September 13, 1916, Was The Day Harald And Sofie Dahl, Two Norwegian Immigrants

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Term Paper Title	September 13, 1916, Was The Day Harald And Sofie Dahl, Two Norwegian Immigrants
# of Words	2518
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	10.07

     September 13, 1916, was the day Harald and Sofie Dahl, two Norwegian immigrants living in Wales, had their first son, a boy they named Roald.  Even before birth Roald was supposed to be endowed with great sense of beauty, courtesy of his father.  Harald Dahl, a thriving ship broker in Cardiff, possessed a great aesthetic sense; wishing to instill this in his children, Harald encouraged his wife to go for long walks along the most beautiful trails in the Welsh countryside, hoping the magnificence of nature would seep through to the brain of the unborn child (Dahl, Boy 18-19).
     The death of Harald Dahl when Roald was four had a devastating effect on the boy.  Although he was very young, Dahl said that the loss of his father was the end of his happy childhood days (Treglown 5), and that in his adulthood he often searched for a paternal figure to compensate for the deficit of a father in his youth (20).  Sofie Dahl, although grief-stricken by the death of her husband, was determined to provide a steady foundation for her children, refusing to relocate from Wales back home to Norway with her parents (Howard 1).  She did steep the children in Scandinavian customs, though, teaching them the language of Norway, and instilling them with a love for all things Norwegian instead of those English.  Mark West contends that this contributed to the detached attitude Dahl had for England and the feelings of isolation he experienced throughout his life (2).
     Regardless of the impact his Norwegian upbringing would have on his future, Dahl wrote in Boy that the most idyllic days of his youth were spent during the summers he, his mother, and his sisters would visit Sofie's parents, Betsepapa and Betsemama, in Norway (53-74).  "The summer holidays!  Those magic words!  The mere mention of them used to send shivers of joy rippling over my skin" (Dahl, Boy 53).  Although these annual forays to Norway were enjoyable for Dahl and his siblings, and they helped to alleviate Sofie's grief, she always regretted that her son would not have a father.  She could do little to ameliorate the situation except carry out her husband's dying wish: he wanted his children to attend English public schools, which he thought were the best in the world (Howard 1).  Consequently, at the age of six, while the annual journeys to Norway did not cease, Dahl embarked upon a new phase of his life: formal schooling.
     The commencement of this "awful process" of the boy's civilization began at Elmtree House...

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