the young Roald Dahl wrote in a prep-school essay. “They will give you many valuable things.”1 There was even, he continued, the outside chance of discovering a gold mine. It’s a fair precis of what many British people at the time believed. It could almost have been the unofficial policy statement of multinational enterprises like Shell, where, on leaving Repton, Dahl was taken on as a trainee. His mother had wanted him to try for Oxford or Cambridge, but Repton made it clear that, given his academic record, this wasn’t an option.2 In any case, what he most wanted to do was to travel. He spent the summer before his eighteenth birthday with fifty or so other young men on a joint public-school expedition to Newfoundland. There, he lived under canvas, supplemented his pemmican diet with wild bilberries and whatever fish could be caught, and undertook various challenges designed to inculcate qualities of leadership and endurance. One of these was a twenty-day march, exploring an unmapped region in the center of the island, south of Grand Falls.
