Summary
Occasionally, a box of Cadbury chocolate bars in a plain gray box is distributed to each boy at Repton as a gift from the manufacturers. With the bars is a ranking sheet the boys fill out, saying what they like or don’t like about the bars they are test marketing. The process makes Dahl fantasize about working for Cadbury and running into the boss’s office with a perfect new chocolate bar. Thirty-five years later, while looking for a plot for his second children’s book, Dahl will remember the cardboard boxes full of newly invented bars, and he will begin to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The only teacher who isn’t completely dull at Repton is an eccentric old bachelor named Corkers. Instead of teaching math, he fills the lesson with distractions, such as the newspaper crossword, which he copies onto the board so the class can play together. One day he brings a snake to class and makes everyone handle it; he says it will cure forever anyone’s fear of snakes. Sometimes he suddenly jerks his head up and flares his nostrils, complaining that one of the boys has farted. They all claim they didn’t, but he gets up and leaves the room, not returning to finish the lesson.
For two years of his time at Repton, Dahl is a “Fag”—the term for a younger student servant of an older boy. A seventeen-year-old named Carleton makes Dahl and two other Fags do detailed cleanings of the study room he oversees. He inspects their work with a clean white glove he runs over every surface of the room. The tiniest speck of dust is taken as evidence that the room hasn’t been cleaned properly, and the Fags are punished with beatings. The rules of Fagging at Repton also include bizarre demands, such as having to sit on toilet seats to warm them for older boys before they go to defecate. Wilberforce uses Dahl as his seat-warmer because he has warm buttocks.
At Repton, Dahl is surprised to learn he is good at the games “fives” and squash. Fives is similar to American handball, and is possibly the fastest ball game on earth. Dahl is called Captain of Fives because he is skilled at the challenging game. This title comes with responsibilities, and it is assumed that Captains will become Boazers. However, the authorities don’t trust Dahl because he dislikes rules and is unpredictable. Dahl comments on how he is glad he never became a Boazer, because he wouldn’t have wanted to beat the Fags. He also is glad the masters didn’t revere him like other athletes. He still gets pleasure out of playing games.
The other pastime that gives him pleasure is photography. Arthur Norris, the photography master, is a shy, retiring man who keeps apart from the other teachers. He takes an interest in Dahl’s artistic talent, and invites him to his flat to drink tea and discuss great artists like Cézanne and Manet. Dahl’s photo enlargements impress the other masters during his graduation art show when Dahl is eighteen. People who never took an interest in him now ask if his photos are for sale. Dahl wins photography awards as a young man, including a photo of the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq. He takes the photo in 1940, when training for the Royal Air Force. He takes the photo while flying a plane solo.
During his last year at Repton, Dahl’s mother asks if he’d like to go to Oxford or Cambridge. He says he’d rather work for a company that will send him to Africa or China—places so difficult to reach in 1934 that they were like distant, magical lands. He competes for a coveted job placement with Shell Oil, and is surprised to get the position. After graduation, he would be an Eastern Staff Trainee working for five pounds a week.
Dahl finishes school and leaves Repton forever, glad to get away on the motorbike he has been keeping secretly in a garage near the school. He spends the summer on a backpacking excursion in Newfoundland, carrying a 140-pound backpack and supplementing his diet with boiled lichen and reindeer moss. He returns to England and lives with his family in Kent while training with Shell. He learns all about the different types of oil and fuels the company produces. Dahl comments on how he falls into the life of a businessman, and enjoys it. A writer’s life is hell in comparison because a writer has to force themself to work, and the work is far more draining than punching the clock at an office. Writers become drinkers, and they are fools to become writers. Their “only compensation is absolute freedom.”
After twelve months at Shell’s head office, Dahl sells kerosene to old ladies in Somerset from a tanker with a tap on the back. Then, in 1936, he suddenly learns he is being sent to Egypt. Dahl complains that the country is too dusty; he wants to go somewhere with jungles and palms and lions and elephants. The boss is upset with him, but sends someone else. A week later, Dahl learns he is going to East Africa. Dahl is overjoyed to know he’ll spend three years in khaki shorts making five hundred pounds a year.
As he takes a boat from London, Dahl doesn’t realize he’ll be gone longer than three years because of the coming war. He first learns Swahili, and that he must shake scorpions out of his boots. He learns, above all, how to take care of himself. In 1939, he joins the RAF and flies Hurricane planes around the Mediterranean. He shoots down German planes, and is shot down himself once: he lands in flames and crawls out to be rescued by soldiers bravely crawling over the sand. He then spends six months in a hospital in Alexandria before taking to the skies again.
Dahl ends the novel by commenting on how his war stories belong to another book. They have nothing to do with boyhood or mice or gobstoppers or summers in Norway. He says that if all goes well, he may tell the other stories about war one of these days.
Analysis
In an early chapter, Dahl recounted his love of candy. In “Chocolates,” he provides more context to how sweets set off his young imagination, planting seeds for what would eventually become his most successful book. Dahl and his friends at Repton are lucky enough to be used as unpaid test-marketing subjects by the major chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s. In exchange for free chocolate bars the company has yet to release to the public, Dahl gives his opinion on their taste and texture. The experience prompts him to develop a fantasy of working the Cadbury’s factory—a fantasy that eventually leads him to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when he is an adult.
Although there are some admirable authority figures at Repton, such as the work-shy Corkers, Dahl’s time at the school is no more pleasurable than his time at St. Peter’s. The school officials’ sadism and barbarism is emulated by older students such as Carleton, who treats Dahl and other younger boys as servants. Again, any minor slip up results in a cane beating. As a “fag,” Dahl must endure more bizarre backside-based public humiliations, such as having to warm the toilet seat for Wilberforce. Although Dahl doesn’t like it, he goes along with the strange rituals because they are ingrained in the English public (i.e. private) school system of the era.
Although Dahl has the social cachet to become a Boazer himself, already serving as Captain of two sports teams, he knows he could never dole out the same punishments, perpetuating the school corporal punishment practices he has never understood. He is not accepted into the upper ranks of the school’s social hierarchy, but he doesn’t mind, showing his resilience by continuing to find fun in playing games and doing photography. Arthur Norris is perhaps the first school authority figure in Dahl’s life to treat him with respect and cultivate his artistic talent.
When big school is over, Dahl opts to work a job that will fulfill his desire for adventure. He has no interest in continuing to take part in the sadistic and socially stratified British education system by continuing at Oxford or Cambridge, even if they are considered the best universities in the world.
Dahl gets his wish to go somewhere exotic when his bosses at Shell Oil send him to East Africa. However, his adventures abroad soon take on a different nature with the outbreak of World War II. Dahl immediately signs up for the RAF. As a fighter pilot, his need for adventure is fulfilled in nerve-wracking, life-threatening missions.
In an image that harkens back to the time his mother showed her resilience following the family’s car crash, Dahl describes how his plane was shot down and he crawled out of the burning mess, only to fly again six months later. The book ends with Dahl commenting that his time in war belongs to another book entirely, a line that sets up the sequel, Going Solo.
