Boy (book)

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Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) is the first autobiographical book by Norwegian writer Roald Dahl. It describes his life from birth until leaving school, especially focussing on living conditions in Britain at in the 1920s and 1930s, the public school system at the time, and how his childhood experiences lead him to writing as a career. It ends with his first job, working for Royal Dutch Shell. His autobiography continues in Going Solo.

[edit] Synopsis

Roald was still only three years old when his father died, and his youngest sister was born shortly afterwards. Roald’s mother, Sofie Magdalene Dahl, travelled on annual summer vacations to Norway together with all her children. Roald’s grandparents lived by the coast in Norway, and by tradition the entire family took a small boat out to a small uninhabited island at shore. Here they lived a relatively primitive life with traditional Norwegian food and adventurous experiences around the sunbathed, idyllic island.

This book follows important, and some smaller events of Roald’s childhood. From the Great Mouse Plot when he went to Llandaff Cathedral School and terrorized Mrs Pratchett, the elderly and dirty owner of his favourite sweet shop, to the removal of young Roald’s adenoids without any form of pain-relievers, the book covers a variety of subjects. Many of Dahl’s descriptions are grotesque and lifelike, however, these descriptions are insight into what the situation was like for people growing up in the 1920s and early 1930s.

[edit] Key points in the story

• Dahl's ancestry : Dahl's parents were Norwegian immigrants who came to Wales in about 1910 after his father and his brother decided to split up and go their separate ways from Paris . His father was more than 20 years older than his mother; 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. His father had lost an arm after falling from the roof of his house at the age of 14, and had two children from his first wife, who had died shortly after the birth of their second child.

• Roald's family tragedy: Roald's older sister Astri (his mother's first child) died of Appendicitis in 1920, when Roald was still only three years old. His father died of pneumonia a month later at the age of 57. This tragedy came shortly before the birth of his mother's fifth and final child (a girl).

• Kindergarten: Roald started at kindergarten when he was four years old, but has very few memories of his time there. The kindergarten was near his home in South Wales.

• The Great Mouse Plot of 1923: By the age of seven, Roald was attending Llandaff Cathedral School in the tiny Welsh city of Llandaff. 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. They played a prank on her by putting a dead mouse in a sweet jar, and they were caned by the school headmaster as a punishment, while Mrs Pratchett watched on in laughter.

• St Peter's School, Weston-super-Mare: Roald moved to St Peter's School, a boarding school in Weston-super-Mare, at the age of nine. The most significant event during his time at St Peter's was his caning by the headmaster after he was wrongly accused of cheating during an assignment. Other major events during his time at the school centred around the matron, who sprinkled soap shavings into the mouth of a boy who snored, and sent another boy to be caned by the head teacher as punishment for throwing a sponge across the dormitory. On a lighter note, a boy in Roald's dormitory sprinkled sugar over the corridor floor and the matron walked through it, though he was lucky enough to get away with it because he wouldn't own up and none of his friends would turn him in. Although the whole school had to go hungry, when the headmaster decided to confiscate food parcels coming from the boys' home as punishment for the sprinkled sugar.

• Goat's Tobacco: On one of Roald's visits to his grandparents in Norway, he placed goat's droppings in his older sisters fiance's pipe, thus making him scream and suffer a coughing fit. Later on, one of Roald Dahl's sisters let slip what happened therefore making his sister's lover chase them into the sea.

• Repton: At the age of 13, Roald moved to Repton School in Derbyshire (a decision based entirely on the fact that the school's name was easier to pronounce than his other choice, Marlborough), where he tells of the fagging duties which he had to perform for "Boazers", as well as the occasion when his friend received 10 lashes of the cane from the headmaster as punishment for bad behaviour. The headmaster of the time was, according to Dahl, Geoffrey Francis Fisher; who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned the Queen in 1953.

• An almost fatal accident: This event happened when Dahl was nine and his sister (in her twenties at the time) was driving their first automobile. She was driving at 60mph when a sudden bend came up. When they crashed Roald flew out the car. When he got up it is said that his nose was hanging on by a small thread of skin. He was taken to the family doctors on Cardiff Cathedral Road.

[edit] Editions

• ISBN 0-14-131140-1 (paperback, 2004)
• ISBN 0-14-130305-0 (paperback, 2001)
• ISBN 0-14-015682-8 (paperback, 1992)
• ISBN 0-14-008917-9 (paperback, 1986)
• ISBN 0-435-12300-9 (hardcover, 1986)