Whenever I read these two Roald Dahl autobiographies, I tend to read them together, because they are two halves of the same story. Boy talks about Dahl’s childhood, and sets the stage for Going Solo, which is about Dahl’s career with the Shell Company right before the outbreak of the Second World War, and then it’s about his service in the Royal Air Force. I love the introduction to Going Solo, which mentions that the first part of the book is edited to take out the boring bits, but the second half includes everything, because “every moment was…absolutely thrilling.”

Dahl has long been one of my favourite authors, and I keep meaning to read his books for adults, some of which are supposed to be quite racy. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of my favourite children’s books, and Danny the Champion of the World is one of my favourite books of all time, bar none.

So anyway. Boy is truly awesome, and you can see where Dahl got his inspiration for many of his books, ranging from ferocious mean adults to sweet store pranks. One thing about the book which particularly interests me is his discussion of corporal punishment in British schools. It was a widely accepted practice when Dahl went to school, and he wrote quite compellingly about his repugnance for the practice. I’ve also noted that several of his books also condemn corporal punishment, so it’s obviously something that continued to bother him long after he grew out of childhood.

It’s also fascinating to read about Dahl’s family, from his one-armed father to his determined mother who managed to keep their family together after the death of her oldest daughter and Dahl’s father in a short period of time. That can’t have been a mean feat in Wales in the 1920s. There are also a number of comic vignettes in the book which are quite sweet and excellent.

In Going Solo, I loved reading about Dahl’s time working for the Shell Company in Africa, and the adventures he had there. His experiences as a pilot are also fascinating to read about, and his quiet condemnation of the way that the war was fought in the Middle East and Greece is quite excellent. He certainly pulled no punches when he bemoaned the “pointless waste of life” among young RAF pilots, and with good reason: of the 16 men he trained with, 14 died in the war.

These books read like Dahl’s children’s books, in some ways, only all the more exciting because they are real, supplemented with excerpts from letters and photographs.

Demographics:

Boy, by Roald Dahl. Published 1984, 176 pages. Autobiography.

Going Solo, by Roald Dahl. Published 1986, 210 pages. Autobiography.