These was one final piece of mythmaking. On almost every occasion that he retold the events of that evening in the last forty years of his life, Dahl recounted them as if he was entirely on his own. But there was another pilot involved. This man flew with him from Fouka in a different Gladiator, safely put his machine down on the sand close by the wreckage of Dahl’s plane, and comforted the burned and bleeding Roald through the long cold desert night. And in Dahl’s earliest versions of these events, “Shot Down Over Libya” and “A Piece of Cake”, both of which were written in wartime, he too is present in the narrative. In fiction, this man was called “Shorty” or “Peter”. In reality, he was Douglas McDonald. McDonald, who had grown up in Kenya and learned to fly before the war at the Aero Club of East Africa, saw his friend “Lofty” that night in extremis — demoralized, tortured by pain and profoundly physically vulnerable. So vulnerable indeed that until, fifty years later, when he had to face the final days of his own terminal illness, he would always recall it as the worst moment of his life.29 Dahl had always liked to appear strong. His position, since childhood, as the dominant male in his family household inclined him to support others, to be the paterfamilias. In this narrative, there was little place for weakness and incapacity. Consequently, “Shorty” or “Peter” soon disappeared from his retelling of the events of the crash. Yet in a remarkable letter written to Douglas McDonald’s widow, Barbara, in 1953 — not long after her husband’s death in a plane crash in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro — Roald offered a tiny glimpse of just how exposed he felt that evening and how much he had needed the simple consolation of human warmth and company:
I expect he’s told you a little of what happened that evening in the desert when we both came down, and I crashed. But I doubt he explained how really marvellous he was to me, and looked after me and tried to comfort me, and stayed with me out there during a very cold night, and kept me warm. Well, he did. And I shall always remember it most vividly, even some of the things he said (because I was quite conscious) and most of all how, when he ran over and found me not dead, he did a sort of dance of joy in the sand and it was all very wonderful, because after all we were not very far away from the Italians and he had a great many other things to think about? 30
The letter is significant not just because it makes plain exactly what happened that night, but also because it also gives us a rare insight into Roald’s sense of vulnerability. This was not a side of his personality that he normally disclosed to the world, preferring to present in its place the image of the stalwart problem solver or the ebullient humorist. These of course were real enough qualities as well, but sometimes they served also to mask feelings of inadequacy or weakness. The pattern had started in his youth. For his mother’s sake, he had cultivated a stiff upper lip and taken pains to conceal his own suffering. This attitude would continue throughout his life. His earliest short stories about flying do reveal occasional cracks in the facade, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in his earlier versions of the immediate aftermath of the crash, where in the “bitter cold” of the desert, “Peter lay down close alongside so we could both keep a little warmer … I do not know how long we stayed there … Later I remember hot thick soup and one spoonful making me sick. And all the time the pleasant feeling that Peter was around, being wonderful, doing wonderful things and never going away.”31
Before he left the Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Roald spent all of the money that had accumulated in his bank account buying a gold watch for each of the three nursing sisters who had looked after him. It was an act of characteristic generosity. Giving presents had been and would always be an essential part of his psychological makeup. Within the family, this could sometimes be interpreted as reinforcing his position as the dominant successful male, but with others the impulse was usually entirely altruistic. It was an attitude that would soon be echoed in the behaviour of others toward him — most strikingly, a wealthy English couple, Major Teddy Peel and his wife Dorothy. Following a new set of medical examinations, Dahl was sent back to Alexandria to convalesce at their home. Like many of the wealthier British inhabitants of Alexandria, the Peels made a point of visiting injured officers in hospital, and Dorothy had taken a particular liking to the charming, fragile giant, persuading him to abandon his plans to recuperate in the Kenyan Highlands and insisting that he stay as a guest in their spacious villa on the rue des Ptolemees. There, Roald told his mother that he spent most of his time “doing practically nothing at all with the greatest possible comfort”. Dahl, of course, had been raised without financial worries. He was used to servants and now had a small private income from his father’s trust. Nevertheless, he was amazed by the lavish expatriate Alexandrian lifestyle, noting — perhaps a little critically — that even in wartime, everyone there seemed to have “pots of money”.32
His hosts were admiringly described as “probably the nicest and richest people” in town, with five cars, a large motor yacht, and a twin-engined aeroplane of their own.33 In their house he slept on silk and linen sheets, often for twelve hours at a stretch, listened to Beethoven, Brahms and Elgar on the gramophone, made occasional conversation, and tried to regain some of the 30 pounds he had lost since the accident. Once or twice he even ventured out to play a few holes of golf. But his recovery was slow. He tired easily, his mind often felt sluggish, and he suffered from severe and prolonged headaches. He complained that he could not even concentrate sufficiently to play a hand of bridge and was prone to blackouts — particularly when he went out of the house.
After a month with the Peels, Dahl’s headaches had become less fre quent, and in February 1941, he was sent to RAF Heliopolis, near Cairo, where he was put on “light duties”, looking after air force pay packets and ferrying messages across town in a chauffeur-driven car. One day, on a trip into Cairo, he accidentally ran into Lesley Pares, a friend of Alfhild’s, who was working for the Air Ministry. Lesley was immediately struck by Roald’s good looks and rakish charm. In our conversations, she recalled him nonchalantly performing Beethoven’s three-minute bagatelle, Fur Elise, in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo as if he was an accomplished pianist, then later confessing to her privately that it was the only thing he could play. She found him unpredictable, attractive and compelling. But she also found him indiscreet, which unsettled her, as did the fact that he could be argumentative and dogmatic. She tried to avoid encounters between him and another friend of hers who was a conscientious objector, because Roald was “rather fierce” on the subject of pacifism.34
For his part, Roald took an immediate liking to Lesley, describing her to his mother as “much nicer than the average Judy one meets here — most of them are bloody awful”.35 Her forthrightness, lack of pretension and disregard for unnecessary politesse reminded him of his family. “I like Lesley because she’s the first woman I’ve met since I left home to whom I can swear or say what I bloody well like without her turning a hair,” he wrote, adding humorously that she had probably been “well-trained” by his sister Alfhild.36 She became a regular companion. They went on picnics into the desert together, where they talked about his family, argued about politics (she remembered him being quite socialist), and discussed poetry.
Wartime Egypt had a thriving British expatriate social scene, and a fertile literary subculture