An expanded edition titled More About Boy was published in 2008, featuring the full original text and illustrations with annotations by Dahl's widow Felicity along with additional stories, letters, and photographs.

Harald and his brother Oscar, who were born in the 1860s, split up and went their separate ways after deciding that a better future lay before them outside their native Norway.

Harald had suffered an unfortunate accident as a teenager in the late 1870s, breaking his left arm by fixing the ceiling tiles of the family home and then falling off the ladder.

Only weeks later, Roald's father died of pneumonia aged 57, shortly before the birth of Dahl’s youngest sister.

Young Dahl dreamt of working as an inventor for Cadbury, an idea he said later inspired Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, eventually published in the early 1960s.

He and his friends thoroughly disliked the local sweet-shop owner, Mrs Pratchett, an unpleasant, elderly woman who gave no thought to hygiene (and described by Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock, as "a comic distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life"[3]).

They played a prank on her by placing a dead mouse in a gobstopper jar while his friend Thwaites distracted her by buying sweets.

They were caned by the headmaster as a punishment, after Mrs Pratchett identified Dahl and his friends as the pupils who were responsible for the mouse in the jar.

He whispered to his friend in hope of obtaining a spare nib, when the master, Captain Hardcastle, heard him and accused him of cheating, issuing him with a "stripe", meaning that the next morning he received six strokes of the cane from the headmaster, who refused to believe Dahl's version of events on the basis of Captain Hardcastle's status.

Wragg, another boy in Dahl's dormitory, sprinkled sugar over the corridor floor so they could hear that the matron was coming when she walked upon it.

When the boy's friends refused to turn him in, the whole school was punished by the headmaster, who for the remainder of the term confiscated the keys to their tuck boxes containing food parcels which the pupils had received from their families.

Towards the end of his time, Dahl purchased a motorbike for £18 and stored it in a local garage, often riding it around the streets of Repton and the Derbyshire countryside, and would pass the school's masters and Boazers on their lunch breaks, without them knowing who he was.

On leaving school in 1934, Dahl declined the opportunity to apply for university and instead secured a position working for Shell, despite the headmaster trying to dissuade him because of his lack of responsibility.