21 1 What’s your story? A visit to the doctor “A visit to the doctor” is an excerpt from Roald Dahl’s book Boy: Tales of Childhood. Boy is often referred to as an autobiography, but Dahl himself wrote in the introduction: “This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten.” I have only one unpleasant memory of the summer holidays in Norway. We were in the grandparents’ house in Oslo and my mother said to me, ‘We are going to the doctor this afternoon. He wants to look at your nose and mouth.’ I think I was eight at the time. ‘What’s wrong with my nose and mouth?’ I asked. ‘Nothing much,’ my mother said. ‘But I think you’ve got adenoids.’ ‘What are they?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’ I held my mother’s hand as we walked to the doctor’s house. It took us about half an hour. There was a kind of dentist’s chair in the surgery and I was lifted into it. The doctor had a round mirror strapped to his forehead and he peered up my nose and into my mouth. He then took my mother aside and they held a whispered conversation. I saw my mother looking rather grim, but she nodded. The doctor now put some water to boil in an aluminium mug over a gas flame, and into the boiling water he placed a long thin shiny steel instrument. I sat there watching the steam coming off the boiling water. I was not in the least apprehensive. I was too young to realize that something out of the ordinary was going to happen. Then a nurse dressed in white came in. She was carrying a red rubber apron and a curved white enamel bowl. She put the apron over the front of my body and tied it around my neck. It was far too big. Then she held the enamel bowl under my chin. The curve of the bowl fitted perfectly against the curve of my chest. MODEL TEXT unpleasant – óþægilegur adenoids – nefkirtlar a surgery – hér: skoðunarherbergi to peer – rýna, skima grim – harður, grimmdarlegur apprehensive – órólegur rubber – gúmmí an apron – svunta enamel – glerungur
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