MASTER. All I see is that you are making an infernal noise and disturbing everybody in the room. Now get on with your work.
They were tough, those masters, make no mistake about it, and if you wanted to survive, you had to become pretty tough yourself.
My own turn came, as I said, during my second term and Captain Hardcastle was again taking Prep. You should know that during Prep every boy in the Hall sat at his own small individual wooden desk. These desks had the usual sloping wooden tops with a narrow flat strip at the far end where there was a groove to hold your pen and a small hole in the right-hand side in which the ink-well sat. The pens we used had detachable nibs and it was necessary to dip your nib into the ink-well every six or seven seconds when you were writing. Ball-point pens and felt pens had not then been invented, and fountain-pens were forbidden. The nibs we used were very fragile and most boys kept a supply of new ones in a small box in their trouser pockets.
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Ball-point pens were first developed in 1888. But it wasn’t until 1938, when László Biró – a Hungarian newspaper editor – came up with a better model, which stopped ink going everywhere.
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Prep was in progress. Captain Hardcastle was sitting up on the dais in front of us, stroking his orange moustache, twitching his head and grunting through his nose. His eyes roved the Hall endlessly, searching for mischief. The only noises to be heard were Captain Hardcastle’s little snorting grunts and the soft sound of pen-nibs moving over paper. Occasionally there was a ping as somebody dipped his nib too violently into his tiny white porcelain ink-well.
Disaster struck when I foolishly stubbed the tip of my nib into the top of the desk. The nib broke. I knew I hadn’t got a spare one in my pocket, but a broken nib was never accepted as an excuse for not finishing Prep. We had been set an essay to write and the subject was ‘The Life Story of a Penny’ (I still have that essay in my files). I had made a decent start and I was rattling along fine when I broke that nib. There was still another half-hour of Prep to go and I couldn’t sit there doing nothing all that time. Nor could I put up my hand and tell Captain Hardcastle I had broken my nib. I simply did not dare. And as a matter of fact, I really wanted to finish that essay. I knew exactly what was going to happen to my penny through the next two pages and I couldn’t bear to leave it unsaid.
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Here is ‘The Life Story of a Penny’ from Roald Dahl’s essay book. (He wrote it in 1926, aged nine and a half.)
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The Life Story of a Penny
One hot day in the month of July, when the men of our copper mine in South America were digging into the depths thereof, I felt something hard strike me underneath. I was shovelled up into a truck, being only a small lump of copper, and was conveyed to Rio de Janeiro where I was shipped to England amongst a heap of copper.
The ship having arrived at Liverpool, I was taken to ‘the mint’ in London, and in a merciful manner I was cast into a roaring furnace. I was left there till quite white hot, when finally I began to melt.
I was taken out and had a picture of King George V’s head stamped cruelly on one side of me and Britannia on the other.
I was then sent to be put in a drawer in the Midland Bank, looking very shiny, but soon got that brown colour that pennies get, when mixed up with a great many other coins. A large and fat lady came into the bank one afternoon, and handed the man a cheque for a penny.
I was handed to the lady who dropped me carefully into her purse. Having remained in the purse for a certain time, I was taken out, greatly to my astonishment I found myself in a fishmonger’s shop, the lady had used me to pay for some shrimps she had bought.
Next time I was taken out of the fishmonger’s drawer, I was handed to a little boy, probably for change. I was placed in his pocket with a rusty old knife, a piece of string and a shilling. This boy being stupid, was rolling me along the street when suddenly I disappeared from the boy’s sight, I had fallen down a drain into the gutter. Down, and down I went amidst the muddy water. The drain went into a river, which flowed rapidly on. Into this river I went and after having gone down with the current a considerable distance, I found myself washed high and dry on the bank. Then two boys came along, the smallest one saw me fir …
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What happened next? We’ll never know what became of Roald Dahl’s penny because his nib broke …
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I glanced to my right. The boy next to me was called Dobson. He was the same age as me, nine and a half, and a nice fellow. Even now, sixty years later, I can still remember that Dobson’s father was a doctor and that he lived, as I had learnt from the label on Dobson’s tuck-box, at The Red House, Uxbridge, Middlesex.