 Dahl's ancestry

Roald Dahl's father Harald Dahl and mother Sophie Hesselberg were Norwegians who lived
in Cardiff, Wales. Harald and his brother Oscar split up and went their separate ways, Oscar
going to La Rochelle, while Harald had lost an arm from complications after fracturing it. A
doctor was summoned, but was drunk on arrival and mistook the injury for a dislocated
shoulder. His attempt to relocate the shoulder caused further damage to the fractured arm,
necessitating an amputation. According to Dahl, his only serious problem was not being able to
cut the top off a boiled egg.
Harald Dahl had two children by his first wife, Marie, who died shortly after the birth of their
second child. He then married Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, Roald's mother. Harald was
considerably older than Sofie; he was born in 1863 and she was born in 1885. By the time Roald
Dahl was born in 1916, his father was 53 years old.
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 Family tragedy
When Roald was three years old, his seven-year-old sister Astri died of an infection from a burst
appendix. Only weeks later, Roald's father died of pneumonia. As the narrator of the book,
Dahl suggests his father died of grief from the loss of his daughter. Roald's mother was forced
to choose between moving the family to Norway with her relatives or relocating to a smaller
house in Wales to continue the children's education in the United Kingdom, and ended up
choosing the latter which is what her late husband had wanted.
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 Primary school
Roald Dahl started at the Elm Tree House Primary School in Cardiff when he was 6 years old. He
was there for a year, but has few memories of his time there because it was so long ago.
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 Sweets
Roald writes about different confectionery, his love of sweets, his fascination with the local
sweet shop, and in particular, about the free samples of Cadbury chocolate bars given to him
and his schoolmates when he was a pupil at Repton School. Young Dahl dreamt of working as
an inventor for Cadbury, an idea he has said later inspired Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Some of the sweets sold at Mrs Pratchett's sweet shop were: Lemon sherbets, pear drops, and
liquorice boot laces.
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 Great mouse plot of 1924
From the age of eight, Dahl attended Llandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff. He and his friends
had a grudge against the local sweet-shop owner, Mrs Pratchett, a sour, elderly widow who
gave no thought to hygiene (and described by Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock, as "a comic
distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life" [3]). They played a
prank on her by placing a dead mouse in a gobstopper jar while his friend Thwaites distracted
her by buying sweets. They were caned by the headmaster as a punishment.
Mrs Pratchett, who attended the canings, was not satisfied after the first stroke was delivered
and insisted the headmaster should cane much harder which he did: six of the hardest strokes
he could muster while Mrs Pratchett beamed with great delight as each boy suffered his
punishment.
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 St Peter's School, Weston-super-Mare
Roald attended St Peter's School, a boarding school in Weston-super-Mare from 1925, when he
was nine, to 1929, when he was twelve. He describes having received six strokes of the cane
after being accused of cheating at his classwork. In the essay about the life of a penny, he
claims that he still has the essay and that he had been doing well until the nib of his pen broke -
fountain pens were not accepted. He had to ask his classmate for another one, when Captain
Hardcastle heard him and accused him of cheating. Many of the events he describes involved
the matron. She once sprinkled soap shavings into Tweedie's mouth to stop his snoring. She
also sent a six-year-old boy, who had allegedly thrown a sponge across the dormitory, to the
headmaster. Still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, the little boy then received six strokes of
the cane. Wragg, a boy in Roald's dormitory, sprinkled sugar over the corridor floor so they
could hear that the matron was coming when she walked upon it. When the boy's friends
refused to turn him in, the whole school was punished by the headmaster who confiscated the
keys to their tuck boxes containing food parcels which the pupils had received from their
families. In the end, he returns home to his family for Christmas.
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 Repton and Shell Oil Company
After St Peter's, Roald's mother entered him for either Marlborough or Repton, but he chose
Repton because it was easier to pronounce. It is soon revealed Marlborough might have been a
better choice: life at Repton was a living hell. The prefects, named Boazers as per school
tradition, were utmost sadists and patrolled the school like secret police. The headmaster, Dahl
describes an occasion when his friend received several brutal strokes of the cane from the
headmaster as punishment for misbehaviour. According to Dahl, this headmaster was Geoffrey
Francis Fisher, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London in 1939.
However, according to Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, Dahl's memory was in error: the
beating took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster concerned
was in fact John Traill Christie, Fisher's successor.[4]
Despite this infernal school, Dahl did make friends with the Maths professor and a boy named
Michael. Even one of the Boazers, Wilberforce, took a liking to Dahl. Despite this being
punishment for Dahl's tardiness, Wilberforce was impressed by how Dahl warmed his lavatory
seat that he hired him as his personal lavatory warmer. Dahl also excelled in sports and
photography, something he says impressed various masters at the school.
After school, Dahl worked for Shell, despite the headmaster trying to dissuade him because of
his lack of responsibility. Dahl was nonetheless entered into the business and toured Britain in
the job. He became a businessman in London and was content. However, he took a trip across
Newfoundland which he says "was not much of a country" with some other boys and a man
who had travelled to Antarctica with Scott. He was then assigned to go to Africa, but declined
Egypt because it was "too dusty." The manager instead selected Dahl for East Africa, delighting
him. Roald Dahl sets off to Africa, now a young man, and unbeknownst to him, Adolf Hitler has
become chancellor of Germany and will soon split the world in two.
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