I mentioned Roald Dahl in my recent Patrick Hamilton piece. The Hamilton radio play had reminded me of a particular story. Not long afterwards, by one of those strange coincidences, I saw a TV documentary on Dahl and the story was mentioned by name. It is called Galloping Foxley and is one of Dahl’s adult stories, first published in the early 1950s. I have not read it for many years. It has stayed in the back of my mind, though, ever since.
It is quite a straightforward story. A railway commuter, William Perkins, is a businessman with a very settled routine. He is put out when a stranger appears on the platform one morning and pushes himself into Perkins’ group. The disruptive stranger insists on sitting in the same compartment as Perkins, taking the seat opposite. Perkins fumes about the intrusion of this man into his daily journey, until a few days later, he recognises the newcomer as Bruce Foxley, the boy who bullied him mercilessly at school, many years before.
This brings all his memories of being tormented to the surface. He sits in the train compartment re-living such delightful experiences as cleaning Foxley’s study, being beaten by him, etc. He decides to identify himself and is shaken when the man replies that he is Jocelyn Fortescue, who attended Eton, not Repton, as Perkins and Foxley did.
When I read it, I was convinced that Perkins had simply made a mistake, that the whole thing was in his mind, and that the memory had been brought back by the man he thought he recognised acting as a catalyst. I accepted that it was a mistake, but what seemed so disturbing, was that the memory of his unhappiness was lurking there, just waiting to come to the surface again.
After checking on Wikipedia, I now realise that there are other possibilities that I did not spot when I read the story. Apparently, the story was adapted for the first series of Tales of the Unexpected. In the TV version, the man who denies he is Foxley, is asked by Perkins again and gives a slightly knowing look when he denies it a second time. This implies that he has recognised Perkins but has given a false name.
This dramatises what is only implied in the story; that the stranger might after all actually be Foxley. If he is in fact Foxley, does he deny it because he is ashamed of his conduct at school? Or is his denial a way of tormenting Perkins all over again? Has he only re-appeared in Perkins’ life to carry on the bullying in a more refined, adult way?
There is of course also the possibility that the man is who he says he is, but that he is a perfect example of the same “type” as Foxley, ie public school bully, and it is this that Perkins has responded to, rather than a facial resemblance.
I do not have a copy of the full text to hand, so I cannot check how much importance Dahl gives to the facial resemblance.
Roald Dahl apparently disliked his public school and had similar unhappy experiences there. Perhaps, haunting as it is, this is not so much a short story as a semi-autobiographical meditation on the power of unhappy memories to last a lifetime.
The Good Reader 