Love from Boy Read online

  Now please let me have some of your recipes for doing fish. Old Piggy the cook has no imagination at all, and I have to tell him exactly how I want it done every day (in my broken, but improving Swahili), and I’m running short of ways of doing it. We can match an English fish out here, so your recipes will do—Koli-Koli for example is just like Turbot; so send a few along or get Else & Asta to send a few plus other fairly easy recipes. I’ve ordered pigeon casserole this evening & before that cold crab in its shell –!

  We had a damn funny evening last Wednesday. George & I’d been out to the cinema with some others & the two of us were driving home at 11.30 in the Company’s car (large Chevrolet) which he always drives, when we whizzed passed an old car broken down on the side of the road. George said, ‘I’m whistled as a coot, and I wish to get home to my bed, but many’s the time when I’ve been broken down on the road miles from anywhere, and some Hindi has helped me out; and at any rate I thought I saw some lovely Indian women in the back of the car.’ So we turned round & offered our services. The occupants turned out to be an educated native all done up in smart suit & trilby hat, his two wives & 2 children aged about 4 & 7. We drove them into Dar es Salaam & on the way passed a bloody great native fair which was going on. You see that day was the big Mahomeddan holiday of Id Ul Haj, and most of these natives call themselves Mahomeddans, although not many are practising. Well as I’ve said before, George was whistled as a coot, and I was not conspicuous for my sobriety, and it was therefore suggested that we should go in and partake of the fun of the fair with the rescued crew of the motor-car. They were all thrilled & thought it was a great joke, because only natives go to these fairs. So in we went; and damn’d interesting it was. There were lots of frightful old hand operated roundabouts (like the one at Havna)* made out of coconut trees etc, slipways down which you slid on coconut matting finishing up amidst a throng of yelling blacks; the most frightful sort of swing boats which were made, by some means or other, to revolve round an enormous coconut tree, and at full speed they stood out (that’s the wrong word) parallel to the ground. Then there were native bands, with the players getting drunker & drunker on that frightful brew of theirs called Pombe, and beating the drums in the most weird fashion. But the best thing of all were the native dances. We saw the real thing—these blokes with nothing on except a bit of coconut matting & masses of white & red paint, yelling & swaying their hips in a manner which would make Mae West look like a fourth-rate novice. As each dance progressed, the dancers got more and more worked up, & yelled & shouted & leapt about until they just couldn’t go on any longer and another tribe came on and took their place. The way they wobbled their tummies would have earned for them the fullest approval of our friend Professor Horniblow. As George drunkly remarked as we were watching the proceedings—‘Old boy, the buggers have been reading old Horniblow.’

  I forgot to tell you that the native whom we picked out of his broken car leant over as we were driving in earlier & said to me, ‘Thanks very much Mr Dahl.’ I’d never set eyes on the fellow before, but apparently most of these natives all around here know you & all about you before long.

  A bad bloomer I created in the office the other day: sometimes Piggy the cook calls into the office to consult with me regarding culinary matters, and on this occasion he brought in the duck he had bought for dinner that evening to ask me if I thought it was big enough. It was dead & plucked; so I held it up by the hind legs or rather by the legs, and shouted to the nearest clerk—one H.V. Pandya—‘Is this duck enough for 5 people Pandya?’ Whereupon he covered up his face and shrank rapidly into the far distance with a murmur of ‘just sir excuse.’ I went & asked George about this & he said, ‘Good God, you mustn’t do that. Pandya is a Brahmin, and they never touch or look at meat, fish or even hen’s eggs.’ So one lives & learns.

  . . . It’s now 11p.m., have been to the sundowner & Samka enjoyed himself very much thank you, he said . . . Alec Noon crashed his airplane up at Luinga last week but didn’t hurt himself much.

  Love to all

  Roald

  Kali Oscar says ‘I’m not Wilde!’ –

  Dog Samka wishes to be remembered to you—Mrs. Taubsypuss sends her regards. –

  Roald’s guard dog, Samka, whose exploits he would chronicle in his letters. Dog Samka is “such an important person in this house,” he told his mother, “that when he is ill or off colour the whole household is disorganised.”

  February 12th

  Sunday evening

  Oyster Bay

  Dar es Salaam

  Dear Mama

  I’ve just been climbing the enormous Baobab tree in front of the house in a pair of shorts & gymshoes. We’re going to build a little house up there in which to give sundowner parties and I was prospecting. You’ve never seen such an enormous tree; the branches very smooth, grey and hard, and lots of them—even the ones high up—have about the same circumference as your dining-room table. There are quite a lot of lizards up there, which don’t hurt you at all, but I don’t think there are any snakes—at least I didn’t see them. But it’s a marvellous tree, right on the edge of the sea, and you get all the breezes which are there to get—if any, but the bark is so smooth, and the boughs are so enormous that it’s very difficult to climb—Louis would spend most of the day up there.

  It was a very good dinner party. We had the Colonel—an old boy of 76 who has been hunting orchids in the forests of South America, mine-prospecting in the forests of Malay, buggering about in Hong Kong & fucking about all over the world. We like him—and he’s called ‘Iron Discipline’, always to be pronounced together with a hearty thump on the table with your fist. That’s because he keeps thumping his old wizened fist on the table—rattling the glasses and upsetting the whiskey—exclaiming the while, ‘Iron discipline, that’s what we want, Iron discipline.’ He tells some incredible stories about his escapades—they make Lord Dunsany pale into insignificance.

  . . . There are so many lovely moths out here that I’m going to start collecting them quite seriously. Has Louis got any books on the elementary things like setting them etc. If not could you please buy me one & send it out airmail, deducting from my next allowance. Also any books you can find regarding East African Moths (don’t suppose there are any). And if I have got to get any implements—tweezers or anything, please send those too. Sorry about asking you to send all this, but you can’t get a thing here.

  There’s no other news except that the sun’s still shining & the natives are still black.

  Lots of love

  Roald

  April 9th 1939

  Dar es Salaam

  Sunday 3.30p.m.

  Dear Mama

  I’ve just been down to fetch two letters from you & one from Asta. The most sensible idea I’ve heard yet is that Bexley will be evacuated in time of war; it’ll have to be done quickly though. I’m very glad to see that you are all ready to shoot off to Tenby—that should be as safe as anywhere. And if Alf, Else or Asta want to go nursing they can do it anywhere in England in one of the numerous country houses which will be converted into hospitals, without going buggering off to the front wherever that may be. We hear the news perfectly every evening at 8.45 pm our time, 6pm your time, on my superb wireless. I think I’m going to buy it. It’s a Phillips 10 valve 1938 with a cracking good tone; and it’s extremely powerful. Even in the afternoon I can get the English Empire broadcasts (short wave) perfectly—just like you get London at home. On the short wave I can get the news from England (fairly authentic), from Italy in English (very garbled), from Germany in English (more garbled still) and from America in American (very detailed, but not too reliable). So you can see that we know all that’s going on as soon as you do. Funny I should be talking about this; at this very moment the bells of St. Martin in the Fields have just stopped and the velvet voice is saying, ‘Here is the news, copyright reserved etc’. This is 1.15pm your time.

 
; I learn that 2 hours ago Lord Halifax called on Chamberlain; there are crowds of holiday makers in Whitehall (it’s Easter Sunday); Count Ciano has flown to Tirana etc.* It’s a bugger. Why doesn’t Mussolini take up some useful hobby; he could collect bird’s eggs instead of countries; he’d probably say that it was cruel. As for Hitler, if he must keep his mind on guns, why doesn’t he concentrate on a little vigorous fornication. Wasn’t it Hitler who said to Göring after a piss up one Saturday night, ‘I am ready for a whore.’ Goering answered, ‘Do you want a Great Whore, Adolf like the one you had in 1914?’ Hitler hiccoughed and answered, ‘I want a whore in the air, but don’t give me a Civil Whore, they bore me, whereas it should be the other way round.’

  . . . Everything goes mildew here during the rains, including most of our delectable inhabitants. I found my camera case and the bellows of the camera covered in green stuff this morning, and had to spring-clean the whole shoot. Golf balls go yellow, but that’s nothing—mine do too, like everything else that’s not used.

  Many happy returns of Tuesday.

  Lots of love to all

  Roald

  Sunday 16th or 15th I’m not sure

  Dar es Salaam

  Dear Mama

  Many thanks for your letter and all the newspaper cuttings . . . We all read them with much interest etc. I’m a bit drunk so you won’t get much of a letter. I had meant to write to you this afternoon because I knew I should be drunk by the evening because we had a darts match on. But someone asked me to go bathing in the Indian Ocean, so I did that instead & said well I’ll write my letter after dinner. We had a lovely bathe—David Powell, a girl called Moira who looks like Kari, and self—the water is rather like tepid bath water but apart from that we’d all seen a bloody great shark on the beach this morning which some fisher boys had caught. David kept shouting that there was a shark just behind, and what with lobsters nipping our toes & sharks biting the old balls—However, I am not yet talking falsetto.

  Then we had a darts match against the Gymkhana ‘A’ Team in this house—it only finished ½ an hour ago, & a great deal of liquor was consumed by all concerned. You see the result in my handwriting for which many apologies, but the alternative is that I wait until I’m sober & miss the bloody mail & you’ll probably think I’ve been eaten by a rhinoceros or a white ant or something equally dangerous.

  . . . Last night we had a good party in Penny Burgess’s house & went to a little dance afterwards. From 2pm Saturday afternoon until 2am Sunday (today) morning I consumed the following variety of liquors:–

  Beer

  Gin

  Whiskey

  Rum

  Champagne

  Sherry

  Crème de Menthe

  Brandy

  And I felt a better man this morning, Gunga Din.*

  I expect you think this is awful, but it’s O.K.; it’s only our weekend blow out from a lot of hard work, & tomorrow things will be running as usual—oiled wheels, etc etc.

  Herewith a bloody great moth I wonder what the hell it’ll look like when it gets to England—I hope you don’t have to pay customs duty on its balls. Tell its parents it died fighting for its country & giving the Nazi salute.

  . . . Apologies for the frivolous note, but better next time, and now there is nothing I’d like better than to fall straight into my bed and Hitler can go & fuck himself.

  Love to all

  Roald

  This is a picture of Hitler fucking himself—note the smile of ecstasy on his face.

  [Notes on this illustration are as follows]

  Famous forelock. If it wasn’t for Angora, I should look an awful cunt, said the Führer.

  Glad eye (He dances with beer in it)

  Note the Aryan nose—Does he pick it?

  X indicates sparrows nest

  • indicates a bat Belfry

  May 14th 1939

  Sunday evening

  Dar es Salaam

  Dear Mama

  I got your post-card from Tenby this morning, and you certainly seem to have got a fizzing house. I expect you’re having a cracking time picking primroses, & going to Manobier & Caldy & all those places, & don’t I envy you.

  Here there’s not much news. The rains are still going on—it rained solidly & heavily without a simple pause day or night from Monday to Friday evening and everything was just bloody wet. Our lawn’s under water and so is my car almost. Dog Samka goes about in a bathing costume all day and thinks he’s the Empress of Australia.

  Roald and his friend George Rybot pose in front of a dartboard, on which has been pinned a picture of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. A similar prank throwing darts at a photograph of Hitler got Roald banned from the largely German Dar es Salaam Club.

  Frightful show here last week. George, David & I got a bit whistled at the Gymkhana Club after a Darts match. We’d won it and were celebrating our victory in the usual manner; there’s an enormous blackboard in the club for chalking up darts scores, & one of us—I think it was yours truly—drew a picture of Adolf Hitler thereon, and we three invented a new darts game. Hitting his balls with a dart counted 10, hitting his tool counted 15, his navel counted 5, his moustache 20 etc. etc. This game progressed merrily for an hour or so and it was not until the next day that we heard that there had been a German bloke present at the time. He had watched us throwing darts at Hitler’s balls for about an hour without saying a word, but the little bugger whipped straight off to the German Consulate afterwards; these people got in touch with the Government, & the Club Committee were called to an extraordinary General Meeting and all that sort of bullshit and now it only remains for us to ring the bell and ask for paper.

  There’s the hell of a showdown—you see there are so many Germans in this place & everything is rather on the boil—we seem to have squeezed the bugger. However we’re just watching the fun at a safe distance.

  Moral: Don’t throw darts at Hitler’s Balls in public they’re private parts.

  Love to all

  Roald

  May 28th 1939

  Sunday

  Dar es Salaam

  Dear Mama

  . . . It’s now 4.30pm. I’m just having tea of toast and marmite, and Dog Samka likes it very much. He had a big adventure yesterday. You know he comes to the office every day; well, yesterday David went across the road at about 12.00 to buy some special ointment for my leg and Sam followed him.

  That was the last they saw of him, so a search was immediately instituted. At 2pm he was located sitting in the window of the chemist’s shop wagging his tail (being a Saturday, the shop had shut at 12.00). But they couldn’t find the proprietor, because he didn’t live on the premises. At 3.00pm David & George came back for lunch with the news that Sam was in the window of the Chemist’s shop & it seemed likely that he would have to stay there over the weekend. We consoled ourselves with the thought that by now he would probably have had a very good meal of vanishing cream with a dessert of orange skin food and perhaps a bottle of ‘Nuits de Paris’ or ‘Blue Grass’ to wash it down. After lunch they went out again and at 5pm they located the owner of the shop and Sam was released. They say that when he trotted out his lips were rouged and he’d powdered his balls, but I don’t believe that. What I do believe though, is that the angry chemist has promised to send us a bill for damage to his furniture—Apparently there are a lot of little stains on the chairs and counters. George said that they’d match the ones on his character, so that didn’t help matters.

  When interviewed later by reporters Dog Samka was heard to remark: ‘I found french letters fried in liquid paraffin very nourishing, I shall always carry a packet with me in future in case of emergencies’—this was immediately cabled to Hitler under the heading ‘Strength through Joy’, and his reply is eagerly awaited in official circles.

  Hope you had a marvell
ous time in Tenby. I expect you’ll be home again by the time this arrives.

  Love to all

  Roald

  Here’s another moth for Asta—Is she setting them?

  June 5th

  Sunday

  Dar es Salaam

  Dear Mama

  Many thanks for your letter and the 2 post-cards of Caldy Islands. You seem to have had a very decent time but I suppose that you’re back by now; probably glad to be back.

  I’ve had a bloody week. The poison seemed to have cleared up out of my leg and foot last Monday, so Doctor Ehrlich said I could hobble to work on Tuesday so long as I sat still with my foot up on a chair. Anyway it was more or less essential that I should go because David went upcountry on safari on that day for 2 months. I hobbled about with the help of a hockey stick and it looked as though it was getting better, but then 4 days ago it got worse again & gave me hell. Old Ehrlich scratched his head and gave me some very potent injections, and put something else on it, and today it seems to be better. But I’m having a very quiet-weekend and haven’t got out of my dressing gown today.

  . . . I’m afraid there’s not much news, as I haven’t been doing much this week. My wireless and gramophone are the greatest relief you can imagine. I borrowed Beethoven’s 3rd (Eroica) and 5th Symphonies from a little man called Finnis and I’m not talking bullshit when I say that I now get the hell of a kick out of them. I studied the analysis of them at the beginning of the album very carefully and I now know them pretty well. I shall buy them and some more as soon as the next allowance rolls along. It’s pleasant lying back and listening and at the same time watching the antics of Hitler and Mussolini who are invariably on the ceiling catching flies and mosquitoes. Perhaps I should explain that Hitler & Mussolini are 2 lizards which live in our sitting room. They’re always here, and apart from being very useful about the house they are very exciting to watch. You see Hitler (who is smaller than Muss and not so fat) fixing his unfortunate victim—often a small moth—with a very hypnotic eye. The moth, terrified, stays stock still, then suddenly, so quickly that you can hardly see the movement at all, he darts his neck forward, shoots out a long tongue; and that’s the end of the moth. They’re quite small, only about 10 inches long, and they’ve taken on the colour of the walls & ceiling which are yellow & become quite transparent. You can see their appendixes, at least we think we can . . .