"Throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of
things happened to me that I have never forgotten. . . . Some are
funny. Some are painful. Some are unpleasant. I suppose that is why
I have always remembered them so vividly." Vividly indeed: with the
intimate, confiding tone of a born storyteller, Dahl turns each of
his family/school memories into a miniature adventure, thriller, or
horror-story - with the earthy emphasis on pleasure (food,
comradeship), fear, and pain. After a brief, charming slice of
family-history, explaining how his Norwegian parents came to live
and prosper in Wales, Dahl gets right down to business. From the
years at Llandaff Cathedral School (ages 7-9, 1923-25), there's a
candy-by-candy tribute to the local sweet-shop, site of "The Great
Mouse Plot": Roald and friends, fed up with the meanness of filthy
sweet-shop-owner Mrs. Pratchett, secretly put a dead mouse in the
Gobstopper jar - but suffered mightily for their glorious prank.
(Mrs. P. reported the crime to the Headmaster - unleashing the
first of many school-career canings, all described in gruesome,
technicolor detail.) Summer vacations in Norway are also recalled
in a mixture of ecstasy - the fish, the scenery - and agony: an
operation for adenoid removal without any anesthetic. And the
extremes of pleasure and pain continue through Dahl's years at two
English boarding schools: homesickness, sadistic Matrons and
Masters, practical jokes, the indignities of "fagging" (warming up
the toilet-seat for older boys), chocolates. . . and, always, the
dreaded Headmaster's cane. ("By now I am sure you will be wondering
why I lay so much emphasis upon school beatings in these pages. The
answer is that. . . I couldn't get over it. I never have got over
it.") Some readers may be put off by Dahl's style here - chatty,
bedtime-story-ish, deceptively avuncular. Others might not take to
the British references (no special explanations for a US audience),
or the particularly British approach - full of bitter humor and odd
relish - to grisly, gory matters. But those who've appreciated Dahl
in various forms will find both the master of chills and the lover
of chocolate here - in a fine, juicy collage of funny/awful boyhood
highlights. (Kirkus Reviews)
"I sat down in assembly one day and started to read this book to my
two hundred and forty students, deciding that I would stop when
restlessness became too obvious. I went on...and on... and on. In
the end I had to stop before the school seized up, and still the
children clamoured for more." Gerald Haigh, TES
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