Summary
During his third term, Dahl gets the flu and so is kept in the Matron’s Sick Room. A seven-year-old named Ellis is there too because he has a plum-sized boil on his thigh. One day, the doctor visits and Dahl watches as he cuts off the boil with a scalpel. Again, there is no anesthetic used; the doctor merely covers the child’s face with a towel as he digs into the boy’s thigh.
Dahl’s elder sister gets engaged to an English doctor who travels with them that summer to Norway. The younger siblings resent his presence because he and the sister spend so much time alone, being in love with each other. While the man swims, Dahl removes the tobacco from his pre-prepared pipe and adds a pinch of dry goat droppings, covering it with a layer of tobacco. The whole family watches, including Dahl’s mother, and he senses the glow of approval.
The sister’s manly lover emerges dripping from the water. He picks up his pipe and lights it, talking of the clean Navy Cut tobacco he prefers. After a moment, he coughs, and jumps in the air. He splutters while saying he has been poisoned. The sister is concerned until one of the children finally laughs, admitting that he smoked “goat’s tobacco.” The sister and her lover understand what they mean, and as the anger shows on the man’s face, Dahl and his siblings leap into the water.
At thirteen, Dahl starts attending Repton, a famous Public School (i.e., what is called in the United States a private school). He is reluctant to wear the fancy, stiff-collared uniform the school requires. The black coat with its long tails makes Dahl feel like an undertaker’s apprentice. Luckily, no one in England, where the family now lives, takes notice of his outfit. His mother says English men have always dressed eccentrically. Dahl boards a train full of boys dressed identically.
At Repton, the prefects (older students put in charge of enforcing discipline on younger students, who have to serve them) are called Boazers. They have “power of life and death” over the junior boys. They thrash the juniors with a cane for any minor misstep, such as failing to light their fire in time for study, or for burning the older boys’ tea-time toast.
The Headmaster at Repton never addresses more than six sentences to Dahl, but Dahl nonetheless forms a negative impression of the short bald man. Interestingly, the Headmaster will become a Bishop, then Archbishop of Canterbury. Dahl will one day watch the man who used to “deliver the most vicious beating to the boys under his care” crown the Queen on television.
Dahl comments on why he is spending so much time detailing the beatings he and other boys received. He says he cannot avoid the topic because even in old age he can feel the cane’s damage on his backside when sitting on a hard chair. As a boy, Dahl watches the Headmaster, a clergyman at the time, caning a boy so hard his bottom bleeds; the next day, Dahl watches the same man deliver a lecture in the school chapel about "Mercy and Forgiveness."
Dahl says a boy in his situation is forced to ask himself if these men of God preach one thing and practice another. The hypocrisy makes Dahl have doubts about religion and God. If the Headmaster is God’s salesman on earth, there must be something rotten about the whole business of religion.
Analysis
The theme of undeveloped medical practices comes up again as Dahl recounts witnessing a fellow student receive treatment for a boil—an inflamed pus swelling on the skin. As the reader has been primed to expect, the doctor operates without delicacy or pain-numbing. In an action sure to traumatize the little boy (and last in Dahl’s memory), the doctor covers the child’s screaming mouth with a towel and digs out the pus with a knife.
Although it is unclear whether Dahl’s sister’s fiancé is unlikeable in part because he is a doctor, Dahl nonetheless exacts some revenge against the medical profession. Touching again on the theme of trickery, Dahl recounts how he pranks his older sister’s fiancé by switching out his pipe tobacco with dry goat excrement. In an instance of situational irony, Dahl’s mother watches her son do it but doesn’t try to intervene. Like him, she is mischievous and playful.
At thirteen Dahl starts attending “big school,” the British term for high school. He is horrified by the school’s uniform, which he believes makes him look like someone who works at a funeral parlor, preparing bodies for display in coffins. However, in an instance of situational irony, Dahl learns that everyone else in England is dressed eccentrically. In an image that symbolizes Dahl’s integration into this strange new world, he boards a train full of boys dressed exactly like him.
The theme of school corporal punishment arises with Dahl’s commentary on the hierarchy of students at Repton. As a thirteen-year-old, Dahl is expected to serve older prefects, known as Boazers. The Boazers are just as violent and sadistic as the cane-wielding Headmasters, and look for any excuse to publicly abuse the juniors. Dahl uses hyperbole to emphasize his great fear of the Boazers, saying that they have power of life and death over him. While they do not actually have the authority of the criminal justice system, it feels as though they could kill him if they wanted to.
Dahl’s thoughts on school corporal punishment lead to a reflection on religious hypocrisy—a theme that has yet to enter the story. Although Dahl has been raised in a Christian country where he is expected to attend public prayers in the assembly hall every morning, he spends little time in the book reflecting on whether or not he believes in God. His avoidance of the subject is explained somewhat when he comments on how the hypocrisy of the clergyman Headmaster at Repton and other religious authority figures led him to a negative association between God and violence.
Dahl implicitly distrusts a man who preaches religious principles like forgiveness when the same man is notorious for his vicious beatings. In an instance of situational irony, the vicious Headmaster will later become Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church. In the role, this man who used to beat boys’ bottoms until they bled is responsible for crowning Queen Elizabeth at her coronation in 1953.
