Going Solo

Dahl, Roald. Going Solo. New York: Penguin 1986. Print.

First Sentences:

 

The ship that was carrying me away from England to Africa in the autumn of 1938 was called the SS Mantola. She was an old paint-peeling tub of 9,000 tons with a single tall funnel and a vibrating engine that rattled the tea=cups in their saucers on the dining-room table.

Description:

Roald Dahl's autobiography, Going Solo, proves again that a reader does not have to know anything about a topic or situation to become totally immersed in the action. Dahl, the well-known author (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, etc.) had another much different life prior to his literary career: that of an World War II RAF fighter pilot. Going Solo recounts his memories starting with his 1938 voyage from London to Tanganyika as an 20-year-old inexperienced agent for Shell Oil through his three-year enlistment and training as a pilot in Egypt, including his aerial battles in Greece, and finally his return to his home in England.

 

Dahl puts the reader right inside his mind: a confident, curious, sometimes reckless youth driving all over Africa to meet with Shell clients and take orders. We sit with him on these desert trips as he marvels at the fearless animals he sees which completely ignore him. His favorite activity is to walk among a herd of giraffes, wandering among their legs and calling to them as they indifferently continue with their grazing of trees.

 

He never lost his fear of African snakes, however, and recounted several encounters with both deadly black and green mambas. (He carefully notes learning the difference between "poisonous" and "deadly" snakes), but continually avoids both.

 

After volunteering for the RAF, Dahl joyfully takes readers up into the air during his training flights in the two-seater Tiger Moth bi-plane. 

We could loop the loop and fly upside down. We could get ourselves out of a spin. We could do forced landings with the engine cut. We could side-slip and land decently in a strong cross-wind...and we were full of confidence.

But he had no actual air-to-air combat training before being sent to Greece to engage German planes. He had to learn to fly modern Hurricane (which he had to cram his 6'6" body into a cockpit with his knees against his chin). Readers again are inside his mind during each dangerous mission: thinking his thoughts, sensing his emotions, and feeling his pain both physical and emotional for the loss of fellow pilots, civilians, and even German enemies. 

 

Flight after flight in Greece, his 15-airplane squadron is hopeless outnumbered by the hundreds of German bombers and fighter planes on missions nearby. Dahl flies 3-5 missions a day trying to protect Allied boats unloading cargo, ammunition, and supplies. He is forced to fly his plane directly at the enemy since his machine guns are fixed in his wings and could only shoot straight ahead. albeit through the rotating propellor, a phenomenon Dahl could never understand.. 

Each flight is perilous. Once completed, he and his meager squadron wait by their runway to see which of their fellow pilots return and which did not make it back. He maintains his fearlessness in flying into incredible situations and, with the exception of one horrific crash, emerges in one piece each time.

As you might surmise, I was totally engrossed in this book chock full of Dahl's adventures and thoughts presented in his clear, straightforward, yet somehow gripping writing style. Highly recommended for lovers of personal memoirs of flying. 

(Note: This is the second book in Dahl's autobiography series. The first book, Boy recounts his early childhood, while Going Solo picks up where Boy ends.)

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  Markham, Beryl. West with the Night: A Memoir.   

Autobiography of the woman pilot raised in Kenya who became the first female commercial pilot and air mail-carrier in Africa, as well as the first woman to fly non-stop from Europe to America. She was a friend to Karen Blixen and Denis Fitch Hatton (depicted in the film Out of Africa). Most importantly this memoir is beautifully written, full of life, adventure, and challenges. It was highly-praised by Ernest Hemingway who said Markham "could write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers". (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

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(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

West With the Night

Markham, Beryl. West With the Night. New York : Heinemann . 1936. Print.

First Sentences:

How is it possible to bring order out of memory?

I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, "This is the place to start; there can be no other."

But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names -- Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru..

Description:

Beryl Markham's  West With the Night is a quietly stunning memoir about her life growing up on a racehorse-training stable in British East Africa in the early 1900s. Markham is best known as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west (the opposite direction as Lindbergh), but this feat only accounts for one chapter of her memories.

The writing is what makes this book unforgettable, painting a spare picture of her world of lions, wild boar hunting with Murani (Masai) warriors, a fearless dog, horses, and airplane flights across trackless Africa during World War I. 

Markham's narrative is a stream of consciousness recollection of events and people in her childhood. Opening with the memory of the seemingly fruitless search in her bi-plane for a lost pilot, she interweaves comments on the landscape, animals, the deadly blackwater plague that wracks another man she encounters, and her description of the silence felt where she eventually finds the missing pilot's plane:

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is a silence that comes with morning in the forest, and this is different from  the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt...Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

She makes a brief reference to a lion attack in another memory which leads to re-telling the attack she suffered as a child. This evolves into the tale of her dog surviving a nighttime abduction and ensuing fight with a leopard which incredibly left the deadly cat as bad off from the encounter as the dog:

[The dog] recovered, after ten months' tedious nursing, and became the same Buller again -- except that his head had lost what little symmetry it ever had and cat-killing developed from a sport to a vocation.

She calmly tells of the dangerous boar hunt with Murani men when only a young girl, hefting her own spear to kill one huge boar that was attacking her dog. Later, during an elephant hunt, she relates the harrowing experience of facing, without a rifle, a huge charging bull elephant.

After drought forces her family farm to ruin, she begins a new life alone at age 18 as a race-horse trainer. Starting off with not much more than the clothes on her back and her horse, she eventually builds up a respected stable of thoroughbreds to race in Nairobi and on other tracks in Africa and abroad. 

She learns the skills to pilot a bi-plane in order to avoid "roads" in that environment that are treacherous and rocky at best, and starts another life delivering goods by plane throughout the uncharted lands of East Africa. This leads to her famous, hugely dangerous solo flight from England to New York in 1932. Your heart is in your throat as she braves the dangers of night flying over the Atlantic, switching over to new fuel tanks when the engine dies and has to point the plane's nose straight down to the ocean to force start it. The first time she was less than 300 feet above the ocean when the motor finally started. Unbelievable.

There is too much of her life that Markham leaves out of West With the Night to make it a true memoir, but what she selects to write about is powerful and modest at the same time. Her respect for the culture and people of Africa shines on each page as she describes the ceremonies and interactions she has with them. Absolutely fascinating stories with beautiful, spare writing makes this memoir a gem. Highly recommended.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Markham, Beryl. The Splendid Outcast

Eight stories by Markham posthumously collected about her life in Africa and passion for airplanes, horses, and men. With West With the Night, these are (unfortunately) the only published writings of Markham and they are great.

Lovell, Mary S. Straight On Til Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham

I haven't read this yet, but am very curious to follow up on the story of Beryl Markham's life as she left so many details out of West With the Night, particularly her three marriages,affairs with Denys Finch Hatten, Tom Black, and various British crown heirs, friendship with Karen Blixen, and life after her famous flight, including the question of authorship of West With the Night..