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10. First Day
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Authority and Hypocrisy
Beauty and Imagination
Growing Up
English Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
At nine o’clock on Sunday mornings, the boys at St. Peter’s are told to write letters to their families while teachers walk among them and look over their shoulders to correct mistakes. Letter-writing would remain a habit for Roald throughout the rest of his life. He recalls that when his mother was about to die in 1957, he couldn’t write to her due to his own poor health, so she installed a phone by her bed to talk to him one last time. When Roald recovered and returned home after her death, he found that his mother kept every letter that he had written her from 1925 to 1945.
Roald’s inclusion of events from his adulthood in this chapter highlights the innocence of his boyhood and the bittersweetness of growing up. When Roald writes letters to his mother from St. Peter’s, he has no idea that she saves every one—he only finds this out after she’s already passed away. The story injects a serious note into an otherwise humorously critical chapter about letter writing and surveillance.
Themes
Roald reflects on the St. Peter’s Headmaster’s policy of reading the students’ letters, noting that the letter writing was both a way of teaching spelling and punctuation and a method of controlling what students said about the school. The boys avoid writing bad things about the faculty or facilities while the intimidating Headmaster is looking at them and even overcompensate by writing positive things about the school instead. If a student makes a spelling mistake, the Headmaster makes them practice the correct spelling later, but doesn’t let them change it in the letter. This way, the boys’ parents never suspect that anyone else is reading them.
Roald’s recollection of the St. Peter’s Headmaster’s letter censorship explains how the school gets away with substandard treatment of their students. The fact that this borderline-abusive treatment is possible suggests that the English boarding school is almost intrinsically corrupt in its exploitation of young boys for their parents’ money. In this chapter, however, it also starts to seem possible that Roald’s schools are exceptionally strict, even for English public schools. After all, the fact that the school is hiding its treatment of its students from their parents suggests that the cruelty of its masters might be beyond the country’s accepted norm.
Themes
