack administered upon the trembling buttocks”, the Boss would light his pipe and “lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing”.⁹⁰ Arnold, Dahl remembered, was subjected to ten strokes, although Ben Reuss recalled that there were twelve, six with a “heavy cane” and six with a “whippy one”.⁹¹

      “At

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