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An interesting article

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In Boy, Dahl describes his first experience of doing this. "I got off the lavatory seat and pulled up my trousers. Wilberforce [the boazer] lowered his own trousers and sat down. 'Very good,' he said. 'Very good indeed.' He was like a wine-taster sampling an old claret. 'I shall put you on my list,' he added. I stood there doing up my fly-buttons and not knowing what on earth he meant. 'Some fags have cold bottoms,' he said, 'and some have hot ones. I only use hot-bottomed fags to heat my bog seat. I won't forget you.'"

Reading the early drafts of Boy, one senses much pent-up bitterness towards Dahl's years there. It was a resentment he clearly struggled to control, and, in the final version, many of his most traumatic memories were expunged or watered down. Even so, the book caused considerable controversy among Old Reptonians when it was published in 1984. But the first draft was more contentious. It painted a portrait of a profoundly melancholy boy, for whom the pleasures of youth had been stifled by an unfair system that was devoid of affection, and whose chief memories were those of loneliness and fear. "Four years is a long time to be in prison," Dahl writes. "It becomes twice as long when it is taken out of your life just when you are at your most bubbly best and the fields are all covered with daffodils and primroses... It seemed as if we were groping through an almost limitless black tunnel at the end of which there glimmered a small bright light, and if we ever reached it we would be 18 years old."

He continues with a description of "plodding endless terms", "grey classrooms" and "incredibly dull teachers... who never stopped to talk to you". The images of isolation and misery are relentless. "At Repton the teachers gained no respect from us nor did they try to. As for the senior boys, they were so busy acting the part of being senior, and so conscious of the power they wielded, that they never bothered to be friendly. They didn't have to be. They ruled us by fear." Independence of spirit and wit in the younger boys was stamped on and regarded as "side". And being "sidey" to a boazer was unthinkable.

Writes Roald: "Once, during my second year when I was 15, I was 'sidey' to a boy called WW Wilson, who was16. WW Wilson wasn't even a study-holder. He was just a second, but he didn't like what I had said, and at once he rounded up half-a-dozen seconds and they hunted me down. I ran into the yard where they cornered me and grabbed hold of my arms and legs and carried me bodily back into the 'house'. In the changing room, they held me down while one of them filled a bath brimful of icy-cold water, and into this they dropped me, clothes and all, and held me in there for several agonising minutes. 'Push his head under water!' cried WW Wilson. 'That'll teach him to keep his mouth shut!' I choked and spluttered and half-drowned, and when at last they released me and I crawled out of the bath, I didn't have any dry clothes to change into."

Thankfully, Dahl's friend Peter Ashton gives this episode a redemptive twist, providing a spare suit for the soaking Roald, who is deeply grateful for this rare "act of mercy" in a world that was filled almost entirely with loneliness and terrors.

Repton also boasted an entrenched system of corporal punishment for offences as minor as forgetting to hang up your football kit in the changing room. In the 1930s, the cane or the strap were, as Tim Fisher described it, "an automatic and assumed part of the growing-up process". They were part of a culture of toughening children up that would survive in England well into the 1960s. As an adult, Dahl objected profoundly to the culture of violence he felt existed at Repton and most of all to the fact that the great majority of beatings were performed by other boys. "Our lives were quite literally ruled by fear of the cane," he wrote.

The white-gloved boazer Carleton, searching his study for the speck of dust that would justify a thrashing, was typical. In Dahl's eyes, he was simply a sadistic thug with a licence to inflict pain. Carleton - actually a boy called Hugh Middleton - was perhaps the most dreaded of Dahl's boazers. He was a "supercilious and obnoxious 17-year-old" with a cane that became an object of fetishistic interest to the other boys. His "creamy-white monster about four feet long with bamboo-like ridges all along its length and a round bobble the size of a golf ball where the handle would have been" struck terror into a fag's heart. "Other Boazers used their OTC (Army) swagger-sticks when they beat the Fags, but not Middleton."

The beatings were usually performed in the boazer's study shortly before going to bed. The victim had a choice: fewer strokes with his dressing gown off or more with it on. Afterwards, the boy thanked the boazer for his thrashing before returning to his dormitory, where he would undergo a ritual inspection of his wounds.

In Boy, Dahl describes such an occasion. The ace cricketer, Jack Mendl, had just beaten him, delivering four strokes, "so fast it was all over in four seconds". Now back in the "bedder", his fellows insist Roald take down his trousers to show them his damaged buttocks. Dahl does not dwell on the "excruciating burning pain" he is suffering. Instead, he recalls the boys' detailed analysis of Mendl's handiwork. "Half a dozen experts would crowd around you and express their opinions in highly professional language. 'What a super job.' 'He's got every single one in the same place!' 'Boy, that Williamson's [Mendl] got a terrific eye!' 'Of course he's got a terrific eye! Why d'you think he's a Cricket Teamer?'"

The scene is comic. At the end, Mendl himself appears in the dormitory, "to catch a glimpse of my bare bottom and his own handiwork".

However, the first draft of Boy also contains psychological analysis, unusual in Dahl's writing, that is revealing: "It is clear to me now that these boys had developed this curiously detached attitude towards these vile tortures in order to preserve their sanity. It was an essential defensive mechanism. Had they crowded round and commiserated and tried to comfort me, I think we would all have broken down."

Among its other influences, Repton was conditioning Dahl to suppress many of his own fundamental emotional responses and to find consolation in disconnection and standing apart.

Mendl's beatings, though fierce, were clinical and dispassionate. With Middleton, it was different. Middleton was not simply the real Carleton, he was also the model for the bully Bruce Foxley in Dahl's adult short story, Galloping Foxley, which he wrote in 1953. This was the first time Dahl had revisited his schooldays in fiction, and his descriptions of the fagging and corporal punishment are strikingly similar to those he later penned in Boy.

Foxley's speciality is to bound down the corridor at full tilt before inflicting each blow. The actual gallop down the changing rooms, "cane held high in the air", may be an exaggeration, but what are we to make of the narrator's admission that his schooldays at Repton made him "so miserable" that he had contemplated suicide?

Dahl does not seem a likely candidate for suicide. However, he believed that one of his friends had been badly treated by Repton - not so much because he had been expelled, but because he had been brutally beaten beforehand. This punishment affected him more deeply than any injury he himself received because the beater, this time, was his headmaster, "the Boss".

In Boy, Dahl's memories of that beating surged back with some ferocity. And this was one incident from the initial draft that he did not censor. His final account is almost entirely as he first described it. "Michael was ordered to take down his trousers and kneel on the Headmaster's sofa with the top half of his body hanging over one end of the sofa," he wrote. In between each "tremendous crack administered upon the trembling buttocks", the Boss would light his pipe and "lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing".

"At the end of it all," Roald continued, "a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers."

Ben Reuss, a fellow pupil, corroborated Dahl's memory of the bloody "mopping-up operations" and added that the beating made a considerable impression on everyone in the school. And, although both his sisters Else and Asta maintained that the Dahls had all been "brought up with no religion whatsoever", Roald would later claim that the incident made him begin "to have doubts about religion and even about God".

In his mind, it was all the more shocking and hypocritical because the perpetrator was Geoffrey Fisher, the man who later went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Unfortunately, Roald had made a mistake. Not for the first time, he sounded off before he had fully checked his facts. For the culprit was not Fisher at all, but his successor, John Christie. The beating happened in the summer of 1933, a year after Fisher, as Dahl records in his own letters home, had left Repton to become Bishop of Chester. More than 50 years later, however, Dahl blamed the "shoddy, bandy-legged" Fisher for the caning, and painted him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. "I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules."

That description was exaggerated. Beatings such as this were unusual. Michael himself was not a small boy, but an 18-year-old who had abused younger boys. Moreover, it was a surprising case of mistaken identity. For there is no evidence that Roald disliked Fisher, either while he was at school or after he left it.

* Extract taken from 'Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl', by Donald Sturrock, is published by HarperPress on September 6 for £25. To order for £23 plus £1.25pp, call Telegraph Books Direct on 0844 8711515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

© Donald Sturrock 2010

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In Boy, Dahl describes his first experience of doing this. "I got off the lavatory seat and pulled up my trousers. Wilberforce [the boazer] lowered his own trousers and sat down. 'Very good,' he said. 'Very good indeed.' He was like a wine-taster sampling an old claret.

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The whole book is fairly shy. A little boy living in boarding schools instead living with his family. The book also criticize former  British political education. I think Pink Floid inspired in "Boy" to create this fantastic song and video (another brick in the wall). If you watch the whole video, You'll recognise a lots of  things of the book.

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Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall (HQ)

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I love the story titled "Writing home" because due to this activity he finally wrote letters to his mother during thirty-two years, once a week (may be more) and in my opinion this is fantastic!!!

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The story I like most is the mouse plot.

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I love the whole book but I'll pick the story when he fakes appendicitis just to go home because he was homesick. I was so moved thinking about my own children or myself in a similar situation that I almost cried. Here's a great song about homesickness:

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John Denver - Back Home Again (with lyrics)