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and the expatriates in general as “awful twits really, full of manners, and getting up when women come in etc. etc. I don’t do it and I’m always in the shit.”⁵⁹ He once disgraced himself at a drinks party in Government House, stealing into the bedroom and returning to the drawing room with the Governor’s chamberpot upon his head. But he found a kindred spirit in his housemate, George Rybot.

       George and I were asked to go and have a drink at Mrs Wilkin’s house. Mrs Wilkin is a frightful old hag who weighs nineteen and a half stone (and is proud of it) and looks like a suet dumpling covered in lipstick & powder. Well, George went into the drawing room and I went down to the basement to have a widdle. Down there I came across the most marvellous crimson tinpi-jerry[chamberpot], so with a whoop of joy I seized it and dashed upstairs to show it to George, entering the drawing room waving the thing above my head. Well, I wasn’t to know that there were twenty other people in the room, sitting primly around sipping their pink gins. There was a horrified silence. Then George started giggling — then we both got a fit of giggling while I pushed the frightful apparition under the nearest sofa and muttered something about “what a pretty colour it was and didn’t they all think so”. ⁶⁰

      Chamberpots and their contents interested him in other ways, too. Like many of his contemporaries, Roald was profoundly concerned about the frequency and quality of his bowel movements, and his letters home are full of scatological details and jokes about urination,⁶¹ enemas,⁶² and the regularity or irregularity of his motions. For a while he was taken with a contemporary bestseller his mother had sent him called Culture of the Abdomen, by Professor F. A. Hornibrook. Subtitled “The Cure of Obesity and Constipation”, Hornibrook argued that maintaining a particular exercise regime, and adopting a squatting posture when on the lavatory, were the most effective means both of thoroughly evacuating the bowel and of remaining fit and healthy. Dahl was fascinated. He quickly renamed the author “Horniblow” and persuaded his housemates to have a go at all the exercises. “Horniblow” soon became a byword for anything involved with the lower bowel at Shell House: native dancers, rhinoceros droppings, the antics of his dog Samka, all got the treatment. “We do Horniblow every morning — it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen,” he wrote to his mother, “George, Panny and I sprawling over the floor of my bedroom groaning, panting and sweating and cursing the old Professor. But I think it’s done me lots of good.”⁶³ He would remain concerned about his daily “deposit in the bank of good health”⁶⁴ until the end of his days.

For Roald as for all the Dahls, domestic life was unimaginable without pets, and so Shell House rapidly acquired a menagerie of peculiar animals. Many of these soon made regular comic appearances in his letters home. Chief among them were the tick-infested Samka, “a guard dog with the biggest tool and the longest tail (always wagging) that I’ve ever seen”,⁶⁵ and two cats, Oscar and Mrs Taubsypuss.** Dog Samka is “such an important person in this house”, Roald told his mother, “that when he is ill or off colour the whole household is disorganized”.⁶⁶ Samka’s escapades were recounted with generous dollops of picaresque detail, as the adventures of an insatiable canine Casanova, who suffered a postcoital hangover most mornings because of his propensity to “go out and roger himself silly at the slightest opportunity”.⁶⁷ At one point he disappeared and no one could find him. Eventually, after much searching, he was discovered locked in the local chemist’s shop. “We consoled ourselves,” Roald reported, “with the thought that by now he would probably have had a very good meal of vanishing cream with a dessert of orange skin food and perhaps a bottle of Nuits de Paris or Blue Grass to wash it down … They say that when he trotted out his lips were rouged and he’d powdered his balls … Interviewed later, Dog Samka was heard to remark: I found french letters fried in liquid paraffin very nourishing, I shall always carry a packet with me in future in case of emergencies.”⁶⁸

      One of the reasons that Dahl took such delight in chronicling the sexual exploits of his pets was because he was finding it difficult to have any himself. He wrote enviously of his sisters “gadding about” in Paris, adding rather dolefully that “there’s no-one here worth gadding about with”.⁶⁹ A week later, his mood was more humorous. Describing how the damp made everything rot, he told his mother: “Golf balls go yellow, but that’s nothing — mine do too, like everything else that’s not used.”⁷⁰ This was typical of the ribald detail Roald adored and which was enthusiastically lapped up by Sofie Magdalene and his three sisters. Dirty jokes abound in almost every letter. Some of these were quite straightforward, but others already verged on the surreal. When his mother was recovering from dental surgery, for example, Roald asked his sisters to “tell her the joke about the person who had all teeth out & couldn’t be fed through the mouth. So the doctor said — I’ll have to feed you with a tube through your anus — what would you like for your first meal? A cup of tea please doctor — Right, here goes. Hi, stop doctor, stop what’s the matter, what’s the matter, is it too hot? No, there’s too much sugar in it.”⁷¹ His sisters, particularly Alfhild, usually responded in kind. And Roald often complimented them on how well their own jokes had been received at the club. Nevertheless, there was much more to Dahl’s time in Africa than playing the fool. If he was not getting the Out of Africa experience of which he had dreamed, he was seeking out its equivalent secondhand among the characters he encountered in Dar es Salaam, be they Brahmin Shell employees, a septuagenarian orchid collector whom he nicknamed “Iron Discipline”, or the servants in Shell House.

Shell House had its own cook and gardener and each of its three white residents had their own personal servant, or “boy”. Roald’s was called Mdisho. He was about nineteen, just three years younger than his master. “I get woken up by my boy at 6.30,” Roald wrote to his mother shortly after his arrival. “He brings tea and an orange — a marvellous orange tasting quite different to anything you’ve ever had … I eat my orange and drink my tea that is after the boy has removed the enormous mosquito net that is suspended about six feet above you.” Mdisho would then run his morning cold bath and lay out all Roald’s clothes for the day ahead. Initially, Dahl enjoyed this power over “the natives”,⁷² but soon he became fascinated by the “tall and graceful and soft-spoken” ⁷³ Mdisho, who was from a tribe of “magnificent fighters”.⁷⁴ Mdisho travelled everywhere with him, showing “absolute loyalty” to his “young white master”.⁷⁵ In turn, Roald looked after Mdisho, advising him on his finances, teaching him to read and write, and even acting as his banker when he wanted to save money to buy a wife.⁷⁶ Mdisho’s lack of guile and his simple, honest view of the world resonated with Dahl, who was also impressed when Mdisho boasted that his tribe had been the only ones ever to defeat the much-feared Masai.†† Dahl evoked him with respect and affection in Going Solo, and celebrated their friendship.⁷⁷ Mdisho’s innocent loyalty and toughness may even have helped inspire the hero of Dahl’s most famous children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For when Dahl first sketched out the story, he made his young hero a black boy, drawing

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