More About Boy Read online

  Contents

  Starting-point

  Papa and Mama

  More About Mama

  Kindergarten, 1922–3

  A Grand Time

  Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923–5 (age 7–9)

  The bicycle and the sweet-shop

  The Great Mouse Plot

  A Life Without Sweets

  Going to Norway

  The magic island

  A visit to the doctor

  The Last Lap

  St Peter’s, 1925–9 (age 9–13)

  First day

  Writing home

  The Matron

  Homesickness

  A drive in the motor-car

  The Meccano Chariot

  Captain Hardcastle

  How I Became a Writer

  Little Ellis and the boil

  Goat’s tobacco

  Repton and Shell, 1929–36 (age 13–20)

  Getting dressed for the big school

  Boazers

  Painful Punishments

  The Headmaster

  Chocolates

  Ten Horrid Little Boys and Girls

  Corkers

  Fagging

  That Awful Cold Bath

  Games and photography

  Goodbye school

  p.s.

  A Dahl-tastic Quiz

  Author’s Note

  An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

  This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten.

  None of these things is important, but each of them made such a tremendous impression on me that I have never been able to get them out of my mind. Each of them, even after a lapse of fifty and sometimes sixty years, has remained seared on my memory.

  I didn’t have to search for any of them. All I had to do was skim them off the top of my consciousness and write them down.

  Some are funny. Some are painful. Some are unpleasant. I suppose that is why I have always remembered them so vividly. All are true.

  R. D.

  * * *

  Roald Dahl was sixty-eight when Boy was first published.

  * * *

  Books by Roald Dahl

  THE BFG

  BOY: TALES OF CHILDHOOD

  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

  CHARLIE AND THE GREAT GLASS ELEVATOR

  DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

  GEORGE’S MARVELLOUS MEDICINE

  GOING SOLO

  JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH

  MATILDA

  THE WITCHES

  For younger readers

  THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE

  ESIO TROT

  FANTASTIC MR FOX

  THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME

  THE MAGIC FINGER

  THE TWITS

  Picture books

  DIRTY BEASTS (with Quentin Blake)

  THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE (with Quentin Blake)

  THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME (with Quentin Blake)

  THE MINPINS (with Patrick Benson)

  REVOLTING RHYMES (with Quentin Blake)

  Plays

  THE BFG: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: A PLAY (Adapted by Richard George)

  DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  FANTASTIC MR FOX: A PLAY (Adapted by Sally Reid)

  JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH: A PLAY (Adapted by Richard George)

  THE TWITS: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  THE WITCHES: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  Teenage fiction

  THE GREAT AUTOMATIC GRAMMATIZATOR AND OTHER STORIES

  RHYME STEW

  SKIN AND OTHER STORIES

  THE VICAR OF NIBBLESWICKE

  THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR AND SIX MORE

  Collections

  THE ROALD DAHL TREASURY

  SONGS AND VERSE

  For Alfhild, Else, Asta, Ellen and Louis

  Foreword

  Even though I was born in the same street as Roald Dahl, I never knew him as a boy (however I was lucky enough to marry him years later, so mustn’t grumble too much).

  Although he told me a lot about his fantastical childhood, MORE ABOUT BOY has let me into some of the secrets he left out. My, what a story! Of course, it has all the familiar ingredients of growing-up, but it is also the tale of how so many of Roald’s books came to be written. Look hard enough, and it’s all there.

  In 2005 – fifteen years after my husband died – the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in his hometown of Great Missenden in England. The Museum is home to Roald’s archive, full of all his jottings and scribbles and crossings out, as well as many of the letters and photos and school reports he mentioned in BOY. Much of this archive has never been seen before though, so it seemed a good idea to share a little of it with you now … which is why you are holding MORE ABOUT BOY. I do hope you enjoy reading – for the first time – about Joss Spivvis and the joys of Meccano and what happened next to the horrible Mrs Pratchett … I certainly did!

  Felicity Dahl

  Gipsy House

  Great Missenden

  Papa and Mama

  My father, Harald Dahl, was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo, called Sarpsborg. His own father, my grandfather, was a fairly prosperous merchant who owned a store in Sarpsborg and traded in just about everything from cheese to chicken-wire.

  I am writing these words in 1984, but this grandfather of mine was born, believe it or not, in 1820, shortly after Wellington had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. If my grandfather had been alive today he would have been one hundred and sixty-four years old. My father would have been one hundred and twenty-one. Both my father and my grandfather were late starters so far as children were concerned.

  Harald Dahl (1863–1920)

  * * *

  Roald Dahl’s grandfather was Octovias Dahl. He and his wife Ellen had six children: three boys – Harald (Roald Dahl’s father), Oscar and Truls; and three girls – Ragna, Olga and Clara.

  * * *

  When my father was fourteen, which is still more than one hundred years ago, he was up on the roof of the family house replacing some loose tiles when he slipped and fell. He broke his left arm below the elbow. Somebody ran to fetch the doctor, and half an hour later this gentleman made a majestic and drunken arrival in his horse-drawn buggy. He was so drunk that he mistook the fractured elbow for a dislocated shoulder.

  ‘We’ll soon put this back into place!’ he cried out, and two men were called off the street to help with the pulling. They were instructed to hold my father by the waist while the doctor grabbed him by the wrist of the broken arm and shouted, ‘Pull, men, pull! Pull as hard as you can!’

  The pain must have been excruciating. The victim screamed, and his mother, who was watching the performance in horror, shouted ‘Stop!’ But by then the pullers had done so much damage that a splinter of bone was sticking out through the skin of the forearm.

  This was in 1877 and orthopaedic surgery was not what it is today. So they simply amputated the arm at the elbow, and for the rest of his life my father had to manage with one arm. Fortunately, it was the left arm that he lost and gradually, over the years, he taught himself to do more or less anything he wanted with just the four fingers and thumb of his right hand. He could tie a shoelace as quickly as you or me, and for cutting up the food on his plate, he sharpened the bottom edge of a fork so that it served as both knife and fork all in one. He kept his ingenious instrument in a slim leather case and carried