Boy: Tales of Childhood

As in the case of the memory of being six and racing his sister on his tricycle, Dahl has an endearing tendency to capture memories that typify what would engage a young child. His ultimate wish in the moment where he sees a 12-year-old boy ride by on his bike is to “wear long trousers with bicycle-clips” (24). In this context, long trousers symbolize being older, as opposed to Dahl’s shorts, which are worn by schoolboys. Dahl wishes to embody the boy’s confidence and style and resolves that one day, “I will go whizzing down the hill pedaling backwards with no hands on the handlebars” (24). This anecdote captures the restlessness of a young boy aspiring to embody the confidence and style of a young man.

The sweets at the sweetshop are exciting and alluring, and the children linger outside the window to stare longingly at them. Dahl conjures the excitement of the young children by detailing the pleasures of handling and eating the sweets: The Bootlace “used to be so long that when you unrolled it and held one end at arm’s length above your head, the other end touched the ground” (29). Dahl describes in detail the process of eating a Sherbet Sucker: “You sucked the sherbet up through the straw and when it was finished you ate the liquorice” (29). Such attention to detail evokes the feeling of being a young child, deliriously excited by all the pleasures that one's favorite treat can offer.  

Mrs. Pratchett is hyperbolically characterized as the epitome of all that a young child would find horrifying and intimidating. Humorously, she is the gatekeeper for the children to be able to access the array of sweets—the children’s “lifeblood”—necessitating constant contact with the terrifying woman (33). Her “loathsome” and filthy appearance is rendered through stark and jarring imagery: “Filth […] clung around her”; her mouth is “sour as a green gooseberry” and never smiles; her blouse is etched with “splotches of dried egg-yolk”; and her hands are “black with dirt and grime” (33). As well as being hyperbolically revolting in appearance, she is intimidating and rude, yelling at and frightening the children, accusing them of having “thieving fingers” (32). As in Dahl’s other childhood memories, he chooses moments that would stand out in a young child’s imagination. In this case, the power of the memory comes from the combination of horror and pleasure. The sweetshop is at once gloriously exciting—containing “Old Fashioned Humbugs and Strawberry Bonbons and Glacier Mints and Acid Drops”—and utterly terrifying, as it also contains the formidable Mrs. Pratchett (25).

Dahl suggests that the memories that stay with young children are the ones that\ provoke a strong emotional response. For the same reason, Dahl vividly remembers the humorous story told by Thwaites’s father about bootlaces being made from crushed rats, as well as the terror of being identified by Mrs. Pratchett and the subsequent pain and humiliation of the flogging with the cane. Mr. Coombes is rendered immense and terrifying in the mind of the young, terrified Dahl. He is a “giant of a man,” which illustrates the young Dahl’s intimidation by the headmaster (43). He compares the man to an “angel of death” as he walks along the line of children with Mrs. Pratchett, conveying Dahl’s immense and all-consuming fear (45).

As is typical of Dahl’s style, he uses humor to mitigate the trauma of the caning anecdote. Along with the pain and humiliation of the beating, he wonders whether “the wily Mr. Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke” (55).

In many ways, Dahl nostalgically celebrates the relative simplicity of his boyhood. For example, he is able to race along streets on his bicycle because cars are a rarity in his Welsh town. Furthermore, he conjures idyllic memories of his boyhood summers spent in Norway. On the other hand, Dahl condemns certain features of his childhood as old-fashioned and merciless, such as the painful and humiliating flogging he receives and the nonchalance surrounding the brutality of the adenoid operation conducted without anesthesia.