II

Plodding, Endless Terms

1930–1934

‘An almost limitless black tunnel at the end of which there glimmered a small bright light.’

ROALD HAD BEEN away from home for two months when, in March 1930, he bought Sofie Magdalene a postcard in the bookshop in the south Derbyshire village of Repton, the site of his public school for the next four years. The postcard reproduced a black-and-white photograph of a meet of the Burton Beagles, attended by numbers of Repton boys. Wearing games kit, Roald himself stands front centre, half turned to face the camera. His expression is hard to read: not quite smiling, not wholly querulous. He is already taller by a head than many of his peers. For his mother he numbered in small neatly inked figures fourteen of the boys with whom he shared his boarding house, The Priory. He identified them on the card’s reverse, enabling Sofie Magdalene to put faces to the names in his letters. The long list of boys was a squeeze, preventing Roald from further comment.¹

In Roald’s letters from Repton is the same breeziness that marked his letters from St Peter’s. Parcels from home of eggs, cream, dates, plums, cake and occasional Norwegian delicacies provoked enthusiastic thanks; out-of-the-ordinary weather, staff tantrums, sports fixtures, a royal visit, Roald’s own recipe for treacle toffee, and a plan to make ‘a gigantic fire balloon, to be 18ft high, with a diameter of 12 feet’ and capable of lifting ‘at least one boy’ into the air, provided material for his pen.² He worked hard to entertain Sofie Magdalene as once, with folk tales, nursery rhymes and stories of his father, she had entertained him. In a final letter from St Peter’s, thirteen-year-old Roald had tripped over himself in pursuit of startling effects: he described the distraction of a boy singing nearby as he wrote, as resembling the noise ‘of a fly’s kneecap, rattled about in a bilious buttercup, both having kidney trouble and lumbago!’³ Months later, writing from Repton, he revealed a surer touch in his first pen portrait of ‘a short man with a face like a field elderberry’: his maths teacher, Major Strickland.⁴ Scatological jokes reveal mother and son’s shared lack of squeamishness: ‘Those figs will keep me going in more sense than one for quite a long time,’ Roald quips.⁵ With a dramatic flourish he began his letter home the day his study burned down, in the summer of 1931: ‘Fire! No one here’s talking about anything else.’⁶ The flames, he told his mother, had destroyed a new mackintosh, his hockey stick, squash racquet and hair brushes, fused every electric light and left his bed ‘brown and nasty’. The teenage Roald appears inconvenienced, chirpily undaunted; the act of letter-writing is itself a pleasure, his tone conversational albeit forceful, and his very forcefulness points to his confidence within what remained his strongest relationship. Nothing spells out the misery that, fifty years later, coloured memories of Repton in his first, unpublished draft of Boy, nor does he acknowledge his letters to his mother as an apprenticeship in storytelling or respite from the systemic boy-on-boy bullying of The Priory, with its awful burden of fagging – junior boys acting as servants to senior boys: making toast, polishing shoes, boots, buttons, cleaning studies, even warming loo seats. Roald’s first intended-for-publication departed from his letters to Sofie Magdalene: he likened the ordeal of public school to ‘groping through an almost limitless black tunnel at the end of which there glimmered a small bright light, and if we ever reached it we would be eighteen years old’.⁷ Overwhelming boredom, he suggested, contributed to his wretchedness, a succession of ‘grey and melancholy days’ through the ‘plodding, endless terms’; he dismissed his teachers as ‘incredibly dull’.⁸ Like others before and since, he compared school to prison, lamenting its mercilessness.⁹ By contrast, his letters communicated amusement, enthusiasm, busyness, the pleasures of fleeting freedoms: empty Sunday afternoons in which he wandered beyond the Priory gardens, with their scum-thick plunge pool where boys bathed naked, into surrounding expanses of Derbyshire countryside, or waking early in the dog days of the school year to absorb ‘a calm that can be experienced only early on a summer morning, when the sun has just risen’.¹⁰ Humorous, jolly and bombastic, epistolary Roald shielded Sofie Magdalene from the view he expressed in a school essay that, in laughter, lay brief escape from ‘gloomy thinking and melancholy brooding’: ‘We seek the silly, ridiculous things not because they please us, but because they make us laugh, and laughing does us good and kills depression.’¹¹

Excessive punishment and the culture of unrelenting bullying – between masters and boys and, especially, between older and younger boys – were principal causes of Roald’s unhappiness. ‘I naturally hoped that my long-suffering backside would be given a rest at my new and more adult school, but it was not to be,’ he wrote in an essay called ‘Lucky Break’. ‘The beatings at Repton were more fierce and more frequent than anything I had yet experienced.’¹² Senior boys ruled their juniors ‘by fear’.¹³ It was an environment dominated by physical abuse and often, in Roald’s memories, the cold: icy baths, outdoor lavatories without doors like ‘the funny little wooden hut standing in the field some way behind the caravan’ that he imagined in Danny the Champion of the World, loo seats rimed with frost, sopping wet clothes.¹⁴ From his disaffection emerged stark unhappiness and an all-embracing contempt. The latter endured. In a story called ‘Galloping Foxley’, written in the early 1950s, Roald’s fictional alter ego, William Perkins, conceives an ‘impish fancy’ to humiliate the senior boy who had once bullied him, encountering him again after an interval of six decades.¹⁵ Roald humiliated his own tormentors in Boy – the book’s sneering and sadistic prefect, Carleton, is Roald’s worst oppressor, Hugh Middleton. But inaccuracies pepper Boy. Mistakenly Roald attributed to one-time Repton headmaster and future Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher a particularly brutal beating inflicted on his best friend, Michael Arnold. In fact, Fisher had left Repton the year before the incident Roald recounted, and Arnold’s beating was not, as Roald appears to suggest, a random act of cruelty but punishment for sexual offences involving younger boys, which Repton explained as a mental breakdown and Roald concealed from Sofie Magdalene. Made aware of his mistake, the older Roald declined to revise his text. Even fifty years on he had no interest in exonerating any of the men or boys responsible for a ‘pretty crisp’ regime he had loathed.¹⁶ His ‘lasting impression of horror’, he claimed, could not be shaken off.¹⁷ In Roald’s version, Middleton/Carleton and Fisher are characters who conform to his preference for ‘villains to be terrible’; having skewered them in print, he must have known they would remain so ad aeternum. Gallows humour characterizes doggerel Roald wrote in 1988, responding to a letter about his school days from children in Northern Ireland: ‘My teacher loved using the cane. / He thrashed me again and again … I used to wear pants extra thick / To lessen the sting from his stick.’¹⁸ Mostly he remained unamused. Neither as schoolboy nor as adult could he reconcile himself to older boys’ gleeful torment of their juniors, and bullies and their comeuppance loom large in his writing. ‘Life isn’t beautiful and sentimental and clear,’ he told a Repton contemporary. ‘It’s full of foul things and horrid people.’¹⁹ It was a verdict born of disillusionment and protest, and the anger it reveals coloured much of his school experience. In his academic reports, inattention and underperformance are recurring criticisms; among boys of his own age were those who noted a forbidding aloofness about tall teenage Roald. Even at St Peter’s, remembered Douglas Highton, ‘stupid or unnecessary rules’ had provoked Roald’s disdain.²⁰ But esoteric and arcane prescriptions dominated Repton life. Roald’s ‘twitchy’ housemaster, J. S. Jenkyns, known as ‘Binks’, commented on his stubbornness; other masters correctly identified his subversion. He could be defensive, defiant, arrogant: in the margin of an essay on parliamentary reform, in which his teacher had crossed out discursive sentences, Roald wrote firmly, ‘Don’t do this on my essays!’²¹ He was frequently ill, including with respiratory problems. His lack of focus, obstinacy, simmering revolt and indifferent health seem not to have prompted questions among his teachers. An attentive Sofie Magdalene dispatched the succession of patent medicines that, on each occasion, Roald confirmed restored him to health. In vivid, loving letters, she worked hard to offer tactful reassurance, aware of the extent of his unhappiness at intervals, like the time he suggested her best present for a new godchild would be ‘a millstone with instructions as to how it should be hung around the neck while in the bath’.²² She does not appear to have considered withdrawing him from school.

Repton’s spartan regime of games, caning and fagging resembled that of other public schools. The horrors of St Peter’s had gone some way to preparing Roald. At his own admission, he suffered less than others. He was not a natural victim – a competent games player (the best squash player in the school and in time captain of both squash and fives, a footballer, cricketer and golfer) and always tall for his age: he was six feet five by his mid-teens. In a class reading of Romeo and Juliet, Roald was cast as Romeo on the strength of his voice having broken ahead of his classmates’. Nor were his boyish sensibilities unusually refined: faced with the choice of a ringside seat at any event in history, Roald suggested the murder, in 1801, of the Russian tsar Paul I.²³ He also shared attitudes of the middle-class plutocracy in which he found himself. In a dramatic sketch entitled ‘A Conversation with a Pavement Artist’, a creative writing task, an enterprising Roald explains to the much older man drawing baskets of fruits in coloured chalks at his feet how to ‘do something different, something which will make every man who passes stop and look’. The man is hesitant, lacking Roald’s confidence or material certainties; Roald is well-meaning, even entrepreneurial, but overweeningly superior.²⁴ In other instances, his intentions were less laudable: he excelled at cruel nicknames and learned quickly the ‘link between cruelty and laughter’ that he would exploit as a writer.²⁵ Again, his ‘natural sense of fantasy’ played its part in transforming routine experiences into shilling shocker stuff in his written memories; throughout his time at school he was happy on the playing fields, in the squash and fives courts, in the company of his softly spoken art master, Arthur Norris, who introduced him to the Post-Impressionists – Cezanne and Matisse – and nurtured a nascent interest in art.²⁶ Reasons for his failure to assimilate himself to Repton lay within Roald himself: fatherless, obdurate and independent, with his Norwegian name, unconventional home life and atypical parental role model in irreverent, plain-speaking Sofie Magdalene. At St Peter’s, Douglas Highton remembered, Roald had been considered an outsider, partly on account of his perceived foreignness. At Repton, Roald’s separation from his peers was of his own choosing. He rationalized his detachment from the school’s ubiquitous hierarchies with catch-all excuses: he disliked rules, the exercise of authority, wielding power.²⁷ His height, he argued, supplied grounds for exclusion: ‘when you’re my size you have everything against you. It’s very hard to get on with other people.’²⁸ He discounted his Norwegian heritage: his schooling was the most important factor in his subsequent identification as British. In a history essay on causes of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 Roald is commendably even-handed; on balance, his argument suggests elements of fellow feeling. It was an uprising, he wrote, ‘of men who wished to drive out an alien rule, and who had seen the sphere in which they could rise to influence and power steadily and rapidly lessened’, like Roald the Apple, accustomed to special treatment at home, cast adrift by Repton’s divergent values and standards.²⁹ Instead he revelled in solitary walks and imaginative flights of fancy that he did not always share with those around him; the adjective he chose for himself was ‘dreamy’. Late in his second year, he took up photography, formalizing his standing as onlooker; his preferred subjects were buildings rather than people. Among early successes was a photograph of the school swimming baths, complete with watery reflections. ‘You can hardly tell which way up it is,’ he wrote proudly to Sofie Magdalene.³⁰

Roald absorbed contradictory lessons. In the interests of self-preservation and saving face he learned to suppress instinctive or emotional responses, like the tears that, when he was caned, ‘poured down your cheeks in streams and dripped on to the carpet’;³¹ in his four years at Repton he took further steps in learning how to write. Corporal punishment, he concluded, reduced perpetrator and victim to a primitive state, no longer fully human: ‘Wherever we went, we walked carefully, with ears pricked for danger, like wild animals stepping softly through the woods.’³² By contrast, writing would enable him to articulate his own understanding of what being human meant. As a writer Roald would benefit from a sequence of unofficial mentors: C. S. Forester, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway. Before them was John Crommelin-Brown, his English master, known to boys as ‘Crummers’. In the decade before Roald’s arrival at Repton a county cricketer for Derbyshire, in 1918 Crommelin-Brown had published a volume of war poetry, Dies Heroica. The foreword to the slim volume celebrated Crommelin-Brown’s ability to capture ‘all the eternal childhood of the human heart’, a quality that an older Roald would claim for himself and one that proved key to the success of his children’s fiction.³³ Crommelin-Brown’s assessment of the compromises of communal living surely rang true for Roald at Repton: ‘About our beings we create a fence / Built of conventions and hypocrisies … Man makes you false, the gods have built you true; / Think, act and speak the godlike truth in you.’³⁴ Mostly Crummers’ advice to the boys he taught concerned style. ‘Don’t let P. G. Wodehouse be your master too much,’ he wrote on a piece of Roald’s creative writing about rich young men amusing themselves by taking up flying.³⁵ More than once he noted, ‘Always use the short word instead of the long one.’³⁶ Roald heeded both instructions. In time his narrative voice slewed off imitation and he took care to avoid artifice or unnecessary elaboration in his writing; he remembered his English teaching as focused on building sentences that captured precisely what the writer intended, one aspect of his own succinct and pithy manner afterwards.³⁷ Later, he shared similar advice with younger authors, telling a would-be short story writer in 1980 to ‘learn how to write short sentences and how to eschew all those beastly adjectives’; to a government committee considering approaches to teaching English, Roald suggested ‘Teach the short sentence. Teach the sparing use of adjectives. Ban the use of “very”.’³⁸ Over time he would repeatedly discuss approaches to writing for children. He stressed the importance of a child-like outlook on the author’s part, but he did not acknowledge Repton’s role in shaping his fictional world of dark reversals and apparently noxious chance – the combination that, in the 1970s, saw his short stories repackaged as ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. Instead, he delighted in flaunting more or less dismissive school reports written by a series of his Repton English teachers with the comment, ‘Not much encouragement there to become a writer’.³⁹ He denied Repton’s part in familiarizing him with what he labelled ‘the tricks with words which writers use, which they have to use just as painters have to use tricks with paint’.⁴⁰ Unrepentant, he would later conclude, ‘I was a very tall boy and most of the masters were very short men and so they didn’t like me very much … I was probably arrogant and opinionated.’⁴¹

It was not in Crummers’ company, but alone, or with a single friend like Michael Arnold that Roald found his most reliable escape from school’s horrors. Little frequented, Repton’s dark room stood at a remove from the core of the school in a converted outbuilding. For Roald it became a second study. It was his Sunday retreat, where his thoughts could be his own and, undisturbed, he could smoke either of the long-stemmed pipes Sofie Magdalene had bought for him in Norway. In the darkroom – quiet, cut off, secret – he found an outlet for the creative urges he had once channelled into his diaries, hiding among the horse chestnut candles in his mother’s leafy garden. Among his photographs were composite images: montages of snapshots of his friends and of Repton landmarks assembled to create a reordering of his Repton world. Given the complexities of photography in the 1920s, he also found there opportunities for arcane ingenuity of a sort that would always appeal to him: among the glass plate negatives and acrid chemicals he resembled Willy Wonka in his ‘marvellous workshop full of wheels and wires and buckets of glue and balls of string and pots full of thick hot foaming stuff that gives off smoke in many colours’.⁴² That the business of photography was time-consuming and deterred the uninitiated were among its recommendations for Roald. Of the photographs he developed there, a clutch won public prizes, including from the Royal Photographic Society. Contra Boy, one picture showed a smiling Geoffrey Fisher.

Like his diary keeping at St Peter’s, photography enabled Roald to capture and fix a particular view of the world around him. Reassurance, however, was not uppermost among his needs. Repton’s cat’s cradle of rules and grey unhappiness stoked an appetite for adventure: the narrative posturing of Roald’s letters points to a desire to flex his muscles, escape, expand. Firmly he rejected Sofie Magdalene’s suggestion of Oxford or Cambridge: he had no intention of prolonging his experience of institutionalized learning. With the confidence he had expressed in a school essay – ‘go to some firms and tell them you are an expert … They would jump at [you]’ – he wrote letters to a handful of companies likely to send him ‘to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China’.⁴³ To his own surprise and the disgruntled astonishment of his housemaster, and partly through the intervention of a family friend, he received an offer of employment from the Shell Company (Eastern Staff) – later, he attributed his success to his status as school heavyweight boxing champion, proof of his physical fitness.⁴⁴ And thanks to the acquisition in 1932 of a 500cc Ariel motorcycle, in his final years at school he realized the version of himself that, at seventeen, he valued highest: daring, rule-breaking, speedy and, above all, free. Disguised by helmet, goggles, raincoat and waders, he roared through Repton, lord of the narrow lanes, inwardly thumbing his nose at dim brick classroom buildings and the prefects and masters he passed. His swagger was insolent, after years of reluctant compliance. By arrangement he kept the bike in a barn some distance away, another secret, at one with the country folk whose casual dishonesties would pepper his stories: Claud switching greyhounds in ‘Mr Feasey’; Ford keen to swindle Gordon Butcher out of his reward in ‘The Mildenhall Treasure’. The element of secrecy added to Roald’s enjoyment. ‘There are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself,’ he reflected afterwards.⁴⁵ Time would show he had a talent for secrets. School Certificate examinations in English, French, History, Scripture Knowledge and Elementary Maths signalled the end of Roald’s formal schooling. Though adequate, his results would not have earned him the place at Oxford or Cambridge Sofie Magdalene dreamed of, even had he wanted it. His final school report commended ‘a real artistic sense’ that Roald may not have suspected staff glimpsed in him.⁴⁶ A disappointed Sofie Magdalene paid an astrologer for a reading of his horoscope. Time would confirm its accuracy.

*

For Roald, Repton’s sole advantage over other public schools was an arrangement with chocolate-makers Cadbury’s. ‘Once a term each boy was given free of charge a small brown box,’ he wrote in 1975.

Inside the box there were eight chocolate bars, a present from Cadbury’s. Seven of the bars were new inventions not on the market. The eighth was one that even in those days, we all knew well, the glorious Dairy Milk Flake. And in return for this gift we were required to taste and give our expert opinions on each new invention, giving it points from 0 to 10 and making carefully considered comments. We also marked the eighth bar, which then served as a control.’⁴⁷

This unexpected boon encouraged Roald’s taste for high-street chocolate. It inspired dreams of working for Cadbury’s, inventing all manner of new and delicious chocolate treats: ‘Suddenly I would shout “I’ve got it!” and I would dash out of the room with my new discovery straight into the office of Mr Cadbury himself.’⁴⁸ In time, it inspired one of the best-loved and biggest-selling of his novels for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a Cinderella story of dreams coming true, just deserts for bullies and childhood anxieties allayed by a magical deus ex machina in the form of resourceful, rule-breaking mythomane, Willy Wonka.