Summary
Narrated in the first person by the book’s author, Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood opens with a preface. Dahl states that the book isn’t an autobiography, which would be full of “boring details,” but rather a collection of true stories from his youth. He says he has skimmed each of them off the top of his consciousness.
Dahl writes that his father, Harald, was a Norwegian born in the small town of Sarpsborg. At 14, Harald fell off a roof and the local doctor was so drunk he mistook the elbow fracture for a dislocated shoulder. It was 1877, and so Harald’s arm was amputated rather than corrected with surgery.
Harald and his brother leave Norway to make more money in France. Harald establishes a business that provided coal for ships and relocates it to Cardiff, Wales. His French wife, Marie, dies after giving birth to their second child. Harald meets Sofie in Norway and they marry, soon having four more children, including Roald. They move to a grand house and fill it with beautiful furnishings.
In 1920, Dahl’s sister Astri, age seven, dies of appendicitis. Several weeks later, Harald dies at 57 of pneumonia brought on by grief. Rather than return to Norway, Sofie, pregnant with another child, upholds her husband’s wish that his children be educated in English schools, which he believes to be the best in the world. She downsizes to a more manageable house in Llandaff and Dahl begins kindergarten at six. All Dahl remembers is how he would zip to school on his tricycle, moving freely down roads in an era when cars were a rare sight.
From ages seven to nine, Dahl attends Llandaff Cathedral School. Only two moments remain in memory: seeing an older boy whizz down a hill on his bicycle with his hands off the handlebars, and stopping at the sweets shop with other boys on the way home from school. Dahl delights over licorice bootlaces, color-changing gobstoppers. and tonsil ticklers.
A boy named Thwaites claims the bootlaces are made from rat blood, but that stops no one from buying them. The only drawback to visiting the shop is Mrs. Pratchett, the greasy-haired, unpleasant woman who runs it. With filthy grime-covered hands, she yells at the boys to buy something or get out, then reaches into the jars of candy with no regard for cleanliness. They wish to get revenge against her.
Dahl and his friends pry up a loose floorboard at the back of their classroom and stash their candy in the cavity. One afternoon, they discover a dead mouse among their treasure. Dahl suggests they slip it into one of Mrs. Pratchett’s jars. That afternoon, one of the boys distracts her with a purchase while Dahl drops the mouse into the gobstoppers jar. The lads leave the shop with a sense of triumph, and Dahl understands how satisfying it is to feel like a hero.
The next morning, the boys look in the window and see the shop is closed. The jar is smashed on the ground and the gobstoppers and mouse are lying among the glass. They walk to school silently, sensing danger in the air. Thwaites says the shock must have given her a heart attack; he accuses Dahl of having murdered Pratchett because he put the mouse in the jar.
After a tense school assembly, the headmaster Mr. Coombes makes the children of the school line up. Mrs. Pratchett appears from inside the school and walks down the line until she points out Dahl and his friends, fingering them as the nasty little boys who come to her shop. Dahl listens as the headmaster and the woman go back inside while she complains about the shock of touching the soggy little mouse.
Analysis
The short preface that opens Boy: Tales of Childhood establishes Dahl’s conversational and joking narrative voice. As a famous children’s author, he knows most of his readers will be young, and might be disinclined to read an autobiography full of “boring details.” In a paradoxical statement, he claims his book isn’t an autobiography while stating that it is a collection of true stories about his life. The self-contradictory tone suggests that although the book is full of traumatic episodes from his youth, Dahl doesn’t take himself too seriously. Rather than paint himself as a victim of his circumstances, Dahl hopes to present the book as something interesting, enjoyable, but ultimately of little importance.
The humility and good nature Dahl conveys in the preface seems to have been inherited from his father, Harald. Despite losing his arm at fourteen because of the drunk local doctor’s incompetence, Harald doesn’t wallow in self-pity. He adapts to life with one arm, crafting a special fork with a sharpened knife’s edge. In a comical understatement, Harald claims the only downside to his disability is that he can’t take the top off a boiled egg. With this portrait of his father, Dahl introduces the major themes of rudimentary medical care as well as resilience.
The theme of grief arises in the second chapter, when the happy and prosperous Dahl family experiences the double-tragedy of Astri and Harald dying within weeks of each other. Although Dahl is only three at the time, he speculates in his narration that his father’s grief for Astri was so great that he lost the will to live. Bringing in again the theme of rudimentary medical practices, Dahl notes that had penicillin been available (it was discovered not long after, in 1928), his sister’s appendicitis and his father’s pneumonia would have been easily cured.
Resilience enters the narrative again as Dahl recounts how his mother didn’t give up hope. Despite the tragedy of losing her daughter and husband just before giving birth to another child, Sofie stays in the UK to fulfill her husband’s wish that his children attend English schools. In his opinion, English schools are the finest in the world.
The theme of adventure arises as Dahl details the earliest experiences he can recall. The image of a boy riding a bicycle without holding the handlebars is seared into Dahl’s memory. He fantasizes about having the same freedom as the boy, the same adventure of sailing down a hill with the wind in his hair. Although Dahl doesn’t speculate on why the memory is so important, it carries symbolic weight. By the end of the book, Dahl will have become a fighter pilot, fulfilling a love of adventure that may have been ignited by the sight of the cycling boy.
Trickery enters the story with Dahl’s and his friend’s plot to prank Mrs. Pratchett, the loathsome candy shop owner. The elation the boys feel after Dahl puts the dead mouse in her gobstoppers jar is quickly undercut by a sense of dread when they see the shop is closed. As the boys go to school, the imagined consequences of their actions make the boys go silent, and Dahl must live, briefly, with the remorse of believing he may have killed Mrs. Pratchett. However, she turns out to be alive; in an instance of situational irony, she has formed an alliance with the boys’ cruel Headmaster. Together, they will exact revenge against the misbehaving boys.
