I was so devastatingly homesick during my first two weeks that I set about devising a stunt for getting myself sent back home, even if it were only a few days. My idea was that I should all of a sudden develop an attack of acute appendicitis.
* * *
Never cry wolf. Much later Roald Dahl really did have appendicitis in 1945. He managed to get himself to hospital to have it removed in an emergency operation, but as he was living in the USA at the time he had to write to his mother afterwards to tell her about it!
* * *
You will probably think it silly that a nine-year-old boy should imagine he could get away with a trick like that, but I had sound reasons for trying it on. Only a month before, my ancient half-sister, who was twelve years older than me, had actually had appendicitis, and for several days before her operation I was able to observe her behaviour at close quarters. I noticed that the thing she complained about most was a severe pain down in the lower right side of her tummy. As well as this, she kept being sick and refused to eat and ran a temperature.
* * *
The appendix is a tube in the abdomen. It leads nowhere and does nothing. But appendicitis – when the appendix becomes inflamed – is no joke. If left untreated, it can be deadly.
* * *
You might, by the way, be interested to know that this sister had her appendix removed not in a fine hospital operating-room full of bright lights and gowned nurses but on our own nursery table at home by the local doctor and his anaesthetist. In those days it was fairly common practice for a doctor to arrive at your own house with a bag of instruments, then drape a sterile sheet over the most convenient table and get on with it. On this occasion, I can remember lurking in the corridor outside the nursery while the operation was going on. My other sisters were with me, and we stood there spellbound, listening to the soft medical murmurs coming from behind the locked door and picturing the patient with her stomach sliced open like a lump of beef. We could even smell the sickly fumes of ether filtering through the crack under the door.
The next day, we were allowed to inspect the appendix itself in a glass bottle. It was a longish black wormy-looking thing, and I said, ‘Do I have one of those inside me, Nanny?’
‘Everybody has one,’ Nanny answered.
‘What’s it for?’ I asked her.
‘God works in his mysterious ways,’ she said, which was her stock reply whenever she didn’t know the answer.
‘What makes it go bad?’ I asked her.
‘Toothbrush bristles,’ she answered, this time with no hesitation at all.
‘Toothbrush bristles?’ I cried. ‘How can toothbrush bristles make your appendix go bad?’
Nanny, who in my eyes was filled with more wisdom than Solomon, replied, ‘Whenever a bristle comes out of your toothbrush and you swallow it, it sticks in your appendix and turns it rotten. In the war,’ she went on, ‘the German spies used to sneak boxloads of loose-bristled toothbrushes into our shops and millions of our soldiers got appendicitis.’
‘Honestly, Nanny?’ I cried. ‘Is that honestly true?’
‘I never lie to you, child,’ she answered. ‘So let that be a lesson to you never to use an old toothbrush.’
For years after that, I used to get nervous whenever I found a toothbrush bristle on my tongue.
* * *
Did Nanny’s white lies inspire Roald Dahl to come up with his own fantastic stories … ?
‘Tell me what else to look out for in a witch?’ I said. ‘The eyes,’ my grandmother said. ‘Look carefully at the eyes, because the eyes of a REAL WITCH are different from yours and mine. Look in the middle of each eye where there is normally a little black dot. If she is a witch, the black dot will keep changing colour, and you will see fire and you will see ice dancing right in the very centre of the coloured dot. It will send shivers running all over your skin.’
(The Witches)
* * *
As I went upstairs and knocked on the brown door after breakfast, I didn’t even feel frightened of the Matron.
‘Come in!’ boomed the voice.
I entered the room clutching my stomach on the right-hand side and staggering pathetically.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ the Matron shouted, and the sheer force of her voice caused that massive bosom to quiver like a gigantic blancmange.
‘It hurts, Matron,’ I moaned. ‘Oh, it hurts so much! Just here!’
‘You’ve been over-eating!’ she barked. ‘What do you expect if you guzzle currant cake all day long!’
‘I haven’t eaten a thing for days,’ I lied. ‘I couldn’t eat, Matron! I simply couldn’t!’