ROALD
DAHL
at Repton
‘Repton,’ I said, ‘I’ll go to Repton.’
‘BOY’
O
ffered the choice between Repton and Marlborough by his beloved mother, the young Roald Dahl chose Repton because it was ‘an easier word to say’ and thus, with such characteristic spontaneity, the bond was established between the School and the man whose magical creations have teemed and fizzed in the imaginations of generations of children, the centenary of whose birth falls on September 13th. Repton in the 1930s was a very different place from the larger, modern School of today. There were nine boys’ boarding houses and no girls in the School at all. Many of the buildings we use every day; the Science Priory, the Sports Complex, the Maths and PE Block, the JCR, the Studio Theatre and the 400 Hall, obviously did not exist then, but even those we regard as fixtures like the Music School and the Art School would have been found in unusual places such as the Tithe Barn. Young Roald would be hard-pressed now to find a department occupying the same rooms as those of his day and certainly not a member of staff, despite scurrilous pupil rumour; IT was still only ever written as ‘it’ and we displayed a worrying fallibility at hockey.
~2~
‘…the dormitories are called ‘Bedders’and the school shop sells everything from an unsophisticated piece of bacon fat, to the school blazer…’
‘LOVE FROM BOY’
Much though has not changed at all. It would be doing a grave disservice to our Grubber’s legendary ‘Two on a plate with’ – sausage rolls which soar above Dahl’s lowly gristle – to label them as ‘unsophisticated’, but the School Shop’s racks of uniform are still there, the blazers and the colourful abundance of school and house ties, the games kit and the stationery – even the dreaded ‘Blue’. When one reads Dahl’s words to his mother in January 1930, it is impossible not to see the excited B Block pupil, eager to communicate the shiny newness of boarding life with all of its esoteric jargon and arcane routines. It is the same energy which can still be found at the start of a term in the chatter crackling across the junior ‘bedders’, though it might find its way home now via a breathless phone call or a brief text rather than Dahl’s carefully crafted letters. Like any true Reptonian, Dahl’s fierce loyalty to his House, The Priory, was ingrained from the start. He told his mother: ‘ I think Priory is easily the nicest house of the whole nine’ but he did feel a little foolish at first in the ‘stiff, wide-brimmed straw hat with a blue-and-black band around it’. ~3~
~4~
‘…the best bit of it is we are allowed to go anywhere we like when nothing is happening…’
I
t must sometimes seem to modern Reptonians that there is barely time to pause for breath before the next task or activity but Dahl’s glee at the thrilling freedom of public school has an engaging innocence, a sense of independence that is still the most marked change for those coming up from prep school. Innocent too, seems that world in which few parameters, if any, need to be set to keep young pupils safe.
In those days, the pupils paid the Housemaster for board and lodging. The Housemaster of The Priory, Mr S.S. Jenkyns, or ‘Binks’ as he was known, provided food for the boys for the majority of the time but on the three half days the boys would cook for themselves. Dahl and his friends would buy their provisions from The Grubber, in those days the manager of the school shop, not the shop itself, which stocked ‘every conceivable kind of sweets, chocolate, or anything like force (a sort of mince) or tinned fruit and even sardines and biscuits.’ On primus stoves, of the sort that the CCF uses on Night Op, the boys would cook their favourites: sausages, baked beans, poached eggs and tinned pears, and then Dahl records the need for magnesia pills to cure the indigestion. Food, then as now, dominated the lives of the young boys. ~5~
‘Every
now and again, a plain cardboard box was dished out to each boy in our House, and this, believe it or not, was a present from the great chocolate manufacturers, Cadbury. Inside the box there were twelve bars of chocolate, all of different shapes, all with different fillings and all with numbers from one to twelve stamped on the chocolate underneath‌ ...all we were required to do in return for this splendid gift was to taste very carefully each bar of chocolate, give it marks and make an intelligent comment on why we liked or disliked it.’ ~6~
T
his miraculous piece of market research consumed the young Dahl’s imagination. He pictured
Cadbury’s laboratories with ‘pots of chocolate and full of all sorts of other delicious fillings bubbling away on stoves’ with him winning the admiration of Mr Cadbury himself for developing ‘something so absolutely, unbearably delicious’. Thirty years later, ‘looking for a plot’ for his second children’s book, Dahl would recall the ‘little cardboard boxes and the newly invented chocolate’ and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, that fantastical hymn of praise to the greatness of the cocoa bean and the goodness of the child, Charlie Bucket, became forever fixed in young minds the world over. ~7~
‘I
began to realise how important it was to be an enthusiast in life...If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it.’ ~8~
‘I have never met anyone who
so persistently wrote words
meaning the exact opposite of what he obviously intended.’
R
oald Dahl was a boy full of energy. His school-time snapshots capture a bright-eyed boy whose expression seems to promise mischief. He felt that ‘boredom
‘He is so large that it is often difficult to remember how young he is’.
was a curse’ and loved the pranks of the classroom and the competitive edge of the sports field. He played football for his house and for school teams but Fives was the sport at which he excelled, winning ‘both the junior and the senior school fives in the same year when [he was] fifteen’ and soon ‘bore the splendid title ‘Captain of Fives’. Dahl loved it: a game in which ‘the quickness of the eye and the dancing of the feet were all that mattered’, qualities which no doubt came in handy later in his life in Hollywood when he squired Ginger Rogers, the film actress and dancer, to glamorous society events. In the classroom, Dahl won fewer accolades. In his Summer Report of 1932, he is described as ‘rather dazed’ and, ironically, his ideas as ‘limited’. He was seen by one master as often trying ‘to hide idleness behind a veil of stupidity’ – not a ringing endorsement of one of the country’s most popular writers – but two comments do perhaps give an insight into a later creation. The stretching of language until it twangs (though the source is more frequently attributed to the confused speech of his wife Patricia after her stroke) and the giant frame (Dahl was 6ft 6ins) do suggest the gangly mangling of one of Dahl’s most loved characters, the BFG. ~9~
‘And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’ Why not try it on Dahl Day?
~10~
D
ahl rated his finest hour as being the brains behind the Great Mouse Plot of 1924 and smuggling a dead mouse into a sweet jar to terrify the ‘loathsome’ Mrs Pratchett, the ‘hag’ who ran the local sweet shop but, in truth, his was a life full of daring and drama: as a fighter pilot and a secret agent in World War II, consorting with movie stars and presidents, and as scriptwriter of the James Bond film ‘You Only Live Twice’, before one even reaches the worlds of adventure he dreamed up in his stories.
Roald Dahl’s words have spoken to generations of children in a language they love. Anything can happen in a Roald Dahl story and invariably does, as just behind the grey grind of the daily routine lies an extraordinary land of wonder and colour. His passion was for ‘teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book’. His invitation is for his readers to see the magic he could, to step off the plank into the swirling currents of the imagination. ~11~
‘We all have our moments of brilliance and glory’