With the story about the bowdlerising of Roald Dahl’s work in the news, I thought it would be a good time to post an introduction I wrote to the Slightly Foxed edition of Going Solo. This is a longer version than the one that appears in the book.
We were fortunate, those of us who grew up in the 1980s. Almost every year there would be a new book by Roald Dahl which would be passed around at school and discussed with great seriousness. There were playground arguments about his name: “it’s not Ronald, it’s Roald! Don’t you know anything?”
We lived in Dahl’s world. My brother and I more literally than most children as we were brought up a couple of miles from where he lived in Great Missenden. We would drive past his home, Gypsy House, and my parents would always say: “that’s where Roald Dahl lives.” I think I used to doubt them, could Dahl really live somewhere as prosaic as an ordinary house in rural Buckinghamshire? I liked to think he lived in a Willy Wonka-esque factory turning out madcap books with the help of oompa loompas. I met him once at a charity event; he was sitting at a table looking very old signing books.
No book of Dahl’s caused as much sensation amongst my class as Boy, Dahl’s memoir of his school days which was published in 1984. In this book, more than any others, it felt like he was talking to us directly. We were still reeling from Boy when the sequel, Going Solo, appeared in 1986. I took it out from the school library and read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. Going Solo picks up where Boy left off with Dahl now an adult sailing to East Africa to work for Shell.
The first thing that struck me after reading it after all these years is how very Dahl-esque his life was. On the long journey to Africa, the elderly couple who run around the boat naked or the man who pretends to have dandruff so nobody will suspect that he wears a wig seem to have stepped from the pages of Dahl’s children’s fiction. One can picture them drawn by Quentin Blake. The animals too: elephants are described with “their skin hung loose over their bodies like suits they had inherited from larger ancestors, with the trousers ridiculously baggy.” Vultures are “feathered undertakers.”
Later in the book, there’s an incident with a rogue lion: “Come quick! Come quick! A huge lion is eating the wife of the cook!” The mixture of the comic and the tragic, reminded me of the beginning of James and the Giant Peach where James parents are killed by a rhinoceros which has escaped from London Zoo.
If these incidents feel like they’ve sprung from Dahl’s imagination it’s probably because they had. Going Solo is largely based on long letters that Dahl wrote to his adored mother, Sophie Magdalene in England. Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock, wrote: “Most of these delightful characters were almost certainly invented as an entertaining alternative to his real companions on the journey who were dismissed in a letter home to his mother as ‘pretty dull’”.
So Going Solo is not a memoir in any conventional sense of the word. Just as in Boy, it is Dahl telling stories loosely based on his life for the benefit of children. The Dahl of Going Solo is a curious Peter Pan-like figure undergoing adult adventures without growing up properly. Apart from a hint of romance when he is in hospital in Alexandria there is no sex in the book which is just how we liked it. Dahl’s great gift was that he related to children better than adults. I spoke to a friend of my parents who knew Dahl and they told me that though he could be difficult with adults, he always had time for their daughter, a friend of Dahl’s granddaughter, Sophie, and used to make up elaborate nicknames for her.
We loved Dahl because he shared our impatience and confusion with the world of adults. In Going Solo, the adults are the British. Despite being born and raised in Wales and England, Dahl was an outsider. He spoke Norwegian at home and only got his first British passport when he went abroad with Shell. Here is Dahl the anthropologist: “in the 1930s, the British Empire was still very much the British Empire, and the men and women who kept it going were a race of people that most of you have never encountered and now you never will. I consider myself very lucky to have caught a glimpse of this rare species while it still roamed the forests and foothills of the earth.”
In Africa his closest relationship is with his manservant Mdisho. In ways that nowadays would be considered a bit racist, Misho’s boyishness (he was 19) is contrasted with the stuffy British. When war breaks out, Mdisho, full of martial enthusiasm, beheads a “German sisal-owner. . . a very wealthy and extremely unpleasant batchelor” with Dahl’s sword. Again, this incident almost certainly never happened. Mdisho exists not as a racist caricature of Africans but as the child in the book baffled by adult ways. And as always in Dahl’s work, death and violence are always dealt with unsentimentally.
Later, Dahl’s confusion with the British breaks into contempt for his senior officers and the general amateurishness of the war effort. “This, I told myself, is a waste of manpower and machinery” he writes at one point on the token British fighter presence in Greece. Despite being 6 ft 6, he trained as a fighter pilot. We are on slightly firmer ground with the RAF stuff. There are no doubt embellishments here and there but much of what he wrote about can be corroborated. Dahl was a superb pilot; he passed third out of 40 in his intake, and in his very brief career had a number of confirmed kills. His descriptions of air battles in his Hurricane are mesmerising: “I was quite literally overwhelmed by the feeling that I had been into the very bowels of the fiery furnace and had managed to claw my way out”.
This love of flying recurs throughout Dahl’s work. It’s there in James and Giant Peach or Charlie and Chocolate Factory. Indeed, Dahl’s first foray into writing was an account of his crash in the Libyan desert early in his RAF career. It’s a story he told many times. In some versions he is shot down, but in Going Solo, he is given the wrong coordinates of the base in North Africa and with night closing in and running out of fuel, he is forced to make a crash landing in the desert.
What is certain is that he suffered severe head and back injuries, and was very nearly killed. In Going Solo he has: “sixteen major operations on numerous parts of my body” and spends four months convalescing in hospital in Alexandria. He did fly again but spent the rest of his life with severe back pain. Not only did this crash give him the material for his first published works but he would later claim that that the “monumental bash on the head” changed him mentally and made him a writer.
Dahl’s career as children’s author was a slow burn. He began writing short stories for adults that were extremely popular in America and it was only in 1961 that he wrote James and the Giant Peach. In his lifetime, they were hated by librarians but Dahl knew his audience. He wrote, “a grown-up talking about a children’s book is like a man talking about a woman’s hat”. Sorry Mr Dahl!
Going Solo appeared towards the end of an extraordinarily fertile patch in Dahl’s career when, with the support of his second wife Felicity Crosland and a collaborative editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Stephen Roxburgh, he wrote classics like the BFG, Mathilda and Boy, all with vivid illustrations by Quentin Blake.
Always in poor health, he would not have long left to live and died in 1990. Since then his personal reputation has taken a bit of a battering. He clearly had a temper and could be extremely unpleasant. More sinister is his attitude to the Jews, where a dislike of Israel sometimes spilled over into outright anti-Semitism. The passage in Going Solo where the Dahl meets Jewish refugees in Palestine, one who “looked like the Prophet Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler”, takes on an edge when you know Dahl’s views on Israel.
And yet, for me that doesn’t dent the magic of the books. Rereading Going Solo, I was struck by his powers as a storyteller: humour, economy, a vivid eye for detail, and that uncanny ability to talk to his reader directly. One of my happiest moments as a father was hearing my daughter’s fits of giggles the first time I read her the BFG. Today children still live in Dahl’s world, my daughter always wants to dress up as Sophie for World Book Day.
My parents still live near Great Missenden. One day a couple of years ago, my daughter was feeding the ducks behind the Red Lion, not far from Gypsy House (which is now a museum), when she befriended two girls who were doing the same. Their mother looked strangely familiar. It was Sophie Dahl, the inspiration for the BFG, those little girls were Roald Dahl’s great grandchildren. The girls and the ducks took on a Quentin Blake-esque quality, and Roald Dahl’s presence suddenly felt palpable.
Henry's World of Booze 