In the early evenings we nearly always went out fishing. We collected mussels from the rocks for bait, then we got into either the row-boat or the motor-boat and pushed off to drop anchor later in some likely spot. The water was very deep and often we had to let out two hundred feet of line before we touched bottom. We would sit silent and tense, waiting for a bite, and it always amazed me how even a little nibble at the end of that long line would be transmitted to one’s fingers. ‘A bite!’ someone would shout, jerking the line. ‘I’ve got him! It’s a big one! It’s a whopper!’ And then came the thrill of hauling in the line hand over hand and peering over the side into the clear water to see how big the fish really was as he neared the surface. Cod, whiting, haddock and mackerel, we caught them all and bore them back triumphantly to the hotel kitchen where the cheery fat woman who did the cooking promised to get them ready for our supper.
I tell you, my friends, those were the days.
* * *
The Mussel Collectors – the Dahl children and their cousins. (Roald Dahl is second from right.)
* * *
* * *
Fishing on the Oslofjord.
* * *
A visit to the doctor
I have only one unpleasant memory of the summer holidays in Norway. We were in the grandparents’ house in Oslo and my mother said to me, ‘We are going to the doctor this afternoon. He wants to look at your nose and mouth.’
I think I was eight at the time. ‘What’s wrong with my nose and mouth?’ I asked.
‘Nothing much,’ my mother said. ‘But I think you’ve got adenoids.’
‘What are they?’ I asked her.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’
I held my mother’s hand as we walked to the doctor’s house. It took us about half an hour. There was a kind of dentist’s chair in the surgery and I was lifted into it. The doctor had a round mirror strapped to his forehead and he peered up my nose and into my mouth. He then took my mother aside and they held a whispered conversation. I saw my mother looking rather grim, but she nodded.
The doctor now put some water to boil in an aluminium mug over a gas flame, and into the boiling water he placed a long thin shiny steel instrument. I sat there watching the steam coming off the boiling water. I was not in the least apprehensive. I was too young to realize that something out of the ordinary was going to happen.
* * *
Roald Dahl aged eight.
* * *
Then a nurse dressed in white came in. She was carrying a red rubber apron and a curved white enamel bowl. She put the apron over the front of my body and tied it around my neck. It was far too big. Then she held the enamel bowl under my chin. The curve of the bowl fitted perfectly against the curve of my chest.
The doctor was bending over me. In his hand he held that long shiny steel instrument. He held it right in front of my face, and to this day I can still describe it perfectly. It was about the thickness and length of a pencil, and like most pencils it had a lot of sides to it. Toward the end, the metal became much thinner, and at the very end of the thin bit of metal there was a tiny blade set at an angle. The blade wasn’t more than a centimetre long, very small, very sharp and very shiny.
‘Open your mouth,’ the doctor said, speaking Norwegian.
I refused. I thought he was going to do something to my teeth, and everything anyone had ever done to my teeth had been painful.
* * *
Roald Dahl had bad teeth from quite a young age – probably due to having a sweet tooth. By the time he was in his twenties he had to wear false teeth!
* * *
‘It won’t take two seconds,’ the doctor said. He spoke gently, and I was seduced by his voice. Like an ass, I opened my mouth.
The tiny blade flashed in the bright light and disappeared into my mouth. It went high up into the roof of my mouth, and the hand that held the blade gave four or five very quick little twists and the next moment, out of my mouth into the basin came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood.
I was too shocked and outraged to do anything but yelp. I was horrified by the huge red lumps that had fallen out of my mouth into the white basin and my first thought was that the doctor had cut out the whole of the middle of my head.
‘Those were your adenoids,’ I heard the doctor saying.
I sat there gasping. The roof of my mouth seemed to be on fire. I grabbed my mother’s hand and held on to it tight. I couldn’t believe that anyone would do this to me.
‘Stay where you are,’ the doctor said. ‘You’ll be all right in a minute.’
Blood was still coming out of my mouth and dripping into the basin the nurse was holding. ‘Spit it all out,’ she said, ‘there’s a good boy.’