What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!
(Going Solo, page 92)

In my simplicity I had thought that Going Solo was an account of Roald Dahl’s time in the RAF in Africa; I hadn’t realised it is simply the continuation of his autobiography, which had begun with Boy: Tales from Childhood (1984), that it picks up precisely where that book ended, and that the RAF memoirs form only a part of the book.

To be precise, the text starts with Dahl setting off in 1938 at the age of 22 for his first job, a three-year contract with the Shell Oil company in East Africa. Little did he or anyone else know that the Second World War would break out only a year later and that Dahl would volunteer for, and be accepted into, the Royal Air Force.

The book therefore falls naturally into two halves: his experiences as a civilian in East Africa and the RAF period. This latter can itself be sub-divided into half a dozen or so parts:

• training in Nairobi
• more training in Iraq
• his crash in the North African desert and the long hospitalisation and recovery which followed
• fully recovered and returned to service for aerial combat in Greece
• aerial combat over Vichy Syria

Before he becomes increasingly incapacitated by blinding headaches and is invalided home, arriving back at his mum’s house three years after he left, and that’s where the narrative ends.

I also hadn’t expected it to be a children’s book. Even Dahl’s ‘grown-up’ stories have an element of cartoon simplicity about them. They tend to be packed with eccentric characters who perform grotesque actions except that, in the ‘adult’ books, in the Tales of the Unexpected stories or a book like Uncle Oswald, these often involve sex. In this book there are, as you would expect, quite a few deaths, some pretty gruesome. And yet the same cartoon simplicity, the noticing of odd characters with silly names, the sense that situations and people are rounded and simple, is basically the same as he uses in his famous children’s books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and so on.

Thus the narrator of this book portrays himself as ‘a conventional young lad from the suburbs’ (p.3) and, in the Africa section especially, the main content focuses on the oddballs, eccentrics and freaks that he meets. This air of an innocent boy abroad in the crazy adult world is emphasised by two notable features of the text:

1. The way that each of the generally short chapters ends by including the text of one of the many, many letters he wrote home to his beloved Mother throughout the three year period, often repeating what we’ve just been told in the main text.

2. The photos. At various points Dahl tells us about cameras he’s bought (and which get stolen from him, as on a Greek airfield) and it’s clear he was a compulsive snapper. The book is liberally sprinkled with photos illustrating every step of his adventures, images which become increasingly dramatic when he sees action in Greece and which include photos of improvised airfields, crashed Messerschmitts and burned-out Hurricanes. The photos of him also bring out what a devilishly handsome young man he was, and freakishly tall, at a strapping six foot six.

Roald Dahl aged 24 training to fly with the RAF in Nairobi

By ship to Tanganyika

In the opening chapters the narrator travels by ship, the SS Mantola, in the old, lazy style, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, but the focus isn’t on places and atmosphere or history. It is on the peculiar upper-class types who, back then, in the 1930s, ran the British Empire and were, without exception, ‘the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet’. There’s Major Griffiths and his wife who, every morning, run round the ship’s deck stark naked to keep fit; the elderly Miss Trefusis who eats fruit with a knife and fork so as to avoid the beastly germs on one’s fingers; Dahl’s cabin-mate, the improbably named U.N. Savory, manager of a cotton mill in the Punjab who, it turns out, is bald but wears a series of four wigs, each thicker and fuller than the one before, in order to give the impression his luxuriant black hair is growing, before its monthly trim, all to impress the Sikhs he employs.

• On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain (p.3)
• Everyone on this ship was dotty (p.12)
• The man was as potty as a pilchard. (p.19)

These chaps and chapesses had generated a special lingo, a dialect incorporating numerous words from Swahili, Hindi and so on.

• sundowner = evening drink
• chota peg = drink at any other time of day
• the memsahib = the wife
• a shufti = a look around
• shenzi = poor quality
• tiffin = supper

Dahl arrives in Dar es Salaam, the Red Sea port of what was then Tanganyika and is now Tanzania, which he describes as made up of small white and yellow and pink buildings set on a sweeping bay of golden sand against luxuriant tropical jungle. Wow. Reminder that it is 1938, before the world was ruined by over-population, tourism and pollution. The whole book is like this, conveying a fairytale sense of wonder and joy at everything Dahl sees and everyone he meets, he is continually reflecting:

what a lucky young fellow I was to be seeing all these marvellous places free of charge and with a good job at the end of it. (p.23)

The clarity of his prose and the untroubled enthusiasm of his schoolboy mentality makes this an extremely enjoyable book to read. Coming from such a modest background he doesn’t feel any class entitlement to the wonders of the Empire but is continually amazed and astonished at it – precisely as a schoolboy traveller back in time from our day might be.

Working for Shell in Dar es Salaam

Thus he is amazed to discover the Shell office in Dar es Salaam is run by just three Englishmen but set in a grand villa with an astonishing cohort of native servants, a cook, a gardener, and a ‘boy’ each. He is a personal valet who looks after every aspect of your clothes and shoes and rooms etc, but in return you were expected to look after him, his wives (at least two) and children. Dahl’s ‘boy’ is Mdisho. Dahl describes how one day he saved their ‘shamba-boy’ Salimu from being bitten by a black mamba snake and thus secured his undying loyalty.

He gets to be driven all around Tanganyika, visiting Shell customers in a wide range of farms and businesses, and revelling in the scenery and the wildlife, which is described as a boy would describe the wonders of a zoo, for there are lions! and hippos! and elephants! and zebra! Apart from the snakes. Dahl hates snakes.

Oh, those snakes! How I hated them! (p.44)

He is taking a sundowner on the terrace of a district officer, Robert Sanford, and his wife when a servant comes running round the corner of the house yelling that a lion is carrying away the cook’s wife. Sanford grabs a gun and gives chase so we have the comic sight of the lion loping along with cook’s wife between his jaws, chased by the cook, chased at a distance by Sanford brandishing his rifle, followed by Dahl wondering what he’s doing. Sanford fires a shot into the ground ahead of the lion who turns round and, seeing all these humans chasing him, drops the cook’s wife and canters off into the jungle. The cook’s wife is perfectly unharmed and gets to her feet smiling, and the whole crew return to the house where another drink is served and the cook gets on with preparing dinner.

Can this possibly have happened? Surely not as pat and neatly as he describes. The book is like this all the way through, perceived, imagined and written in the style of a crisp, clean children’s book. But, regarding this particular story, he goes on to write that the story became a legend and he was eventually asked to write up his version for the local paper, the East African Standard which paid him £5, his first published work. So maybe it did happen.

But whereas events like this in the hands of, say, Hemingway would have become a gripping insight into the eternal contest between man and beast, or in the hands of Graham Greene would have had a much messier ending involving someone’s adultery and guilt – under Dahl’s light touch it becomes a neat children’s story with a happy ending.

War breaks out

After a few more colonial adventures (the main one featuring ‘the snake man’, i.e. a little old European who specialises in catching poisonous snakes as and when they enter people’s homes) the Second World War breaks out on page 66 of this 223-page edition i.e. about a third of the way through.

To Dahl’s horror, he is conscripted by the captain of the King’s African Regiment and put in charge of a platoon of native soldiers (‘askaris’), armed with rifles each and one machinegun. He tells us that, as it had originally been a German colony (‘German East Africa’) there are far more German citizens in Tanganyika than all other European nationalities put together, and the army officer expects that, as soon as war is declared, all the Germans will try to escape on the one road which heads south towards Portuguese East Africa (nowadays called Mozambique). Dahl is ordered to stop them, and send them back to Dar where the men will be interned in a camp for the duration and the women and children remain free.

So he heads south in a lorry full of askaris. Like so many inexperienced young officers he has to rely on the experience of his (black) sergeant, who tells him where to stop and how to set up a roadblock. They camp for the night and the platoon cook makes a delicious meal of boiled rice and bananas.

Next day they get a phone call telling them war has, indeed, been declared and later that morning a convoy of German citizens in cars and vans arrives at the roadblock. In this account the German men get out of their cars holding guns and a young inexperienced Dahl finds himself confronted by the bullish leader of the convoy who refuses to return. He tells his comrades to start dismantling the roadblock and points his gun directly at Dahl. At which point a single rifle shot rings out and the man’s head explodes, his body falling to the road like a puppet. Dahl’s askaris emerge from their hiding places and the civilians mutely put down their guns, get in their cars and turn round, to be escorted to the camp by his lorryload of native soldiers (pages 59 to 70).

The thing is, in a story Dahl wrote a decade earlier, Lucky Break (1977), the shooting doesn’t happen. The Germans meekly turn around and return to Dar. Is this later version the true, unabridged version of events? Or a deliberately more violent and garish version, reflecting the uninhibited nature of culture as a whole, which became steadily more interested in graphic violence from the 1970s onwards? Or an old man (Dahl was 70 when this memoir was published) enjoying giving his readers the shivers?

Dahl joins the RAF and trains

In December 1939 Dahl enrols in the RAF. His employer, Shell, release him and continue to pay his salary for the duration of his service (!).

Dahl gives a beautifully boyish description of the long solitary drive from Dar up to Nairobi in Kenya, stopping to marvel at giraffes and elephants.

At Nairobi he is quickly inducted and taught to fly a Tiger Moth, which you started by swinging the big wooden propeller by hand, making sure not to topple forwards because then it would chop your head off. The text radiates boyish glee in the macabre and violent.

How many young men, I kept telling myself, were lucky enough to be allowed to go whizzing and soaring through the sky above a country as beautiful as Kenya? (p.90)

Once he can fly he is sent by train to Kampala, flown to Cairo, which was lovely, and then on to Habbaniya in Iraq, ‘the most godforsaken hellhole in the whole world’ (p.94) where he spends six months, from 20 February to 20 August 1940 (p.98) training in Hawker Harts.

Finally he ‘gets his wings’ and is transferred to RAF Ismailia on the Suez Canal, and posted to 80 Squadron, who were flying Gladiators against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. He is boyishly fascinated by the way the Gladiator’s two fixed machineguns fire bullets through a propeller rotating at thousands of times per minute (p.99).

He is stunned to be told no-one is going to show him either how to fly a Gladiator nor anything at all about aerial combat. He’s just going to be plonked in one and given the map co-ordinates of 80 Squadron and told to make his way there by himself. Here he makes the first of what become many comments and criticisms about the RAF and army’s lack of imagination and planning.

There is no question that we were flung in at the deep end, totally unprepared for actual fighting in the air, and that, in my opinion, accounted for the very great losses of young pilots that we suffered out there. (p.101)

He crashes

Dahl is at pains to point out that, although it was reported in the press that he was shot down by enemy planes, this was propaganda cooked up to make the incident sound patriotic.

On 19 September Dahl was ordered to fly his new Gladiator from RAF Abu Suweir on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. He refuelled at Amariya near Alexandria and flew on to Fouka. It is mind-boggling to learn that he had no radio and only a map strapped to his knee for guidance. The CO at Fouka gave him the co-ordinates of his final destination, the current 80 Squadron base, and he set off. But it wasn’t there. He flew up and down and round and round looking for it, as the desert dusk drew in and he ran short of fuel. He realised he had to make an emergency landing, tried to find a flat long stretch of desert and took the Gladiator down.

The plane hit a boulder at about 75 miles an hour. He regained consciousness to discover his nose was smashed, his skull fractured, he’d lost a few teeth and he couldn’t see. In one of the most vivid parts of the book, he describes the incredibly lethargy he felt, he just wanted to sleep, but the plane was on fire and eventually the scorching heat persuaded him to undo his straps and reluctantly leave the nice cosy cockpit and crawl onto the sand. Here he just wanted to curl up and sleep but, again, the fierce heat persuaded him reluctantly to crawl away towards the cool desert night.

Later he discovered the area he crashed in was no man’s land between the Italian and British front lines and that three brave British soldiers ventured out after nightfall to check the wreckage and were surprised to find the pilot had survived. They carried him back to British lines and thence began the long, complicated journey back to hospital in Alexandria.

Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Alexandria

In his clear, boyish style, Dahl vividly describes his prolonged hospital treatment. He spends around six months recovering from his injuries, under the care of the hospital staff, in particular nurse Mary Welland whose gentle ministrations to the swollen flesh around his eyes is calming and reassuring. He has various operations, including an adventure with a spanking new anaesthetic, sodium pentathol, which turns out not to work at all (pages 112 to 116).

Then one day, as Mary is laving his swollen eyes, one opens a crack and light floods in. For six weeks he had been blind, his other senses heightened. The return of light is a revelation (pages 118 to 122).

Dahl was discharged from hospital in February 1941, five months after he was admitted, and goes to stay with a wealthy English family in Cairo, the Peels.

When he reports to RAF Ismailia he is told 80 Squadron are now in Greece, and are no longer flying Gladiators, but Mark I Hurricanes. Once again he is thrown in the deep end, given just two days solo practice, the first time he’d flown a modern, super-speedy plane, the first plane with retractable undercarriage, with wing flaps, with a variable pitch propeller, with machineguns in the wings, that he’s ever flown.

Two days to teach himself then he’s ordered to fly solo across the Med to Greece. The Flight-Lieutenant tells him they’re fitting it with extra fuel tanks, but if the pump doesn’t work, he’ll run out and be forced to ditch in the sea. Then swim home.

Fighting in Greece

As soon as he lands his Hurricane at Elevsis airfield near Athens, the ground crew set him straight about the parlous situation. The entire RAF has just 15 Hurricanes and four clapped-out Blenheims. Dahl explains the background: the Italians invaded Greece in October 1940 but ran into unexpected resistance. The British government took a vital slice of Field-Marshall Wavell’s Eighth Army and planes and sent them to Greece in March 1941. When it was just the Italians to hold off, this was fine. But on 6 April 1941 the Germans invaded and began a steady advance which was to bring them to Athens just three weeks later on 27 April. The German Luftwaffe outnumbered the measly little RAF outfit by anything up to 100 to 1.

So Dahl had flown into an utterly hopeless situation, and the pilots and ground crew let him know it straightaway. Sending British forces to Greece had been a colossal miscalculation. Now the best that could be hoped for was managing their withdrawal. It was like Dunkirk but was being hushed up in the press.

Dahl immediately made friends with David Coke, in line to inherit the title Earl of Leicester, who is appalled to learn that Dahl has absolutely no idea about air combat whatsoever. Over a couple of pages he fills Dahl (and the reader) in on the basics.

There follow a sequence of absolutely thrilling and terrifying descriptions of aerial warfare. On his first flight he takes on a pack of 6 Junker 88s, apparently downing one but making every mistake in the book. The Squadron CO barely looks up when he tells him. Every day more men and planes are being lost. In the small ‘mess’ there are no friendships, people don’t talk. They are all alone with their thoughts, convinced they will all die within days.

Next day he tries to defend a British ammunition ship from attack, engaging with Stukas and being chased by what he says felt like 30 or so Messerschmitts to avoid which he descends right down to tree level, then fence level, terrifyingly dangerous. Did this actually happen or is the professional author in Dahl giving the reader a thrill for their money? It’s noticeable how many times he directly addresses the reader, as if in one of his children’s books:

You may not believe it but I can remember having literally to lift my plane just a tiny fraction to clear a stone wall, and once there was a herd of brown cows in front of me and I’m not sure I didn’t clip some of their horns with my propeller as I skimmed over them. (p.153)

There follows a chapter packed with incident as he details the four consecutive days leading up to the Battle of Athens:

• 17 April he went up 3 times
• 18 April went up twice
• 19 April went up 3 times
• 20 April went up 4 times

They try to defend ships in Piraeus harbour from German bombers. On 20th the entire squadron of 12 Hurricanes is sent up to fly over Athens to try and bolster morale, led by legendary air ace Flight-Lieutenant Pat Pattle, but of course the Germans send hundreds of Messerchmitts after them and it turns into a mad bloodbath. His description of the intensity of split second perceptions required continually is amazing.

Dahl survives but five of the 12 Hurricanes were lost. After he lands he finds he is drenched in sweat. His hands are shaking too much to light a cigarette. He has stripped and is washing alongside his friend David when the airfield is strafed by Me 109s.

Amazingly all seven planes survive and the Messerschmitts don’t return, probably expecting the little airfield to be heavily defended, not knowing it is only protected by one measly Bofors gun.

Next thing Dahl and the other 6 are ordered to fly to a new landing strip along the coast, near Megara. The existing ground crew will decamp with all tents etc that evening. Next morning the seven pilots awaken to a camp stripped almost bare. There’s no mess tent, no cooks, no food. As dawn breaks they climb into their planes, assemble at 1,000 feet and fly down the coast to Megara.

They land in a field which has been rolled flat. There is absolutely no-one else about. They wheel the planes into the cover of olive trees and climb a ridge from where they can see the sea. There’s a large oil tanker 500 yards out. They watch as Stukas dive bomb it, blow it into a fireball, and watch as the crew leap off into the flaming water and are roasted alive (pages 174 to 175).

The ground crew and other ancillaries arrive in lorries and set up tents. Again the pilots ask why the devil they’re not being sent straight to Egypt. They conclude it’s so that propagandists/the Press/the government can claim that the RAF stayed till the bitter end to protect ‘our troops’. Words like ‘mess’, ‘balls-up’, ‘muddle headed’, ‘incompetent’, ‘terrific cock-up’ sprinkle the text. The Commanding Officer unhappily tells them they have to stay.

A flight of Messerschmitts flies over. Their new base has been rumbled. They calculate they have an hour and a half before a bombing raid returns but the commanding officer idiotically refuses to let them take off and be prepared. Instead they must wait till 6pm on the dot and then fly off to cover the evacuation of troops. a) this gives the Germans exactly the right amount of time to return and shoot up the new airbase, killing one pilot in his plane as it is taking off and b) when they get to the location where they’re told they’re meant to be protecting the troops, there’s nothing there: no troops, no ships. In actuality the troops were being disembarked down the coast at Kalamata where they were being massacred by Ju 88s and Stukas. Another complete cock-up.

When they return from this pointless errand they find the new landing base has indeed been heavily bombed and have to land in smoke. In a hurry the Adjutant finally orders five other pilots to fly the five remaining Hurricanes to Crete, all other pilots to take a lorry and cram into a de Havillande Rapide. This includes Dahl. He carries his Log Book and crams in next to his buddy David.

Two hours later they land in the Western Desert and catch a truck back to Alexandria where the superbly well-mannered Major Peel and his wife immediately put their entire mansion at the disposal of nine filthy, hungry, smelly, penniless pilots.

‘The whole thing was a cock-up,’ someone said.
‘I think it was,’ Bobby Peel said. ‘We should never have gone to Greece at all.’ (p.195)

Although whether Bobby Peel actually said that, or even existed, is a moot point, given the neat roundedness of so many of the facts and anecdotes in this account.

So what comes over very powerfully indeed is the stupidity and futility of the short-lived British expedition to Greece. On the last page of this section Dahl gives his opinion straight, which is that diverting troops and planes from the African desert to Greece fatally weakened the Eighth Army and condemned it to years of defeats against the Germans under Rommel who at one stage threatened Cairo and thus the entire Middle East. It took two years for the British Army’s strength to be rebuilt sufficiently for them to drive Rommel and the Italians back into Tunisia and ultimately win the war in the desert.

Fighting in Syria

Lebanon and Syria were French colonies. When the Vichy government came to power in France, the French forces in Lebanon and Syria switched to the Vichy side and became fanatically pro-German and anti-British. They could obviously provide beachheads for the Germans to land in the Middle East and so threaten a) our oil supplies from Iraq b) the Suez Canal, our gateway to India (and large numbers of Indian troops). Which is why there was a bitter and hard-fought battle for control of Lebanon and Syria which pitched British, Australian and South African forces against the Vichy French.

In May 1941 80 Squadron were redeployed to Haifa in northern Palestine. They consisted of 9 pilots and Hurricanes and their task was to protect the Royal Navy as it pounded Lebanon’s ports. Dahl briefly describes a series of run-of-the-mill sorties, during which 4 of the 9 pilots were killed.

He spends much more time describing a solo mission he was sent on, to go, land and reconnoitre a satellite landing field 30 miles away. Here he discover a strip of land which has been flattened but has absolutely no other facilities whatsoever. It is ‘manned’ by one tall old man and a surprising legion of children.

It’s a peculiar scene, whose sole point is that the old man and the children are Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Dahl goes out of his way to demonstrate his naivety on the Jewish Question, and emphasises that he has been totally out of touch with European news for 2 years, and so simply doesn’t know about the escalating Nazi attacks on Jews (p.208). Which explains why he doesn’t understand what the man means when he says that he and the children are refugees, and really doesn’t understand it when the man says this is his country. What, you’re going to become a Palestinian, asks Dahl in his naivety. But the man is clearly a Zionist, clearly a believer that the Jews have a right to a homeland the same as every other nation on earth, and clearly believes that he and his comrades are going to build that homeland right here, in Palestine. Dahl is ‘flabbergasted’ at his attitude and, maybe, this is a good indicator of the lack of understanding of many British people and armed forces during and immediately after the war, as the Jews’ struggle to establish the homeland of Israel reached its climax.

Demobilised and return to England

Dahl continues dutifully flying missions from the Haifa base but during the month of June 1941 begins to suffer increasingly intense headaches, including ones which lead him to black out. The base medical officer reads his history, particularly the fractured skull from his crash, and orders him to cease flying. He is demobilised, takes a bus back to Cairo, catches a luxury liner to South Africa, then a troop ship which makes the perilous journey up the west coast of Africa, threatened by enemy planes but especially U-boats, eventually docking in Liverpool.

From here he makes phone calls to relatives and discovers his mother’s house in Kent was bombed out and so she’s bought a cottage in rural Buckinghamshire. It’s worth reminding that every few pages of this text includes excerpts from the letters he wrote to his mother regularly as clockwork throughout this period. Cumulatively, these convey a very close bond between mother and son. He catches a train to London, stays overnight at a relative’s place in Hampstead, then catches a train and a bus to his mother’s village, steps down from the bus and into his mother’s waiting arms, and it is with this moment that this exciting, eye-opening, boyish and fresh-faced memoir comes to a dead halt.

Credit

Going Solo by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. All references are to the 2018 Centenary Collection Penguin paperback edition.

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