ISBN: 9780141371412
Going Solo is a personal account of Roald Dahl’s adult life, a sequel to his autobiography called Boy. The Novel starts where Boy left off – Roald is on his way to Kenya, East Africa, on his first job at the age of 22.
He describes in beautiful conversational language his encounters with the “dotty” people he met on his voyage, including a streaking Major, a bold cabin companion obsessed with hair, and an old coffee farmer who peals and eats oranges with a knife and fork!
On his arrival at Mombassa, Kenya, he learned that he had to travel further down to Dar Es Salaam in Tanganyika (Tanzania), where he was starting his service for the Shell Company. He then gives his readers the opportunity to relive some of his interesting experiences in Dar Es Salaam until the outbreak of World War II, at which point he had to leave for Nairobi to be trained as a fighter pilot.
His captivating account continues throughout his (in-depth) training to fly (about 7 hours!), and he beautifully describes the aircraft and how it worked, and his progression to Iraq to finalise his flight training (6-months later) to be prepared to “join a squadron and face the enemy”. When he was at last shipped out to the Western Desert, through unfortunate mis-calculations on the part of his Commanding Officer he managed to crash his Gladiator plane, though, and ended up in hospital.
After his recovery in Alexandria, Egypt, he had orders to fly the Hurricane plane he was then assigned to Greece, where at last he could join his squadron near Athens. Once there, he was informed that they were totally outnumbered against the vast numbers of aircraft the enemy (Germans) had, and his being inexperienced in combat was simply ignored because his squadron needed all the men they could get.
Eventually they had to be extracted back to Alexandria for safety’s sake, but were called on again to assemble at Haifa, Northern Palestine. Roald recalls events where he and the other pilots escaped death with the skin off their teeth because of unreasonable (or miscalculated) orders from superiors, but he says “it is easy to be critical of one’s commanders after the event…”, and that it is “wrong to indulge in it too much”.
Going Solo is a beautiful, live account, which could be classified as historical fiction, a living book, a good read to those who love knowledge about the World Wars, and who love real-life accounts of real-time events, written from experience.
The book includes photographs, letters and records from Roald Dahl’s own life, which makes the writing even more real.
Images of some of the war-planes mentioned in Going Solo follows:
