More About Boy(38)
Dear lovely Mrs O’Connor! Perhaps it was worth going to that awful school simply to experience the joy of her Saturday mornings.
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‘Ellis and the Boil’ was once part of a very early draft of The Witches, in which the hero is sent away to boarding school. But Roald Dahl decided to include the chapter in Boy instead.
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Little Ellis and the boil
During my third term at St Peter’s, I got flu and was put to bed in the Sick Room, where the dreaded Matron reigned supreme. In the next bed to mine was a seven-year-old boy called Ellis, whom I liked a lot. Ellis was there because he had an immense and angry-looking boil on the inside of his thigh. I saw it. It was as big as a plum and about the same colour.
One morning, in came the doctor to examine us, and sailing along beside him was the Matron. Her mountainous bosom was enclosed in a starched white envelope, and because of this she somehow reminded me of a painting I had once seen of a four-masted schooner in full canvas running before the wind.
‘What’s his temperature today?’ the doctor asked, pointing at me.
‘Just over a hundred, doctor,’ the Matron told him.
‘He’s been up here long enough,’ the doctor said. ‘Send him back to school tomorrow.’ Then he turned to Ellis. ‘Take off your pyjama trousers,’ he said. He was a very small doctor, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a bald head. He frightened the life out of me.
Ellis removed his pyjama trousers. The doctor bent forward and looked at the boil. ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘That’s a nasty one, isn’t it? We’re going to have to do something about that, aren’t we, Ellis?’
‘What are you going to do?’ Ellis asked, trembling.
‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ the doctor said. ‘Just lie back and take no notice of me.’
Little Ellis lay back with his head on the pillow. The doctor had put his bag on the floor at the end of Ellis’s bed, and now he knelt down on the floor and opened the bag. Ellis, even when he lifted his head from the pillow, couldn’t see what the doctor was doing there. He was hidden by the end of the bed. But I saw everything. I saw him take out a sort of scalpel which had a long steel handle and a small pointed blade. He crouched below the end of Ellis’s bed, holding the scalpel in his right hand.
‘Give me a large towel, Matron,’ he said.
The Matron handed him a towel.
Still crouching low and hidden from little Ellis’s view by the end of the bed, the doctor unfolded the towel and spread it over the palm of his left hand. In his right hand he held the scalpel.
Ellis was frightened and suspicious. He started raising himself up on his elbows to get a better look. ‘Lie down, Ellis,’ the doctor said, and even as he spoke, he bounced up from the end of the bed like a jack-in-the-box and flung the outspread towel straight into Ellis’s face. Almost in the same second, he thrust his right arm forward and plunged the point of the scalpel deep into the centre of the enormous boil. He gave the blade a quick twist and then withdrew it again before the wretched boy had had time to disentangle his head from the towel.
Ellis screamed. He never saw the scalpel going in and he never saw it coming out, but he felt it all right and he screamed like a stuck pig. I can see him now struggling to get the towel off his head, and when he emerged the tears were streaming down his cheeks and his huge brown eyes were staring at the doctor with a look of utter and total outrage.
‘Don’t make such a fuss about nothing,’ the Matron said.
‘Put a dressing on it, Matron,’ the doctor said, ‘with plenty of mag sulph paste.’ And he marched out of the room.
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Magnesium sulphate paste draws out nasty impurities and poisons from the body. It can be used on boils – like with poor little Ellis – and carbuncles.
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I couldn’t really blame the doctor. I thought he handled things rather cleverly. Pain was something we were expected to endure. Anaesthetics and pain-killing injections were not much used in those days. Dentists, in particular, never bothered with them. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.
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It must have been pretty grim being ill at boarding school. Roald Dahl often told his mother all about it in letters home.
The wart that Roald Dahl describes here was nothing compared to some of the other dreadful illnesses and operations that he and his family went through in later life.
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Roald Dahl was particularly concerned about an outbreak of measles, a disease that children are now usually vaccinated against.