Chapter One Hundred Twelve: Boy: Tales of Childhood AND Going Solo

Boy: Tales of Childhood and Going Solo are Roald Dahl's autobiographies, intended for children--the audience he is perhaps best-known for writing for, although he also wrote works intended for adults.  Anyway, I don't know why I'd never read these autobiographies before, because I love everything by Roald Dahl that I've read so far (which is not all of his work, not by any means, but I'll get around to it all eventually).  So Roald Dahl actually had this really fascinating life!  I guess that's not surprising--he had to get all those fantastic story ideas from somewhere, so it makes sense that he might have done a lot of interesting things to get those ideas.  Boy focuses on his childhood, up to the age of 18; mostly it relates his days in various boarding schools, which sound fairly miserable (especially the beatings), but also fun times like summer family trips to Norway, and some hairy medical experiences (having his nose almost ripped off his face in a car crash; having his adenoids out without general anesthetic).  Going Solo focuses on his life after he left boarding school: he decided he wanted to see the world, and the best way to do that was to go and work for a large company with many foreign branches.  So he ended up getting a job with Shell Oil that sent him to eastern Africa, to what is now Tanzania.  And then while he was there, World War Two broke out, so he joined the RAF as a pilot and had all sorts of adventures and a horrific injury as well, which he obviously survived or he wouldn't have been able to go on to become a famous writer.  Going Solo ends when he finally returns back to his mother's home from the war, and it is quite possibly one of the most moving ends to a book I've yet read.  Mostly Boy and Going Solo take a humorous or at least light tone, even when the content is a bit heavy--Dahl is a master of that sort of thing, after all--but the end was quite moving, which I wasn't expecting but which I really appreciated.  For anyone who wants to learn about Roald Dahl as a person, or about one man's experience growing up in Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, or about his experience as a fighter pilot in the RAF during WWII in Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, or for anyone who just wants an interesting story about an interesting life, I'd highly recommend Boy and Going Solo.