“Come quick, bwana! Come quick, come quick! A lion is carrying off the wife of the cook!”
A jolly good romp through the savannah is just the ticket, hey chaps!
Going Solo is the second memoir from celebrated (and in some circles reviled) children’s author Roald Dahl. It picks up where his first memoir, Boy, left off. I read Boy when I was young and, of all Dahl’s stories, the ones from this book have stayed with me the most. But for reasons I can’t recall, I never read its sequel.
When recently I found a copy of Going Solo in the shelf of a B&B, I thought I’d dip into it for a sample read. After a couple of chapters, I was so riveted I was hard pressed to stop myself slipping it into my bag on departure. So, on my next visit home, I plucked my parents’ copy from their bookshelf to continue the adventure.
Dahl is a unicorn of a memoirist: someone who has had more than his fair share of genuinely incredible life experiences and is a talented enough storyteller to do them justice.
Boy recounts a series of not-so-extraordinary tales from his childhood, but Dahl has a Sedaris-like talent for making the mundane enthralling (or maybe Sedaris has a Dahl-like talent, if we’re going chronologically). Tales of the sweet shop owner who would pick liquorice – and the occasional mouse – from the jar with filthy blackened fingers; of being forced to sit with bare buttocks on frosty toilet seats to warm them for the older boys at boarding school, are somehow wonderfully fun to read. In these tales of his youth, you can also clearly see the inspiration for many of the characters and events in his famous children’s books.
Looking back, I suspect at least a dash of creative licence in the telling of some of these tales, but the stories in Going Solo, assuming they are not totally fabricated, need no exaggeration.
Going Solo is told as a series of vignettes rather than a continuous narrative and covers the author’s time working with the Shell company in East Africa and his service as a fighter pilot with the RAF during the Second World War.
Sprinkled throughout are black and white photos, mostly taken by the author, and excerpts from letters back home to his mother, as well as maps, telegrams and documents like his flying log. This mix serves to round out the reading experience into a wonderful voyage to the past – like walking through a museum with the best tour guide ever.
In Africa, he tells of narrow escapes from deadly snakes with the help of an eccentric Scottish snake-whisperer. There’s the time a lion grabs the cook’s wife in its jaws and starts trotting off with her (since, miraculously, the cook’s wife escaped unharmed, I feel the quote at the top can still be used in good taste) and a story of Dahl’s native ‘house boy’ and friend who, upon hearing that his employer is soon to be at war with the Germans, takes matters into his own hands, in the style of his native warrior tribe.
With his signature talent for characterisation, Dahl describes the ‘completely dotty’ chaps and chapesses he spent his time with in and en route to Africa. While we might now look with much scepticism on the colonial project the author was part of, it made for a fascinating read – an insight into both the native and the colonial way of life.
The author’s own colonial self-awareness was beyond what I expected for his time. When his ‘boy’ and good friend, Mdisho, goes rogue based on a cultural misunderstanding the size of Everest, he writes:
“I refused to blame him for what he had done. He was a wild Mwanumwezi tribesman who had been moulded by us Europeans into the shape of a domestic servant, and now he had broken the mould.”
It’s great fun to read the stories in his native British wartime language. It’s not quite ‘bally ho, what what!’ but a believable version of that voice for which my main reference point is parody. It was a delight to feel like I was stepping into a past I’ve had little contact with, even through literature or film. While I have read many books from the 19th century, the early-mid 20th seems to be a bit of a blank spot in my reading vocabulary.
The author’s wartime stories are thrilling and harrowing in equal measures. The whole time, I couldn’t help but marvel and thank the fates that he made it back alive to not only tell this tale, but all the others that have made him a staple of children’s bookshelves.
Arriving in Greece fresh from a near-death experience and long recovery in hospital, he finds himself totally unprepared and untrained, flying among a squadron of fifteen fighter pilots and four bombers (a number that diminishes literally by the day) tasked with taking on a thousand German planes.
The young author takes it all in his stride, watching his fellow pilots fall out of the sky, shooting down German planes and knowing he is unlikely to make it through the week. ‘We weren’t afraid of anything’, he says of the group of young RAF pilots. Reading it ninety-odd years on, rugged up in my blanket, a world where this kind of daily brush with mortality was accepted without the bat of an eyelid was harder to imagine than a whiz popping giant.
In the context of recent controversies over this author – the attempted cleansing of his children’s books (removing words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’) and the general whiff of unsavouriness that seems to have swirled up around him (Philip Pullman, author of The Rose Field, has gone so far as to suggest that Dahl should be left to go out of print) – I was subconsciously looking for hints of this nasty character as I read. I found nothing I couldn’t like about this man.
Of course, in a memoir, one is the author of one’s own self-image, but it’s remarkable how nasty people can still give themselves away even with all the scrubbing tools at their disposal. The memoir was written more than forty years after the events, when Dahl was in his sixties. Still, in all his attitudes he appears warm, humble and open-minded.
The Roald Dahl of later years earned a bit of a reputation as an anti-Semite, and some quotes attributed to him certainly make that charge hard to defend.
Interestingly, the last story in Going Solo tells of meeting a Jewish refugee at a desolate aircraft base in Palestine, where he is hiding out with a school of Jewish orphans. The man speaks to him, somewhat cryptically, of his intention to set up a Jewish homeland. The author comments that as they spoke, he had no idea that the biggest massacre in human history was currently taking place in Germany.
It’s not impossible that some of the author’s less agreeable views were edited, or self-edited, out of this book, but all I can say is the Roald Dahl of both his memoirs is an utterly charming man. On whether this gives a complete account of his true character, I prefer to remain both ignorant and ambivalent.
I devoured this book. I knocked it over in a week, which is as fast as I can remember finishing a book in basically forever. It’s an easy and fun read, but fascinating and enlightening. For the first time in a while, I was not just enjoying reading time when I could snatch it but finding excuses to go to bed early and sit with it late into the night to read just a bit more. It was a treat worthy of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and, like all the best treats, it left me wanting more.
The Next Shelf 