LITMIR.BIZ

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just in time to witness its rout and the death of two of its most senior pilots.²⁸On top of this, he was still struggling to keep his persistent headaches at bay and needed to conserve his energies, to concentrate on survival. He wrote to his mother a few days later from the Peels’ garden, summarizing his time in Greece, and reassuring her he was in good health. He tried to make light of it all, to reconnect with the swashbuckling schoolboy optimism of ten years before. But he could not do it. He simply concluded: “I don’t think anything as bad as that will happen again.”²⁹

      While 80 Squadron was being re-formed in Palestine, Dahl spent almost a month relaxing as a house guest of the Peels. His mother had arranged for him to be sent some money. With it he bought a small car, which in early June he drove across the Sinai peninsula and up toward Haifa (now in Israel), where the squadron was now based. “I loved that journey,” he wrote later. “I loved it, I think, because I had never before been totally without sight of another human being for a full day and night.” The harsh magnificence of the desert inspired him. He revelled in the sense of solitude it gave him. It was an interlude in sharp contrast to the three weeks that followed. In Haifa, his squadron’s task was to provide support for an expeditionary force of British and Australian troops whose aim was to occupy Syria and Lebanon, where planes from Vichy French air bases had been regularly attacking Allied shipping. Dahl reserved a particular venom for these “disgusting pro-Nazi Frenchmen”. In his eyes, not only had they willingly acquiesced to the occupation of their homeland, but he blamed their “fanatical loyalty” to the pro-German Vichy regime in France for the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.³⁰

When he got to Haifa, he found some familiar faces — including David Coke’s — and twelve new pilots.‡‡The biblical landscape around the air base excited him and he delighted in the proximity of a warm sea and in the many orange, grapefruit and lemon groves that lay scattered across the rolling hillsides. It was, as he told his family, a land “definitely flowing with milk and honey”.³¹ But he had little time to enjoy it. Though the campaign, which began in early June, was ultimately successful, the flying was intense and also dangerous. In the course of the first three weeks, Dahl shot down two French planes, while his squadron lost four more of its pilots. “What a lot of flying,” he told his mother. “We never stopped — you see there weren’t many of us. Ground-strafing, escorting, intercepting etc. etc. Some days we did seven hours a day which is a lot out here, where you sweat like a pig from the moment you get into the cockpit to the moment you get out.”³² In fact, the pressure was too intense. As he wrote that letter, the headaches from which he had been suffering in Greece began to become unbearable. He described them later as like having a knife driven into your forehead. Then the blackouts started. Five days later, he was suspended from flying. A few days after that an RAF medical board examined him, declared him no longer fit to fly, and sent him home. His days as a combatant were over.

      Before Dahl departed from Palestine, he was involved in one other curious incident. He was sent to report on the viability of an alternative landing ground, in the event that the runways at Haifa were bombed. This potential airstrip was at a small village called Ramat David. It had been cut in a field of maize that was part of one of the earliest kibbutzes — one named after the British prime minister David Lloyd George, whose government had issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration that Great Britain “viewed with favour” the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Quite ignorant of this background, Dahl was startled to encounter a Zionist settler and a group of Jewish orphans when he landed there. The settler, a bearded man with a strong German accent, who, Dahl remembered, “looked like the prophet Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler”, tried to explain to the naive RAF pilot the need for a Jewish homeland. Dahl was unconvinced, but also fascinated by the settler’s quiet sense of conviction and particularly by his startling eyes, whose pupils “seemed larger and blacker and brighter than any I had ever seen”. “‘You have a lot to learn,’” the man told Dahl as he got back into his Hurricane. “‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.’”³³

      Dahl, who later in life became publicly anti-Zionist, returned to Haifa and reported to his commanding officer only that the landing strip was “quite serviceable” and that there were “lots of children for the pilots to play with” should the squadron need to relocate there.³⁴ They did. Within days, Haifa had been attacked and 80 Squadron, following Dahl’s advice, decamped to the kibbutz, to live once more among tents and olive groves. But by this time Dahl himself had moved on.

      Dahl profoundly regretted the fact that he was no longer able to fly. “It’s a pity,” he commented when he told his mother the news, “because I’ve just got going.”³⁵ Alfhild also later recalled that being invalided out of the war “hit him hard”.³⁶ From now on he would no longer be in the thick of the battle. That solitary joy of being a flyer — of swooping, diving and floating in the air — would be his no more. He would miss it for the rest of his life. Combat, however, had altered him and made him more reflective, more inclined to relax and to celebrate life. “All the dreadful masculine aggressions of youth” had been “squeezed out” of him. From now on, Roald would live his life in a “lower gear”.³⁷

      And he was going home. He drove back to Egypt, sold his car, and two weeks later boarded a troop ship, travelling back to England around the coast of Africa, stopping at Durban, Cape Town and Freetown in Sierra Leone, where he indulged himself buying presents for his family: sackfuls of citrus fruit, chocolate, marmalade and expensive silks for his sisters. On the final leg of the journey, the convoy in which he was sailing was attacked by German bombers and U-boats and three ships were sunk. After disembarking at Liverpool, Dahl took a train to London, where he spent a night with his half sister Ellen and her husband Ashley Miles. In the morning he travelled by train and bus to Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire, where his mother was now living. She was waiting for him by the roadside. “I signalled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.”³⁸ He had been away from home for almost three years.

      That is where Dahl himself left off his memoirs. But Going Solo ends as it begins — with a liberal measure of embroidery and fabrication. Not satisfied with the relief of an ordinary homecoming, Dahl could not stop himself injecting an extra measure of tension for his readers: he tells us that he has heard nothing from his family for months, that he has no idea they have moved from Bexley, and that he is haunted by the fear that they have all been killed by a stray bomb. A disconnected phone line at his former home seems to confirm his anxieties, while a helpful telephone operator searches through phonebooks for other Dahls. An S. Dahl in Grendon Underwood is ignored because he has never heard of the village. All of this was untrue. Dahl was quite aware his house in Bexley had been bombed, and that his family was safe. He also knew exactly where his mother was living. He had been writing to her there ever since he recovered from his crash in the desert. Yet just as tales of lions and snakes animated the reality of endless sundowners in Dar es Salaam, so here, in war-torn London, he used these invented details to heighten a mood he wanted to create.

      It was about coming home. Coming home to his sisters, to his beloved mother and to the Buckinghamshire countryside that he had yet to taste, but which would become his own favourite landscape. His sisters Else and Asta described this false ending as “slushy” and “sentimental”.³⁹ Yet those closing pages of Going Solo are charged with genuine emotion. An emotion so powerful that when, shortly after they were written, Dahl read them in

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