Kitabı oku: «Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl», sayfa 11

Dahl later claimed that an RAF inquiry had revealed that the commanding officer at Fouka had given him the wrong coordinates and that 80 Squadron’s desert airstrip was actually 50 miles further south of the place where he had crashed his plane.²⁵ Now we will only ever have his word for it, as the official records of that inquiry were destroyed in the 1960s.²⁶ Dahl also implied that the crash was partly due to systemic planning failures within the RAF itself, maintaining that he was quite unused to flying Gloster Gladiators and that he only saw one for the first time less than twenty-four hours before he was due to ferry it from Ismailia into the desert. He added that when he had asked for some training, a “supercilious” officer pointed out to him that, as there was only one cockpit, he would have to teach himself. “This was surely not the right way of doing things,” he concluded.²⁷ The aviation writer and historian Derek O’Connor has subsequently observed that what Dahl failed to mention in that context was that he had spent the preceding two weeks at Ismailia learning how to fly an almost identical aircraft: the Gloster Gauntlet. According to O’Connor, the Gladiator was essentially “an improved version of the Gauntlet with an uprated Bristol Mercury engine and an enclosed cockpit”.²⁸ Dahl’s need to rewrite history here speaks of more than a great STORYTELLER embellishing the truth to entertain his reader. It suggests instead the intensity of his need to tell the story of the crash in a way that exonerated him of any slur of incompetence. The RAF records were not enough. He also needed a version of events that absolved him from responsibility and pointed the finger of blame elsewhere. Inevitably, it contributed to his later repeated fiction that instead of wrecking his plane, he was “shot down” in combat over the desert.

These was one final piece of mythmaking. On almost every occasion that he retold the events of that evening in the last forty years of his life, Dahl recounted them as if he was entirely on his own. But there was another pilot involved. This man flew with him from Fouka in a different Gladiator, safely put his machine down on the sand close by the wreckage of Dahl’s plane, and comforted the burned and bleeding Roald through the long cold desert night. And in Dahl’s earliest versions of these events, “Shot Down Over Libya” and “A Piece of Cake”, both of which were written in wartime, he too is present in the narrative. In fiction, this man was called “Shorty” or “Peter”. In reality, he was Douglas McDonald. McDonald, who had grown up in Kenya and learned to fly before the war at the Aero Club of East Africa, saw his friend “Lofty” that night in extremis — demoralized, tortured by pain and profoundly physically vulnerable. So vulnerable indeed that until, fifty years later, when he had to face the final days of his own terminal illness, he would always recall it as the worst moment of his life.²⁹ Dahl had always liked to appear strong. His position, since childhood, as the dominant male in his family household inclined him to support others, to be the paterfamilias. In this narrative, there was little place for weakness and incapacity. Consequently, “Shorty” or “Peter” soon disappeared from his retelling of the events of the crash. Yet in a remarkable letter written to Douglas McDonald’s widow, Barbara, in 1953 — not long after her husband’s death in a plane crash in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro — Roald offered a tiny glimpse of just how exposed he felt that evening and how much he had needed the simple consolation of human warmth and company:

I expect he’s told you a little of what happened that evening in the desert when we both came down, and I crashed. But I doubt he explained how really marvellous he was to me, and looked after me and tried to comfort me, and stayed with me out there during a very cold night, and kept me warm. Well, he did. And I shall always remember it most vividly, even some of the things he said (because I was quite conscious) and most of all how, when he ran over and found me not dead, he did a sort of dance of joy in the sand and it was all very wonderful, because after all we were not very far away from the Italians and he had a great many other things to think about? ³⁰

The letter is significant not just because it makes plain exactly what happened that night, but also because it also gives us a rare insight into Roald’s sense of vulnerability. This was not a side of his personality that he normally disclosed to the world, preferring to present in its place the image of the stalwart problem solver or the ebullient humorist. These of course were real enough qualities as well, but sometimes they served also to mask feelings of inadequacy or weakness. The pattern had started in his youth. For his mother’s sake, he had cultivated a stiff upper lip and taken pains to conceal his own suffering. This attitude would continue throughout his life. His earliest short stories about flying do reveal occasional cracks in the facade, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in his earlier versions of the immediate aftermath of the crash, where in the “bitter cold” of the desert, “Peter lay down close alongside so we could both keep a little warmer … I do not know how long we stayed there … Later I remember hot thick soup and one spoonful making me sick. And all the time the pleasant feeling that Peter was around, being wonderful, doing wonderful things and never going away.”³¹

Before he left the Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Roald spent all of the money that had accumulated in his bank account buying a gold watch for each of the three nursing sisters who had looked after him. It was an act of characteristic generosity. Giving presents had been and would always be an essential part of his psychological makeup. Within the family, this could sometimes be interpreted as reinforcing his position as the dominant successful male, but with others the impulse was usually entirely altruistic. It was an attitude that would soon be echoed in the behaviour of others toward him — most strikingly, a wealthy English couple, Major Teddy Peel and his wife Dorothy. Following a new set of medical examinations, Dahl was sent back to Alexandria to convalesce at their home. Like many of the wealthier British inhabitants of Alexandria, the Peels made a point of visiting injured officers in hospital, and Dorothy had taken a particular liking to the charming, fragile giant, persuading him to abandon his plans to recuperate in the Kenyan Highlands and insisting that he stay as a guest in their spacious villa on the rue des Ptolemees. There, Roald told his mother that he spent most of his time “doing practically nothing at all with the greatest possible comfort”. Dahl, of course, had been raised without financial worries. He was used to servants and now had a small private income from his father’s trust. Nevertheless, he was amazed by the lavish expatriate Alexandrian lifestyle, noting — perhaps a little critically — that even in wartime, everyone there seemed to have “pots of money”.³²

His hosts were admiringly described as “probably the nicest and richest people” in town, with five cars, a large motor yacht, and a twin-engined aeroplane of their own.³³ In their house he slept on silk and linen sheets, often for twelve hours at a stretch, listened to Beethoven, Brahms and Elgar on the gramophone, made occasional conversation, and tried to regain some of the 30 pounds he had lost since the accident. Once or twice he even ventured out to play a few holes of golf. But his recovery was slow. He tired easily, his mind often felt sluggish, and he suffered from severe and prolonged headaches. He complained that he could not even concentrate sufficiently to play a hand of bridge and was prone to blackouts — particularly when he went out of the house.

After a month with the Peels, Dahl’s headaches had become less fre quent, and in February 1941, he was sent to RAF Heliopolis, near Cairo, where he was put on “light duties”, looking after air force pay packets and ferrying messages across town in a chauffeur-driven car. One day, on a trip into Cairo, he accidentally ran into Lesley Pares, a friend of Alfhild’s, who was working for the Air Ministry. Lesley was immediately struck by Roald’s good looks and rakish charm. In our conversations, she recalled him nonchalantly performing Beethoven’s three-minute bagatelle, Fur Elise, in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo as if he was an accomplished pianist, then later confessing to her privately that it was the only thing he could play. She found him unpredictable, attractive and compelling. But she also found him indiscreet, which unsettled her, as did the fact that he could be argumentative and dogmatic. She tried to avoid encounters between him and another friend of hers who was a conscientious objector, because Roald was “rather fierce” on the subject of pacifism.³⁴

For his part, Roald took an immediate liking to Lesley, describing her to his mother as “much nicer than the average Judy one meets here — most of them are bloody awful”.³⁵ Her forthrightness, lack of pretension and disregard for unnecessary politesse reminded him of his family. “I like Lesley because she’s the first woman I’ve met since I left home to whom I can swear or say what I bloody well like without her turning a hair,” he wrote, adding humorously that she had probably been “well-trained” by his sister Alfhild.³⁶ She became a regular companion. They went on picnics into the desert together, where they talked about his family, argued about politics (she remembered him being quite socialist), and discussed poetry.

Wartime Egypt had a thriving British expatriate social scene, and a fertile literary subculture that included the writers Elizabeth David and Lawrence Durrell, who both moved there in 1941, after the Nazis invaded Greece. Lesley Pares would get to know them both and come to be extremely close to Elizabeth David. But Dahl was concentrating on his recovery and literary soirees held little interest for him. He preferred listening to his gramophone, animated only by occasional forays into the routine colonial existence of golf clubs, cocktails, dinner parties, and games of bridge. His contribution to Egyptian artistic life was limited to exhibiting two of the Iraqi photographs that had survived the destruction of his kit at an exhibition in Cairo, organized by a friend of his mother’s from London, Dr Omar Khairat. One of them, an aerial photograph of the mighty 2,000-year-old Arch of Ctesiphon, won him a silver medal. He had taken it from the cockpit of his plane while flying from Hab-baniya. However, his head injuries remained slow to heal and a return to the air was beginning to seem increasingly unlikely. Blinding headaches could still force him to abandon the simplest of tasks and retire to his room, and he was dogged by a sense of lethargy and lightheadedness. So he waited, hoping that his health would improve and that he would be able, at last, to fly in action. For, despite the doctors’ pessimistic prognosis about his head injuries, his “one obsession was to get back to operational flying”.³⁷

“A monumental bash on the head” was how Dahl once described his accident in the Western Desert, claiming that it directly led to his becoming a writer.³⁸ This was not just because his first published piece of writing was a semifictionalized account of the crash, but also because he suspected that the brain injuries which he received there had materially altered his personality and inclined him to creative writing. His daughter Ophelia recalled her father’s fascination with tales of people who had experienced dramatic psychological and physiological changes — such as losing or recovering sight — after suffering a blow to the head. He also told her that he was convinced something of this sort had happened to him, as it explained why a budding corporate businessman, without any particular artistic ambition, was transformed into someone with a burning need to write and tell stories.³⁹ This hypothesis was doubtless attractive too because it pushed potentially more complex psychological issues about the sources of his desire to write into the background.

Nowadays doctors might well have diagnosed Dahl as suffering from what is called postconcussive syndrome.⁴⁰ The initial symptoms of this condition are normally forgetfulness, irritability, an inability to concentrate and severe headaches. Dahl suffered from all of these. In some patients the symptoms disappear, but leave behind longer-lasting behavioural changes, which are usually associated with mood swings and an increased lack of inhibition. In some cases, too, it can also result in a fundamental alteration of the perception of the self. With Dahl, these alterations were marginal, but they were nonetheless significant. His sense of embarrassment — already minimal — was further diminished, his sense of fantasy heightened, while his desire to shock became even more pronounced. He emerged from his crisis more confident, more determined to make a mark. His first brush with death doubtless also played a significant part in this change in his own perception of himself, making him more aware of his vulnerability, more reflective, yet also intensifying the sense of himself as a survivor, as a figure of destiny.

This heightened sense of self was closely linked to the very act of flying. From its ecstatic beginnings, swooping over the Kenyan bush, the sense of being alone and free in an unfamiliar element stimulated Roald’s sense of the mystical. It reinforced his sense of isolation. The sky became an alternative world: a place of tranquillity and gentle beauty, a refuge either from the horrors of war or the cruelties of human behaviour that could be magical, transformative, even redemptive. Most of his early adult stories are profoundly connected to this spiritual dimension of flying, and it is also a feature of many of Dahl’s most well loved children’s books. In the first of these, James and the Giant Peach, the child protagonist, James, who has escaped from his cruel aunts to find shelter inside an enormous peach, stands at night on the surface of the giant fruit, accompanied by a group of equally outsize bugs. They are all flying high above the Atlantic Ocean because the peach has been borne aloft by a flock of seagulls. Contemplating the heavens above him, James is filled with an overpowering sense of mystery and wonder. “Clouds like mountains towered over their heads on all sides, mysterious, menacing, overwhelming …,” Dahl writes. “The peach was a soft, stealthy traveller, making no noise at all as it floated along. And several times during that long silent night ride high up over the middle of the ocean in moonlight, James and his friends saw things that no-one had seen before.”⁴¹ It is a sense of epiphany similar to that which affects Charlie Bucket, the hero of Dahl’s next children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when, flying high over the factory inside a great glass elevator, Willy Wonka hands over his world to the young boy.

The glory of flight also suffuses Dahl’s last book, The Minpins, in which a small boy, Little Billy, flies on the back of a swan into a dark and magical nocturnal landscape, filled with extraordinary natural wonders. Here, fifty years after he himself last flew on his own, Dahl powerfully evokes that sense of separation between the solitary flyer and the rest of humanity that he had felt when launching his schoolboy fire-balloons, and which, through flying a fighter plane, had been fixed at the centre of his psychology. Boy and bird, moving as one, witness things that neither will ever be able to understand or explain. And what they see is theirs alone. “They flew in a magical world of silence, swooping and gliding over the dark world below, where all the earthly people were fast asleep in their beds.”⁴² This mystical connection between boy and bird was familiar territory for Dahl, who had explored it fifteen years earlier in one of his cruellest and most powerful tales, “The Swan”. Here, another small boy is hunted and bullied by a ruthless pair of child tormentors. They torture him and deliberately kill the nesting swan he has been watching with their rifle. Cutting the wings off the dead bird, they strap them to the terrified boy and force him to climb high up a nearby tree. Then they dare him to fly. When he refuses, they shoot him in the thigh in an attempt to make him jump. Wounded and bleeding, the boy spreads his wings and dives off the branch. However, he does not fall to the ground. Instead, he soars into safety toward “a light … of such brilliance and beauty he was unable to look away from it”.⁴³ Dahl viscerally understood that situation: the dazzling bright aviator’s light, the fine thread that separates life from death. He had experienced that, too.

In March 1941, after five weeks in Heliopolis, he was surprisingly declared fit enough to be sent up to RAF Ismailia on the banks of the Suez Canal for some further training, prior to joining his squadron. There, he was relieved to discover that the outdated Gloster Gladiators had now been replaced by “a much more modern type of fighter”⁴⁴ — a Mark I Hurricane. But he was also shocked again at how little time he was given to learn to fly it and prepare for aerial combat.‡ His accident was now seven months in the past. But in early April 1941, he once again found himself in almost exactly the same position as he had been in September 1940 — ferrying an unfamiliar aircraft into alien territory. Only this time he was going to Greece rather than Libya. Another thing had changed as well. The pilot. He was no longer the nervous youth flying recklessly into the desert night. He had passed though a marking point, a division between innocence and experience, between a kind of happy-go-lucky view of life and a darker, more critical view of human nature. He had not yet flown a sortie in anger, but the crash and his months in hospital had brought him face-to-face with death and had caused him to reflect on the reasons for living. The next two weeks would only intensify this sensation, as each new day brought with it the imminent prospect of his own demise.

^*I have pieced these events together as accurately as I can from Roald Dahl’s own pilot’s logbook, RAF records, interviews with other pilots, and Dahl’s many written descriptions of the events of that day, principally in “Shot Down Over Libya” (1942), “Missing: Believed Killed” (1944), “A Piece of Cake” (1942—46),

^†Although he told his mother he was only blind for a week, he later told his editor at Farrar, Straus, Stephen Roxburgh, that he had “said that so as not to alarm her. It was much, much longer …” — Letter to Stephen Roxburgh, undated, FSG.

^‡In Going Solo, Dahl claims he was given just a “couple of days” to master the Hurricane and fly it to Greece. Yet in Ismailia, after a refresher course flying Miles Magisters and Gloster Gauntlets, Dahl had been sent on a two-week Hurricane conversion course. As Derek O’Connor commented, this was not “an immense amount of time to come to terms with a monoplane equipped with retractable landing-gear and a variable-pitch propeller, but there was a war on” — O’Connor, “Roald Dahl’s Wartime Adventures”, p. 47.

CHAPTER SEVEN
David and Goliath

IN ONE OF THE drawers of a cabinet in his writing hut, Roald Dahl kept a battered black Herculex address book. Purchased in 1941, and used for more than thirty years, it contains many a famous name: Walt Disney, Hoagy Carmichael, Max Beaverbrook, Ginger Rogers, Lillian Hellman, Ben Travers and Ian Fleming are just a few of the well-known figures from show business, politics and the arts who played bit parts in Dahl’s life and whose contact details ornament the book’s yellowing pages. The scruffy, tattered little volume is more than a testament to his fascination with celebrity: it offers a number of clues to his personality and tiny insights into his life in the 1940s and 1950s. On one page are scribbled memories of a lunch with Noel Coward. On another, a betting forecast. Most intriguingly, on the inside front cover is a list of names. These run in an irregular column down the right-hand side and there are no related addresses or telephone numbers. A corner of the address book is water-damaged and the ink has run off the page, so some of the names are indecipherable. Several are misspelled. Most however are still clearly legible: Tap Jones, Oofy Still, Timber Woods, Trolly Trollip, Pat Pattle, Bill Vale, Keg Dowding, Jimmy Kettlewell, Doc Astley, Hugh Tulloch, George Westlake, David Coke. A digit is scrawled beside each of them and against several Dahl also marked an X. At the end of the list, the writing curling away toward the bottom of the page, he added: “Self 5”. Above all these names, underlined and in capitals, is the heading: “80 SQUADRON, GREECE”.¹

When the Italian Army opportunistically entered the northern Greek province of Epirus in late October 1940, it did not expect to encounter any significant resistance. But despite inferior firepower and an air force that consisted of outdated planes, the Greeks had fought back with unexpected tenacity, and by mid-November the Italians had been forced back into Albania. Great Britain, a guarantor of Greek independence, had responded to an immediate call for air support by despatching two squadrons of fighters, one of Gladiators (80 Squadron) and another mixed squadron of Blenheims (112 Squadron) from their already overstretched operations in North Africa. Based initially in the northern Greek airfields of Larissa, Trikkala and Ioannina, 80 Squadron’s twelve Gloster Gladiators provided support for the Greek ground forces and made several “kills” of enemy aircraft in the border area, before winter rains waterlogged the grass airfields and forced the squadron to return south, to Elevsis, on the coast, a few miles west of Athens.

Six weeks later, in February 1941, an Allied Expeditionary Force, made up largely of Australians and New Zealanders, was sent from Egypt to bolster the Greek resistance. Then, as the weather improved, 80 Squadron — assisted by reinforcements from 33 Squadron — moved north again toward the Albanian border to support them. Under the command of South African-born Marmaduke “Pat” Pattle, the RAF’s top fighter ace in the war, and flying largely in outdated biplanes, they scored a remarkable series of victories, destroying over a hundred Italian aircraft, against the loss of eight British fighters and two pilots. On one memorable day at the end of February, the RAF destroyed twenty-seven enemy planes without a single loss of their own. It was 80 Squadron’s finest hour, and their victories were celebrated across Greece, with the pilots feted as heroes by the grateful locals. Their successes were rewarded with the arrival of six brand-new Mark I Hawker Hurricanes, a single-engined, highly manoeuvrable fighter, whose fuselage, though still covered with doped linen, was constructed from modern high-tensile steel rather than the wood of the Gladiators. Each was equipped with eight wing-mounted Browning machine guns which fired simultaneously when the pilot’s thumb depressed his gun button. Pattle himself claimed the new plane’s first victim over Greece, a Fiat G.50, which exploded before his eyes in a spectacular fireball with his first touch of the button. Beyond the mountains to the east that separated Greece from Yugoslavia, however, lurked vast numbers of the German Luftwaffe, who were advancing south through the Balkans. As their Italian allies struggled to hold the Greek counterinsurgents, it became inevitable that they would soon be drawn into the conflict.

On April 6, 1941, the Nazi invasion of Greece began. It was a ruthlessly effective assault. Within two days the Germans had occupied the northeastern city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki), and soon the Allied forces were in full retreat. While 80 Squadron withdrew south to Elevsis to be refitted entirely with Hurricanes, the inspirational Pat Pattle was despatched from 80 Squadron to the front line to command 33 Squadron, which — alongside 112 Squadron — was now bearing the brunt of the German offensive. Eighty Squadron remained behind at Elevsis to defend Athens. The odds against the British and Greek pilots were enormous: approximately 800 German and 300 Italian planes against a motley force of 192 British and Greek machines — or, as one the pilot described it, “a pleasant little show. All the wops in the world and half the Jerries versus two men, a boy and a flying hearse.”² The mountainous terrain and the thick clouds and driving rain ensured that there were occasional lulls in the fighting. One lasted almost a week. But the calm was only temporary. And everyone was aware of it. It was into this gloomy mind-set that Dahl was despatched from Egypt on April 14. He evoked its awful fatalism in an early short story, “Katina”; “The mountains were invisible behind the rain, but I knew they were around us on every side. I had a feeling they were laughing at us, laughing at the smallness of our numbers and at the hopeless courage of our pilots.”³

As he climbed into his Hurricane at Abu Suweir, once again Dahl felt that the military establishment were being reckless both with human life and with their own machinery. “I had no experience at all flying against the enemy,” he was later to write. “I had never been in an operational squadron. And now they wanted me to jump into a plane I had never flown in before and fly it to Greece to fight against a highly efficient air force that outnumbered us by a hundred to one.”⁴ He may have exagger ated the odds, but his scepticism was more than justified. Dahl was entering a conflict where the only possible outcome was defeat. The cockpit of his Hurricane was cramped and uncomfortable, particularly for someone of his height. He was also carrying gallons of extra fuel in tanks strapped to the wings just so he could complete the journey without refuelling. For nearly five hours he flew over the Mediterranean, contorted into “the posture of an unborn baby in the womb”.⁵ When he landed on “the red soil of the aerodrome at Elevsis”, dotted with tents, temporary latrines, washbasins, and grey corrugated iron hangars along one side,⁶ he was suffering from “excruciating cramp” and could not climb out of the plane. He had to be lifted out by ground crew.⁷

In Going Solo, Dahl dwells on the pointlessness of the Greek campaign. His spanking new plane “won’t last a week in this place”, declares one of the men who help him out of the cockpit, while explaining the full extent of the awesome opposition the squadron is facing. Half an hour later, a fellow pilot confirms the situation, telling Roald that their position is “absolutely hopeless”. None of this unduly worried him, he claimed. “I was young enough and starry-eyed enough to look upon the Grecian escapade as nothing more than a grand adventure. The thought that I might never get out of the country alive didn’t occur to me. It should have done, and looking back on it now I am surprised that it didn’t.” He was surely being disingenuous. Naturally he felt a sense of triumph that he had overcome his injuries and made it to the front line. He was a member of his squadron at last — even if, as his commanding officer Edward “Tap” Jones sarcastically noted, he was reporting for duty “six months late”.⁸*

Yet, since his crash, Dahl had also lost the young pilot’s protective sense of invulnerability. Walking across the airfield, with its myriad wildflowers “blossoming blue and yellow and red”,⁹ he must have pondered with foreboding what the future held in store. In the desert he had brushed against death and lived to fight another day. Now, in the ancient blue skies of the Mediterranean, once again he had to face its cold, silent whisper. That sense of dread, of death as a character, haunts many of his early short stories.

Each time now it gets worse. At first it begins to grow upon you slowly, coming upon you slowly, creeping up on you from behind, making no noise, so that you do not turn round and see it coming. If you saw it coming, perhaps you could stop it, but there is no warning … It touches you gently on the shoulder and whispers to you that you are young, that you have a million things to do and a million things to say, that if you are not careful you will buy it, that you are almost certain to buy it sooner or later, and that when you do you will not be anything any longer; you will just be a charred corpse. It whispers to you about how your corpse will look when it is charred, how black it will be and how it will be twisted and brittle, with the face and the fingers black and the shoes off the feet because the shoes always come off the feet when you die like that. ¹⁰

It was not an easy situation for the young pilot. He was joining a squadron at the end of a campaign which many of his fellow pilots had been fighting for almost six months and which was now falling apart. By the time he got to Elevsis, the remains of 112 Squadron had abandoned its northern bases and retreated south to join 80 Squadron there. The following day, 33 Squadron did the same, merging to fight the unhappy endgame of a campaign that could only have one outcome. It was hardly surprising then that on his first evening Dahl found most of his eighteen fellow pilots uncommunicative. An exception was David Coke, a son of the Earl of Leicester, who took Dahl “under his wing” and gave his tentmate some useful tips on how to shoot at the kind of German planes he was likely to be facing the following day. The rest kept themselves to themselves. “They were all very quiet. There was no larking about. There were just a few muttered remarks about the pilots who had not come back that day. Nothing else.” ¹¹