Summary
In Mr. Coombes’s office, Dahl and his friends are made to line up and bend over until they are touching the ground. Coombes goes along, one by one, hitting the boys’ bottoms with a yellow cane. Pratchett eggs him on to hit them harder, and Coombes does as she says. Dahl feels agony as the blows land on his skin and he listens to the pistol-like crack of the cane strike. His bottom feels like it is on fire.
That evening, Dahl’s mother sees the bruises. When he tells her what happened, she immediately leaves the house and goes to talk to Coombes. She tells Dahl she told Coombes that where she is from, you don’t hit children. Coombes called her a foreigner and said she can take Dahl away if she doesn’t like his methods. Dahl’s mother says she will send him to an English boarding school, because a Welsh school is not of the same caliber as the English schools Dahl’s father knew were best in the world.
That summer, Dahl travels over land and sea to visit Norway with his family, all of whom speak Norwegian. It takes four days to reach Oslo, but it is like going home. He marvels at how his mother and nanny managed to organize all the bookings on trains and taxis and ships for so many seasick children.
When they arrive at Dahl’s grandparents’ house, they all eat boiled fresh white fish and new potatoes around an oval table. Throughout the meal, everyone raises their glasses and says, “Skaal,” the Norwegian ritual version of a cheers. After the stop in Oslo, the family travels by boat up the fjord to the island of Tjöme.
The Dahl family stays in a rustic hotel with a wooden outhouse, and Dahl can see rats scurrying around at the bottom of the hole he defecates into. He and his family eat lots of fresh seafood and dairy, then spend the days rowing out to little islands, where they play in the water and get sunburnt. They collect mussels from the shore, and fish on lines, pulling up cod, whiting, haddock, and mackerel.
The only unpleasant thing to happen on vacation in Norway is a visit Dahl makes to the doctor. His mother believes he has adenoids in his nose and throat. Without warning, the doctor boils a scalpel in a mug of water and then cuts four or five red lumps from inside Dahl’s mouth, which feels like it is on fire. He spits out lots of blood.
The doctor says he’ll breathe more easily now. Dahl comments that this is 1924, and it is common for doctors to operate on adenoids and tonsils without administering anesthetic first. He asks the reader to imagine how they would feel if a doctor did that today.
From ages nine to thirteen, Dahl attends St. Peter’s. The boarding school is in England, though still close to South Wales. It is located in a seedy seaside resort town called Weston-super-Mare, reachable from Wales by paddle-steamer boat.
On his first day, Dahl and his mother set out with a pine trunk full of brand-new clothes. The pine trunk is called a tuck box, and all boys at boarding school have them. Mothers send weekly care packages of treats that the boys keep in the boxes, along with their trinkets and clothes. Dahl’s mother says goodbye before the school gates and gets back in the taxi to return to Wales. Nine-year-old Dahl stands beside his box and cries.
Analysis
School corporal punishment—the practice of using physical pain to discipline children in school—enters the narrative. As punishment for pranking Mrs. Pratchett, the boys must bend over and receive violent strikes from Mr. Coombes’s rattan cane. To modern-day readers of Dahl’s book, the moment may appear shocking, but school corporal punishment was only outlawed in British private schools in 1998. In the 1920s, the practice would have been a common means of disciplining misbehaving boys.
But however commonplace caning was, the violence of the action was no less terrible to witness and receive. Dahl emphasizes the agony of the cane strike by likening its sound to the crack of a pistol. School officials would cane boys until their bottoms were bruised and bleeding, a sensation akin to being on fire.
The sadistic treatment sparks outrage in Sofie, who goes straight to the Headmaster to complain. When he refuses to change his ways, Sofie resolves to send her son to a boarding school in England, as she assumes their local Welsh school is more barbaric. However, as Dahl will go to recount, the use of corporal punishment in English schools is just as bad, if not worse.
Dahl juxtaposes the violent episode with Mr. Coombes by recounting his family’s adventures in Norway every summer. No longer living in fear of sadistic school officials, Dahl enjoys quality time with his family. They swim, bask in the sun, eat heartily, and pull up many types of white fish. However, memories of his dream-like summers in Norway are undercut by a traumatic encounter with the undeveloped medical practices of the time.
When Dahl’s adenoids are affecting his breathing, his mother takes him to the local doctor, who cuts out the fleshy lumps in Dahl’s throat without warning or anesthetic. Dahl expresses his astonishment that anesthesia-free surgery was common in the era, and invites the reader to imagine going through such a procedure in the modern day.
Making good on her decision to send her son to an English school, Sofie enrolls Roald at St. Peter’s, a boarding school just over the border from their home in Wales. Dahl condenses his life at home into what he can carry in his tuck-box, and his mother brings him to the school on his first day before returning to Wales. Touching again on the theme of grief, Dahl recalls how, as soon as he was alone, he began to cry. With this image, Dahl introduces the reader to the homesickness that will haunt his days away from family.
