More About Boy(30)
Huge strips of sticking-plaster were strapped across my face to hold the nose in position. Then I was led back into the car and we crawled the two miles home to Llandaff.
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Roald Dahl’s nose took a lot of stick. After nearly being chopped off in the car accident, it was bashed in when his plane crash-landed during the Second World War. After the crash, the surgeon rebuilt his nose in the style of silent-film star Rudolf Valentino.
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Source: BFI Stills
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About an hour later I found myself lying upon that same nursery table my ancient sister had occupied some months before for her appendix operation. Strong hands held me down while a mask stuffed with cotton-wool was clamped over my face. I saw a hand above me holding a bottle with white liquid in it and the liquid was being poured on to the cotton-wool inside the mask. Once again I smelled the sickly stench of chloroform and ether, and a voice was saying, ‘Breathe deeply. Take some nice deep breaths.’
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Chloroform is also known as trichloromethane and methyl trichloride. Scientists call the mixture of chemicals CHC13. It was once widely used as an anaesthetic.
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I fought fiercely to get off that table but my shoulders were pinned down by the full weight of a large man. The hand that was holding the bottle above my face kept tilting it farther and farther forward and the white liquid dripped and dripped on to the cotton-wool. Blood-red circles began to appear before my eyes and the circles started to spin round and round until they made a scarlet whirlpool with a deep black hole in the centre, and miles away in the distance a voice was saying, ‘That’s a good boy. We’re nearly there now … we’re nearly there … just close your eyes and go to sleep …’
I woke up in my own bed with my anxious mother sitting beside me, holding my hand. ‘I didn’t think you were ever going to come round,’ she said. ‘You’ve been asleep for more than eight hours.’
‘Did Dr Dunbar sew my nose on again?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Will it stay on?’
‘He says it will. How do you feel, my darling?’
‘Sick,’ I said.
After I had vomited into a small basin, I felt a little better.
‘Look under your pillow,’ my mother said, smiling.
I turned and lifted a corner of my pillow, and underneath it, on the snow-white sheet, there lay a beautiful golden sovereign with the head of King George V on its uppermost side.
‘That’s for being brave,’ my mother said. ‘You did very well. I’m proud of you.’
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A 1925 gold sovereign could now be worth as much as £300.
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The Meccano Chariot
As I write, I am remembering something I did during the Christmas holidays when I was either nine or ten, I can’t be sure which. For Christmas that year I had been given a fine Meccano set as my main present, and I lay in bed that night after the celebrations were over thinking that I must build something with my new Meccano that had never been built before. In the end I decided I would make a device that was capable of ‘bombing’ from the air the pedestrians using the public footpath across our land.
Briefly my plan was as follows: I would stretch a wire all the way from the high roof of our house to the old garage on the other side of the footpath. Then I would construct from my Meccano a machine that would hang from the wire by a grooved wheel (there was such a wheel in my Meccano box) and this machine would hopefully run down the wire at great speed dropping its bombs on the unwary walkers underneath.
Next morning, filled with the enthusiasm that grips all great inventors, I climbed on to the roof of our house by the skylight and wrapped one end of the long roll of wire around a chimney. I threw the rest of the wire into the garden below and went back down myself through the skylight. I carried the wire across the garden, over the fence, across the footpath, over the next fence and into our land on the other side. I now pulled the wire very tight and fixed it with a big nail to the top of the door of the old garage. The total length of the wire was about one hundred yards. So far so good.
Next I set about constructing from the Meccano my bombing machine, or chariot as I called it. I put the wheel at the top, and then running down from the wheel I made a strong column about two feet long. At the lower end of this column, I fixed two arms that projected outwards at right angles, one on either side, and along these arms I suspended five empty Heinz soup tins. The whole thing looked something like this:
I carried it up to the roof and hung it on the wire. Then I attached one end of a ball of string to the lower end of the chariot and let it rip, playing out the string as it went. It was wonderful. Because the wire sloped steeply from the roof of the house all the way to the other end, the chariot careered down the wire at terrific speed, across the garden and over the footpath, and it didn’t stop until it hit the old garage door on the far side. Great. I was ready to go.