LITMIR.BIZ

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continued, “I still maintain that if Dr Bogert or any of his learned friends go to Africa and talk to some of the native tribes there, they will tell them they have seen that sort of thing happen. But let us forget it. Send me back the story and I will keep it to read to my children.”⁹² To his mother, a week later, he wrote that, though the story had been declined, “morally and metaphorically I count it a sale”.⁹³

His time in Tanganyika was also formative in other ways. He learned to run a house, adopting the role of housekeeper and “holding court” each morning with Mpishi the cook and Mwino the head boy; paying wages, deciding menus, planning recipes and devising social events. He also indulged himself in the role of present giver and treatmaker, regularly sending back ornate jewellery, unusual furs and curios to his family. Hardly a letter goes by without mention of a gift he is seeking out or having made for one of them.‡‡ His love of classical music deepened, as did his pleasure in listening to his records at a very high volume. He sent long and detailed lists of exactly what he wanted to his family back in Bexley, declaring that listening to his music gave him “a hell of a kick”.⁹⁴ His taste for his own company intensified as well. A few months before Dahl left Dar es Salaam, he chose to rent a remote house on his own rather than live in the club or share with others. “It’ll be rather fun living there alone,” he wrote, “plus wireless and gramophone and about three boys for whom incidentally there are special quarters built beyond the house. The rent is bloody high … but the rest of the blokes would give me piles to live with.”⁹⁵ One evening, listening to Beethoven symphonies, he studied the antics of two transparent lizards hunting on the ceiling of his sitting room. It was “very exciting”, he told his mother, watching the gecko “fixing his unfortunate victim — often a small moth — with a very hypnotic eye”.⁹⁶ He nicknamed the two reptiles “Hitler” and “Mussolini”.

      Those two names were frequently on his lips during his year in East Africa, for the political background to his time there was one of increasing certainty of war between Britain and Germany. As Roald set sail on the Mantola, German troops were occupying the disputed Sudetenland territory on the border with Czechoslovakia. By the time he arrived in Dar es Salaam, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich and announced to the world that he had won peace for his time. Dahl was one of many who did not believe it. He sided with the outsider Winston Churchill, who argued that Britain had suffered an “unmitigated defeat”, that it had succumbed to a bullying German regime, and that soon all of Czechoslovakia would be “engulfed in the Nazi regime”.⁹⁷ Two years earlier, Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had occupied Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, with little international opposition. Now, it seemed to Dahl, Hitler was being allowed to do the same. Listening to the BBC’s Empire Broadcasts on his short-wave radio in Shell House, he kept abreast of the growing international crisis. Sometimes he tried to make light of it, wishing that Mussolini would take up a useful hobby like “collecting bird’s eggs instead of countries”, but adding ruefully that the Italian dictator would “probably say it was cruel”.⁹⁸

      In March 1939, Churchill’s predictions were realized when the German Army occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. It left Chamberlain’s “peace with honour” exposed as empty rhetoric. From then onwards, Dahl was convinced that war was inevitable. Repeatedly he urged his mother to get out of their house in Bexley, which he rightly believed would be directly under the flight path of any German bombers attacking London. He hoped that his mother and sisters would move to their holiday haunt on the Welsh coast in Tenby. There he believed they would be safe. “If war breaks out you’ve jolly well got to go to Tenby otherwise you’ll be bombed,” he wrote. “None of you must stay in London … Don’t forget, you’ve got to go if war breaks out.”⁹⁹ But Sofie Magdalene was stubborn. She did not want to move. And neither did her daughters, who were enjoying their social life in London too much and had no desire to relocate to the remote Welsh seaside. They elected to stay on, believing that Oakwood’s large cellar would make an effective air-raid shelter against any attack.

      Roald was infuriated by his mother’s refusal to bend to his logic and repeatedly tried to make her change her mind. But mother and son were as obstinate as each other. By the end of September, the Germans had invaded Poland, Britain was formally at war, and Roald was desperate. “I say once more,” he wrote, certain that the Luftwaffe raids were about to begin, “that you’ve no right to be sitting in one of the most dangerous places in the world at the moment, quite happy in the mere thought that you’ve got a cellar — That cellar’s no good once the real raids start, which presumably they must before very much longer.”¹⁰⁰ Roald’s fears, though amply justified, would prove somewhat premature, as his family got a stay of execution from the bombs for another year. The “Phoney War” continued for another eight months, until May 1940, when Germany invaded France, while air raids on London did not begin in earnest until four months after that, in September 1940.

      The impending war in Europe may have been thousands of miles away, but it had an immediate manifestation in Tanganyika, where the majority of white settlers were still German nationals. By the summer of 1939, significant tensions had already begun to develop with the British. Never the diplomat, Dahl’s unbridled sense of mischief soon got him into trouble. One day at the Gymkhana Club, he and two of his friends drew a picture of a naked Hitler on a blackboard and spent an hour throwing darts at it. He described the game in some detail: “Hitting his balls with a dart counted 10, hitting his tool counted 15, his navel counted 5, his moustache 20 etc.” A German member of the club made a formal complaint. “There was a frightful show … the little bugger whipped straight off to the German Consulate … and the Club Committee were called to an extraordinary General Meeting and all that sort of bullshit … There’s one hell of a showdown — you see there are so many Germans in this place and everything is rather on the boil,” he told his mother. Dahl was formally reprimanded, but he didn’t care. The only lesson he had learned was: “Don’t throw darts at Hitler’s balls in public. They’re private parts.”¹⁰¹

      By the late summer of 1939, the British authorities were preparing internment camps across Tanganyika for all German nationals should war be declared. On September 1, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, to whom Britain was pledged as an ally, appeared to make that declaration inevitable. Roald had enlisted as a Special Constable. He was given a platoon of native soldiers to command and charged with guarding a stretch of road running south from Dar es Salaam to the border with Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique. His job was to arrest any escaping German nationals and escort them to one of these internment camps. “If war breaks out it’ll be our job to round up all the Germans,” he had written to his mother on August 27, adding that he hoped they “would allow themselves to be rounded up quietly”.¹⁰² According to the report which Sir Mark Young, the Governor of Tanganyika, sent back to Whitehall almost two weeks after war was eventually declared, that is exactly what happened. Sir Mark told Malcolm MacDonald, the secretary of state for the colonies, that, despite his anxieties, the local Nazis under their leader Herr Troost had been unexpectedly cooperative, urging German nationals to submit to arrest and bear their fates with dignity and honour. “No resistance was offered by any enemy national and for the most part they submitted cheerfully and good-humouredly,” Sir Mark noted. “In no single case was opposition reported.”¹⁰³

      On September 2, Dahl and his six armed native Askaris from the King’s African Rifles spent the night sleeping rough in the bush by the road from Dar es Salaam to Portuguese East Africa. Shortly after one o’clock the

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