LITMIR.BIZ

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pilots enrolled in the Initial Training School. Only three would survive the next two years. Yet thoughts of death were far from his mind as he squeezed into his tiny two-seater Tiger Moth and someone chased the grazing zebra off the airfield. Nonetheless, he faced one significant problem. At six foot five, perched on top of his parachute, Dahl’s head stuck so far over the top of the windshield that once the plane was airborne, its powerful slipstream made it almost impossible for him to breathe. Every few seconds he had to duck down behind the shield just in order to take a breath. Characteristically, he soon devised a solution: a thin cotton cloth tied over his nose and mouth allowed him to avoid being choked while flying. His love affair with this new element was immediate and intense. “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much,”¹¹⁶ he wrote his mother. After seven hours and forty minutes, he went solo and was soon flying alone over the wide African savanna, soaring high through the Great Rift Valley and around Mount Kenya, then swooping down to only 60 or 70 feet above the ground, causing giraffes to look up in amazement and herds of wildebeest to stampede. He felt at one with his aeroplane and took an intense delight in the experience of being alone in the vast open spaces of the sky, from where he could view the landscapes about which he had fantasized for so long, from the vantage point of a god. He learned to navigate, to loop the loop, and make forced landings with his engine cut.

      Then, after eight weeks, and with about fifty hours’ flying time in their logbooks, the young pilots were all put on a train to Kampala in Uganda, where “bursting with energy and exuberance and perhaps a touch of self-importance as well, because now we were intrepid flying men and devils of the sky”,¹¹⁷ they went, via Cairo, to complete their flying training in Iraq — at a vast base called Habbaniya. After six months there in the fierce desert heat, “the worst climate in the world,” where they were to live “only for the day we will be leaving”,¹¹⁸ in September 1940 Dahl found himself heading for action in the Western Desert of North Africa, ferrying an out-of-date and unfamiliar biplane toward a camouflaged airstrip just behind the Allied front line.

^*The equivalent of about £25,000 in 2010.

^†His sister Alfhild maintained that it was principally the tales of the Danish Karen Blixen that made her brother long to go to East Africa — Conversation with author, 08/07/92.

^‡Letter from Asiatic Petroleum Company Ltd. to Roald Dahl, 07/16/34 — RDMSC RD 13/1/9/53. This letter, reminding Dahl that he could not take up a foreign posting with Shell without having British citizenship, suggests that at that point he may have had a Norwegian passport. The possibility that Roald was not a UK citizen until at least 1934 is reinforced by the fact that his sister Alfhild remembered none of the girls could join the British Forces until after Norway entered the war, and that, although they were British-born, they were treated as “foreigners and spies” — Conversation with the author, 08/07/92.

^§Aadnesen & Dahl continued in existence until the late 1950s, but by 1930, Ludvig Aadnesen “Parrain” was spending much of his time travelling in Norway and France. A bon viveur, without children of his own, he was a generous and supportive godfather to the Dahl children, who always spoke of him with enormous warmth and affection.

^¶Originally known as German East Africa, Tanganyika finally became independent in 1961. In 1964 it merged with the neighbouring island of Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania.

^**Thirty-four years later, Mrs Taubsypuss would also make a cameo appearance as the US president’s cat in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

^††In Going Solo, Dahl describes Mdisho as coming from the nonexistent Mwanumwezi tribe. It is likely he intended to write Nyamwezi — the main tribe from the area in northwest Tanzania where Mdisho was born.

^‡‡"I’ve got a present in the offing for you,” he told his mother in May 1939. “It’s a large unlined fur made of a special rare & very beautiful kind of rabbit which is found only on the lower slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro. It would make a lovely coat — or otherwise a car rug. The deal is not yet completed” — Dahl, Letter to his mother, 05/07/39 — RDMSC RD 14/3/36.

       CHAPTER SIX

      A Monumental Bash on the Head

      ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1940, a tiny aircraft landed at a remote military airfield in northern Egypt. It was just after 5 p.m. and the sun was already falling low in the Western sky, causing the small machine to cast distorted shadows on the bright blue sea as it came in on its final approach. There was a light wind from the northwest. Visibility was good. The Gloster Gladiator, barely 27 feet long, touched down on the primitive airstrip and taxied rapidly to a standstill. The pilot switched off the single 830hp Bristol Mercury radial engine and all was silent. A couple of engineers approached the aircraft. As they did so, the canopy tilted backwards and a tall, gangly figure emerged from the tiny cockpit. He was wearing a light cotton flying suit. A route map was strapped to his knee. Pilot Officer Roald Dahl was just twenty-four years old and he was understandably nervous, for it was his first venture into a field of war. He had been in the air for much of the afternoon, ferrying the new Gladiator from an airstrip on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron at a secret location somewhere in the North African desert. At Amiriya, near Alexandria, where he had stopped to refuel an hour earlier, he had landed in a sandstorm. Now he was tired. He had yet to discover his final destination, which was still confidential. In a few moments’ time, the airstrip’s commanding officer would tell him its coordinates and he could depart. He asked directions to the CO’s tent, hoping the end of his journey would not be far away.

      The tiny coastal airstrip at Fouka was no more than a huddle of tents and parked aircraft — around it sand and water stretched as far as the eye could see. Less than 100 miles west was the front line. The invading Italian Army, which had crossed over from Libya the week before, was now encamped further down the coast at Sidi Barrani. Fouka was the last place of safety. Beyond it lay the real war — a war for which Dahl knew he was largely unprepared. He was flying a plane with which he was relatively unfamiliar and had received no air-to-air combat practice during his six months of advanced training. The sand blew against the tents, making the canvas rustle and sometimes flap violently. Inside one of them, the commanding officer made a phone call. He asked the pilot for his map. “Eighty Squadron are now there,” the officer declared, pointing to a spot called Sidi Heneish in the middle of the Libyan Plateau 30 miles south of Mersah Matruh, another small coastal town on the edge of the Mediterranean. “Will it be easy to see?” Dahl asked. He knew the airstrip was camouflaged and it was already beginning to get dark. “You can’t miss it,” was the reply.

      At 6.15 p.m. the aeroplane took off from the landing strip at Fouka and headed southwest. The windsock by the runway stood out straight like a signpost. Dahl estimated the journey would take fifty minutes at most. It would not be properly dark until seven-thirty, so he should just have time to get to there before night fell. He had calculated his bearings carefully, but navigating across desert was always dangerous. He flew low, at about 800 feet, but now he was travelling away from the coast. Now, the reassuring white foamy guideline, running between blue sea and yellow sand, was no longer there to keep him on track. The terrain below him was quite

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