Tales of Childhood Summary
Tales of childhood is an excerpt from the autography Boy. Tales of childhood by Roald Dahl. In this story Roald Dahl talk about his childhood memories. The excerpt starts with description of Roald Dahl’ father and grandfather. His grandfather was a prosperous merchant is Sarpsborg and traded in everything from cheese to chicken wire. His father become a successful shipbroker is a shopkeeper for ships and the most important item he supplies is the fuel on which the ship engine run. His ship broking farm was at Cardiff of South Wales. His father married his mother a Norwegian woman Sophie Magdalena during the summer of 1911. When Roald was two, they all moved into an imposing country mansion beside the village of Rody, eight miles north of Cardiff in 1920, when Roald was only three, his sister Astri, died from appendicitis. Astri was his father’s favourite child. He adored her the most and her sudden death left him speechless for days. His father was emotionally broken and soon after his diagnoses of pnemonia his father died. His father refused to fight, he wanted to join his beloved daughter in heaven, so he died. If they had penicillin in those days, neither appendicitis nor pneumonia would have been much a threat Roald’s mother was all alone and had to free all hardships. She had five children to look after, his mother sold their house to support the family, and moved to a smaller one a few miles away in Llandaff.
When Roald, was six he went to his first school. The school was a kindergarden run by two sisters named Mrscorfield and Miss Tucker and the school was called the Elmtree house. Roald says that he can Kindergarden all sorts of things that happened to him after the age of eight but not before that he cannot remember the faces of his two teachers. He only has a faint memory of sitting on the stars trying to tie his laces. But he can remember the journey & he made to and from the school because they were exciting. The excitement was of his new tricycle.He remember riding in it to his kindergarden and his sister riding on hers. He also remembers how happy he and his sister had been while riding the tricycle to school. Roald says its thus memories left with him. Now he is sixty two years old and this memories of kindergarden or left with him. How Roald speaks about his earliest memory, he remembers very little of his childhood.