More About Boy(20)
‘You’ll be able to breathe much better through your nose after this,’ the doctor said.
The nurse wiped my lips and washed my face with a wet flannel. Then they lifted me out of the chair and stood me on my feet. I felt a bit groggy.
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Adenoids are small lumps of tissue found at the back of the throat, just above the tonsils. They help fight infection and protect the body from bacteria and viruses. But did you know that only children have adenoids? They begin to shrink when a child is about seven years old and will have completely vanished by the time they’re grown up. By then, the body has developed much more effective ways of battling infections and viruses.
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‘We’ll get you home,’ my mother said, taking my hand. Down the stairs we went and on to the street. We started walking. I said walking. No trolley-car or taxi. We walked the full half-hour journey back to my grandparents’ house, and when we arrived at last, I can remember as clearly as anything my grandmother saying, ‘Let him sit down in that chair and rest for a while. After all, he’s had an operation.’
Someone placed a chair for me beside my grandmother’s armchair, and I sat down. My grandmother reached over and covered one of my hands in both of hers. ‘That won’t be the last time you’ll go to a doctor in your life,’ she said. ‘And with a bit of luck, they won’t do you too much harm.’
That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today.
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It wasn’t the last time poor Roald Dahl had to visit a doctor. He had no less than SIX operations on his spine, two hip replacements and an emergency operation for a burst appendix. But despite these – and many more – medical problems, he said he would have wanted to be a doctor if he had not been a writer.
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The Last Lap
For four weeks every summer we stayed in that lovely white hotel on the island of Tjöme. But that was never the whole of the holiday. Our indefatigable mother was not nearly finished yet. Her plan was always that we should have those four weeks by the sea during August and then, as the weather began to get cooler, we would all move up into the mountains for another ten days before finally returning home.
After ten days in our mountain hotel, we took the train, not back to Oslo, but onward to Bergen on the west coast, and from there we caught a boat to Newcastle. Then Newcastle to London and London to home.
I don’t think we knew how lucky we were to have a holiday like that every summer of our growing-up lives. I don’t think we knew either how lucky we were to have a mother who gave us such a lovely time every year.
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First day
In September 1925, when I was just nine, I set out on the first great adventure of my life – boarding-school. My mother had chosen for me a Prep School in a part of England which was as near as it could possibly be to our home in South Wales, and it was called St Peter’s. The full postal address was St Peter’s School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.
Weston-super-Mare is a slightly seedy seaside resort with a vast sandy beach, a tremendous long pier, an esplanade running along the sea-front, a clutter of hotels and boarding-houses, and about ten thousand little shops selling buckets and spades and sticks of rock and ice-creams. It lies almost directly across the Bristol Channel from Cardiff, and on a clear day you can stand on the esplanade at Weston and look across the fifteen or so miles of water and see the coast of Wales lying pale and milky on the horizon.
In those days the easiest way to travel from Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare was by boat. Those boats were beautiful. They were paddle-steamers, with gigantic swishing paddle-wheels on their flanks, and the wheels made the most terrific noise as they sloshed and churned through the water.
Photograph©francisfrith.com
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Weston-super-Mare.
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Now the easiest way to travel from Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare is over the magnificent Severn Bridge. Opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966, it was forty-one years too late for Roald Dahl.
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On the first day of my first term I set out by taxi in the afternoon with my mother to catch the paddle-steamer from Cardiff Docks to Weston-super-Mare. Every piece of clothing I wore was brand new and had my name on it. I wore black shoes, grey woollen stockings with blue turnovers, grey flannel shorts, a grey shirt, a red tie, a grey flannel blazer with the blue school crest on the breast pocket and a grey school cap with the same crest just above the peak. Into the taxi that was taking us to the docks went my brand new trunk and my brand new tuck-box, and both had R. DAHL painted on them in black.