LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

— but he had never wielded the force of school authority. And he had never beaten anyone. Had he been given an official position, perhaps it would all have been different, although, as his daughter Ophelia observed, “the typically English ‘it happened to me, so it will happen to you’ attitude was never part of his mentality”.¹⁰⁹ His schoolfriend Ben Reuss was not so sure. “The powers-that-were mistrusted him and he got no promotion at all in a very hierarchical society. Probably a great mistake. No doubt it was feared that he would be subversive,” Reuss concluded, “but in these cases the poachers generally make the best gamekeepers.”¹¹⁰ So, just as the photograph is fixed in the darkroom, Dahl was “fixed” at Repton. Already immensely self-reliant, he now further turned his back on English protocol and pecking orders. From now on, where possible, he resolved to control his own destiny. John Christie, his headmaster, concluded Dahl’s final school report with these words: “He has ambition and a real artistic sense … If he can master himself, he will be a leader.”¹¹¹

^*In many respects, Repton was the archetypical contemporary British public school. As such it was chosen as the setting for the classic movie version of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), with Robert Donat and Greer Garson.

^†Dahl told his mother in 1931 that he had been made to go to see the school doctor about his heart despite the fact that he had already been to a number of specialists. Hodie, the school medic, apparently “said the same as Dr Goodall.” What that was he did not specify — Letter to his mother, 09/31 — RDMSC RD 13/1/7/2.

^‡Sofie Magdalene seems to have had little inkling of what torments lay behind the wild irises she saw in her son’s bedder. Visiting Roald during his first summer at the school, she wrote to her daughter Else that she was “very pleased with Repton…. It is much nicer than I expected it to be … Roald’s study was absolutely crammed with flowers” — Sofie Magdalene Dahl, Postcards to Else Dahl, 06/27/30 — RDMSC RD 20/9/2 and RD 20/9/3.

^§Curiously, when John Betjeman wrote to Dahl in 1961 to congratulate him on his collection of stories Kiss Kiss, he also made that comparison. He described the book as “a triumph of humour, poetry, the macabre, the unexpected — as though Denton Welch had become H. C. Anderson” — Betjeman, Letter to Roald Dahl, 01/01/61 — RDMSC RD 16/1/2.

^¶Probably both out of respect for Arnold’s privacy and because Boy was directed at young readers, Dahl failed to mention the nature of Arnold’s offence in his book. The reader is consequently left rather in the dark as to why his friend has been treated so savagely.

^**In eschewing university, Dahl was doing the same as most of his fellows. According to the Repton archivist, of the eighteen pupils who arrived with Dahl in January 1930, only two were listed in the school register as going on to university when they left. Of the thirty-four pupils who left with him in July 1934, ten went on to get a university education.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      Distant Faraway Lands

      IN AUGUST 1934, WHILE the rest of his family were frolicking in the Oslo Fjord, Roald boarded the RMS Nova Scotia as a member of the Public School Exploring Society. Fifty volunteers from across Britain had each paid £35 for the dubious pleasure of a four-week trek across a remote and unexplored area of the island of Newfoundland off the coast of northern Canada. The purpose was ostensibly to map an uncharted part of what was then still a British dominion, but no one really cared very much about that. What mattered far more to the organizers of the expedition was the business of character-building: instructing young empire builders how to survive in the wild, far away from the luxuries of civilization. For twelve of the fittest (that included Dahl) the journey culminated in a twenty-day Long March through soaking mosquito-infested bogs with between 60 and 100 pounds on their backs, living under canvas on a diet that consisted essentially of pemmican (a mixture of pressed meat, fat and berries), boiled lichen, mud and reindeer moss. It was a tough undertaking. The would-be explorers waded knee-deep down the Great Rattling Brook. They trudged through desolate swamps collecting plant and insect samples. They attempted to fish for trout and trap rabbits, but had little success at either. Their tents leaked and eventually they ran out of food. For most of the time they were hungry, wet and cold. As Roald recorded plaintively in his daily journal, “honestly I don’t think any one of us has ever been so miserable”.¹

      The week-long sea journey from Liverpool to St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, began in high spirits. Roald and another friend of his from Repton, the boisterous Jimmy Horrocks, got drunk and Horrocks had to be carried back to his cabin in a stupor. In between avoiding contact with a “silly little missionary” who wanted to talk about Labrador, and flirting with Ruth Lodge, a twenty-year-old actress who was also aboard the boat, Roald found time to make friends with a crew member from British Guiana called Sam. It was typical of him to look outside his immediate peer group for a kindred spirit, and Sam’s freewheeling Caribbean attitudes were much more appealing than those of most of his fellow explorers who, apart from Jimmy Horrocks, scarcely get a mention in his journal. “He’s a marvellous fellow, black curly hair & a blue beret,” Dahl wrote of Sam to his mother, adding that he had asked Sam to shave his head for him — leaving only “a tiny bit of bristle on the top”. Roald thought that he “looked fine”² with his new haircut, and Sam gave the seventeen-year-old boy his blue beret to keep his head warm. Dahl gratefully added it to a pack that, as he was the expedition’s official photographer, included a camera and eighteen rolls of film in lead cases, as well as 14 ounces of tobacco, two pipes and a mouth organ.

      The expedition was led by fifty-seven-year-old Surgeon Commander “Admiral” George Murray Levick, the founder of the Public Schools Exploring Society, and a survivor of Scott’s doomed expedition to the Antarctic. Murray Levick was an eccentric British penguin expert, who advocated Spartan values in the education of young men. For many on the expedition, including one of his three assistants, a journalist called Dennis Clarke, he was tantamount to a national hero. In his official history of the trip, Clarke eulogized his leader’s asceticism as well as his obsessive desire to put his feet where no other had trod before, boasting that, “if exploring were a crime … Commander Levick would have been hanged several times over”.³ He shared his commander’s delight in the pleasures of bathing naked in ice-cold rivers, marching through unknown landscapes, and rejoiced in what we might now call the culture of male bonding. He celebrated Levick’s disgust, for example, at having to travel first class on the 250-mile train journey inland from St John’s to Grand Falls, where the expedition began, rather than “roughing it” on the third class tickets he had specifically requested. Roald too clearly enjoyed the sense of pitting himself against a hostile natural environment — though perhaps not quite to the same degree as his commander. His journal records his battle with hunger and the elements in pithy detail, with occasional forays into imaginative fantasy, when things got really tough. “That night the water … soaked into our little bog and the water level in the tent rose several inches,” he wrote one evening. “If some great giant, wandering by that night, having caught a cold in the wet the previous day had, in need of a handkerchief, seized up our tent, we would all have drifted away in our sleeping bags.” Скачать книгу