Roald Dahl, trainee pilot, Iraq, 1940
It was March 1941. Roald was twenty-five and an RAF pilot once more, who soared through the sky in a Mark I Hurricane, a modern, fast-flying machine, doing his bit to win the war against Germany and her allies.
The Battle of Britain, a battle fought in the skies in 1940 between the Germans and the British, helped to glamorize all RAF pilots, no matter where they flew. This is partly because the pilots did what very few people in the 1940s had experienced: flying fast and high. Another reason – and it’s a sad and awful reason – is that so many of these very young men were shot down in their planes and killed. So, just being alive meant that there was something almost magical about them. If they had survived the many dangers of flying in wartime, surely they could survive anything?
When I was a boy, we imitated these pilots with our toy planes, looping the loop and making ack-ack-ack noises as we shot down the imaginary enemy. In the movies we watched, the men were always handsome, calm and brave. And women always fell in love with them. At school, if one of our teachers had been in the RAF during the war, we knew that he’d been to places and seen things that were more incredible than we could imagine. We also knew that he must be full of stories, just like those in our adventure books and comics, where the pilot sat in his cockpit, his helmet on, enemy planes in the sky behind him, shouting out to his tail gunner, ‘Let him have it, Binky!’ And then the air would be full of zigzag lines and noises like ‘BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!’ and the next picture would show a plume of smoke in the sky.
Whether he liked it or not, Roald became one of these hero-like characters. Although he didn’t fly in the Battle of Britain itself, he and his fellow pilots – all members of 80 Squadron – fought a series of brave air battles, mostly above Greece. At the time, he wrote about what was happening in letters to his mother and to his friends.
Of all the shocking things that happened, death affected him the most – the deaths of his young friends and the deaths of the young men he had to kill. His way of coping was by trying to be indifferent, or not caring. Whether he managed this or not, I don’t know. Perhaps he was very good at pretending that he didn’t care. But later in life, as he wrote more and more, at least some of that indifference – real or otherwise – vanished. He had to care about his characters – Matilda, Danny, Sophie and the rest – so that when we read about them in his books we care about them too. On the other hand, he wrote Dirty Beasts and Revolting Rhymes and one of the reasons why those poems are so funny is that people die or do horrible things to each other in ways that don’t really seem to matter. Those poems seem to me to almost laugh at death. Perhaps this is what Roald Dahl learned to do in the midst of all that sadness and loss when he was a pilot during the war. What do you think?
Roald’s crash had left him with terrible headaches and, after a year of active service, these headaches grew so bad that he had to be sent home. He had been away from his mother and his sisters for three years. After everything he and they had been through, their reunion must have been a very emotional experience. Many years later, when he was reading aloud the last chapter of his second autobiography, Going Solo, to an audience at the National Theatre in London, his daughter Ophelia saw him crying. It seems as if that sadness still remained many years later.
What was left of Roald’s old house had been taken over by the British Army. (As the country was at war, the army could do that at any time.) His new home was now a strange, much smaller, older house in a little village called Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire and it was here that he planned to spend time recovering from the war … except, he couldn’t do that. Just because the RAF had sent Roald back to England didn’t mean that they were finished with him. Not yet. There were plenty of jobs on the ground for him, like helping the RAF to find and train more pilots. But this wasn’t really what Roald wanted to do.
What happened next was like something out of a James Bond movie. A member of parliament took Roald out for a meal in a tiny, very posh gentlemen’s club. It was a strange and secretive meeting in which Roald was offered a job at the British Embassy in Washington, USA. He would be called an Assistant Air Attaché. This hush-hush job offer must have been very exciting for someone like Roald, who loved tricks, plots and plans. But what would he actually be doing?
In March 1942 the USA had only just joined in the war. Most people in Britain had desperately wanted such a big, rich and powerful nation to become involved because they would be able to supply millions of soldiers, planes, boats and tanks. But the Americans were still very divided about the war. Some had always thought that they should join in, while others thought that they definitely shouldn’t.
The British government, headed by Winston Churchill, decided that they needed some of their own people in the USA, people whose role would be to keep America on Britain’s side in the war. And it was Roald’s job to encourage very powerful people in the American government to support Britain, reminding them what the RAF was doing and making sure that stories showing what a terrible time the British people were having got into the American newspapers.
It would also be Roald’s job to report back to Churchill and his ministers on the mood of the country – whether the Americans were more or less keen to support Britain, whether there was any gossip from people in high places that Britain needed to know about.
Roald’s new job looked like a lot of fun – dinner parties, tennis matches, barbecues, late-night chats with newspaper reporters and long conversations about going up in planes and being brave. But, underneath the glitz and the socializing, it was really all about collecting and sending out information. This job has a name: intelligence. And the fantastically exciting word for it is ‘spying’. Roald Dahl had become a spy. He would work for the British government by spying on the USA, a country that was, to a large extent, friends with Britain.
So off he went. He travelled by train to Glasgow in Scotland, where he boarded a ship and headed off across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. Then he went by train from Montreal to Washington, DC, to stay in the Willard Hotel until he found an apartment.
And that’s how Roald added something else to the amazing list that people tend to put after his name – you know the sort of thing: ‘Roald Dahl, world-famous bestselling writer, war hero and spy …’
Roald was about to begin the next chapter in his life, in a place where things were very different from what he was used to. And, talking of chapters, it really does seem that Roald Dahl was someone whose life was a series of wildly different chapters. It was as if he finished one adventure and then started on another straight away, in a new place and with new people. I don’t know if that’s something he created for himself or if life just kept happening to him that way. What do you think?