Summary
On Sunday mornings at St. Peter’s, Dahl and the other pupils write letters home. The weekly letters to his mother become a habit for Dahl, and he will keep them up until the day she dies thirty-two years later. He does not know that she keeps every letter in neat bundles held together with green tape.
While writing letters home, Dahl is aware of the Headmaster, who runs the school for profit, leaning over students’ shoulders to see if they are writing anything negative about his institution. Because of this, Dahl only ever says nice things about the masters and food. To make it seem as though the letters aren’t being censored, the Headmaster won’t let the boys correct spelling errors, giving the parents the impression the letters are genuine expressions of the boys’ feelings.
The dormitories are overseen by the Matron, a terrifying, large, fair-haired woman with a pronounced bosom. She relishes the power to send any boy who misbehaves to be caned by the Headmaster. One night he opens her room so she can put iodine on his scraped knee and he finds her locked in an embrace with the Latin teacher.
One night a boy gets caught eating candy when he shouldn’t be, and when he doesn’t fess up, all the boys have their tuck-box keys confiscated. For the six weeks remaining in the term, they are all famished. One boy, Arkle, keeps his frog fed and moist in the tuck-box by feeding and watering him through a hole in the lid. Dahl respects his care for small animals and spends the rest of his life trying to treat small creatures with the same care.
One night a boy named Tweedie is snoring. Matron gets angry, saying that it is a habit for the lower classes. She switches the lights on and drops flakes of soap in the sleeping boy’s mouth. Soon white foam gurgles over his lips. He claws at his face and asks what’s happening. Matron throws a washcloth to him and tells him to never snore again, saying he shouldn’t sleep on his back.
When Dahl’s homesickness gets bad, he fakes being sick with acute appendicitis. He knows the symptoms because one of his sisters has had it and was operated on at home. He fools Matron and gets to return home. His regular doctor, Dunbar, knows right away that Dahl is faking because his stomach is soft, not hard. The doctor understands Dahl is homesick and says he has to stick it out at the boarding school. He says he’ll tell the school Dahl has a stomach infection that he is curing with pills. He says Dahl can stay home three more days, but he mustn’t do this again because his mother has enough to deal with already. Dahl promises he won’t do it again.
Dahl is delighted to go home again during the Christmas holidays. It is only because he has been away that he appreciates the joys of being back. The family goes for their first-ever drive in the new motor-car they own, a black French car called a De Dion-Bouton. His older sister, who does not have a license because there is no licensing in the era, drives with a scarf tied over her hair. Everyone in the family urges her to drive fast. She speeds up and then brakes around a sudden curve, locking the wheels into a skid. The car hits a hedge and everyone flies out through the windscreen.
Miraculously, only Dahl is badly hurt. The glass of the windscreen has nearly taken his nose off. With a calm but stern attitude, Dahl’s mother directs the sister to drive the shattered car into the city to bring Dahl to the doctor. The children sit in the glass shards. Dr. Dunbar says he can sew Dahl’s nose back on. He puts Dahl under with chloroform and Dahl wakes feeling sick. His mother has given him a gold sovereign coin with King George V’s head on it. She says it’s for being brave, and that she’s proud of him.
Aside from the Headmaster, the teacher at St. Peter’s that Dahl most fears is Captain Hardcastle, a slim, wiry football player. He has bright orange hair and a matching mustache curled up at the ends. The confusion displayed in his furrowed brow suggests he is a man of “very limited intelligence.” He twitches and jerks constantly, apparently because of the shell-shock he experienced during WWI. He teaches Latin and seems to "have it out" for Dahl from day one.
Dahl catches Captain Hardcastle’s attention when he breaks his writing nib and asks another boy to lend him a new one. Captain Hardcastle accuses Dahl of cheating for talking to Dobson. The Headmaster doesn’t believe Dahl’s story, and gives him six strokes of the cane. A boy named Highton is incensed by the injustice, and he writes a letter to his father to try to do something about it. Nothing comes of it, but Dahl appreciates the gesture of solidarity nonetheless.
Analysis
Dahl’s love of writing begins while he attends St. Peter’s and is made to send his mother weekly letters home. The practice helps him retain a connection to home in an era when it wasn’t yet common for people to own phones. In an instance of dramatic irony, Dahl’s mother receives the letters without realizing that her son’s writing is being implicitly censored by the school’s Headmaster. She, like the other parents, is fooled into thinking all the boys are happy with their teachers and their accommodation.
In truth, the boys have many complaints, but they cannot be honest when the Headmaster is lurking over their shoulders. Showing his own capacity for trickery, the Headmaster won’t allow the boys to correct the spelling errors he points out. The result is that the letters appear genuine, and as though no authority figure has overseen their creation.
Although Sofie hoped her son’s new English boarding would be better than the Welsh school run by the violent Mr. Coombes, Roald deals with the same sadistic authority figures at St. Peter’s. The threat of corporal punishment doesn’t only loom over his time in class; it also haunts his nights and evening in the dormitories. The Matron, a woman in charge of the boys’ well-being while they are living at the school, ironically hates children.
While the role might have been best-suited to someone who enjoys looking after boys, the Matron is eager to punish the boys for the slightest infraction. This capacity for evil is encapsulated in the image of her pouring soap flakes into a sleeping boy’s mouth. She wishes to punish him for snoring, a habit over which he clearly has no control.
The atmosphere of terror does little to help Dahl overcome his longing for home. The theme of trickery enters the story again as Dahl recounts how he fools the Matron into believing he has appendicitis by modeling the same symptoms his older sister recently had. The fakery doesn’t convince Dr. Dunbar, however. Although the reader has been primed to fear and distrust authority figures and medical practitioners, Dunbar undermines the reader’s expectations when he treats Dahl with compassion, sympathizing with his homesickness. Rather than submit Dahl to punishment at school, he lies on Dahl’s behalf, giving him some time at home.
The theme of resilience arises again with the Dahl family’s car crash. Although they are all thrown through the car’s dual windshields, only Dahl is badly hurt. Rather than succumb to panic and despair, Sofie demonstrates her immense resilience. She takes charge of the situation and directs Dahl’s traumatized sister to drive the busted car into town so the doctor can sew Dahl’s nose back on. For this surgery at least, Dahl is knocked unconscious with chloroform, a liquid anesthetic.
Back at school, Dahl finds himself as Captain Hardcastle’s target. The man seems to wait for Dahl to slip up, and leaps on the opportunity to punish him when he sees Dahl ask to borrow another student’s writing nib. Dahl receives six strikes of the Headmaster’s cane, punishment for something he didn’t do. Dahl feels some comfort at least when a fellow student, in a gesture of solidarity and sympathy, offers to write a letter to his father, as he knows Dahl’s own father is dead. The compassion Highton shows Dahl helps him move past the incident, helping him feel more resilient.
