Chapter 7: Repton

Chapter 7: Repton

In 1929, my mother asked me, “Do you want to go to Marlborough or Repton?”

They were famous and expensive English schools, but I knew nothing about them other than that.

“Repton,” I answered, because it was an easier word to say than “Marlborough”.

“Very well,” said my mother. “You will go to Repton.”

Repton was a boarding school in the middle of England. Every Repton boy wore the same, very strange, uniform. I wore it, and my sisters laughed at me.

I felt stupid in the clothes for Repton, but in the street my mother said, “You look good in your school uniform. People can see it. They think you are important because you go to a famous school.”

At the station, I saw many boys, and they all wore the same uniform. The train took us all away to Repton. I was thirteen years old.

Lots of strange things happened at Repton - they did at all English boarding schools. Older boys were always more important than younger boys, and a small group of the oldest boys were the most important of all.

At Repton, we called these boys “Boazers”. Boazers told us what to do, and we had to do it. We cleaned the Boazers’ rooms and made their fires. We sometimes cooked their breakfast. Boazers were always right, and younger boys were always wrong.

On Sundays, two other boys and I had to clean our Boazer’s room. We cleaned it for hours. We washed the floor, the windows and the walls.

But the Boazer often found something wrong with our cleaning, and he hit us with a cane.

A Boazer could stand in any room of the school and shout about a job. Then every young boy had to run to him. The slowest boy had to do the job. One snowy morning, I heard a Boazer shout about a job. I ran as fast as possible, but I was the slowest boy to get there.

“Dahl, come here,” said the Boazer. His name was Wilberforce. “Go and make my toilet warm.”

At Repton, all the toilets were outside, and their little rooms had no doors. In winter, they were very cold. My job was to sit on the toilet before Wilberforce and make it warm for him.

I sat on the toilet for fifteen minutes, and then Wilberforce came.

“Is it warm?” he asked me.

“It’s as warm as possible, Wilberforce.”

“We will see,” he said.

He sat on the toilet. “Very good,” he said. “Very, very good. Some boys have cold bottoms. I only use boys with warm bottoms. I will not forget you.”

He did not forget me. I always carried a book with me because I often had to sit on Wilberforce’s toilet. It was very boring. In my first winter at Repton, I read many books by Charles Dickens on Wilberforce’s toilet.

Not everything at school was bad. Sometimes all the boys got a grey box from a company called Cadbury’s. Cadbury’s made wonderful chocolates.

Inside the box were twelve different chocolates. We always knew one of them well, but eleven of them were new. There was also paper in the box. Our job was to try all the chocolates and write the good and bad things about each one on the paper.

Cadbury’s plan to ask us about their new chocolates was a good one. Boys at Repton were some of the best chocolate customers in the world. Who knew more about chocolate than us?!

How do companies plan their new chocolates? I loved to think about this.

Many years later, I needed a story for a new book. I remembered those little boxes of chocolate at Repton, and I started to write my book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Sport is very important at English boarding schools, and we played a lot of it. Happily, I was good at sport, and I enjoyed it. Playing sport helped to make the long days shorter.

Life at school was easier for good sportsmen, but it was difficult for bad sportsmen. My favourite sport was a very fast game with a ball. It was called Fives. Because I was one of the best at Fives at Repton, I travelled to other boarding schools and played it with their boys. I also played football and a ball game called squash.

At school, I loved taking photos. Today, cameras are very easy to use, but in the 1920s they were difficult work. I had a big, heavy camera with glass plates. I made a darkroom near the school’s music rooms, and I made many photos there.

“After school, do you want to study at Oxford or Cambridge?” my mother asked me one day. These are great and very famous places, and boys from good public schools normally wanted to study at them. But I did not want to study more. I chose to start work at a company called Shell because I wanted to see the world.

I travelled to many countries with Shell, but that is a different story and a different book. I may tell it one day.