Kitabı oku: «Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl», sayfa 8

From that incident onward, Dahl’s final months at Repton were a kind of holding pattern. He had lost his soul mate. He was not made a prefect. So his energies turned even further inward. As he wrote slightly resentfully in Boy, “the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable…. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them.”¹⁰³He also had another secret consolation: his motorbike. For Christmas 1932 his mother had bought him a 500cc Ariel. He hid it in the barn of a local farm and it gave him a huge sense of independence and freedom. At weekends he would take it out and ride through the Derbyshire countryside, sometimes venturing into Repton itself and annoying masters and boazers, as he whizzed noisily past them, incognito beneath his old overcoat, rubber waders, helmet and goggles. He got a summons for speeding, but managed to keep that secret as well.¹⁰⁴

Eventually, he took his School Certificate exam in the summer of 1933, passing with credit in Scripture Knowledge, English, History, French, Elementary Mathematics and General Science. He had already decided that he neither wanted to go to university nor to do “missionary work or some other fatuous thing”.¹⁰⁵ His father’s trust would provide him with a modest income from the age of twenty-five, so there was no immediate pressure to find a job. What he desired was adventure. So he chose to join an oil company and go to work abroad.** His mother, “desperate” at what she saw as his lack of ambition, sent off to have his horoscope professionally read. Years later she told her daughter Else that the psychic predicted Roald was going to be a writer.¹⁰⁶

His final weeks at the school were spent building gigantic fire-balloons, which he and his friends constructed out of tissue paper, wire and paraffin. The biggest, he claimed, was 18 feet high.¹⁰⁷ Making these fire-balloons was something he would do on and off for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the thrill of seeing them rise up into the night sky and would chase them for miles across the countryside to see where they landed. At that point in his life they must also have seemed a symbol of freedom and escape. Because he had not become a boazer, he was leaving Repton uncorrupted and with his rebellious nature uncurbed. He may have been occasionally cruel — giving Denton Welch Chinese burns, or teasing an elder boy whom he dubbed “The Vapour” because he farted a lot¹⁰⁸ — but he had never wielded the force of school authority. And he had never beaten anyone. Had he been given an official position, perhaps it would all have been different, although, as his daughter Ophelia observed, “the typically English ‘it happened to me, so it will happen to you’ attitude was never part of his mentality”.¹⁰⁹ His schoolfriend Ben Reuss was not so sure. “The powers-that-were mistrusted him and he got no promotion at all in a very hierarchical society. Probably a great mistake. No doubt it was feared that he would be subversive,” Reuss concluded, “but in these cases the poachers generally make the best gamekeepers.”¹¹⁰ So, just as the photograph is fixed in the darkroom, Dahl was “fixed” at Repton. Already immensely self-reliant, he now further turned his back on English protocol and pecking orders. From now on, where possible, he resolved to control his own destiny. John Christie, his headmaster, concluded Dahl’s final school report with these words: “He has ambition and a real artistic sense … If he can master himself, he will be a leader.”¹¹¹

^*In many respects, Repton was the archetypical contemporary British public school. As such it was chosen as the setting for the classic movie version of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), with Robert Donat and Greer Garson.

^†Dahl told his mother in 1931 that he had been made to go to see the school doctor about his heart despite the fact that he had already been to a number of specialists. Hodie, the school medic, apparently “said the same as Dr Goodall.” What that was he did not specify — Letter to his mother, 09/31 — RDMSC RD 13/1/7/2.

^‡Sofie Magdalene seems to have had little inkling of what torments lay behind the wild irises she saw in her son’s bedder. Visiting Roald during his first summer at the school, she wrote to her daughter Else that she was “very pleased with Repton…. It is much nicer than I expected it to be … Roald’s study was absolutely crammed with flowers” — Sofie Magdalene Dahl, Postcards to Else Dahl, 06/27/30 — RDMSC RD 20/9/2 and RD 20/9/3.

^§Curiously, when John Betjeman wrote to Dahl in 1961 to congratulate him on his collection of stories Kiss Kiss, he also made that comparison. He described the book as “a triumph of humour, poetry, the macabre, the unexpected — as though Denton Welch had become H. C. Anderson” — Betjeman, Letter to Roald Dahl, 01/01/61 — RDMSC RD 16/1/2.

^¶Probably both out of respect for Arnold’s privacy and because Boy was directed at young readers, Dahl failed to mention the nature of Arnold’s offence in his book. The reader is consequently left rather in the dark as to why his friend has been treated so savagely.

^**In eschewing university, Dahl was doing the same as most of his fellows. According to the Repton archivist, of the eighteen pupils who arrived with Dahl in January 1930, only two were listed in the school register as going on to university when they left. Of the thirty-four pupils who left with him in July 1934, ten went on to get a university education.

CHAPTER FIVE
Distant Faraway Lands

IN AUGUST 1934, WHILE the rest of his family were frolicking in the Oslo Fjord, Roald boarded the RMS Nova Scotia as a member of the Public School Exploring Society. Fifty volunteers from across Britain had each paid £35 for the dubious pleasure of a four-week trek across a remote and unexplored area of the island of Newfoundland off the coast of northern Canada. The purpose was ostensibly to map an uncharted part of what was then still a British dominion, but no one really cared very much about that. What mattered far more to the organizers of the expedition was the business of character-building: instructing young empire builders how to survive in the wild, far away from the luxuries of civilization. For twelve of the fittest (that included Dahl) the journey culminated in a twenty-day Long March through soaking mosquito-infested bogs with between 60 and 100 pounds on their backs, living under canvas on a diet that consisted essentially of pemmican (a mixture of pressed meat, fat and berries), boiled lichen, mud and reindeer moss. It was a tough undertaking. The would-be explorers waded knee-deep down the Great Rattling Brook. They trudged through desolate swamps collecting plant and insect samples. They attempted to fish for trout and trap rabbits, but had little success at either. Their tents leaked and eventually they ran out of food. For most of the time they were hungry, wet and cold. As Roald recorded plaintively in his daily journal, “honestly I don’t think any one of us has ever been so miserable”.¹

The week-long sea journey from Liverpool to St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, began in high spirits. Roald and another friend of his from Repton, the boisterous Jimmy Horrocks, got drunk and Horrocks had to be carried back to his cabin in a stupor. In between avoiding contact with a “silly little missionary” who wanted to talk about Labrador, and flirting with Ruth Lodge, a twenty-year-old actress who was also aboard the boat, Roald found time to make friends with a crew member from British Guiana called Sam. It was typical of him to look outside his immediate peer group for a kindred spirit, and Sam’s freewheeling Caribbean attitudes were much more appealing than those of most of his fellow explorers who, apart from Jimmy Horrocks, scarcely get a mention in his journal. “He’s a marvellous fellow, black curly hair & a blue beret,” Dahl wrote of Sam to his mother, adding that he had asked Sam to shave his head for him — leaving only “a tiny bit of bristle on the top”. Roald thought that he “looked fine”² with his new haircut, and Sam gave the seventeen-year-old boy his blue beret to keep his head warm. Dahl gratefully added it to a pack that, as he was the expedition’s official photographer, included a camera and eighteen rolls of film in lead cases, as well as 14 ounces of tobacco, two pipes and a mouth organ.

The expedition was led by fifty-seven-year-old Surgeon Commander “Admiral” George Murray Levick, the founder of the Public Schools Exploring Society, and a survivor of Scott’s doomed expedition to the Antarctic. Murray Levick was an eccentric British penguin expert, who advocated Spartan values in the education of young men. For many on the expedition, including one of his three assistants, a journalist called Dennis Clarke, he was tantamount to a national hero. In his official history of the trip, Clarke eulogized his leader’s asceticism as well as his obsessive desire to put his feet where no other had trod before, boasting that, “if exploring were a crime … Commander Levick would have been hanged several times over”.³ He shared his commander’s delight in the pleasures of bathing naked in ice-cold rivers, marching through unknown landscapes, and rejoiced in what we might now call the culture of male bonding. He celebrated Levick’s disgust, for example, at having to travel first class on the 250-mile train journey inland from St John’s to Grand Falls, where the expedition began, rather than “roughing it” on the third class tickets he had specifically requested. Roald too clearly enjoyed the sense of pitting himself against a hostile natural environment — though perhaps not quite to the same degree as his commander. His journal records his battle with hunger and the elements in pithy detail, with occasional forays into imaginative fantasy, when things got really tough. “That night the water … soaked into our little bog and the water level in the tent rose several inches,” he wrote one evening. “If some great giant, wandering by that night, having caught a cold in the wet the previous day had, in need of a handkerchief, seized up our tent, we would all have drifted away in our sleeping bags.”⁴

It was not long too before another characteristic Dahl trait began to reemerge: a dislike of authority. This manifested itself in a growing sense of annoyance at “Admiral” Murray Levick. Roald was already suspicious of people who inflated themselves with unnecessary rank or title, and Murray Levick, who had been a surgeon commander but was certainly no admiral, and had been retired from the Royal Navy since 1918, instantly aroused his irritation. Roald found him both absurd and bogus. And that was not all. The “Admiral” defecated publicly each morning in full view of anyone who happened to be around: “Breakfast at 6.45,” Roald noted in his journal. “The Admiral craps in the middle of the camp — quite unashamed and very successful — we all wish he wouldn’t.” And, as the Long March progressed and things started to go wrong, this distaste soon escalated into contempt. Roald began to believe that the “filthy old boy” was also a fool — albeit a tough one. He became particularly infuriated by one specific issue: Murray Levick’s insistence that his team build a makeshift raft to row across a lake, when walking round it would have both been safer and increased their chances of finding food. At this point the young explorers were not in good shape. One of them was seriously ill with mumps, while Roald’s footwear had disintegrated to such an extent that on one foot he had been forced to improvise a boot out of a canvas bucket. With their supplies of food almost exhausted, talk in his tent quickly began to get “revolutionary”.⁵ Eventually, Roald and two veterans of other Murray Levick expeditions, Michael Barling and Dennis Pearl, decided they must face the Admiral down and persuade him to return to base.

“We led a mutiny, he and I,” remembered Dennis Pearl. “It didn’t really get us very far, but it was what drew Roald and I together.”⁶ In fact, the trio made quite an impression. Even Clarke was struck by the intelligence and eloquence of their pleas, recording that although Murray Levick did not actually turn back, he did abandon his plan to cross the lake by raft. Whether he was irritated by the fact that one of his mutineers had been named after Roald Amundsen, who had triumphed over Scott in the race to the South Pole, was not mentioned. The final days of the bad-tempered journey were spent in silence as the marchers fought off their hunger pangs. Eating dominates the closing pages of Roald’s journal. “You see our only thoughts were on food, more food and even more food still.” At night, in their tents, the boys fantasized about imaginary meals in London restaurants — Simpsons, perhaps, or Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. “It really was marvellous to talk about such things and to realise that they still existed,” Dahl observed, adding that then the conversation would turn to literature or music. Those were the subjects that “gave us the greatest pleasure to talk about”.⁷ He returned to England in September, with “large side whiskers and beard”,⁸ and a new friend, Dennis Pearl. His suspicions of the pomposities and absurdities of certain elements of the British establishment had been reconfirmed, but so had his confidence that he could deal with them. He believed himself “fit and ready for anything”.⁹

A few days later, Roald took up his job as a probationary member of staff with the Asiatic Petroleum Company, later to become a part of Royal Dutch Shell. He worked at St Helen’s Court, in the heart of the City of London, and his salary was £130 per annum.* The job offered him few challenges. Commuting up each day from the family home in Bexley, he fell into a pleasurable rut of undemanding office work, punctuated by weekends playing golf, going racing, listening to Beethoven on his gramophone, and reading American crime stories. He was not a natural office worker. Bored by his time in the Accounts Department, with its chattering clerks seated on stools at their high desks,¹⁰ and uninterested in the technicalities of refining petroleum, he dreamed only of travelling abroad. Inspired by the stories of Rider Haggard and Isak Dinesen,† he had asked to be posted to East Africa, but for many months the furthest he got from his desk was to the Shell Central Laboratories in West London, where he was made to study the composition of petroleum products.¹¹ In the summer of 1936 he was despatched to a refinery and oil wharf in Essex, on the lower reaches of the Thames. There too he found little to stimulate him. “Spent most of today on top of an enormous petrol tank — very hot and nearly suffocated by the fumes,” he complained to his mother. “In the evening watched a tanker discharging a cargo of lubricating oil from Mexico.”¹² A sales trip around the West Country the following year was a little more interesting, mainly for the opportunities it gave him to take photographs.

It took almost four years for the African posting to come through. Part of the reason for this delay may have been that Dahl was not a full British national when he joined Shell and needed to secure a British passport in order to travel abroad with them.‡ He may also have been considered just too unreliable. One contemporary of his at Shell remembered thinking that Roald would not last the training course because he was such an “independent person” and “didn’t like an awful lot of direction”.¹³ Yet he was enjoying his release from the prison of school and his emergence into the longed-for sunlight of freedom. So wait he did.

If the four years in the rambling house at Bexley with his mother and sisters were without particular incident, they were perhaps as happy and carefree times as Dahl was to experience until the last decade of his life. There, he and his siblings moved gently together into adulthood. In April 1930, his chatty and intense half sister Ellen had married Ashley Miles, the talented young pathologist — later an eminent immunologist — whose pipe Roald had once filled with goat droppings on holiday in Norway. Soon the couple had settled into the comfortable professional gentility of Hampstead, in North London. The gentle Louis was more bohemian and took longer to leave the family nest. After a series of professional failures that included some months at Aadnesen & Dahl§ — where he discovered that, like his half brother, he disliked office life — and working as a jackaroo on a remote Australian sheep station, he went to London to study at St Martin’s College of Art, after which he took on a job as a commercial illustrator.¹⁴

While at St Martin’s, Louis had converted the top floor of the house in Bexley into a studio. There he spent hours painting, often to a soundtrack of Sibelius symphonies on the gramophone. Sometimes he would venture out with Alfhild in the evening to a concert in London at the Queen’s Hall. In 1936, he got engaged to a vicar’s daughter, Meriel Longland, and he married her in Cambridge later that year. The newlyweds then moved up to London, first into rented accommodation in Marylebone and then to a house in Shepherd’s Bush. Alfhild, who also aspired to be an artist, and was frustrated that Sofie Magdalene told her the family did not have enough money to send a daughter to art school,¹⁵ found solace living a rather “fast” London existence, where she had affairs with the composer William Walton and the conservative historian Arthur Bryant, as well as with Roald’s friend, Dennis Pearl. Her sister Asta recalled that she was often to be found “coming home on the milk train”.¹⁶ Else, a year younger than Roald, was shier and quieter. Initially she had refused to follow her sisters to Roedean, going briefly to Lindores College in Bex-hill¹⁷ and a “very expensive” school in Switzerland instead, both of which she left after a single term.¹⁸ “I expect she’s quite a connoisseur of schools now,”¹⁹ Roald commented wryly to his mother after the Swiss episode, where Else ate her train ticket on the station platform so she would not be able to board the train. She finally joined her younger sister, Asta, at Roedean in September 1933.

As Sofie Magdalene approached fifty, and her family responsibilities began to diminish, she was becoming increasingly arthritic, immobile and concerned with the welfare of her many animals. She had quarrelled with Oscar, her brother-in-law, over his administration of Harald’s estate, accusing him of abusing his position as a trustee and humiliating her by making her submit receipts for every purchase she made. He in turn had threatened to sue her. But her children and stepchildren, led by the vociferous sixteen-year-old Roald, had rallied round. “I should jolly well sue him, get ten thousand and not care what anyone said!”²⁰ he told her. “Get Ellen and Louis to entice him to Bexley; take him up to Dartford … and push him into that most useful and old-established institution — the Dartford Mental Home, where he could spend his time writing lavatory roll after lavatory roll of concentrated libel — for writing libel seems to be his pet hobby nowadays.”²¹ As her family grew up, Sofie Magdalene’s zest for travelling to Norway also began to wane. She preferred to take her Cairn terriers down to Tenby or to Cornwall instead, provoking her mother to accuse her of caring more for her puppies than her own parents.²² Gradually she retreated into her own space and let her children get on with their own lives. She would be there if they needed her. Otherwise, she kept herself to herself.

In Bexley, Roald had set up his own “very smart” ²³ darkroom with shuttered windows and zinc-lined sink. He spent much of his spare time there developing photographs and entering them for competitions. He also began to dabble in writing spoofs and sketches, including a short comic piece called Double Exposure which has survived as perhaps his first adult literary work. It is set in America some time in the future when the government has decreed that all couples must produce a child within five years of marriage. The plot tells of the aptly named Mrs Barren, who has failed to get pregnant and therefore faces a visit from a government official whose job it is to impregnate her — or, as Dahl puts it, to “go through the usual routine prescribed under the code” to ensure “continued propagation of the race”. The humour is built on a premise of mistaken identity. On her fifth wedding anniversary, Mrs Barren is visited not by the government stud, but by Mr Litmus F. Lenser, a photographer of children who is trying to sell his services to her. A series of lewd double entendres ensues, as Mr Lenser talks about his “baby work” and Mrs Barren becomes increasingly alarmed by the number and variety of sexual acts she imagines she will have to perform with him. “I have reduced it to a science,” says Lenser typically. “I recommend at least two in the bath tub, one or two on the couch, and a couple on the floor. You want your children natural, don’t you?”²⁴

Dahl found other outlets too for this madcap inventiveness. In Norway, in 1935, he had taken a photo of his bare-chested half brother Louis, playing a harmonica, and looking “not unlike a native of Honolulu. Brown granite looks white next to his skin”.²⁵ In September 1937, however, this same photograph appeared in a very different context: The Shell Magazine. In a section entitled “Whips and Scorpions”, the man in the photograph was identified as a Mr Dippy Dud, and Shell employees from the unlikely town of Whelkington-on-Sea were invited to rugby-tackle him to the ground when they saw him on the promenade. If they floored him while carrying a copy of The Shell Magazine, the article declared, a prize would be theirs. “Mr Dud,” the anonymous writer continued, “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 harmonica, also on the harmonium, euphonium, pandemonium, saxophone, vibraphone, dictaphone, glockenspiel and catarrh … Don’t be afraid to tackle anyone you think may be Mr Dud. People who are mistaken for him enter heartily into the fun of the thing, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.” Dahl was surely the author of this piece, whose subversive tone and extravagant comic vocabulary anticipate the language of one of his most famous fictional characters: Willy Wonka.

It is hard to imagine these four years of relaxed normality — travelling up to London six mornings a week on the 8.15 train from Bexley, with trilby hat and furled umbrella, alongside a “swarm of other equally sombre-suited businessmen”²⁶ They simply do not fit in with the rest of Dahl’s extraordinarily eventful existence. Perhaps in hindsight not even Roald himself could believe it. In Boy, he telescopes these four years into two and suggests that he was in East Africa for much longer than the single year he spent there. Yet Dahl’s time in the leafy suburbs was important in forming him as a writer for it was at this time that he became a voracious reader. “The best reading times I ever had were in the 1930s,” he declared less than a year before he died, in a speech at the Sunday Express Book Awards, where he listed the novels by Waugh, Greene, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald that had thrilled him in his twenties. “We never had it so good,” ²⁷ he continued, celebrating these novels for being entertaining, well-plotted, elegant and yet serious. One story of Damon Runyon’s particularly excited him — for its terseness, its present-tense narrative and the fact that its style “broke all the rules”.²⁸ Those years in Bexley also confirmed his ideal of family life. The carefree, easygoing atmosphere of Oakwood — a huge Edwardian house on three floors with rambling gardens, studios, well-stocked wine cellar, conservatory, grotto and servants — set a kind of standard for Dahl as to what a family house should be. It was relaxed. And there were few, if any, rules. It would become a model for the kind of lifestyle Dahl tried to create for himself and his own young family in rural Buckinghamshire twenty years later.

When not in his darkroom, Dahl could often be found playing golf. He had started playing as an eleven-year-old on the beach at Weston-super-Mare,²⁹ and joined Dartford Golf Club as a Junior Member in 1927, where he went almost every day of the holidays with Alfhild.³⁰ By 1936, when he was runner-up in the Shell Championship,³¹ he had become almost a scratch player.³² If not on the golf course, he was likely to be at the races, gambling either on horses or greyhounds. Dennis Pearl remembered Roald being introduced to the world of racing greyhounds by Dick Wolsey, a wealthy bookmaker who played at Dartford Golf Club. Wolsey was from the wrong side of the tracks. He had left school aged twelve, sometimes carried £1,000 in cash in his back pocket, and kept a Rolls-Royce that he only drove at night, “in case the tax man saw him”.³³He was perhaps the first of many self-made entrepreneurs to whom Dahl found himself instinctively drawn.

Wolsey took his young friend to the newly opened Catford Stadium, nine miles away, to see his own dogs racing, and Roald was instantly hooked. From then onwards he would spend most Saturday evenings there, often wagering his week’s earnings on the races. Pearl remembered his friend’s fascination with the other gamblers too and how intrigued Dahl was by “the way in which they gambled, and the effect that gambling had on them”.³⁴ It was the beginning of a love affair with betting that would last to the end of his life. Indeed, he once told his daughter Ophelia that winning on the horses or at blackjack gave him more pleasure than receiving a royalty check from his writing.³⁵

Shell did not offer much in the way of paid holidays, but whenever he could, Roald got away. Twice he went to Norway with Michael Arnold and Dennis Pearl. There, he swam, fished, went boating, chased girls, and reconnected with his cousin Finn, the son of his uncle Truls. Once he sketched out notes for a tale about an absurd encounter with a local mechanic, which some years later, relocated to wartime Greece, would become the basis of his poignant story “Yesterday Was Beautiful”. He also indulged a sense of fun that could at times be distinctly oafish. Once on a climbing trip to Snowdonia, with Dennis Pearl and Jimmy Horrocks, Roald set fire to Dennis Pearl’s sleeping bag while he was asleep inside it. This provoked outbursts of helpless laughter from the anarchic Horrocks, whom Pearl described as “an early version of the druggy dropout”.³⁶ Next day, while taking a bath in the local hotel, Horrocks also flooded the bathroom. When the owner asked him for some money to repair the damage, Roald told his mother with delight that his friend had simply replied: “My dear sir, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I just washed your floor for you!”³⁷

On the way up to Snowdonia, Pearl also remembered his friend inventing stories about characters glimpsed through the car window, creating detailed situations and plots simply from the look on someone’s face or the way they were walking.³⁸ Most of the key threads that would characterize Dahl’s fiction were subtly coming together in his psyche: an acute observational eye for detail, a madcap relish for fantasy, a sense of the irreverent, a delight in invention and a crude, childish sense of humour. Storytelling too was becoming part of his makeup. But he was a long way from doing it in an organized manner, let alone contemplating it as a means of earning his living. It was a diversion. For the moment, he seemed quite content to remain what he was — a young professional, with a salary and private income, whose spare hours were mostly spent playing golf, gambling, listening to music and practising his seduction techniques.

“I went into oil because all girls go for oilmen,” Dahl told his Rep-tonian friend David Atkins, who sometimes had lunch with him in the City.³⁹ But if Dahl thought Shell would provide him with a glamorous social life, he was disappointed. For this, he was forced to look elsewhere, largely following in the wake of his vivacious elder sister Alfhild, and her friend the clever, larger-than-life Alfred Tregear Chenhalls, who worked as business manager for the actor Leslie Howard. “Chenny” was another misfit who became part of the Dahl clan — “a curious character,” as Alfhild would later describe him, “a bit of a womanizer, but a bit of something else as well. You never quite knew what he was.”⁴⁰ Chenny provided the Dahls with witty conversation and party opportunities in London. He taught Else and Alfhild to play piano duets and invited Sofie Magdalene, who “adored him”, on holiday to his family home in Corn-wall.⁴¹ He helped Roald to get his job with Shell.⁴² He was also “randy as hell” and liked to chase the girls. Alf had “a whale of a time” with him, but Else and Asta used to set traps for him on their bedroom doors in case he prowled the corridors when he stayed overnight.⁴³

However, while Roald enjoyed talking about sex, he was somewhat buttoned up when it came to his own love life. As far as romance was concerned, Alfhild later recalled that Roald “didn’t really discuss himself”.⁴⁴ Dennis Pearl, who had had a row with his own parents and was now living at Oakwood too, remembered that his friend’s first romances were often secretive. Several originated from his local golf club and at least two involved adultery.⁴⁵ One was with a peer’s wife (he would always be attracted to aristocrats) and another with a woman from Bexley, whom he saw only when her husband was away on business.⁴⁶ “He tended to choose something which created difficulties,” Pearl recalled. “He seemed to like mystery.”⁴⁷ By the time his posting to Africa finally came through in September 1938, Roald had been dating a girl of his own age called Dorothy O’Hara Livesay, whom he had met through Alfhild’s future husband, Leslie Hansen. “Dolly”, as she called herself, was of Belgian-Irish descent,⁴⁸ and joined Roald’s family on the pierside at London Docks to wave him goodbye on his trip to East Africa. “Look after her, Dennis,” said Roald to his friend as he boarded the SS Mantola. Pearl took the advice to heart. Not long afterwards he got her pregnant and Dolly became the first Mrs Dennis Pearl.⁴⁹