Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock

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as “an early version of the druggy dropout”.36 Next day, while taking a bath in the local hotel, Horrocks also flooded the bathroom. When the owner asked him for some money to repair the damage, Roald told his mother with delight that his friend had simply replied: “My dear sir, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I just washed your floor for you!”37

      On the way up to Snowdonia, Pearl also remembered his friend inventing stories about characters glimpsed through the car window, creating detailed situations and plots simply from the look on someone’s face or the way they were walking.38 Most of the key threads that would characterize Dahl’s fiction were subtly coming together in his psyche: an acute observational eye for detail, a madcap relish for fantasy, a sense of the irreverent, a delight in invention and a crude, childish sense of humour. Storytelling too was becoming part of his makeup. But he was a long way from doing it in an organized manner, let alone contemplating it as a means of earning his living. It was a diversion. For the moment, he seemed quite content to remain what he was — a young professional, with a salary and private income, whose spare hours were mostly spent playing golf, gambling, listening to music and practising his seduction techniques.

      “I went into oil because all girls go for oilmen,” Dahl told his Rep-tonian friend David Atkins, who sometimes had lunch with him in the City.39 But if Dahl thought Shell would provide him with a glamorous social life, he was disappointed. For this, he was forced to look elsewhere, largely following in the wake of his vivacious elder sister Alfhild, and her friend the clever, larger-than-life Alfred Tregear Chenhalls, who worked as business manager for the actor Leslie Howard. “Chenny” was another misfit who became part of the Dahl clan — “a curious character,” as Alfhild would later describe him, “a bit of a womanizer, but a bit of something else as well. You never quite knew what he was.”40 Chenny provided the Dahls with witty conversation and party opportunities in London. He taught Else and Alfhild to play piano duets and invited Sofie Magdalene, who “adored him”, on holiday to his family home in Corn-wall.41 He helped Roald to get his job with Shell.42 He was also “randy as hell” and liked to chase the girls. Alf had “a whale of a time” with him, but Else and Asta used to set traps for him on their bedroom doors in case he prowled the corridors when he stayed overnight.43

      However, while Roald enjoyed talking about sex, he was somewhat buttoned up when it came to his own love life. As far as romance was concerned, Alfhild later recalled that Roald “didn’t really discuss himself”.44 Dennis Pearl, who had had a row with his own parents and was now living at Oakwood too, remembered that his friend’s first romances were often secretive. Several originated from his local golf club and at least two involved adultery.45 One was with a peer’s wife (he would always be attracted to aristocrats) and another with a woman from Bexley, whom he saw only when her husband was away on business.46 “He tended to choose something which created difficulties,” Pearl recalled. “He seemed to like mystery.”47 By the time his posting to Africa finally came through in September 1938, Roald had been dating a girl of his own age called Dorothy O’Hara Livesay, whom he had met through Alfhild’s future husband, Leslie Hansen. “Dolly”, as she called herself, was of Belgian-Irish descent,48 and joined Roald’s family on the pierside at London Docks to wave him goodbye on his trip to East Africa. “Look after her, Dennis,” said Roald to his friend as he boarded the SS Mantola. Pearl took the advice to heart. Not long afterwards he got her pregnant and Dolly became the first Mrs Dennis Pearl.49

      For Dahl, aged just twenty-two, a new chapter of his life was beginning. After a two-week journey on the Mantola to Mombasa in Kenya, in the company of some empire-building Englishmen and their “bright, bony little wives”,50 he took a small coastal steamer, a “bloody little ship”,51 down the African coast to Dar es Salaam. His letters home from the voyage describe none of the eccentric passengers he would later evoke in his memoir, Going Solo (1986): the nudist athletes Major Griffiths and his wife, for example, or the rupophobic Miss Trefusis. Not even the bewigged Mr U. N. Savory gets a mention. Most of these delightful characters were almost certainly invented as an entertaining alternative to his real companions on the journey, who were dismissed in a letter to his mother as “pretty dull”. The welfare of some of the animals on board concerned him more: dogs that needed exercise and, in particular, a horse “doomed to stand in his box in which he can’t even turn round”.52 By the end he longed to reach Tanganyika.

      Dahl spent most of his year there living with two colleagues, Panny Williamson and George Rybot. They shared a large, spacious villa called Shell House, set in lush gardens some fifty yards from the beach at Oyster Bay, just south of the centre of Dar es Salaam. Much of his spare time was spent playing squash, darts and golf at the whites-only Dar es Salaam Club, or socializing at the colonial cocktail parties. “As far as I can see,” he told his mother, “the average person … gets drunk at least twice a week out here. They have these things called ‘sundowners’ starting at about seven or eight o’clock — cocktail parties really — but no cocktails, only whisky, beer and gin … Actually it does you no harm and you never have a hangover because you sweat it all out in the night — it’s so hot! I only get drunk once a week and then not properly drunk — just merry — I think it’s good for you.”56 As his alcohol intake increased, Roald boasted that he was developing “hollow legs”,57 and complained about the vast amounts of money he had to spend on beer and spirits. The drunker he got, the more raucous his behaviour became, while his instinctive dislike of anything that smacked of bourgeois

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