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attempting to leave or enter the town.” His own account of the ensuing events, in a letter written a few days later, concurred with the Governor’s report that the Germans offered no resistance, though he gave few specific details in case the “ruddy censor” held up the letter.¹⁰⁴ His early short story “The Sword” painted a similar picture: “The Germans started coming … as fast as they could. Some were in trucks and some were in private cars, Fords and Chevrolets mostly, and we rounded them up bit by bit without much difficulty. They saw our machine-gun and very quickly gave themselves up.”¹⁰⁵ A later story, “Lucky Break” (1977), was more expansive, but also followed a similar pattern. There, Dahl described how he marched about two hundred German civilians back to Dar es Salaam, “where they were put into a huge camp surrounded by barbed wire … There was no battle. The Germans, who after all, were only civilian townspeople, saw our machine-guns and our rifles and quickly gave themselves up.”¹⁰⁶ Less than ten years later, in Going Solo, Dahl was to embellish the story grandly. Now an angry bald German, whose movements are “full of menace”, threatens him by the roadside. In a style reminiscent of Ian Fleming, he describes how the man points a Luger pistol to his chest and how one of his own Askari guards shoots the German through the face: “It was a horrible sight. His head seemed to splash open and little soft bits of grey stuff flew out in all directions. There was no blood, just the grey stuff and fragments of bone. One lump of the grey stuff landed on my cheek. More of it went all over my khaki shirt. The Luger dropped onto the road and the bald man fell dead beside it.”¹⁰⁷

      This is the first of two unlikely deaths that conclude the African adventures in Going Solo. The second comes later that night when Dahl discovers that his good-natured servant Mdisho, excited by the declaration of war, has run off into the bush and murdered a rich local German landowner with an eighteenth-century ceremonial Arab sword that Dahl kept hanging on his wall. Running several miles through the night, Mdisho arrived at the homestead of this “unpleasant bachelor”, who was rumoured to beat his employees with a whip made from rhinoceros hide, and sliced his head off as he stood in his back garden throwing pieces of paper onto a fire. Dahl recounts with relish Mdisho’s proud but grisly description of his deed. “Bwana, it is a beautiful sword. With one blow it cut through his neck so deeply that his whole head fell forward and dangled down onto his chest, and as he started to topple over I gave the neck one more quick chop and the head came right away from the body and fell to the ground like a coconut and the most enormous fountains of blood came spurting out of his neck.” Dahl then explains to the uncomprehending young man that he has committed a crime and must keep quiet about it or risk arrest. Mdisho is dumbfounded, but thrilled when Dahl presents him with the sword as a gift for his bravery. He concludes that the two men are now “exactly equal”,¹⁰⁸ as both have been involved in killing a German.

      This story was in essence a reworking of “The Sword”, where Mdisho is replaced by an older boy called Salimu. That was presented as fiction. In Going Solo, it is presented as fact. In each case, however, the symbolism is clear. A rite of passage has been enacted. By killing a man, as young Masai warriors traditionally kill a lion, the two men have left their youth behind and become adults. They have grown up. It was a powerful fable and one that clearly resonated with Dahl himself. Whether it was presented as fact or fiction was of little interest to him. In much the same way as he had done at Repton, he simply constructed for himself a world that evolved naturally from his impulse to tell a story. As time went by, that imaginary world, revisited, relished and refined in storytelling, gradually became more real and more alive than the reality it had replaced. Sitting in his writing hut in the English countryside in the early 1980s, his interest was not with facts, but rather with visceral memories and narrative possibilities.

      Unlike the early drafts of Boy, those of Going Solo are not tortured with changes and emendations. They flow with ease and speed. Occasionally one even senses Dahl dropping his entertainer’s mask and pausing for a moment almost to moralize. The tale of Mdisho and the sword, for example, serves as a poignant curtain-raiser to the violence and absurdity of the coming war. There normal values will be turned on their heads and a single comprehensible killing, like Mdisho’s of the brutal German, will be replaced by something much more faceless and inhuman. The little parable seems to be telling us something important — about life and death, about masters and servants, about whites and blacks, about innocence and experience, about youth and adulthood. Perhaps it also tells us something about the author himself. For Mdisho’s viewpoint, even if fictional, was one to which Dahl himself was powerfully drawn. He too saw himself trapped by English values and manners to which he did not entirely relate and which he did not completely understand. The loner listening to Beethoven and watching geckos, the scatological humorist, the fantastical chronicler of Dog Samka’s amorous adventures — all of these set him apart and, despite his efforts to fit in, compounded his reputation as the club’s subversive misfit. Mdisho’s fictional predicament was thus rather like his own. “I looked at him and smiled. I refused to blame him for what he had done. He was a wild Mwanumwezi tribesman who had been moulded by us Europeans into the shape of a domestic servant, and now he had broken the mould.”¹⁰⁹

      Within days of the outbreak of war, Dar es Salaam began to fill up with soldiers. Dahl instinctively disliked the army, and described the new arrivals with thinly disguised contempt: “Fellows in uniform and cockade hats all over the place and a frightful lot of snobbishness. All bullshit.” Joining this invasion of khaki did not appeal to him at all. Its regulations and pomposities reminded him only of school. Pointedly, he told his mother he had invented an “oxometer” designed to measure “the amount of bullshit talked and written by the military”.¹¹⁰ He had another plan. Inspired by his friend the pilot Alec Noon, who flew small commercial aeroplanes out of Dar es Salaam, Dahl had decided how he would finally see the Africa of which he had long dreamed, but which his job in Shell had largely denied him. He would join the Royal Air Force and become a pilot.

      It was a fateful decision, perhaps the most important he ever made. That October, Noon had taken him on a patrol flight along the Tanganyikan coast to Mafia Island. Dahl was thrilled, writing home lyrically of the views and the “long, long line of sandy beach with palm trees on it and an endless white surf breaking”.¹¹¹ A few days later he went up to Nairobi for his RAF medical, which he passed “with flying colours” despite the disadvantage of being just over six foot five inches tall. Reassuring his mother not to be alarmed by “this flying business”, he told her it was all just “very good fun”,¹¹² that he would get £1,000 worth of flying lessons for free, and that it would be “a bloody sight better than joining the army out here and marching about in the heat from one place to another doing nothing special”.¹¹³

      Dahl returned to Dar es Salaam, packed most of his clothes into mothproof trunks, paid his bills, resigned from his club, and wrote to his mother asking her not to send him a luxury Christmas hamper “because it will be difficult to eat those things … in an airmen’s mess. I can imagine a pot of pate de foie gras going in one meal, and someone who’s never had it before saying they prefer bloater paste.”¹¹⁴ Two weeks later, in a large three-seater Chevrolet, he drove 900 miles north to Nairobi. The journey gave him time to contemplate the glories of the African landscape and ponder what the future had in store for him and his family. He talked to giraffes, crossed fast-running rivers on wooden rafts, watched Masai warriors demonstrating their skill with bows and arrows, and reflected philosophically on the gentle beauty of a family of elephants. “They are better off than me,” he mused, “and a good deal wiser. I myself am at this moment on my way to kill Germans or be killed by them, but those elephants have no thought of murder in their mind.”¹¹⁵

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