More About Boy(31)
With the string, I hauled the chariot back to the roof. And now, from a jug I filled all the five soup tins with water. I lay flat on the roof waiting for a victim. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long because the footpath was much used by people taking their dogs for walks in the wood beyond.
Soon two ladies dressed in tweed skirts and jackets and each wearing a hat, came strolling up the path with a revolting little Pekinese dog on a lead. I knew I had to time this carefully, so when they were very nearly but not quite directly under the wire, I let my chariot go. Down she went, making a wonderful screeching-humming noise as the metal wheel ran down the wire and the string ran through my fingers at great speed. Bombing from a height is never easy. I had to guess when my chariot was directly over the target, and when that moment came, I jerked the string. The chariot stopped dead and the tins swung upside down and all the water tipped out. The ladies, who had halted and looked up on hearing the rushing noise of my chariot overhead, caught the cascade of water full in their faces. It was tremendous. A bull’s-eye first time. The women screamed. I lay flat on the roof so as not to be seen, peering over the edge, and I saw the women shouting and waving their arms. Then they came marching straight into our garden through the gate at the back and crossed the garden and hammered on the door. I nipped down smartly through the skylight and did a bunk.
Later on, at lunch, my mother fixed me with a steely eye and told me she was confiscating my Meccano set for the rest of the holidays. But for days afterwards I experienced the pleasant warm glow that comes to all of us when we have brought off a major triumph.
* * *
Captain Hardcastle
We called them masters in those days, not teachers, and at St Peter’s the one I feared most of all, apart from the Headmaster, was Captain Hardcastle.
This man was slim and wiry and he played football. On the football field he wore white running shorts and white gymshoes and short white socks. His legs were as hard and thin as ram’s legs and the skin around his calves was almost exactly the colour of mutton fat. The hair on his head was not ginger. It was a brilliant dark vermilion, like a ripe orange, and it was plastered back with immense quantities of brilliantine in the same fashion as the Headmaster’s. The parting in his hair was a white line straight down the middle of the scalp, so straight it could only have been made with a ruler. On either side of the parting you could see the comb tracks running back through the greasy orange hair like little tramlines.
* * *
Brilliantine is an old-fashioned hair gel favoured by gentlemen when Roald Dahl was a boy. It is very oily and and makes hair look very greasy.
* * *
Captain Hardcastle sported a moustache that was the same colour as his hair, and oh what a moustache it was! A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. But this was not one of those nailbrush moustaches, all short and clipped and bristly. Nor was it long and droopy in the walrus style. Instead, it was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs heated in the mornings over a tiny flame of methylated spirits. The only other way he could have achieved this curling effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the looking-glass every morning.
Behind the moustache there lived an inflamed and savage face with a deeply corrugated brow that indicated a very limited intelligence. ‘Life is a puzzlement,’ the corrugated brow seemed to be saying, ‘and the world is a dangerous place. All men are enemies and small boys are insects that will turn and bite you if you don’t get them first and squash them hard.’
Captain Hardcastle was never still. His orange head twitched and jerked perpetually from side to side in the most alarming fashion, and each twitch was accompanied by a little grunt that came out of the nostrils. He had been a soldier in the army in the Great War and that, of course, was how he had received his title. But even small insects like us knew that ‘Captain’ was not a very exalted rank and only a man with little else to boast about would hang on to it in civilian life. It was bad enough to keep calling yourself ‘Major’ after it was all over, but ‘Captain’ was the bottoms.
* * *
Captain Hardcastle’s real name was Lancaster. Roald Dahl changed it in Boy, perhaps because he describes him in such terrifying detail. He created a similarly foul teacher – called ‘Captain Lancaster’ – in Danny the Champion of the World: