Boy: Tales of Childhood

Every week, the boys must sit and write a letter home to their parents. This is a practice that Dahl faithfully maintains; he writes to his mother for the rest of her life, including from Kenya, Egypt, and Iraq during the war when he is stationed there with the Royal Air Force. He signs his letters Boy,” the nickname that he was given as his mother’s only son.

The headmaster peers over the boys’ shoulders as they write, ostensibly checking their spelling and grammar. Dahl suggests that he is actually checking whether the boys are writing anything critical about the school.

Dahl recounts the terrifying figure of the Matron, who oversees the boys in their dormitories and is quick to send any misbehaving boys to the Headmaster for caning. She treats any ailments harshly, ripping lint from cuts and administering white medicine to cause constipation in any boys suffering from diarrhea. One night, she shaves soap into the open mouth of a snoring boy, admonishing him that “only the lower classes snore” and that it is a disgusting habit (106).

A brave peer sprinkles sugar all over the floor of the hallway when the boys are in bed. The furious Matron demands to know who is responsible, but the boys will not turn in their friend, and he does not own up to it. As punishment, all the boys’ tuckbox keys are confiscated until the next break.

Incredibly homesick, Dahl decides to fake a case of appendicitis, having seen the symptoms in his older sister. The Matron, worried, sends for a doctor, who decides that Dahl should be sent home. Dahl is overjoyed boarding the boat back to Wales, believing his ruse was successful. However, the family’s local doctor at Llandaff immediately realizes that Dahl is faking his illness. He understands that Dahl is homesick and assures him that he will not tell the school, but he makes Dahl promise that he will not fake his illness again.

Dahl joyously returns home for Christmas break, relieved to be free of the strictness of boarding school for a few weeks. His older half-sister takes the family for a drive in their new motor car, having received two half-hour lessons on how to operate it. The children in the back—Dahl and his siblings—yell from the back for their sister to go faster; encouraged, she speeds down the country roads. Suddenly, she comes upon a sharp bend and loses control of the car, which crashes into a bush. All the passengers fly through the glass of the windshields. (There is a windshield separating the front and back passengers, as well as one at the front of the car.) Only Dahl is seriously hurt; his nose is cut almost completely off his face. The family goes to the hospital in Cardiff. A doctor tapes Dahl’s nose to his face but follows the family back to their home, where he performs the operation of stitching Dahl’s nose back on. Dahl wakes to find that his mother gave him a gold sovereign (a coin) to reward him for his bravery.

Dahl describes a particularly terrifying master (i.e., teacher) at school, Captain Hardcastle. He dislikes all the boys, but he seems to especially detest the young Dahl and constantly finds reasons to snap at and berate him. One evening during Prep (an hour in the evening when the boys are required to silently work), Dahl’s pen nib breaks. He tries to silently ask the boy beside him to lend him one, but Hardcastle sees his mouth moving and immediately explodes, assuming that Dahl is trying to cheat. Dahl is given a “stripe”—a negative strike against his name for the term—and a thrashing for “talking in Prep, trying to cheat and lying” (142).

The next day, Dahl is humiliated when he must submit his stripe to the Headmaster in front of the school. He reports to the Headmaster in his study afterward and explains that he was simply trying to borrow a pen nib. The Headmaster believes Hardcastle rather than Dahl and cautions Dahl against calling his teacher a liar. Dahl receives six strokes of the cane on his bottom; these are each incredibly painful, taking weeks to heal. Dahl’s classmates are kind and sympathetic.

Dahl is in the sick room for a few days with a bad flu. In the bed next to his is a seven-year-old boy named Ellis who is suffering from an inflamed boil on his inner thigh. A doctor comes to inspect both boys. Dahl is deemed well enough to return to school the following day. The doctor asks the Matron for a towel while inspecting Ellis’s boil, and—to the boy’s shock and horror—throws the towel into his face, presumably as a distraction, and cuts into the center of the large boil with a scalpel. Ellis screams in pain. The doctor instructs the Matron to dress the wound and leaves.

The younger children in the Dahl family feel annoyed by their eldest half-sister’s engagement to a British doctor, because the couple tends to want to spend time alone on the family’s annual Norway summer holiday. As a form of revenge, Dahl, supported by his siblings, tips the tobacco out of the half-sister’s fiancé’s pipe and replaces it with goat’s dung while the pair are swimming. When he returns to the shore of the island and smokes, the fiancé is reduced to a fit of coughing and spluttering. The siblings taunt him that he is smoking “goat’s tobacco” and quickly jump into the water to escape his anger.