Miranda Reads's Reviews > Going Solo

Whew! This man did more within a year than I have in my life.

And the giraffes would incline their heads very slightly and stare down at me with languorous demure expressions, but they never ran away. I found it exhilarating to be able to walk freely among such huge graceful wild creatures and talk to them as I wished.

This is the second half of Dahl's autobiography. What a wild life! Right after high school, Roald packed up his belongings, got a job for the Shell company and set off for Africa. For three years. No visits home, no calling his mom, just up and leaves his beloved family for a life of adventure. And during his time in Africa, a lion carries away a woman, a black mamba attacks his servant and a green mamba invades a house to kill a family dog.

It's quite interesting to hear an unfiltered account of that time. For example, all the men at the Shell company had a "boy." Now, this "boy" was actually a full grown man. He had a wife (sometimes wives) to support and essentially acted as a butler. He spoke Swahili and so did Roald (it was not considered right to force the "boys" to learn English). Roald taught his boy how to read and write, and his boy tended Roald's every need. It was strange to read about.

Only, before Roald could finish his time with the Shell company...the Great War broke out. And that was quite a story in itself. Roald joined the airforce and was trained as a pilot. As in, he was give 7 and a half hours of in-flight training before being declared fit for service along with fifteen other new pilots. Then, they were given fighter planes and told to get up in the air. Unsurprisingly, this happened:

It is a fact, and I verified it carefully later, that out of those sixteen, no less than thirteen were killed in the air within the next two years

All this before he turned twenty-five. The things he had to live through churned my stomach - e specially the account of how he crashed his first plane. Dahl spares no details and, as always, his stories were absolutely fascinating.

The PopSugar 2018 Reading Challenge - A childhood classic you never read

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