Dahl’s time as an active fighter pilot lasted barely a month, but those thirty-two days reconfirmed him both as a loner and as a survivor. They gave him the need to write as well as something to write about. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine any of Dahl’s first stories being written without his experience as a flyer. All of them are intimately bound up with it. Many touch on the ecstasy of flying itself. Others deal with the confused tangle of human emotions he experienced in that short but intense four weeks in Greece. Most reveal a deeply fatalistic streak, so much so that one is tempted to wonder whether writing them may initially have been a kind of therapy, a way of making some sort of sense out of the muddle of conflicting emotions to which he had been exposed. Later, that act of writing would become habitual, a necessary escape from another reality. Then his claustrophobic, dark writing hut itself became a surrogate cockpit — a place where, in “tight, warm, dark” 42 surroundings, he could reconnect with that potent mixture of excitement, fear, beauty, horror, humour, wonder and exaltation that he had felt as a fighter pilot and that first animated his desire to tell stories. There, he could let his guard down. There, he surely penned that list of pilots in his address book, with the number of kills beside each name and an X against those who had died in combat.
Each name must have reminded him of the hard reality that lay behind so much of his literary fantasy. Some were the briefest imaginable record of a human life that had been extinguished in a random and unnecessary manner, perhaps by the tiniest jink on an aerial turn or the slightest misjudgement of pressure from a foot on the rudder bar. The list may even have become a kind of talisman. A covenant, almost, between the writer and his past; between Roald and those who had not been so fortunate as he. In that sense it may even represent the very germ of his literary imagination.
*With his broad shoulders and bushy moustache, Tap Jones was clearly the model for Monkey, the squadron leader in Dahl’s unpublished short story, “The Ginger Cat”. There Dahl describes him as “a big fine man with a black moustache” — RDMSC 5/14/1—3.
†These “kills”, reported in Going Solo and confirmed in Dahl’s logbook whose entries were signed off by “Tap” Jones, are not mentioned in 80 Squadron’s operations record book, which credits all nine confirmed successes on those days to other pilots. Yet in this instance Dahl’s own account is probably the more reliable. The squadron’s own records were destroyed before they left Greece, so reconstructing what actually happened there relied largely on intelligence summaries and on the vagaries of human memory. Individual logbooks were rarely used, although these often provided the most accurate firsthand evidence of events.
‡ Harold Matson, Letter to RD, 18/05/42 — RDMSC RD 1/1/1/4. Dahl later rewrote “A Piece of Cake”, removing Oofy completely, and replacing him with another pilot alter ego called Peter, who was based on Douglas McDonald. One senses that many of the characters in his early stories — Fin, Stuffy, the Monkey, and the Stag, for example — were based on pilots he had met during his short time in 80 Squadron.
§Though he regularly misspells Pattle’s name in his logbook, Dahl agreed with those who hailed the South African ace as the “top-scoring” RAF pilot of the war — See Christopher Shores, Brian Cull and Nicola Malizia, Air War for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete 1940—1941 (London: Grub Street, 1987).
¶Shores, Hill and Malizia describe the raid as taking place on the following morning, but Dahl’s logbook makes clear it happened that evening.
**Interestingly, Dahl recounts this story the other way round in his short story “Katina”. There he is given the package in Elevsis by a man “in civilian clothes” and carrying “a revolver in one hand and a small bag in the other” — Collected Stories, p. 42.
††Perhaps Dahl remembered this detail and used it as the inspiration for the child Katina, who at the climax of the short story he named after her stands amidst the flames at Argos and shakes her fist in anger at the attacking German planes. Ironically, Dahl was probably unaware that John Grigson, the pompous air commodore who had asked him to fly back to Elevsis with that secret package, was also identified by Bill Vale as the symbol of this futile resistance. In the centre of the field, with rifle to shoulder and aircraftman to load for him, the two men stood “as calmly as if they were on the grouse moors, while the 109s fairly plastered the place” — Wisdom, Wings Over Olympus, p. 199.
‡‡Coke was “almost inevitably” killed in action later that year — Going Solo, p. 201.
Alive But Earthbound
SOFIE MAGDALENE WAS AN incurable optimist. All through the summer of 1939, despite constant pressure to move from Bexley to the remote seaside resort of Tenby, where the family had spent so many holidays together, she remained determined to sit out the war in her big, rambling home with her two younger daughters and their menagerie of animals, believing that somehow she would manage to evade the German bombers there. For a while, it looked as if her stubbornness would pay off, as the “Phoney War”, which had begun in September that year, continued on into winter and then into spring. Spring even moved into early summer with none of the predicted German attacks. Food rationing and blackout restrictions aside, for the average British civilian there was little tangible sense of being involved in military conflict. Moreover, as long as Neville Chamberlain remained prime minister, there was still an outside chance that some sort of peace might eventually be concluded with the Nazis.
Ironically for the Dahls, the series of events that precipitated the end of this twilight war began when the Nazis invaded Norway on April 10, 1940. In response, the British despatched an Expeditionary Force there to support their new Norwegian allies, but the short-lived campaign was so badly planned and mismanaged that, a month later, it forced Chamberlain’s resignation. After a short struggle for the premiership with Viscount Halifax, Chamberlain’s aloof and patrician foreign secretary, Winston Churchill, the maverick leader of the anti-Nazi Conservative faction in Parliament, emerged as the new prime minister. The same day that he entered Downing Street as the leader of a new all-party wartime government, Hitler invaded Luxemburg, Holland and Belgium. Within forty-eight hours, German Panzer divisions were pushing into France. As French defences collapsed, almost a quarter of a million British troops had to be evacuated back to the United Kingdom from Dunkirk. By mid-June, Paris was occupied, and France on the brink of surrender that became reality a few days later. Suddenly Britain was alone. On June 18, Churchill announced to the nation grimly that the Battle of France was over and that the Battle of Britain was surely about to begin. Nevertheless, as British forces retreated from mainland Europe, he brushed aside any suggestion of making peace with the Nazis. “We shall fight on,” he declared. Hitler felt he