LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers.”⁹² Ben Reuss corroborated Dahl’s memory of the bloody “mopping up operations” and added that the beating made a considerable impression on everyone in the school.⁹³ And, although both his sisters Else and Asta maintained that the Dahls had all been “brought up with no religion whatsoever”,⁹⁴ Roald would later claim that the incident made him begin “to have doubts about religion and even about God”.⁹⁵ In his mind, it was all the more shocking and hypocritical because the perpetrator was Geoffrey Fisher, the man who later went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

Unfortunately, Roald had made a mistake. Not for the first time, he sounded off before he had fully checked his facts. For the culprit was not Fisher at all, but his successor John Christie. The beating happened in the summer of 1933, a year after Fisher, as Dahl records in his own letters home, had left Repton to become Bishop of Chester.⁹⁶ More than fifty years later, however, Dahl blamed the “shoddy bandy-legged” Fisher for the caning, and painted him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. “I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.”⁹⁷ That description was exaggerated. Beatings such Michael Arnold’s were unusual. Arnold himself was not a small boy, but an eighteen-year-old who had abused younger boys.¶ Moreover it was a surprising case of mistaken identity. For there is no evidence that Roald particularly disliked Fisher — either while he was at school or after he left it.

      Indeed, in many of his letters, his headmaster comes across as an object of affection. In the summer of 1931, for instance, Roald took a photo of the Boss laughing uproariously during a cricket match. Thirty years later, he sent Fisher a copy of his collection of short stories Kiss Kiss. He enclosed a copy of that photograph and alluded with warmth to the same incident. On the first page he wrote:

       The headmaster was roaring with laughter. There was a “click” behind him. He looked round and saw the thin boy holding a camera in his hands. “Dahl,” the headmaster said sternly, “if it is ribald you will

       suppress it!” Today, thirty-two years later, the boy is a little frightened that the headmaster will feel the same way about these stories. But he offers them, nevertheless, with gratitude and affection? ⁹⁸

      The inscription is dated December 1962. It was sent shortly after Roald had turned to his headmaster for consolation after the death of his seven-year-old daughter Olivia. Returning to Repton in the 1970s, to give a generally lighthearted and entertaining speech to the pupils, he described his former headmaster as a “thoroughly good” man, although “not guiltless” when it came to inflicting violence on younger boys.⁹⁹ By contrast, Christie made little impression, except as something of a Christian zealot. In the summer of 1932, Roald wrote to his mother explaining why he had not invited her to his confirmation and telling her that there was no question he would ever become seriously devout. “Talking about religious fanatics,” he continued, “this new Boss is one. He’s most frightfully nice, but he’s a religious fanatic. Far too religious for this place.” ¹⁰⁰

      It has been suggested that when Dahl published Boy, he deliberately falsified the truth about Michael Arnold’s beating in order to create a sensation. Fisher went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, crowning Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation in 1953, while Christie was simply a public school headmaster who later became principal of Jesus College, Oxford. However, there is no evidence at all that this mistake was anything other than a lapse of memory. Dahl had already mistaken the identity of Michael Arnold’s assailant eight years earlier, when he recounted the story of his friend’s beating on his visit to Repton in 1975. There, on home turf as it were, he told the tale as vividly as he was to do in Boy, describing the flogging in terms of a “medieval religious inquisitorial exercise”.¹⁰¹ Strangely, perhaps, on this occasion it caused no stir. Moreover, Dahl also related “an interesting sequel” to this story, explaining that when he had been to visit the now ennobled Lord Fisher in Sherborne eleven years earlier, the Boss, who he declared had “an astonishing memory”, could remember nothing of the beating. Perhaps this should have flashed a warning light that something was wrong. It didn’t. And so the error became set in stone.

      But when Boy was published in 1984, there was a furore. Family and former students rushed to Fisher’s defence. Dahl’s final head of house, John Bradburn, summed up their feelings when he wrote: “The Boss was a wise and stern headmaster … but always fair; and in general held in great respect, admiration and indeed affection.”¹⁰² It was curious that no one at the time stumbled on the fact that Dahl had simply accused the wrong man. Michael Arnold, presumably, could have set the record straight, but chose not to. Why he did not do so, we will probably never know.

      From that incident onward, Dahl’s final months at Repton were a kind of holding pattern. He had lost his soul mate. He was not made a prefect. So his energies turned even further inward. As he wrote slightly resentfully in Boy, “the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable…. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them.”¹⁰³He also had another secret consolation: his motorbike. For Christmas 1932 his mother had bought him a 500cc Ariel. He hid it in the barn of a local farm and it gave him a huge sense of independence and freedom. At weekends he would take it out and ride through the Derbyshire countryside, sometimes venturing into Repton itself and annoying masters and boazers, as he whizzed noisily past them, incognito beneath his old overcoat, rubber waders, helmet and goggles. He got a summons for speeding, but managed to keep that secret as well.¹⁰⁴

Eventually, he took his School Certificate exam in the summer of 1933, passing with credit in Scripture Knowledge, English, History, French, Elementary Mathematics and General Science. He had already decided that he neither wanted to go to university nor to do “missionary work or some other fatuous thing”.¹⁰⁵ His father’s trust would provide him with a modest income from the age of twenty-five, so there was no immediate pressure to find a job. What he desired was adventure. So he chose to join an oil company and go to work abroad.** His mother, “desperate” at what she saw as his lack of ambition, sent off to have his horoscope professionally read. Years later she told her daughter Else that the psychic predicted Roald was going to be a writer.¹⁰⁶

      His final weeks at the school were spent building gigantic fire-balloons, which he and his friends constructed out of tissue paper, wire and paraffin. The biggest, he claimed, was 18 feet high.¹⁰⁷ Making these fire-balloons was something he would do on and off for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the thrill of seeing them rise up into the night sky and would chase them for miles across the countryside to see where they landed. At that point in his life they must also have seemed a symbol of freedom and escape. Because he had not become a boazer, he was leaving Repton uncorrupted and with his rebellious nature uncurbed. He may have been occasionally cruel — giving Denton Welch Chinese burns, or teasing

Скачать книгу