Book Reviews: Going Solo

This is another autobiography by Roald Dahl.   This one is about his time in the air force after leaving school.   It's obviously a story about courage, but it's also one about exotic adventures in a far-off land, but mostly it's just about a young man trying to find his way in the world.   It's also about how much surviving a battle is down to chance.   Very harrowing.   The number of near death experiences in this is...quite an eye-opener.   I enjoyed this one much more than Boy.   Again though, some thing that comes through very strongly is the strong relationship between Roald Dahl and his mother.   The ending, where Roald Dahl is shipped home due to injuries and is reunited with his mother moved me to tears.   Perhaps my favorite bit though, is the description of the people he met on the way out to Africa.   It reminds me so much of my life in an expat community.

“What I remember so clearly about the voyage is the extraordinary behaviour of my fellow passengers.   I had never before encountered that peculiar breed of Englishman who spends his whole life working in distant corners of British territory.   Please do not forget that in the 1930s the British Empire was still very much the British Empire, and the men and women who kept it going were a race of people that most of you have never encountered and now you never will.   I consider myself very lucky to have caught a glimpse of this rare species while it still roamed the forests and foot-hills of the Earth, for today, it is totally extinct.   More English than the English, more Scottish than the Scots, they were the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet.   For one thing, they spoke a language of their own.   If they worked in East Africa, their sentences were sprinkled with Swahili words, and if they lived in India then all manner of dialects were intermingled.   As well as this, there was a whole vocabulary of much-used words that seemed to be universal among all these people.   An evening drink, for example, was always a sundowner.   A drink at any other time was a chota peg.   One’s wife was the memsahib.   To have a look at something was to have a shufti.   And from that one, interestingly enough, RAF/Middle East slang for a reconnaissance plane in the last war was a shufti kite.   Something of poor quality was shenzi.   Supper was tiffin and so on and so forth.   The empire builders’ jargon would have filled a dictionary.   All in all, it was rather wonderful for me, a conventional young lad from the suburbs, to be thrust suddenly into the middle of this pack of sinewy sunburnt gophers and their bright bony little wives, and what I liked best of all about them was their eccentricities.  

It would seem that when  the British live for years in a foul and sweaty climate among foreign people they maintain their sanity by allowing themselves to go slightly dotty.   They cultivate bizarre habits that would never be tolerated back home, whereas in far-away Africa or in Ceylon or in India or in the federated Malay states they could do as they liked.   On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain, and for me it was like watching a kind of non-stop pantomime throughout the entire voyage.”