The chocolate test
IS ‘Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory’ among your all-time favourite reads? Have you sailed
through ‘The BFG,’ ‘Matilda’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach’ time and
again? Is it news to you that the man who penned these popular works was born
in south Wales
to a shipbroker named Harald Dahl and Sophie Magdalene Hesselberg, both of
Norwegian origin?
Let’s check out the life of best-selling author Roald Dahl.
Did you guess that after a short stint with the Shell oil company, he was a
fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force during World War II, later posted to Washington as part of
the British intelligence (yes, the guys who dig out all the hidden truths). So,
he wrote only in his spare time!
Roald was lucky to have an unusual father like Harald, who
supplied ships with all they could possibly need at port, and loved climbing
Alpine slopes, despite an arm amputated at the elbow. But Roald (the fifth of
six children by two wives) lost his father when he was just three. Sophie was
determined to fulfil Harald’s dream of an English education for their children,
so she took them to Norway
only for vacations.
At six, an excited Roald rode his tricycle to his first
kindergarten at Llandraff, alongside his older sister on her bicycle. A year
later, he joined the Llandraff
Cathedral School,
in the shadow of the Welsh town cathedral. At eight, can you guess what Roald’s
greatest wish was? To go whizzing down a hill on a cycle, with his hands off
the handlebars!
As a schoolboy, the Llandraff sweetshop was the centre of
his life. But he and his mates were terrified of its owner, Mrs. Pratchett. She
hated customers who bought nothing. So, they hatched the Mouse Plot. What’s
that? One day, clutching their clammy pennies, they trooped in. As they bought
a Sherbet Sucker and a Licorice Bootlace, Roald popped a dead mouse into the
great glass jar of Gobstoppers.
To their horror, Mrs. Pratchett turned up at their school
one morning. She pointed out the five culprits ~ and the headmaster caned them
for their petty crime. Upset, Sophie vowed to shift Roald to an English
boarding school, St. Peter’s at Somerset.
But before that, the whole family took off for Norway.
In Oslo, they
met Sophie’s parents, Bestemama and Bestepapa, who treated them to a huge
poached fish and mounds of caramel ice-cream. Then, off they went by boat, up
the Norwegian fjords (remember those from geography class?), to the island of Tjome. They even learnt to laugh as
giant waves tossed their little motor-boat atop their crests, for all the Dahls
were super swimmers!
St. Peter’s seemed a
typical boarding school, complete with stuffed tuck boxes, terrible food, a
strict matron and letters home every week. At nine, here’s the first one Roald
ever wrote:
“Dear Mama… I’m having
a lovely time here. We play foot ball (sic) every day here. The beds have no springs. Will you send my stamp album
and quite a lot of swaps? The masters are very nice. I’ve got all my clothes
now, and a belt, and a tie, and a school jersey. Love, Boy”. That’s what
Sophie called Roald, her only son.
How did he cope with homesickness? By turning his face
towards the Bristol Channel and his missing
family while in his dormitory bed. By keenly observing the weird ways of the
‘ancient’ matron, probably 28. By pretending to have appendicitis, so his
mother had to rush him back to Wales.
By 12, Roald was sent away to the Repton public school, near
Derby. That’s
where Cadbury’s used to send cardboard boxes of their new chocolate bars for
pre-teen boys to grade on enclosed sheets. The firm knew these were the world’s
greatest chocolate-tasters. No wonder one of them went on to write ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ That
doesn’t surprise you a jot, does it?
No comments:
Post a Comment