My mother got the message. She kissed me on the cheek and said goodbye and climbed right back into the taxi.
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There are seventy-three boys in this school photo (go on, count them!) taken at St Peter’s in about 1929.
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The Headmaster moved away to another group and I was left standing there beside my brand new trunk and my brand new tuck-box. I began to cry.
Writing home
At St Peter’s, Sunday morning was letter-writing time. At nine o’clock the whole school had to go to their desks and spend one hour writing a letter home to their parents. At ten-fifteen we put on our caps and coats and formed up outside the school in a long crocodile and marched a couple of miles down into Weston-super-Mare for church, and we didn’t get back until lunchtime. Church-going never became a habit with me. Letter-writing did.
Here is the very first letter I wrote home from St Peter’s.
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Roald Dahl was known to his family as ‘Boy’. As you can see from his letters, when he first went away to school he even signed himself ‘Boy’. This lasted for about a term: after that, all his letters are signed ‘love from Roald’.
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From that very first Sunday at St Peter’s until the day my mother died thirty-two years later, I wrote to her once a week, sometimes more often, whenever I was away from home. I wrote to her every week from St Peter’s (I had to), and every week from my next school, Repton, and every week from Dar es Salaam in East Africa, where I went on my first job after leaving school, and then every week during the war from Kenya and Iraq and Egypt when I was flying with the RAF.
My mother, for her part, kept every one of these letters, binding them carefully in neat bundles with green tape, but this was her own secret. She never told me she was doing it. In 1967, when she knew she was dying, I was in hospital in Oxford having a serious operation on my spine and I was unable to write to her. So she had a telephone specially installed beside her bed in order that she might have one last conversation with me. She didn’t tell me she was dying nor did anyone else for that matter because I was in a fairly serious condition myself at the time. She simply asked me how I was and hoped I would get better soon and sent me her love. I had no idea that she would die the next day, but she knew all right and she wanted to reach out and speak to me for the last time.
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Mama in 1964 when she was seventy-nine years old.
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When I recovered and went home, I was given this vast collection of my letters, all so neatly bound with green tape, more than six hundred of them altogether, dating from 1925 to 1945, each one in its original envelope with the old stamps still on them. I am awfully lucky to have something like this to refer to in my old age.
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Bubbles was a children’s comic.
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* * *
Only one term’s letters are missing: September – December 1928. The Dahl family home was damaged by bombing in 1940 so perhaps it’s even more amazing that any letters survived at all! There are over four hundred of them altogether, and now they are all kept in Roald Dahl’s archive, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Great Missenden.
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Letter-writing was a serious business at St Peter’s. It was as much a lesson in spelling and punctuation as anything else because the Headmaster would patrol the classrooms all through the sessions, peering over our shoulders to read what we were writing and to point out our mistakes. But that, I am quite sure, was not the main reason for his interest. He was there to make sure that we said nothing horrid about his school.
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A mashie-niblick is not a pre-war chocolate bar. It is a golf club used for hitting high shots.
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There was no way, therefore, that we could ever complain to our parents about anything during term-time. If we thought the food was lousy or if we hated a certain master or if we had been thrashed for something we did not do, we never dared to say so in our letters. In fact, we often went the other way. In order to please that dangerous Headmaster who was leaning over our shoulders and reading what we had written, we would say splendid things about the school and go on about how lovely the masters were.
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Roald Dahl was always fascinated by birds:
‘We have a pair of swallows that have built their nest in exactly the same place on a wooden beam in the tool shed for the past six years, and it is amazing to me how they fly off thousands of miles to North Africa in the autumn with their young and then six months later they find their way back to the same tool shed at Gipsy House, Great Missenden, Bucks. It’s a miracle and the brainiest ornithologists in the world still cannot explain how they do it.’ (My Year)