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  As well as tuck, a tuck-box would also contain all manner of treasures such as a magnet, a pocket-knife, a compass, a ball of string, a clockwork racing-car, half a dozen lead soldiers, a box of conjuring-tricks, some tiddly-winks, a Mexican jumping bean, a catapult, some foreign stamps, a couple of stink-bombs, and I remember one boy called Arkle who drilled an airhole in the lid of his tuck-box and kept a pet frog in there which he fed on slugs.

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  A Mexican jumping bean is a very special type of seed, found in Mexico. The egg of a small moth is laid inside the bean and when the moth’s larva moves, the bean appears to jump. They were in great demand in the 1930s.

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  So off we set, my mother and I and my trunk and my tuck-box, and we boarded the paddle-steamer and went swooshing across the Bristol Channel in a shower of spray. I liked that part of it, but I began to grow apprehensive as I disembarked on to the pier at Weston-super-Mare and watched my trunk and tuck-box being loaded into an English taxi which would drive us to St Peter’s. I had absolutely no idea what was in store for me. I had never spent a single night away from our large family before.

  St Peter’s was on a hill above the town. It was a long three-storeyed stone building that looked rather like a private lunatic asylum, and in front of it lay the playing-fields with their three football pitches. One-third of the building was reserved for the Headmaster and his family. The rest of it housed the boys, about one hundred and fifty of them altogether, if I remember rightly.

  As we got out of the taxi, I saw the whole driveway abustle with small boys and their parents and their trunks and their tuck-boxes, and a man I took to be the Headmaster was swimming around among them shaking everybody by the hand.

  I have already told you that all Headmasters are giants, and this one was no exception. He advanced upon my mother and shook her by the hand, then he shook me by the hand and as he did so he gave me the kind of flashing grin a shark might give to a small fish just before he gobbles it up. One of his front teeth, I noticed, was edged all the way round with gold, and his hair was slicked down with so much hair-cream that it glistened like butter.

  ‘Right,’ he said to me. ‘Off you go and report to the Matron.’ And to my mother he said briskly, ‘Goodbye, Mrs Dahl. I shouldn’t linger if I were you. We’ll look after him.’

  My mother got the message. She kissed me on the cheek and said goodbye and climbed right back into the taxi.

  * * *

  There are seventy-three boys in this school photo (go on, count them!) taken at St Peter’s in about 1929.

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  The Headmaster moved away to another group and I was left standing there beside my brand new trunk and my brand new tuck-box. I began to cry.

  Writing home

  At St Peter’s, Sunday morning was letter-writing time. At nine o’clock the whole school had to go to their desks and spend one hour writing a letter home to their parents. At ten-fifteen we put on our caps and coats and formed up outside the school in a long crocodile and marched a couple of miles down into Weston-super-Mare for church, and we didn’t get back until lunchtime. Church-going never became a habit with me. Letter-writing did.

  Here is the very first letter I wrote home from St Peter’s.

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  Roald Dahl was known to his family as ‘Boy’. As you can see from his letters, when he first went away to school he even signed himself ‘Boy’. This lasted for about a term: after that, all his letters are signed ‘love from Roald’.

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  From that very first Sunday at St Peter’s until the day my mother died thirty-two years later, I wrote to her once a week, sometimes more often, whenever I was away from home. I wrote to her every week from St Peter’s (I had to), and every week from my next school, Repton, and every week from Dar es Salaam in East Africa, where I went on my first job after leaving school, and then every week during the war from Kenya and Iraq and Egypt when I was flying with the RAF.

  My mother, for her part, kept every one of these letters, binding them carefully in neat bundles with green tape, but this was her own secret. She never told me she was doing it. In 1967, when she knew she was dying, I was in hospital in Oxford having a serious operation on my spine and I was unable to write to her. So she had a telephone specially installed beside her bed in order that she might have one last conversation with me. She didn’t tell me she was dying nor did anyone else for that matter because I was in a fairly serious condition myself at the time. She simply asked me how I was and hoped I would get better soon and sent me her love. I had no idea that she would die the next day, but she knew all right and she wanted to reach out and speak to me for the last time.

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  Mama in 1964 when she was seventy-nine years old.

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  When I recovered and went home, I was given this vast collection of my letters, all so neatly bound with green tape, more than six hundred of them altogether, dating from 1925 to 1945, each one in its original envelope with the old stamps still on them. I am awfully lucky to have something like this to refer to in my old age.

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  Bubbles was a children’s comic.

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  Only one term’s letters are missing: September – December 1928. The Dahl family home was damaged by bombing in 1940 so perhaps it’s even more amazing that any letters survived at all! There are over four hundred of them altogether, and now they are all kept in Roald Dahl’s archive, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Great Missenden.

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  Letter-writing was a serious business at St Peter’s. It was as much a lesson in spelling and punctuation as anything else because the Headmaster would patrol the classrooms all through the sessions, peering over our shoulders to read what we were writing and to point out our mistakes. But that, I am quite sure, was not the main reason for his interest. He was there to make sure that we said nothing horrid about his school.

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  A mashie-niblick is not a pre-war chocolate bar. It is a golf club used for hitting high shots.

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  There was no way, therefore, that we could ever complain to our parents about anything during term-time. If we thought the food was lousy or if we hated a certain master or if we had been thrashed for something we did not do, we never dared to say so in our letters. In fact, we often went the other way. In order to please that dangerous Headmaster who was leaning over our shoulders and reading what we had written, we would say splendid things about the school and go on about how lovely the masters were.

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  Roald Dahl was always fascinated by birds:

  ‘We have a pair of swallows that have built their nest in exactly the same place on a wooden beam in the tool shed for the past six years, and it is amazing to me how they fly off thousands of miles to North Africa in the autumn with their young and then six months later they find their way back to the same tool shed at Gipsy House, Great Missenden, Bucks. It’s a miracle and the brainiest ornithologists in the world still cannot explain how they do it.’ (My Year)

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  Mind you, the Headmaster was a clever fellow. He did not want our parents to think that those letters of ours were censored in this way, and therefore he never allowed us to correct a spelling mistake in the letter itself. If, for example, I had written … last Tuesday knight we had a lecture …, he would say:

  ‘Don’t you know how to spell night?’

  ‘Y-yes, sir, k-n-i-g-h-t.’

  ‘That’s the other kind of knight, you idiot!’

  ‘Which kind, sir? I … I don’t understand.’

  ‘The one in shining armour! The man on horseback! How do you spell Tuesday night?’

  ‘I … I … I’m not quite sure, sir.’

  ‘It’s n-i-g-h-t, boy, n-i-g-h-t. Stay in and write it out for me fifty times this afternoon. No, no! Don’t change it in the letter! You don’t want to make it any messier than it is! It must go as you wrote