Please do not forget that in the 1930’s the British Empire was still very the British Empire, and the men and women who kept it going were a race of people that you 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 and the English, more Scottish than the Scots, they were the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet.
Going Solo is a memoir that picks up exactly where the previous autobiography—Boy: Tales of Childhood—left off. As the reader closes the cover on that book, Dahl has just learned he’s been appointed to a job in Africa working for Shell. The opening scene of this sequel has him setting sail aboard the SS Mantola in 1938 on his way from England to Mombasa. Take note of that date because like all those plans of mice and men, a thunder its rumbling its way to undercut much of that excitement about going to the land of lions, elephants and giraffes.
“You’ve got a few shocks coming to you, young man, before you’re very much older, you mark my words. People go quite barmy when they live too long in Africa. That’s where you’re off to, isn’t it? You’ll go barmy for sure, like the rest of us.”
Miss Trefusis is an elderly owner of a coffee farm in Kenya who had actually been an acquaintance of Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. She herself had not been out of Africa even in recent decades to maintain her Britishness in full. By her own admission, she’d gone barmy. For the uninitiated, that is British slang which Americans know much better as “going native.” In other words, if you stay in a foreign place too long, you begin to lose your sense of national identity related to where you came from and pick up habits from the natives of your new homeland. This quote is of particular interest when seen in conjunction with Dahl’s characterization of those who kept the Empire going during the 1930’s. Although on the surface, a critique of British ways and manners, the unspoken link here is that going native certifies one as being among the crazy bunch. Thus, those who show up in this memoir seem to be damned if they do or don’t in the eyes of the author.
Some forty years ago I described in a story called “A Piece of Cake” what it was like to find myself strapped firmly into the cockpit of my gladiator with a fractured skull and a bashed-in face and a fuzzy mind while the crashed plane was going up in flames on the sands of the Western Desert. But there is an aspect of that story that I feel ought to be clarified by me and it is this. There seems, on re-reading it, to be an implication that I was shot down by enemy action…I was not shot down either by another plane or from the ground.
The macabre aspects of many of Dahl’s stories written for kids have always made him a controversial writer, but perhaps the biggest controversy of his career stems from one of his earliest published work, “Shot Down in Libya.” The indisputable truth is that Dahl’s did suffer massive injuries in a fiery plane crash in North Africa during World War II. The original story’s title spells it out rather unambiguously: shot down in Libya. Subtle alteration of the details began to change once Dahl went from struggling unknown to very famous writer. As indicated here, “A Piece of Cake” is essentially a rewrite of “Shot Down in Libya” which begins to fuzzy up the strong indication in the original that he was the victim of enemy gunfire. By the time this memoir was published, the story had been changed again with the biggest difference now being Dahl trying to shift any blame for any misunderstanding onto the original publishers of the original story.
