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boy of his age in the town, and as brave as a lion and as kind and nice and cheerful as anyone you could meet”.⁷⁸

      As a young man in Tanganyika, Dahl was guilty of making largely unflattering generalizations either about the native Africans, or the Indians, who made up a large part of the professional classes in Dar es Salaam. His endlessly feuding Goanese clerks, Carrasco and Patel, provoked him to complain that “they’re all the same, these bloody Hindus”, and to assert that their minds “grind exceedingly low”. When his shipping clerk invited him to his house, he was appalled by the family’s cramped and filthy living conditions, “their thousands of bloody relations” and “no less than eight horrible little naked children”.⁷⁹ While he may have been repelled by their living conditions, Dahl was nevertheless curious about the lives of nonwhites and seized with enthusiasm the rare opportunities that occurred to explore their world. On one occasion, he and George Rybot stopped their car to help another car that had broken down at the side of the road. The occupants turned out to be “an educated native all done up in smart suit & trilby hat, his two wives & two children aged about 4 & 7”. By way of thanks, they took Dahl and Rybot to “a bloody great native fair” that was celebrating “the big Mahomedan holiday of Id Ul Haj”. Roald told his mother he found the experience “damn’d interesting.”

      There were lots of frightful old hand-operated roundabouts … made out of coconut trees etc, slip ways down which you slid on coconut matting finishing up amidst a throng of yelling blacks; the most frightful sort of swing boats which were made, by some means or other to revolve round an enormous coconut tree, and at full speed they stood out (that’s the wrong word) parallel to the ground. Then there were native bands, with the players getting drunker & drunker on that frightful brew of theirs called Pombe, and beating the drums in the most weird fashion. But the best thing of all were the native dances. We saw the real thing — these blokes with nothing on except a bit of coconut matting & masses of white & red paint, yelling & swaying their hips in a manner which would make Mae West look like a fourth-rate novice. As each dance progresses, the dancers got more & more worked up, & yelled & shouted & leapt about until they just couldn’t go on any longer and another tribe came on and took their place. The way they wobbled their tummies would have earned for them the fullest approval of our friend Professor [sic] Horniblow.⁸⁰

      This response may have been unsophisticated and naive, but it was much more tolerant and embracing than that of many other whites around him. And as he grew older, Dahl became increasingly critical of his own youthful attitudes. In a speech at Repton in 1975, he described himself in Dar es Salaam as “a ridiculous young pukka-sahib”, and in his last year of life, he admitted that he was “mildly ashamed” by his tacit acceptance of certain British imperial attitudes while he was in Tanganyika, regretting his failure at the time to see that the whole colonial situation was just “not right”. He blamed it on the values he saw around him and on the fact that he had not yet learned to think independently. “When you’re very young, you just swim along with what everyone else is doing,” he told an Australian radio interviewer. “You can’t buck the tide. It was the last days of the British Empire.”⁸¹

      Over forty years earlier, in his short story “Poison”, he had been even more forthright, revealing a surprising empathy for the Indians he had once dismissed as “bloody fools”. The tale is set in India. There, a white man, Harry Pope, lies in bed, sweating with fear because he believes a krait, a venomous nocturnal snake, has slithered under the sheets and curled up on his stomach. The narrator, discovering his terrified friend, sends for the local Indian medic, Dr Ganderbai, who eventually pumps chloroform under the covers in an attempt to anaesthetize the deadly creature. In an atmosphere of tense drama the sheet is eventually removed to reveal: nothing. The snake has been a figment of Pope’s imagination. Humiliated, Pope turns on Ganderbai, shouting at him and calling him a “dirty little Hindu sewer rat” and other “terrible things”, as the embarrassed narrator thanks the doctor for his trouble and ushers him apologetically toward his car. As published, it was clear that Dahl (in the person of the narrator) is totally on the side of Ganderbai. However, an earlier incarnation of the tale included a paragraph (later removed) that was even more overt in its condemnation of British colonial snobbery:

       Dr Ganderbai was worried about his reputation and I must say I couldn’t blame him. It was probable that he had never been called in to attend a European. None of them bothered with him much, except perhaps the British upon whom, in those days, his job depended, and who noticed him only in order to be politely offensive — as only the British can be. I imagined that even now little Ganderbai could hear the thick, fruity voice of Dr James Russell in the lounge at the club, saying, “Young Pope? Ah yes, poor fellah. Not a nice way to go. But then if people will call in a native witch doctor, what can they expect?” ⁸²

      Dahl’s own encounters with venomous snakes were few and far between. Once he encountered one outside his home. “These black mam-bas are real bastards,” he told his mother. “Not only are they one of the few snakes that will attack without provocation, but if they bite you, you stand a jolly good chance of kicking the bucket in a few hours unless you receive treatment at once.” This one was reportedly “eight feet long and as thick as my arm and as black as soot”.⁸³ Roald killed it with his hockey stick. Another time he saw one through the window of his car driving back from a cricket match in Morogoro.⁸⁴ In Going Solo, however, he recounts a host of exotic African animal adventures, including a close encounter with another mamba at the home of a customs official in Dar es Salaam and one with a man-eating lion, who steals into the garden of the District Officer’s homestead and abducts his cook’s wife. None of these incidents is recorded in his letters home. Aside from the snakes, and a glimpse of a “bloody great leopard”⁸⁵ in his back garden, his letters chronicle much more mundane experiences, such as climbing up trees to pick coconuts,⁸⁶ Dog Samka’s attempts to impersonate the Empress of Australia in a swimming costume,⁸⁷ and countless visits to the club for a “snifter”.⁸⁸ His life frustrated as much as it exhilarated and Dahl was clearly often bored with an existence that was often little more than one “long string of sundowners”.⁸⁹ Trips into the interior were extremely rare and a lot of the time he was forced to admit that there was “bugger all to do except sweat”,⁹⁰ complaining that, even with his car (a Ford 10 that he bought for £40), “you can’t go up country more than a few miles, the roads are too bad”.⁹¹ The more exotic tales recounted in Going Solo are likely either to be compelling recreations of stories heard from others or just flights of pure fancy, written in the manner of his heroes Rider Haggard and Isak Dinesen.

      These African experiences did fire his imagination, however, and give him the feeling that he had something special to write about. One of his earliest short stories, “An Eye for a Tooth”, eventually published in 1946 as “An African Story”, used a plot device that hinged upon another snake, a black mamba, which had learned to suckle milk from a cow. It was a bizarre and unlikely idea. Concerned that the tale was implausible, his literary agent at the time, Ann Watkins, contacted a certain Dr Bogert, an expert at the Museum of Natural History in New York, to ascertain whether such a thing might indeed be possible. Assured by Dr Bogert that it was not, a potential publisher rejected the story. This irritated Dahl, not only because he had lost a sale but also because he believed the event to have been entirely credible. In his own mind, he now saw himself as an expert on Africa and, in any event, it was quite against his nature to

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