Roald Dahl (41 page)

11
. Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher,
The Pied Pipers:
Interviews with the influential creators of children's literature, 1974, p. 111.

12
. Ambrose Bierce,
Can Such Things Be
, 1926 edn., pp. 14–14.

13
. Interview with Douglas Highton.

14
.
A History of Elm Tree House School
, privately printed, [1984].

15
.
The Dahl Diary, 1992;
see Chapters 11–11.

16
.
Boy
, p. 33.

17
. Interview with Mrs. Ferris.

18
. Interview with Brough Girling.

19
. RD to his mother, FSG.

20
. Material from St. Peter's school magazine, supplied by Woodspring Central Library, Weston-super-Mare.

21
. See n. 18.

22
. Letter from B.L.L. Reuss.

23
. Interview with Douglas Highton.

24
. Telephone interview with Sir Stuart Hampshire.

25
.
Boy
, pp. 133f.

26
. Ibid., p. 131.

27
. Ibid., p. 132.

28
. Dahl's friend was subsequently expelled, and the issue was made public in the school. Several people who were at the top of Priory House at the time have discussed it with me, particularly B.L.L. Reuss and John Bradburn.

29
. Letter from John F. Barclay. B.L.L. Reuss has written to me that Fisher “very rarely beat anyone.” And even Denton Welch ended up being favorably impressed by the future archbishop (
Maiden Voyage
, second printing, 1945, pp. 77–77).

30
. Interview with Sir David Sells. Meeting Sells much later, the archbishop asked him whether they had overlapped at the school. Only by a term, Sells told him. “You're lucky,” Fisher said. “I was pretty crisp.”

31
. Telephone interview with Sir Stuart Hampshire.

32
. Review of
J. T. Christie: A Great Teacher
(a selection of his own writings, with introductory memoirs by Donald Lindsay, Roger Young, and Hugh Lloyd-Jones),
London Review of Books
, October 3, 1985.

33
. Interview with Sir David Sells.

34
. Letter from J.T.J. Dobie.

35
. Letter from B.L.L. Reuss.

36
. Interview with John Bradburn.

37
.
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

38
. “Galloping Foxley” was bought by
Town and Country
in 1953 and first collected in
Someone Like You
the same year.

39
. For example, pp. 96–96 of “Galloping Foxley” (
SLY
, Penguin edn., 1970) become pp. 155–155 of
Boy
(Penguin edn., 1984).

40
. David Atkins in
The Author
, Spring 1992, p. 24. Atkins tells various other stories about his friendship with Dahl, but his memory isn't faultless. He thinks Dahl had a Norwegian accent, and that they both arrived at Repton “on the same day in September 1930,” along with Welch and Geoffrey Lumsden. Dahl
had in fact joined the school in January, Welch the previous September, and Lumsden in May 1928.

41
. Letter from Jim Furse.

42
. Interview with Dennis Pearl.

43
. Bernard Thomas, ed.,
Repton, 1557 to 1957
, 1957, pp. 104–104; Ruth Dudley Edwards,
Victor Gollancz: A Biography
, 1987, pp. 95–95.

44
. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder was so impressed by the power of Carthage that he famously ended every speech by saying that the rival city must be destroyed:
“Delenda est Carthago.”

45
. Debates recorded in
The Reptonian
, 1931–1931, p. 31; 1933–1933, pp. 11, 13.

46
.
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

47
. Interview with Ian Rankin.

48
. Letter from B.L.L. Reuss.

49
.
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

C
HAPTER
3

Main sources

FSG

Interviews and correspondence with Tessa Dahl, Dennis Pearl, Antony Pegg, and with survivors of 80 Squadron named in the notes or in the Further Acknowledgments.

Boy; Dahl Diary, 1992; Going Solo; Memories with Food; Over to You
; “A Piece of Cake,” “Shot Down over Libya”

Dennis Clarke,
Public Schools Explorers in Newfoundland
, [1935]

The Shell Magazine
, 1936–1936

Shell pamphlets: “The Shell Company of East Africa Limited” and “East Africa Tanganyika: History of Shell–B.P.”

Christopher Shores,
Strike True: The Story of No. 80 Squadron Royal Air Force
, 1986

John Terraine,
The Right of the Line:
The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939–1939, 1985

N
OTES

1
. FSG.

2
. Interview with Dennis Pearl.

3
. The organization continues today as the British Schools Exploring Society.

4
. Ibid.

5
. Dennis Clarke,
Public Schools Explorers in Newfoundland
[1935].

6
.
Boy
, p. 155.

7
. Interview with Antony Pegg.

8
.
The Shell Magazine
, 1936–1936.

9
. Interview with Dennis Pearl; Roald Dahl, “A Book That Changed Me,”
Independent on Sunday
, July 15, 1990.

10
.
Memories with Food
, p. 20.

11
.
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

12
. Shell pamphlets: “The Shell Company of East Africa Limited” and “East Africa Tanganyika: History of Shell—B.P.”

13
.
Going Solo
, pp. 20f;
Memories with Food
, p. 34.

14
. FSG.

15
.
Going Solo
, p. 8.

16
. ABC radio interview with Terry Lane, 1990.

17
. See Chapter 11, n. 15.

18
. CM, April 30, 1950.

19
.
SLY
, Penguin edn., pp. 117–117.

20
.
Collier's
, June 3, 1950.

21
. FSG.

22
. Interview with Dennis Pearl.

23
. FSG.

24
. Ibid.

25
. Ibid.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Letter from Roy Ballantyne.

28
. For detailed information in this section, I have relied principally on 80 Squadron's Operations Record Book in the Public Record Office (PRO Air 27, 669) and the relevant volumes in the typescript official RAF Narrative held in the library of the RAF Museum at Hendon.

29
.
Going Solo
, pp. 97–97.

30
. See Chapter 4, n. 8.

31
. PRO Air 27, 669.

32
. RD to Sofie Dahl, November 20, 1940, FSG.

33
.
Going Solo
, p. 132. Dahl attributes the criticism to his friend David Coke, also a relative newcomer to the squadron. Jones was wounded in action soon after his arrival in Greece in November 1940, when his Gladiator was shot to pieces. As usual, what Dahl says has to be treated with at least a double amount of caution. He glamorizes Coke as heir to the Earl of Leicester, “although anyone acting less like a future Earl I have never met”: unsurprisingly, since the future earl was in fact his older brother.

34
. Letter from Air Marshal Sir Edward Gordon Jones.

35
.
Going Solo
, pp. 121, 117.

36
. Telephone interview with G. E. Wilson.

37
. Dahl doesn't mention Coke's brother in
Going Solo
, although he was impressed by the aristocratic connection: see n. 32.

38
. The squadron history (Shores, p. 22) attributes no claims to Dahl before April 20. In his own version (
Going Solo
, pp. 122–122), he was credited with one Junker 88 on his first day, April 15, and another on April 16.

39
.
Going Solo
, p. 146.

40
. Dahl's Flight Sergeant “Rivelon,” for example, whose death he records on April 17, is Rivalant, who two days later was officially credited with having shot down a dive bomber.

41
. RAF Narrative, vol. cit., p. 70.

42
.
80 Squadron Operations Record Book summary for April 1941; Shores, p. 22; RAF Narrative, vol. cit., p. 70.

43
. See the later comment of his squadron leader, p. 49.

44
.
Ladies' Home Journal
, March 1944.

45
.
Going Solo
, pp. 174f.

46
. Ibid., p. 184.

47
.
The Dahl Diary, 1992
.

48
.
Going Solo
, pp. 194–194. Dahl seems not to have heard, either, of the Balfour Declaration, by which in 1917 Lloyd George's Foreign Secretary promised the Jews a national home in Palestine.

49
. 80 Squadron Operations Record Book, PRO Air 27, 669, June 9, 1941.

50
. Ibid., June 16, 1941.

51
. FSG.

52
. Letter from Sir Edward Gordon Jones.

53
. Letter from Creekmore Fath.

54
. Interview with Robin Hogg.

55
.
Over to You
, Penguin edn., 1973, p. 23.

C
HAPTER
4

Main sources

AK; CM; WD

Interviews with Annabella, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Tessa Dahl, Creekmore Fath, Martha Gellhorn, Antoinette Haskell, Alice Keene, Stephen Koch, Helen Lillie, Claudia Marsh, David Ogilvy, Claudia Warner

Going Solo
; “Lucky Break”; “Searching for Mr. Smith,” 1979, reprinted in
Matthew Smith
, catalogue of the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition of 1983, pp. 54–54.

David Brinkley,
Washington Goes to War:
The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City, 1988

Anthony Cave Brown,
The Secret Servant:
The Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Churchill's Spymaster, 1988

H. Montgomery Hyde,
The Quiet Canadian:
The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson, 1962

Richard Shale,
Donald Duck Joins Up:
The Walt Disney Studio During World War II, 1982

For Dahl's own version of his career in British Security Coordination I have used his accounts to Chris Powling in
Roald Dahl
(1983), to Terry Lane for ABC, and on the CBC TV program about Sir William Stephenson,
A Man Called Intrepid
, 1974. Dahl also talked about this to Professor Stephen Koch in connection with his forthcoming book on literary spies.

N
OTES

1
.
Matthew Smith
, catalogue of the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition of 1983, p. 42.

2
. See Dahl's article “Searching for Mr. Smith,” 1979, reprinted in the catalogue of the Matthew Smith exhibition (see n. 1), pp. 54–54.

3
. Ibid., p. 50.

4
. Eg. to Justin Wintle in
The Pied Pipers
.

5
. ABC interview with Terry Lane.

6
. See n. 13.

7
. Interview with Sir Isaiah Berlin.

8
. Berlin adds, “Captain Hornblower was a kind, generous, sweet, second-rate imitator and admirer of Somerset Maugham (who in turn was an imitator of Maupassant).”

9
.
Going Solo
, p. 97.

10
. The revised text appeared as “A Piece of Cake” in
OTY
, first published in 1946 and again in
WSHS
, in 1977, where it is subtitled “My first story—1942.”

11
. Interview with Martha Gellhorn.

12
. Interview with Creekmore Fath.

13
. David Brinkley,
Washington Goes to War:
The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City, 1988, Chapter VI, “Parties for a Purpose.”

14
. Ibid., p. 152.

15
. Ibid., p. 160.

16
. Interview with Tessa Dahl.

17
.
As I Am, p
. 157.

18
.
The Noël Coward Diaries
, May 22, 1951, p. 69.

19
. Isaiah Berlin, for example, recalls Dahl's dramatic response to being offered a house for rent after its occupier, a woman official of OSS, had been shot dead by her lover. “He went along and sat in the twilight to see if ghosts would occur—which as a creative writer he would find disturbing to cope with. The ghosts duly appeared, and he did not take the house.” Berlin was also house hunting at the time and, when Dahl told him about the place and the reason for his decision, unsuperstitiously rented it. He lived there with a friend for two or three years, undisturbed by ghosts.

20
.
Switch Bitch
, 1974, p. 38.

21
. WD archives.

22
. See Richard Shale,
Donald Duck Joins Up:
The Walt Disney Studio During World War II, 1982.

23
. WD, July 13, 1942.

24
. WD, May 19, 1943.

25
. Ibid., October 14, 1942.

26
. Ibid., November 30, 1942.

27
. Ibid., February 1, 1943.

28
. Ibid., November 8, 1942.

29
. Minutes of story meeting, WD, August 20, 1943.

30
. WD, October 8, 1942.

31
. WD, May 22, 1943.

32
.
Kenneth G. Wynn,
Men of the Battle of Britain
, 1989, pp. 40–40.

33
. WD, September 20, 1942.

34
. Ibid., September 18, 1942.

35
. Ibid., October 7, 1942.

36
. In his autobiographical piece “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer,” he says, “I also had a go at a story for children. It was called ‘The Gremlins,' and this I believe was the first time the word had been used” (
WSHS
p. 216). In an interview with him on Australian radio in 1989, Terry Lane tried to suggest that the gremlins had already been widely current in RAF lore, but Dahl insisted that it was he who had put them there.