Kipper, Mr.|
English 8-2
12 September, 1998

The Boy Behind the Chocolate Factory

Have you ever put a dead mouse in a candy jar because you didn’t like the sweet shop owner, or chosen a school based on how easy its name was to pronounce? How about putting goat droppings in your sister’s fiancee’s pipe and then watching him smoke it? Roald Dahl has, and he lived to tell about it. All of his experiences may not have been pleasant-- in fact, some of them were downright horrible-- but he is able to examine all parts of his childhood, good and bad, without excessive bitterness.

Roald Dahl was born in Wales to two Norwegian parents in 1916. He was the fifth of six children, a boy and a girl from his father’s previous marriage and three sisters. When his mother’s eldest daughter died of appendicitis in 1920, Roald’s father was mentally crippled from the loss and died himself a few months later of pneumonia. Roald’s mother was now a widow in the foreign country of Wales, but she would not allow herself to take the easy way out and go back to Norway. The main reason for this was that before he died, her husband had always stated that he wished all his children to attend English schools, and she was determined to carry out his wishes. Although she wasn’t quite ready to move to England itself yet, the family moved to a smaller house in a village a few miles away. It was here that Roald, at the age of six, attended his first school. It was a kindergarten, and he admits he can’t remember anything about this except sitting on the steps trying over and over to tie his shoelace. “So much, then, for my memories of kindergarten sixty-two years ago. It’s not much, but it’s all there is left (p. 24),” he declares.

At the tender age of seven, Roald attended his first “proper” school; it was a nearby Preparatory School for boys known as Llandaff Cathedral School. Again, he confesses he can hardly remember anything, and only a few incidents stand out very clearly in his mind from that time in his life. Of course, there was the time he and his friends put a dead mouse in a candy jar to find out what the evil candy store owner would do. When the shop was closed the next day and there was broken glass all over the floor, they were convinced she was dead, and Roald was pronounced a murderer as he had been the one to come up with the idea. Later that day, they found out she was still alive-- they were relieved about this at first, until they were all caned heartily by the Headmaster for their deed.

Then there were the summer holidays. From the time Roald was four to when he was seventeen, his family always spent the summer in Norway. They’d always ride the ferry to Oslo, the capital, and visit their grandparents-- Bestemama and Bestepapa, as they called them-- for a day. Then they’d be off for another day of traveling until they reached their final destination, the island of Tjöme. There they would stay all summer in a simple wooden hotel run by an elderly couple. According to Roald Dahl, the whole place except for the dining-room was extremely primitive, but they loved it. Every day after breakfast, the whole family would pile into their little boat-- a rowboat at first and a motorboat in the later years-- and go exploring around the island. Every afternoon they went fishing, and ate what they caught for supper. And, in Roald Dahl’s words, those were the days.

Roald’s next school, which he started at when he was nine, was an English boarding-school called St. Peter’s. “[The school] was a long three-storeyed stone building that looked rather like a private lunatic asylum (p. 72),”he recalls. Of this particular time in his life he can remember much, such as the time he pretended to have appendicitis so he could be sent home for a few days, or when he went home for the Christmas holidays and almost had his nose cut off in an automobile accident thanks to his half-sister’s inexperienced driving.

Roald Dahl has accomplished much in his life; his many books are some of the most popular children’s books around, and people who are only children inwardly enjoy them greatly also. The idea for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of his most famous novels, came to him while he was at Repton, a very famous boarding-school. Every now and again, the Cadbury chocolate company would come out with presents for all the boys at the school-- little grey boxes with twelve different bars of chocolate in them. Eleven were new inventions, and one was a sort of “control” bar. They were marked from one to twelve, and with these gifts, they were required only to give each bar a rating of zero to ten and then give a statement as to why they liked or disliked the bar on an attached piece of paper. It was then that Roald realised that chocolate companies did indeed come up with new inventions all the time, and this served as his inspiration when he began to write his second book for children thirty-five years later.

During his last year at school, when he was seventeen, he made the decision to go straight from school to a company rather than attending a university. What he really wanted to do was go to fabulous far-off places such as Africa or China. So, during his last term, he applied for a job to three companies he knew would be sure to send him abroad-- they were the Shell Company, Imperial Chemicals, and a Finnish lumber corporation whose name he had forgotten. He was accepted at the latter two of these, but for some inexplicable reason he really wanted to go to Shell. There were one hundred and seven boys applying for jobs there and only seven vacancies, and his Housemaster told him it was ridiculous to even try for one of them. Somehow, for reasons he is still unsure of, Roald got one of those vacancies, and in July 1933 he left school forever and joined the Shell Company. After two years of intensive training, he became a full-fledged businessman and enjoyed it immensely. Then, at twenty years of age, he was called upon to go to East Africa. He was tremendously excited about this prospect, writing about it this way in Boy: “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 (p. 159).”

When World War II broke out in 1939, he went to Nairobi and joined the RAF. Within six months, he found himself a fighter pilot “flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean (p. 159).” He shot down German planes and was shot down himself and had quite a time of it, but here the book ends, and Roald Dahl leaves us with this closing statement: “...all that is another story. It has nothing to do with childhood or school or Gobstoppers or dead mice or Boazers or summer holidays among the islands of Norway. It is a different tale altogether, and if all goes well, I may have a shot at telling it one of these days (p. 160).”

Unlike most autobiographies, Boy does not seem to be told from the point of view of an adult author remembering his childhood. Rather, it is told from the exact point of view he had when it happened, and it ends as soon as the author graduates from school.  He does not go much into the things that may seem like “the important things” to us, but he describes in great detail things that were important to him when they happened; he does not pass them off as mere childhood escapades that weren’t really as important as they seemed. His tone is playfully vengeful and he pokes fun at himself and others all throughout the book. His feelings towards all the things that happened to him are expressed perfectly; no glossing over the truth or exalting himself more than is due. As for his choice of turning away from being a businessman and becoming a writer, Roald Dahl has this to say: “The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman... if he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not... It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him... 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.” (p. 156)

Roald Dahl’s life was far from charmed and far from hellish. Many things happened to him which we may look on in horror, and many things happened to him which sound almost heavenly. To him they were simply a part of his life, and he tells it all like exactly like it was.