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  I enjoyed it, I really did. I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

  The Shell Company did us proud. After twelve months at Head Office, we trainees were all sent away to various Shell branches in England to study salesmanship. I went to Somerset and spent several glorious weeks selling kerosene to old ladies in remote villages. My kerosene motor-tanker had a tap at the back and when I rolled into Shepton Mallet or Midsomer Norton or Peasedown St John or Hinton Blewett or Temple Cloud or Chew Magna or Huish Champflower, the old girls and the young maidens would hear the roar of my motor and would come out of their cottages with jugs and buckets to buy a gallon of kerosene for their lamps and their heaters. It is fun for a young man to do that sort of thing. Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset on a fine summer’s day.

  * * *

  Roald Dahl never found writing easy. He wrote, rewrote and wrote again before he was satisfied with his stories. Much of his work went up in flames in the regular bonfires that he had outside his writing shed. Some of his books went through several incarnations, including this one. Two episodes of Boy first appeared in The Witches. The BFG first made an appearance in Danny the Champion of the World. And an early version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was once about a boy who was made entirely of chocolate! (Click here to read it.)

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  Then suddenly, in 1936, I was summoned back to Head Office in London. One of the Directors wished to see me. ‘We are sending you to Egypt,’ he said. ‘It will be a three-year tour, then six months’ leave. Be ready to go in one week’s time.’

  ‘Oh, but sir!’ I cried out. ‘Not Egypt! I really don’t want to go to Egypt!’

  The great man reeled back in his chair as though I had slapped him in the face with a plate of poached eggs. ‘Egypt,’ he said slowly, ‘is one of our finest and most important areas. We are doing you a favour in sending you there instead of to some mosquito-ridden place in the swamps!’

  I kept silent.

  ‘May I ask why you do not wish to go to Egypt?’ he said.

  I knew perfectly well why, but I didn’t know how to put it. What I wanted was jungles and lions and elephants and tall coconut palms swaying on silvery beaches, and Egypt had none of that. Egypt was desert country. It was bare and sandy and full of tombs and relics and Egyptians and I didn’t fancy it at all.

  ‘What is wrong with Egypt?’ the Director asked me again.

  ‘It’s … it’s … it’s,’ I stammered, ‘it’s too dusty, sir.’

  The man stared at me. ‘Too what?’ he cried.

  ‘Dusty,’ I said.

  ‘Dusty!’ he shouted. ‘Too dusty! I’ve never heard such rubbish!’

  There was a long silence. I was expecting him to tell me to fetch my hat and coat and leave the building for ever. But he didn’t do that. He was an awfully nice man and his name was Mr Godber. He gave a deep sigh and rubbed a hand over his eyes and said, ‘Very well then, if that’s the way you want it. Redfearn will go to Egypt instead of you and you will have to take the next posting that comes up, dusty or not. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I realize that.’

  ‘If the next vacancy happens to be Siberia,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to take it.’

  ‘I quite understand, sir,’ I said. ‘And thank you very much.’

  Within a week Mr Godber summoned me again to his office. ‘You’re going to East Africa,’ he said.

  ‘Hooray!’ I shouted, jumping up and down. ‘That’s marvellous, sir! That’s wonderful! How terrific!’

  The great man smiled. ‘It’s quite dusty there too,’ he said.

  ‘Lions!’ I cried. ‘And elephants and giraffes and coconuts everywhere!’

  ‘Your boat leaves from London Docks in six days,’ he said. ‘You get off at Mombasa. Your salary will be five hundred pounds per annum and your tour is for three years.’

  I was twenty years old. I was off to East Africa where I would walk about in khaki shorts every day and wear a topi on my head! I was ecstatic. I rushed home and told my mother. ‘And I’ll be gone for three years,’ I said.

  I was her only son and we were very close. Most mothers, faced with a situation like this, would have shown a certain amount of distress. Three years is a long time and Africa was far away. There would be no visits in between. But my mother did not allow even the tiniest bit of what she must have felt to disturb my joy. ‘Oh, well done you!’ she cried. ‘It’s wonderful news! And it’s just where you wanted to go, isn’t it!’

  * * *

  Roald Dahl – in a topi, with a Coconut! Now his salary was raised to ten pounds a week.

  * * *

  The whole family came down to London Docks to see me off on the boat. It was a tremendous thing in those days for a young man to be going off to Africa to work. The journey alone would take two weeks, sailing through the Bay of Biscay, past Gibraltar, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, calling in at Aden and arriving finally at Mombasa. What a prospect that was! I was off to the land of palm-trees and coconuts and coral reefs and lions and elephants and deadly snakes, and a white hunter who had lived ten years in Mwanza had told me that if a black mamba bit you, you died within the hour writhing in agony and foaming at the mouth. I couldn’t wait.

  * * *

  Roald Dahl continued to write to his mother while he was away. And she kept every single one of his letters. They are now kept safely in the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden.

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  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sailing away for a good deal longer than three years because the Second World War was to come along in the middle of it all. But before that happened, I got my African adventure all right. I got the roasting heat and the crocodiles and the snakes and the long safaris up-country, selling Shell oil to the men who ran the diamond mines and the sisal plantations. I learned about an extraordinary machine called a decorticator (a name I have always loved) which shredded the big leathery sisal leaves into fibre. I learned to speak Swahili and to shake the scorpions out of my mosquito boots in the mornings. I learned what it was like to get malaria and to run a temperature of 105°F for three days, and when the rainy seasons came and the water poured down in solid sheets and flooded the little dirt roads, I learned how to spend nights in the back of a stifling station-wagon with all the windows closed against marauders from the jungle. Above all, I learned how to look after myself in a way that no young person can ever do by staying in civilization.

  When the big war broke out in 1939, I was in Dar es Salaam, and from there I went up to Nairobi to join the RAF. Six months later, I was a fighter pilot flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Palestine, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt. I shot down some German planes and I got shot down mysel