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Boy - Tales of Childhood

In the beginning it is in the family house at Radyr, and at Llandaff Cathedral School where "The Great
Mouse Plot" and the following caning took place. At his trips to Norway they would stay on a small
island with a small guesthouse. But most of the story takes place at different boarding schools. Both St.
Peters and Repton are described as big, cold brick buildings with large dormitories and cold toilets.
In the book, Dahl first tells us about his father Harald Dahl and his childhood in Sarpsborg in Norway. We
are also told how he lost his arm. At a young age he left the family home, and set out for the great world
with his brother Oscar. They soon split up, and Harald Dahl and another Norwegian called Aadnesen set
up a business in Cardiff in Wales. When he was in Paris he had met a young French girl called Marie,
who he married. Unfortunately, she died after giving birth to their second child. Harald Dahl realised that
his children ought to have a mother figure, and he set of to Norway to find a new wife. Her name was
Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, and together they had five children. The book follows Roald Dahl, the third
child they had together from kindergarten, through many different schools until he got a job in Shell Oil
Company at the age of twenty.
In this book Roald Dahl himself is the main character, and he comes of as a nice young fellow. Even
though he had the idea for "The Great Mouse Plot" and "Goat Tobacco". At one of the schools he attended
he could not be made a "boazer", or a prefect, because he refused to hit younger students. He had a very
good relationship with his mother, and wrote to her every week until she died. He doesn't say much about
his family, in fact, his two oldest siblings are just referred to as the ancient half-sister and the ancient halfbrother. His mother is the only person he tells us something about. She is described as a strong woman
who held the family together after her husband and daughter died.
I think the theme is boarding schools, and how it was like for him being sent from one school to another.
He writes "An English school in those days was purely money-making business owned and operated by
the Headmaster." I think this describes Roald Dahls opinion on the British school system. He doesn't say
that he hated the system or the schools, but it is obvious that he did not like the schools he went to.
There are some sad stories as well, like the story of how his sister and father died, many descriptions of
caning and some painful stories, for instance the story of how he had his adenoids removed. These stories
are all told in a way that makes us understand his opinion, even if the story is from when he was six years
old. The book deals with the theme in both a serious and entertaining manner.
Dahl's ancestry
Roald Dahl's father Harald Dahl and mother Sofie Magdalene were Norwegians who lived
in Cardiff, Wales. Harald and his brother Oscar split up and went their separate ways, Oscar
going to La Rochelle. Harald had lost an arm from complications after fracturing it: a doctor was
summoned, but was drunk on arrival and mistook the injury for a dislocated shoulder. His attempt
to relocate the shoulder caused further damage to the fractured arm, necessitating its amputation.
Harald Dahl had two children by his first wife, Marie, who died shortly after the birth of their
second child. He then married Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, Roald's mother. Harald was
considerably older than Sofie; he was born in 1863 and she was born in 1885. By the time Roald
was born in 1916, his father was 53 years old.
Family tragedy
Roald's older sister Astri died of appendicitis in 1920 at the age of seven. His father,
overwhelmed with grief, died of pneumonia himself just weeks later.
Primary school
Roald started at the Elmtree House Primary School when he was six years old. He was there for a
year, but has few memories of his time there.
Sweets

Roald writes about different confectionery, his love of sweets, his fascination with the local sweet
shop and in particular about the free samples of Cadbury chocolate bars given to him and his
schoolmates for evaluation when he was a student at Repton. Young Dahl dreamt of working as
an inventor for Cadbury, an idea he has said later inspired Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Great mouse plot of 1924
From the age of seven, Roald attended Llandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff. He and his friends
had a grudge against the local sweet-shop owner, Mrs. Pratchett, a sour, elderly widow who gave
no thought to hygiene (and described by Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock, as "a comic
distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life"[1]). They played a
prank on her by placing a dead mouse in a gobstopper jar while his friend Thwaites distracted her
by buying sweets. They were caned by the headmaster as a punishment, while Mrs. Pratchett
watched, laughing and encouraging him to cane them harder.
St Peters School, Weston-super-Mare
Roald attended St Peter's School, a boarding school in Weston-super-Mare, from 1925, when he
was nine, to 1929. He describes having received six strokes of the cane after being accused of
cheating at his classwork (in the essay about the life of a penny; he claims that he still has the
essay and he was doing well until the nib of his pen broke-fountain pens were not accepted-and
had to ask his classmate for one when Captain Hardcastle heard him and accused him of
cheating.) Many of the events he describes involved the matron. She once sprinkled soap
shavings into Tweedie's mouth to stop his snoring. She sent a six-year-old boy who allegedly
threw a sponge across the dormitory to the headmaster in his pyjamas and dressing gown; the boy
was then caned. Wragg, a boy in Roald's dormitory, sprinkled sugar over the corridor floor so
they would know she was coming and the matron walked through it. When the boy's friends
refused to turn him in, the whole school was punished when the headmaster confiscated the keys
to their tuck boxes containing food parcels the pupils had received from their families. At the end
he returns home to his family for Christmas.
Goat's tobacco
On one of Dahl's visits to his grandparents' home in Norway, he placed shredded goat dung in the
tobacco pipe of his half sister's fianc, who suffered a coughing fit while smoking it. One of
Roald's sisters let slip what had happened.

Repton
At the age of 13, in 1929, Roald moved to Repton School in Derbyshire. He was given a choice
between Repton and Marlborough and chose Repton because its name was easier to pronounce.
He tells of the fagging duties he had to perform for "Boazers" (prefects), such as warming up a
Boazer's toilet seat in winter by sitting on it. He states that he read entire works of Charles
Dickens while sitting on the toilet seat.
Dahl describes an occasion when his friend received several brutal strokes of the cane from the
headmaster as punishment for misbehaviour. According to Dahl, this headmaster was Geoffrey
Francis Fisher, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned the Queen in 1953.
However, according to Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, Dahl's memory was in error: the

beating took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster concerned
was in fact John Traill Christie, Fisher's successor.[2]

Boy opens with Roald Dahls one-armed father, Harald Dahl, running away with his brother to
France. Uncle Oscar went to La Rochelle, and Harald Dahl set up a shipbroking business with a
Mr Aednesan in Cardiff. He had married and had a daughter and a son, but his wife tragically
died after giving birth to the boy. Harald Dahl looked for a stepmother, and then met and married
Sofie Hesselburg, who bore him five children, Roald Dahl and his four sisters.
The rest of the book explains in great detail about Roald Dahls eventful, amusing, interesting
and sometimes gruesome childhood. Roald Dahls first school was Llandaff Cathedral School.
Over there, Roald Dahl and his four friends liked to devour the sweetshop (which they would if
they had more than 20p). But they hated the filthy, smelly owner, Mrs Pratchett. They played a
prank for fun on her (which included a dead mouse and a Gobstopper jar) and Mrs Pratchett got
her revenge in a rather painful way, so Roald Dahl went to St Peters.
After a great deal of amusing and horrible events, the soon-to-be author went to a great finishing
school, Repton. Boy is a great book to enjoy Boy goes from when Harald Dahl was
fourteen to when Roald Dahl was starting his job. The book Boy shows us that truth is stronger
than fiction. There are moments to make you laugh and moments to scare you. My favourite
incident was when Roald Dahl put Goats Tobacco in his half-sisters fiances pipe, because it is
comedic and courageous.
Late in his life, Roald Dahl decided to write about his own early years.Boy: Tales of Childhood consists
of his recollections of the period that ranged from his birth to the time he turned twenty. The title is taken
from his many letters home, written while he was at English boarding schools from the age of nine until
the end of his schooling, which he would simply sign "love from Boy". As his works of fiction deal with
the joys and travails of young children, it should come as no surprise that Dahl's youth contained both in
substantial dollops. Dahl maintains that this is not intended as an autobiography, which I suspect Dahl
believed required an attention to detail he was not interested in, but instead merely the recollections of an
adult looking back upon his younger days and picking out those memories both wonderful and tragic.
Most fascinating about this book is the glimpse it gives into the mind of the man who wrote so many
books about childhood, and the indications it gives as to where his stories came from.
And tragedy seems to have been a fairly common element to Dahl's life. When Dahl was three, his sister
Astrid died of appendicitis at the age of seven, and his grief stricken father died shortly thereafter. (In a
tragic coincidence, Dahls own daughter Olivia died of measles at the age of seven). Although almost
everything written about Dahl's father in Boy concerns events that took place long before Dahl was born,
one can feel the love he has for a man who, at the time this book was written, had been dead for sixty-four
years. This love shows up in many of Dahl's works, most notablyDanny: The Champion of the World,
which has always struck me as a love letter from a man to the father he never really knew but desperately
wished he had. But the loss of one's parents crops up as a recurring theme in Dahl's work, with orphaned
children serving as the central characters in works such as The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, and The
Witches.
This tragedy caused by the uncaring world is compounded in Dahl's memoirs by the viciousness inflicted
upon him and other children by adults. Though his family was originally from Norway, Dahl was raised
in England, and sent to English schools as a result of his father's belief that English schools were the
finest in the world, and his widow's refusal to go against her dead husband's wishes. But in the 1920s,
when Dahl entered school, it was commonplace for schoolmasters to beat children who misbehaved. In a
particularly disturbing sequence, after Dahl and his friends play a prank upon the somewhat crabby
woman who runs a local candy shop, after which she complains to the school headmaster, who proceeds
to cane the children. Reading this, it struck me as absurd that people would consider an acceptable

response to the alleged misbehavior of children to complain to their school and not to their parents, and
that the school administration would consider it appropriate to punish these children for actions taken
outside of school. This seems to have been disturbing to Dahl's mother as well, because she complained to
the school headmaster, who defended his actions on the grounds that Dahl's mother, being Norwegian and
a woman, was simply a silly little woman who didn't understand proper schooling.
In a perfect world, Dahl's mother would have seen the absurdity of this system, and made substantial
changes to his education (by spurning the brutal English school system), but she seems to have identified
the school as the problem, not the system, and Dahl was sent on to boarding schools first to St. Peter's and
then to Repton. Of course, the vicious brutality of the system continued, but as Dahl was away from
home, and the school masters used subtle and not-so-subtle ways to keep the truth of the violence away
from parents, nothing much changed except the boys became inured to the viciousness heaped upon them.
It seems quite damning evidence that of all his years in school, the memories that most stuck with Dahl
into his elder years were the memories, not of learning, but of the brutality and pettiness of his instructors.
Oddly, Dahl recounts a couple of medical procedures, including the removal of his own tonsils, in which,
as was the order of the day, the medical professionals dispensed with the need to use any kind of
anesthetic on the grounds that children didn't really feel pain. The cognitive dissonance between the idea
that removing tonsils by simply slicing them out of a young man's throat because he won't really feel it,
and the idea that the best way to discipline that same child is to beat him bloody with a cane should be
readily apparent. In many ways, it seems like English society had conspired to try to make the lives of its
children as painful as possible while engaging in a series of contradictory rationalizations to keep abusing
their progeny.
Of course, Dahls childhood was not all vicious beatings at the hands of his school masters and surgery
performed without painkillers by uncaring doctors. His life contained numerous moments of happiness
and joy, mostly involving vacations his family took every year to Norway. He writes of the excitement of
riding in a car with his much older sister at the wheel, careening about the countryside barely under
control an experience that probably served as an inspirations for elements of his screenplay for Chitty
Chitty, Bang Bang. Dahl also reminisces about playing pranks upon his sisters fiance, and even some of
the good times he had in school including the deliveries of Cadbury chocolates the company sent to test
new products (which inspired Dahl to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and his athletic pursuits.
But lurking in the background are always characters like Captain Hardcastle and adults like him who
serve as the obvious models for so many villains in Dahls stories. Dahl also speaks with great affection
for his mother, and how she kept every letter he ever wrote her without ever telling him she had done so.
This is, as with so many events in the book, touchingly sweet colored with tragedy as he only discovered
this level of devotion after his mother had died.
A long time ago, in 1916, a little boy was born to Norwegian parents living in South Wales. His
father was a successful businessman, but idiosyncratic to say the least. He wanted his children to
have an appreciation of beauty, so before they were born he spent hours taking his pregnant wife
on "glorious walks" to take in the natural splendour of the countryside. In this way he hoped that
the wonder of nature and an appreciation of it would somehow be transmitted to his unborn child.
The little boy's father had only one arm, but got along just fine with the aid of various ingenious
gadgets he'd invented for himself, like the sharpened fork which acted as all three forms of
cutlery, which he kept in a special case in his pocket. He also kept a long and involved diary.
Sadly, the little boy's father died when he was still very young.
The little boy was Roald Dahl and doesn't it sound like the little boy grew up to be very like his
father - an inveterate scribbler, inventor and appreciator of good things, with a little bit of
eccentricity thrown in? Boy is a collection of stories Roald Dahl has to tell about his babyhood
and schooldays, beginning of course, as all stories of childhood should begin, with a setting of
the scene, and an explanation of the things which went before. After his father's death the Dahl

family did not return home to Norway, but stayed in Wales, for Dahl senior had been a great
supporter of the public school system and had always wanted his children to have an English
education. His mother was determined to fulfil that aim. Dahl's first school was in Llandaff in
Cardiff, and his memories of it are sparse in comparison with his memories of the sweet shop
nearby:
"The sweet shop in Llandaff in the year 1923 was the centre of our lives. To us, it was what a bar
is to a drunk, or a church to a bishop. Without it, there would have been little to live for. But it
had one terrible drawback, this sweet shop. The woman who owned it was a horror... Her name
was Mrs Pratchett. She was a small skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a
mouth as sour as a green gooseberry."
Only Dahl would mention a drunk and a bishop in a children's book, only Dahl would remember
the importance of sweets, or the horror of a nasty lady behind the counter and brook no argument
when calling her a hag. Of course Mrs Pratchett is very nasty, losing no opportunity to shortchange the children with their sweets or to generally be disparaging and unpleasant.
Marvellously, she receives her comeuppance, for Dahl and his little group of friends one day
place a dead mouse in the gobstopper jar when she's not looking, with hilarious and awful
consequences. Summers were wonderful for the Dahl family, for then they returned to Norway, a
huge travelling circus they made:
"We were always an enormous party. There were my three sisters and my ancient half- sister
(that's four), and my half-brother and me (that's six), and my mother (that's seven), and Nanny
(that's eight), and in addition to these there were never less than two others who were some sort
of anonymous ancient friends of the ancient half-sister (that's ten altogether).
Those holidays were full of lazing, and boating, and eating, in far-away, secluded Norwegian
islands and they were full of fun, and naughtiness too, of course. Once, the ancient half-sister
took her pompous boyfriend along who really did get on everyone's nerves but hers. One of his
most annoying habits was his constant pipe- smoking, and while he was swimming one of Dahl's
sisters replaced all the tobacco in the bowl of the pipe with crushed goat droppings. When he
returned the entire family watched him smoke, aghast, before falling into hysterics as he realised
what had happened.
Soon enough, Dahl makes the step from prep to boarding school, and here things aren't so
blissful. The rigid, incomprehensible discipline, the endless push for pigeon-holing and
conformity and the cruel, institutionalised ways this was enforced often left Dahl lonely,
homesick and afraid. He wrote home to his mother every week and even after countless readings
of the book I still get a tight, sad, terrible feeling inside when I see some of the copied letters,
signed "love, Boy" and when I read of the horrors of ritualised corporal punishment.
Perhaps one of the reasons we all find stories so satisfying is that stories, both invented and true,
are like a thin layer torn from a part of a whole: rounded but at the same time incomplete. Stories
can entertain and they can teach, they can make us happy or they can make us sad, but the most
valuable thing they give is a sense of inclusion, a sense of feeling an indivisible part of that

whole. Stories are amongst the most precious of all the things we have, and often the true ones
are the most important of all. Autobiographies probably have more to tell us about selves than
about times and places, they are more stories than histories, I think. I think too, that this is a good
thing, and I think Roald Dahl would have agreed with me. He prefaces Boy with a few words:
"This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand,
throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I
have never forgotten... Some are funny. Some are painful. Some are unpleasant. I suppose that is
why I have always remembered them so vividly. All are true."

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