Roald Dahl (6 page)

None of this dampened his enthusiasm for travel, and once he had returned home and joined Shell in September 1934, he hoped for an early posting to Africa or the Far East. For the moment, the farthest east the job took him was to his mother's house in Bexley, where he lived while he learned “all about fuel oil and diesel oil and gas oil and lubricating oil and kerosene and gasoline.”
⁶
He spent six months working in a refinery and some enjoyable weeks driving a truck in the West Country, but for the most part was based in London, commuting daily to Shell's office in St. Helen's Court, Leadenhall Street, near the Bank of England.

When they arrived in the morning, employees signed their name in a book. At nine, the office manager drew a red line across the page, so that he could tell at a glance who was late.
⁷
After signing, Dahl and the others went out of the back door to a nearby Italian café for bacon and eggs. There wasn't a lot to do: much of the training seemed to consist of sorting letters and drafting replies. Besides, according to Antony Pegg—a fellow
Eastern Staff trainee who spent his whole life in Shell—Dahl was “a very independent person. He didn't like an awful lot of direction and that kind of thing. That's why I was never surprised when he left Shell. If he was told to do things—bah!—he wasn't interested.”

Not that he didn't try to be a good company man. Shell was a world in itself—in some ways not unlike a vast school. There were interesting and likable people in the office: Douglas Bader, for example, the future Second World War hero, who had joined the company as a clerk a year earlier, after losing his legs in a flying accident. Dahl played golf in the company tournament (he was runner-up in June 1936) and entered his photographs in the annual art exhibition—matters reported in the
Shell Magazine
, alongside accounts of a Shell amateur dramatic performance near Calcutta and a Shell cocktail party in Rio, and articles on new directions in gas-station architecture.
⁸
In the September 1937 issue, the magazine's humorous gossip column, “Whips and Scorpions,” which was compiled in the St. Helen's Court office, parodied a currently popular
News Chronicle
competition in which readers could win prizes by recognizing and challenging a representative of the newspaper, who toured British seaside resorts under the name Lobby Lud. The spoof was illustrated by a photograph taken by Dahl of a bare-chested man on a beach playing the mouth organ. It all reads as if it could have been dreamed up, and possibly even written, by Dahl himself:

The idea is that, upon recognizing Mr. Dud, you should floor him with a Rugger tackle, sit firmly upon his chest, and shout into his left ear: “You are Mr. Dippy Dud. I claim THE SHELL MAGAZINE prize,” at the same time brandishing a copy of the current issue.

“It will be noticed,” the piece warned, “that Mr. Dud is a keen musician, but do not be misled if he is not playing a mouth-organ when you see him”:

He is an equally adept performer on the … harmonium, euphonium, pandemonium … dictaphone, glockenspiel and catarrh.…

Don't be afraid to tackle anyone you think may possibly be Mr. Dud, unless he is very much bigger than yourself. People who are mistaken for him enter heartily into the fun of things, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.

Mr. Dud's next visit would be to “Whelkington-on-Sea,” where his itinerary was planned to include a lunchtime tour of “places of interest, including The Red Lion, The Where's George, The Bookmakers' Arms, and The Slap and Tickle,” followed by a two-minute visit to the municipal museum and art gallery, and an hour's “Demonstration of three-card trick in Municipal Fun Fair,” before another pub crawl.

In this lighthearted atmosphere, and with home to escape to, Dahl found it easier to make friends than at school. In the evenings, he played poker with people from the office, or went greyhound racing with them. He also often saw a young Cambridge undergraduate, Dennis Pearl, whom he had met on the Newfoundland expedition and who spent many weekends at Bexley. Pearl liked both Dahl and his sisters—“a very lively, bright lot.” Alfhild was the most attractive and most sought-after—her admirers included the composer William Walton. Else was quieter, with a full figure and sleepy eyes. (Much later, divorced from his first wife, Pearl would marry one of Else's daughters.) Asta, angular and very tall, was still at Roedean, and Pearl was once both startled and flattered when her mother, who hadn't expected him to stay the night, directed him with a Scandinavian disregard for sexual complexity to the same room as the sixteen-year-old, where a spare bed happened to be already made up.

Pearl remembers these weekends as idylls. The pattern was usually the same: horse racing or greyhounds with Roald and other male friends on Saturday; golf on Sunday morning; and then an afternoon spent lazing around, listening to Alfhild
and Else playing Beethoven piano duets, or reading aloud the latest Damon Runyon story published in the
Evening Standard
.
⁹
Pearl was an insatiable reader, and often recommended books to his friend: R. H. Mottram's First World War trilogy,
The Spanish Farm;
Thornton Wilder's
The Bridge of San Luis Rey;
novels by another American writer, Christopher Morley. Dahl shared many of his friend's enthusiasms, and Damon Runyon in particular gave him a taste for American crime fiction which lasted for the rest of his life. (The year before he died, 1989, he urged Pearl to read Thomas Harris's newly published novel,
The Silence of the Lambs
.) But he was too active to give much of his time to reading, and his tastes were less sophisticated and “literary” than Pearl's. Besides, he was always busy with a game or hobby of some kind. Sports apart, photography still absorbed him—one of the bedrooms at Bexley had been converted into a darkroom—and he spent hours making model aircraft. He was also developing an increasingly complicated and secretive sex life. He had some single girlfriends of his own age, including for a short time a Belgian-Irish girl named Dorothy O'Hara Livesay, who later became Pearl's first wife. But Dahl was particularly attracted, and attractive, to older women, especially if they were married. In Pearl's words, he “tended to choose something which created difficulties—he seemed to like mystery,” so the details are hazy. But among his affairs was one with a baronet's wife, and another with a local woman in Bexley whom Dahl kept separate from his friends and saw only on nights when her husband was away on business.

Some of these liaisons were organized by telephone from the office—as, also, were his dealings with the bookmakers. He regularly slipped out in the middle of the afternoon to buy an evening paper for the racing results.
¹⁰
Although his salary as a trainee was only £130 a year—today, about £4,000—he had no living expenses. To Antony Pegg, whose wages were entirely used up by the rent for his lodgings and who was dependent on
his parents for spending money, Dahl seemed to have much more to spare for gambling than the rest of them.

Meanwhile, the would-be traveler watched impatiently as other Shell staff went to and from Latin America, Australia, Africa, Eastern Europe. On his desk sat a ball which, when he joined the company, he had begun making from the silver wrappings of his daily post-lunch chocolate bar (and which he kept, along with other relics and fetishes, for the rest of his life).
¹¹
Already it was as big as a tennis ball. At his desk, Dahl fantasized about Africa, while more realistically planning holidays closer to home: a trip to Norway with his old school friend Michael Arnold, now at Oxford, and Dennis Pearl; or a climbing expedition in Snowdonia, where he and Pearl took along another Reptonian called Jimmy Horrocks, who had been on the Newfoundland trip with them and had recently quarreled with his parents. In the conventionally minded view of Pearl, who was then a law student and later a successful colonial administrator, Horrocks was “a complete and utter dead loss from every point of view—an early version of the druggy dropout.” Pearl noticed that Dahl was often drawn to outsiders.

Eventually, in the autumn of 1938, his posting came through: to Dar es Salaam, in what is now Tanzania, was then Tanganyika, and from 1887 until the First World War had been German East Africa.

European imperialism had brought European technological “needs” to East Africa. Suddenly the nights had come to seem too dark without kerosene lamps, cooking too laborious without kerosene stoves. The first oil storage tank which Shell built in East Africa went up in 1900 in Zanzibar, along with a factory for making cans.
¹²
Trucks, cars, and oil-driven ships soon required more and bigger tanks: in Mombasa, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam. Deep harbors were built, with pipelines to draw oil from
the ocean tankers. New offices served these installations, and from 1930, there was a club in Nairobi for those who worked in them.

Dahl lived with two other young Englishmen in a company house in Dar es Salaam, on the cliffs above the Indian Ocean.
¹³
Between them, they ran the business in Tanganyika—a country four times the size of Great Britain, one and a half times that of Texas—sharing their somewhat awed sense of power and freedom with the colonial administrators who accommodated them on their travels. Dahl greatly admired the way the District Officers lived, combining the roles of judge, political adviser, and doctor. Their Africa wasn't the aristocratic twenty-four-hour nightclub of Kenya's “Happy Valley.” It was a more conscientious society, and its excitements were more indigenous: a tarantula in a friend's shoe; a green mamba sliding into the living room of a customs officer and killing the dog; a lion carrying off the wife of the district officer's cook, while the D.O. and his family sat with Dahl listening to Beethoven on the gramophone.

Much of the life was routine. In Dar es Salaam, he spent his days sitting in the office in his white suit, at a desk partitioned off from the clerks, who were mostly Indians and whose obsequiousness, he told his mother, made him feel “like a bloody king.”
¹⁴
He played a lot of sports, mainly through the club: sailing, swimming, golf, tennis, squash, hockey, and soccer, often in temperatures of 90 degrees. The social highlight was the annual dinner of the Caledonian Society. But he often had to make long circular safaris on business, taking his servant, Mdisho, with him. They traveled west to Lake Tanganyika, south to the borders of Nyasaland (Malawi) and back toward Mozambique, visiting customers who ran mines and plantations and supplying them with fuel and lubricants for their machinery. In
Going Solo
, Dahl colorfully describes the wildlife he saw on these trips and his relations with Africans and white settlers. As a writer, he was no Isak Dinesen—he lacked her experience of African life, her patience, and her subtlety. But he had read her book
Out of Africa
,
¹⁵
published
the year before he left England, and respected her interest in non-European ways of thought and her impatience with the unimaginativeness of many settlers. In old age, Dahl confessed to feeling “mildly ashamed” of his youthful acceptance of British imperialism in Africa, and of the social inequalities on which it was based: “It was only comfortable because we had masses of servants, which is not right, of course it's not right.”
¹⁶
But even while he was still fairly young, he became more critical of colonial attitudes than perhaps he later recalled. The point is worth making because—as we shall see—Dahl was accused of racism in the 1970s, when
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
was attacked for its somewhat unthinkingly Victorian treatment of the “Oompa-Loompas”: cheerful factory laborers who, until he was persuaded to revise the book, were depicted as Congolese pygmy slaves.
¹⁷

Dahl himself satirized racism in his story “Poison,” a psychological thriller which he first published in 1950. The plot was suggested to him by a friend in Washington,
¹⁸
but it fitted some of his own African experiences.

A white settler in India is trapped in bed by a deadly snake, a krait.
¹⁹
Harry Pope's friend finds him paralyzed with terror and fetches the local native doctor. During a scene drawn out over nine sweat-drenched pages, Dr. Ganderbai first injects Pope with serum and then pumps chloroform into his bed, to immobilize the krait. But when at last they pull back the sheet, nothing is there. In the story's fierce final twist, Dr. Ganderbai asks whether his patient has been dreaming, and Pope turns on him: “Are you telling me I'm a liar?… Why, you dirty little Hindu sewer rat!… You dirty black—” The friend, who is also the narrator, apologetically hurries Ganderbai out.

“You did a wonderful job,” I said. “Thank you so very much for coming.”

“All he needs is a good holiday,” he said quietly, without looking at me, then he started the engine and drove off.

Ganderbai's dignity, here, makes its own quiet point, but in the original version, Dahl included a more plainly anti-racist paragraph which was obviously based on his time in Tanganyika. The passage both interrupts the tension and, by overanticipating Harry's behavior at the end, weakens its impact. Presumably that is the reason why, although it appeared in the version published by
Collier's
magazine,
²⁰
Dahl later removed it:

[Dr. Ganderbai] was worried about his reputation and I must say I couldn't blame him. It was probable that he had never before been called in to attend a European. None of them bothered with him much, except perhaps the British upon whom, in those days, his job depended, and who noticed him only in order to be politely offensive—as only the British can be. I imagined that even now little Ganderbai could hear the thick fruity voice of Dr. James Russell in the lounge at the club, saying, “Young Pope? Ah, yes, poor fellah. Not a nice way to go. But then if people
will
call in a native witch doctor, what can they expect?”