Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock

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in how to shoot down other planes. He found these experiences “exhilarating”.12 By mid-August 1940, with more than 150 hours in his logbook, he had been made a pilot officer, passing out, he told his mother, with “Special Distinction” and being assessed as having “exceptional” flying ability.13

      In his final exams, Dahl passed out third out of forty. The only two men to pass with higher marks had already flown as civilian pilots before the war.14 Now, proudly wearing his RAF flying badge, he returned to Egypt, to the RAF station in Ismailia, where he was posted to 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. But he never arrived there. Instead, on the eve of his first day as a combat pilot, he destroyed his own plane, crashing it in the desert, before he had fired a shot in anger.

      The smell of petrol stirred his consciousness. He tried to open his eyes, but he could see nothing. Moments later both the Gladiator’s fuel tanks exploded and the craft itself caught fire. Blinded and numb, Dahl contemplated what seemed to be a certain death. “All I wanted was to go gently off to sleep and to hell with the flames,”15 he wrote later. But something forced him to act, to extricate his damaged body from its parachute straps, push open the cockpit canopy, and drop out of it onto the sand beneath. His overalls were burning too, but he put out the fire by rolling on the ground. It was not bravery, Dahl later noted, simply a “tendency to remain conscious”16 that saved him from being burned to death. “All I wanted was to get away from the tremendous heat and rest in peace. The world about me was divided sharply down the middle into two halves. Both these halves were pitch black, but one was scorching hot and the other was not.”17 In terrible pain, Dahl crawled slowly away from the burning wreckage. But he was not yet out of danger.

       My face hurt most. I slowly put a hand up to feel it. It was very sticky. My nose didn’t seem to be there. I tried to feel my teeth to see if they were still there, but it seemed as though one or two were missing. And then the machine guns started off. I knew right away what it was. There were about fifty rounds of ammunition left in each of my eight guns and, without thinking, I had crawled away from the fire out in front of the machine, and they were going off in the heat. I could hear them hitting the sand and stones all round, but I didn’t feel like getting up and moving right then, so I dozed off. 18

      All the bullets missed him. Later that night, three infantrymen from the Suffolk Regiment, who had seen the plane come down some two miles west of their base in Mersah Matruh, went out to inspect the wreckage and found the injured pilot, barely conscious, but still alive. His flying overalls were so burnt and his face so disfigured that he was almost unrecognizable as an RAF officer. The soldiers carried him back to the underground Army Field Ambulance Station in Mersah, where one of the army doctors initially mistook him for an enemy Italian.19Eventually, he was patched up, sedated, and sent by train to the Anglo-Swiss Hospital in Alexandria, where he was treated for burns, severe concussion and spinal trauma. Initially, his face was so swollen that he could not open his eyes and it was impossible to assess whether the accident had blinded him. The doctors did not know whether he would ever see again.

       The whole world was white and there was nothing in it. It was so white that sometimes it looked black, and after a time it was either white or black, but mostly it was white. He watched it as it turned from white to black, then back to white again, and the white stayed a long time, but the black lasted only a few seconds. He got into the habit of going to sleep during the white periods, of waking up just in time to see the world when it was black. The black was very quick. Sometimes it was only a flash, a flash of black lightning. The white was slow, and in the slowness of it, he always dozed off. 20

      Dahl later wrote that the possibility of losing his sight did not frighten or depress him and that “blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important … the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past was to accept all the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.”21 As he lay in his bed, he also learned that the family house in Bexley had been hit by German bombers (his mother and sisters had survived, but had been forced to evacuate the property) and that the tent in Ismailia, where his air force kit, including camera and photographs, was being kept, had also been destroyed in an air raid. It was a low point, but it confirmed in him the sense that — despite the pleasure that the good things in life could bring — all material possessions were ultimately transitory. He and his family had survived. That was what mattered.

      Gradually, his condition began to improve. The cranial swelling subsided and he was able to see again. Nevertheless, he was still sleeping more than sixteen hours a day and would remain immobilized for more than another month. His features were reconstructed by a Harley Street plastic surgeon, now working for the army, who Dahl later claimed had modelled his new nose on the movie star Rudolph Valentino’s.22 But his first letter back home to his mother, written almost two months after the accident, was probably closer to the truth, as he described how the ear, nose and throat surgeon “pulled my nose out of the back of my head and shaped it”. He added that his new nose looked “just as before except that it’s a little bent about”.23 His injuries were sufficiently severe that his doctors suggested Dahl be invalided back to England on the next convoy, but he resisted their advice, because he had been told that he might yet fly again, and if that were possible, he wanted to remain close to his squadron. It cannot have been an easy decision. He was in great pain. He had not seen his family for more than two years. And, as he had yet to meet any of his fellow pilots from 80 Squadron, which had by that time moved from North Africa to Greece, where it was engaged in a successful counterattack against the invading Italians, he had no real comrades to rejoin. But Dahl was brave, stubborn and eager for action. Moreover, although the RAF had concluded that he was “not to blame” for destroying the Gladiator and that pilot inexperience had caused his accident,24 he wanted to prove his fighting skills, and put behind him what had been an ignominious beginning to his career as a fighter pilot.

      Dahl later claimed that an RAF inquiry had revealed that the commanding officer at Fouka had given him the wrong coordinates and that 80 Squadron’s desert airstrip was actually 50 miles further south of the place where he had crashed his plane.25 Now we will only ever have his word for it, as the official records of that inquiry were destroyed in the 1960s.26 Dahl also implied that the crash was partly due to systemic planning failures within the RAF itself, maintaining that he was quite unused to flying Gloster Gladiators and that he only saw one for the first time less than twenty-four hours before he was due to ferry it from Ismailia into the desert. He added that when he had asked for some training, a “supercilious” officer pointed out to him that, as there was only one cockpit, he would have to teach himself. “This was surely not the right way of doing things,” he concluded.27 The aviation writer and historian Derek O’Connor has subsequently observed that what Dahl failed to mention in that context was that he had spent

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