For all his beloved work, for children and adults alike, readers won’t know a helluva lot about the authors who pen their stories. I know Roald Dahl better from his style, easygoing and lighthearted prose. His tone is one of a beloved English teacher reading stories out loud to fifth graders. He doesn’t treat the children as children but more as friends that he had known for years, and you know that he loves the stories that he’s telling.
But I know very little about his own life and childhood before this. I knew that he wrote from a small little garden house, with walls as plain as paper as to minimise distraction and that he was in the military at some point of his life. But this doesn’t cover the scope of the book, for Boy is the vignettes originating from his childhood and teenage years. And as any Roald Dahl book, it will charm you though the reader must tamper their expectation to not expect anything surreal like talking foxes or flying glass elevators. Boy is very much grounded in Dahl’s own memories.
Dahl was the son of a Norwegian shipping merchant who made his fortune freighting coal. His father was married to a French girl, who died after having given him two children. This prompted Harald Dahl to remarry someone closer to his own home, a Norwegian by the name of Sofie who would turn out to be Roald Dahl’s mother as well as three sisters (he was the only boy). The Dahl family was struck by tragedy when Harald passed away by way of grief, months after Dahl’s sister Astri passed away from illness, leaving Sofie as a single parent.
Much of the stories embedded in this quasi-autobiography (as Dahl himself did not want to label this book an autobiography) are bits and pieces of his life, though these bits and pieces make up for a coherent narrative until the time Dahl became a fighter pilot in the RAF. Among these memories, Dahl recounted nicking lollies from the dirty old Mrs Pratchett and had the gall one time to put a dead mouse into a jar of gobstopper, which resulted in his first brutal spanking by the headmaster in front of the said Mrs Pratchett, who was euphoric with enthusiasm.
Moving to a boarding school after his mother disagreed with the headmaster’s methods, Dahl was put under the same discipline that occasionally leads him to getting the cane. At one time, he was unfairly accused of cheating. The atmosphere in the St Peter’s school was equally oppressive, with a headmaster who censors the students’ letters to the parents, lest they find that their children have been mistreated and mismanaged.
For what it is, Dahl wrote about a time long past, practices which at the time of writing (Dahl was nearing seventy when Boy was published) was long archaic. For example, children had to endure operations without anaesthetics for their tonsillitis and adenoids. They were made of different stuff back then. Caning was already on its way out of private education. Chocolate companies used to send a bunch of samples to schoolchildren to test out new flavours (this is partly the inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as Dahl was one of the test subjects). And for today’s generation, it is a time when finishing your college education guarantees you a job.
