Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl. Donald Sturrock
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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