Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 10

THE EDWARDIAN CHILDREN’S WRITER Edith Nesbit thought that the most important quality in a good children’s writer was an ability vividly to recall their own childhood. Being able to relate to children as an adult, she believed, was largely unimportant. Roald Dahl could do both. His seductive voice, the subversive twinkle in his eye, and his sense of the comic and curious gave him an ability to mesmerize almost every child who crossed his path — yet he could also remember and reimagine his own childhood with astonishing sharpness. The detail might sometimes be unreliable, but what never failed him was an ability instinctively to recreate and understand the child’s point of view. It was something of which he was very proud. He knew he could do it and that a great many others could not. Sitting in his high-backed faded green armchair by the fire at Gipsy House, a glass of whisky in one hand, he once talked to me about it with considerable pride. “It’s really quite easy,” he would say. “I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.” Or, as his alter ego, Willy Wonka, put it in an early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “In my factory I make things to please children. I don’t care about adults.”¹

Dahl seldom dwelt on the traumatic early years of his childhood, and he generally made light of any connection between his fiction and his own life, yet the parallels between the two are intriguing. His fictional childhood bereavements, for example, are never maudlin. His child heroes or heroines always follow the positive pattern that Roald and his own sisters established after their father’s death. Sophie in The BFG has lived in an orphanage almost as long as she can remember, but does not dwell on what might have been. “Oh you poor little scrumplet!” cries the Big Friendly Giant, when he discovers that Sophie has no father or mother. “Is you not missing them very badly?” “Not really,” replies Sophie, “because I never knew them.”² This pragmatism was characteristic of Dahl himself. Perhaps because he never really knew his father, he does not seem unduly to have felt his absence.

This attitude contributed to an unsentimental, frequently subversive view of families, which was reflected strongly in his children’s fiction. The child always stands at the centre of things. Survival is often his or her main motivation, and enemies are as likely to come from within the family as from outside it.

Sometimes, the enemy is parents themselves — particularly if they are dreary or unimaginative. Occasionally, a good one appears — the “sparky” father figure in Danny the Champion of the World is probably the best example — but more often they feature as a negative force that the child must learn to endure, evade or subvert. To achieve this, the young hero must usually find an unexpected friend, who appreciates that child’s special qualities and allows them to bloom. Charlie Bucket’s soulmate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is neither mother, father, sibling nor schoolmate, but his quirky Grandpa Joe, and ultimately the great chocolate maker Willy Wonka himself. The orphaned narrator of The Witches has a similar relationship with his eccentric Norwegian grandmother. James in James and the Giant Peach finds salvation in nonhuman friends, a group of outsize and wacky bugs, while Sophie in The BFG finds her affinity in the person of a lumbering, good-natured giant. Sophie and James are both orphans and so have no parents to reject. Matilda Wormwood, on the other hand, the child heroine of Dahl’s last major book, Matilda, has parents from hell — conniving, vulgar imbeciles who ignore their daughter and try to crush her love of reading. They are comic caricatures, but also capable of brutal insensitivity, being “so gormless and so wrapped up in their silly little lives” that Dahl doubts they would have noticed had their daughter “crawled into the house with a broken leg”.³ Matilda’s exceptional connection with her teacher Miss Honey is the emotional core of the story, and in the end, she chooses to desert her dysfunctional family to live with her new adult friend — an option many children may have dreamed of in sulkier moments. In each case, the love Dahl celebrates is not the traditional one between parent and child, but a close friendship established by the child, on its own terms, and in an unfamiliar context.

In many instances his books are a kind of imaginative survival manual for children about how to deal with the adult world around them. They offer the vision of an existence freed from parental controls, a world full of imagination and pleasure, where everything is possible. Escapist perhaps, but not sentimental. For Dahl always remembered that children were programmed to be survivors. Several times in conversation he described them as “uncivilized creatures”, engaged in a battle with a world of adults who were constantly telling them what to do. Once, in a radio interview, he even argued that most children unconsciously view their parents as “the enemy” and that there was “a very fine line between loving your parents deeply and resenting them”.⁴ It was a perception he developed early and one that remained with him until he died. It gave him the confidence to claim, at the end of his life, that he spoke for young people, that he was their advocate in a world that largely ignored them. Indeed, by then he often claimed that he preferred the company of children to that of adults.

Roald himself was blessed with an extraordinarily strong and influential Norwegian mother, who single-handedly raised him and did much to shape his attitudes. He described her as “undoubtedly the primary influence on my own life”, singling out her “crystal clear intellect” and her “deep interest in almost everything under the sun” as two of the qualities he admired most in her. He acknowledged her as the source for his own interest in horticulture, cooking, wine, paintings, furniture and animals. She was the “materfamilias”, his constant reference point and guide.⁵ “She devoted herself entirely to the children and the home. She had no social life of her own,” recalled her daughter Alfhild, adding that her mother “was very like Roald … a bit secret, a bit private”.⁶ Sofie Magdalene was undoubtedly a remarkable woman: brave, stubborn, eccentric and determined, a survivor who was able to face almost any difficulty or disaster with equanimity. “Practical and fearless,”⁷ was how her youngest daughter described her. “Dauntless”⁸ was the adjective Roald used in Boy, while pointing out that she was always the only member of the family not to get seasick on the two-day ferry crossing from Newcastle to Norway. He admired her toughness, her lack of sentiment, her buccaneering spirit and her laissez-faire attitude toward her offspring. His description of her, a non-swimmer, in a small motorboat, guiding seven children, all without lifebelts, through mountainous waves in the open Norwegian seas was typical. “That was when my mother enjoyed herself most,” he wrote, revelling in behaviour most parents would consider reckless in the extreme. “There were times, I promise you, when the waves were so high that as we slid down into a trough the whole world disappeared from sight. Then up and up the boat would climb, standing almost vertically on its tail, until we reached the crest of the next wave, and then it was like being on the top of a foaming mountain.” Dahl’s description may be exaggerated, childish, but the implied metaphor is telling of his admiration for her as a parent. “It requires great skill to handle a small boat in seas like these,” he concluded, “but my mother knew exactly how to do it and we were never afraid. We loved every minute of it.”⁹

If his mother was the principal source of Roald’s sense of adventure, she may unwittingly have been the source of some of his talents as a writer as well. For according to Roald’s niece Bryony, Sofie Magdalene was also a born STORYTELLER, and sometimes a gossip too, who enjoyed “weaving fantasies about members of the family, interspersed with downright lies”. Bryony here hints at the division in Sofie Magdalene’s attitude toward her blood children and her stepchildren, to whom one suspects she was always dutiful but less loving. They were usually the victims of her more malicious stories. “She used to have dreams about members of the family and say terrible things about what was going to happen to them,” remembered Bryony, “and she loved to spread foul rumours about.” It seems likely she was the source for the story of Marie Beaurin-Gressier’s abortion and she once put it about the village that her stepson Louis’s wife Meriel (Bryony’s mother) was starving her husband. In hefty old age, confined to a wheelchair and dressed in black, Sofie talked less, but could still petrify her grandchildren and stepgrandchildren. “Witchy”, “terrifying” and “like a spider” were some of the many descriptions of her. But she was not the only fabulist in the family. Alfhild and Roald both quickly honed their skills in that department, under the tutelage of their half sister Ellen, who also enjoyed an exaggerated yarn. Nevertheless, Sofie Magdalene was in a different league. “She was the real STORYTELLER,” Bryony recalled with a wistful chuckle. “I reckon Roald got it all from her.”¹⁰ And one of the first and most enduring legends she created for her children was about their father.

Roald was only three years old when his father died. The tales of Harald’s personality and background, both real and invented, became therefore unquestioned, unexamined truths for his children. And Sofie Magdalene was largely responsible for all of them. As the years passed, she gradually cut off contact with almost all the other Dahls, creating a situation where few could contradict her version of events. The entrepreneur who left his family in Norway to find success abroad; the one-armed survivor, undaunted by adversity, who learned to cope with everything life could throw at him; the craftsman/painter living the high life in fin-de-siecle Paris; the lover of nature, the proponent of “glorious walks”; the grieving father, who lost the will to live. All these aspects of Harald’s personality came to acquire talismanic qualities for his young son, who used them to help define himself. In later life, when things got difficult, sometimes he found himself looking for father figures who could measure up to this ideal. But he never inquired too deeply as to the veracity of the stories about his own father. They were too ingrained in his own personality. The legend of Harald, passed on to his children by his devoted wife, was perhaps the most powerful of the many myths of which his mother was the prime architect. Much of what she said, of course, was true. Yet Sofie Magdalene would later admit, in moments of weakness, that her husband had not been an entirely easy man to live with. For her young children, however, and for Roald in particular, Harald would always be the ideal “papa”.

Roald criticized his father for only one thing: leaving an intricate, complex and controlling will, which suggested a distrust of his wife and which made the family’s day-to-day survival much more difficult than was necessary. His plans were predicated on the assumption that Sofie Magdalene would marry again, so the bulk of the estate was left in a trust that was constructed more in favour of his children than his wife. But she remained a widow, and the result was that she was left with very little direct control of the family finances. Although she was one of the trustees, Sofie Magdalene still had to get approval from the other two trustees, her brother-in-law Oscar, and Ludvig Aadnesen, for almost everything she bought for the household. This was time-consuming and Sofie Magdalene sometimes also found it humiliating. The estate was large. In 1920, it was valued at over £150,000.¹¹ In today’s terms its equivalent could be reckoned about £5 million (or $7.5 million). Harald’s family in Norway were not entirely forgotten, but the bequests to them were small ones. He left £100 to each of his sisters, but to his eighty-six-year-old father, Olaus, who was still alive, and living in poverty in Kristiania in a tiny flat, and to his brother Truls, who had taken over the family business as pork butcher and sausage maker, he left nothing. Almost all of his wealth was left to his children.

One might have thought that the income from the modern-day equivalent of £5 million would have been enough for the Dahl family to go on living in Radyr, but it was not, and their life as rural landowners was abruptly terminated soon after Asta — “Baby”, as she became known — was born in the autumn of 1920. By Christmas, the beloved farm was put on the market, the animals auctioned off, and the servants dismissed. From that moment onward, Radyr, with its turrets and fields, occupied an idealized place in the minds of the Dahl children, and the house came to embody a kind of paradise, irretrievably taken from them at a very young age. This sense of loss is echoed in many of Roald Dahl’s books, most strikingly perhaps in James and the Giant Peach, where, on the very first page “the perfect life for a small boy” — which in this instance involved beaches, sun and sand rather than horses, fields and servants — comes to an abrupt end. James’s parents had been up to London to go shopping (always a mistake in Dahl’s eyes) and there they met a terrible, if hilarious fate — “eaten up in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street, by an enormous angry rhinoceros that had escaped from London Zoo”. Though this was “a rather nasty experience” for them, Dahl reflects, “in the long run it was far nastier for James”. His parents’ end had been swift and relatively painless. Their son, on the other hand, was left behind, cut off from everything familiar and everyone he loved: “alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world”.¹²

So Radyr was sold. The family, with Birgit the nanny and a couple of maids, moved back to Llandaff, into a “pleasant medium-sized suburban villa” ¹³ called Cumberland Lodge, now part of Howell’s School, which was also near the home of Ludvig Aadnesen. It was a comfortable existence, if less grand than life in Radyr. But there were consolations for a young boy. Its principal attraction was a large garden, with a swing and some rudimentary cricket nets, where Roald, already a keen sportsman, could practise his batting. Even more important than the garden was the man who worked there — a fellow whose real name was Jones, but whom the children called Joss or Spivvis. “Everyone loved him,” Dahl would later recall, “but I loved him most of all. I adored him. I worshipped him, and whenever I was not at school, I used to follow him around and watch him at his work and listen to him talk.” Every Saturday in the winter, when there was a home match, Joss would take young Roald to Ninian Park, to see Cardiff City, the local football team. Roald was already tall enough to see over many people’s heads and clearly relished the experience of being away from a house full of women. “It was thrilling to stand there among those thousands of other men,” he later wrote, “cheering our heroes when they did well and groaning when they lost the ball.” The experience gave him “an almost unbearable sense of thrill and rapture”, and contrasted with his feelings toward his first school: a local kindergarten called Elm Tree House, run by two sisters, Mrs Corfield and Miss Tucker. Their “sweet and smiling” faces made little impression on him and few memories of his short time there would linger in his brain.¹⁴ One alone remained fresh. The swashbuckling thrill of riding his new tricycle down the road to school and leaning into the corners so steeply that only two of the cycle’s three wheels touched the ground.

Roald’s next school would be much more memorable. Llandaff Cathedral School, an elegant three-storey Georgian building, constructed in the shadow of a medieval cathedral, is an educational institution with a pedigree that dates back to the ninth century. Roald’s elder brother Louis had been sent there, and though Sofie Magdalene was already planning a move to England, she was not yet quite ready to leave Wales. The school was also a stone’s throw from Cumberland Lodge and so it was the natural place to send Roald after his year with the smiling sisters. He went there in 1923, at the age of seven, and stayed for two years. Of all the incidents he would later recall there, one adventure stood out above the others. It was both exciting and traumatic, and contained three ingredients that would come to characterize his later children’s fiction: a sweetshop; a foul old hag; and violent retribution. In Boy, he introduces the story with a fanfare that is both swaggering and yet deliciously ironic. “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful,” he begins. “Truth is more important than modesty. I must tell you therefore, that it was I and I alone who had the idea for the great and daring Mouse Plot. We all have our moments of brilliance and glory,” he concludes, “and this was mine.” ¹⁵

The story is a simple one. A boy finds a dead mouse under the floorboards at school. Along with a group of friends, Roald decides to use it to play a trick on the ugly and bad-tempered proprietor of the local sweetshop, Mrs Pratchett. He takes the dead mouse into the shop and when she is not looking, drops the mouse into a glass jar of sweets. Mrs Pratchett is so shocked when she opens it and finds the dead rodent that she drops the jar to the ground, where it shatters in pieces. Furious, she tracks down the offenders and takes revenge on them by ensuring they are ferociously beaten. A simple enough tale of a schoolboy prank that goes wrong, you might think. But not for Roald Dahl. For his sensitive child’s antennae, this is an adventure story of grandiose proportions — enacted with buccaneering style and panache. Its setting, a sweetshop, is the centre of the universe. It is “what a bar is to a drunk, or a church is to a Bishop” — the most important place in town. Despite the suspicion that the tasty liquorice bootlaces may be made from rat’s blood, or that the Tonsil Ticklers are infused with chloroform, the contents of its jars and boxes are objects of reverence and profound fascination. Dahl and his young accomplices are a “gang of desperadoes”, locked in mortal combat with the hideous villain of the piece, Mrs Pratchett, a comic distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life.¹⁶ She is “a small, skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry”. She has “goat’s legs” and “small malignant pig-eyes”. Her “grimy hands” with their “black fingernails”¹⁷ dig horrifyingly deep into the fudge as she scoops it out of the container. She is a typical Dahl enemy — cruel, bony, repulsive and female — and she wreaks a savage revenge on her five child tormentors, insisting that they are each caned by their headmaster while she sits in a chair, enthusiastically egging him on to greater violence.

Dahl’s description of corporal punishment and adult unkindness in Boy is memorable and utterly convincing. It is the first time that any of the five boys have been beaten, so the tension is tremendous, as they venture ever deeper into the adult world, arriving at the inner sanctum of the enemy, the headmaster’s study, with its forbidding smell of tobacco and leather. Mr Coombes, the headmaster, has so far seemed comic — a sweating, pink-faced buffoon. No longer preposterous, however, he is now transformed into a chilling agent of retribution: a giant, dangerously flexing his curved yellow cane. Roald’s friend Thwaites is the first to feel its sting. As he bends over and touches the carpet with his fingers, Roald cannot help noticing “how small Thwaites’ bottom looked and how very tight it was”.¹⁸ Each stroke of the cane is exaggerated, as the rod cracks “like a pistol shot” and boys shoot into the air, straightening up “like elastic”.

But when Roald’s own turn comes, the tone loses all comedy. The pain of the first stroke causes him to gasp so deeply that it “emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them”. Aiming the strokes of the rod so that they come down in the same place has been a source of abstract comment, even admiration for the young boys. Now it is revealed as an act of cruel brutality. “It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin,” he declares, “but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.”¹⁹ No surprise then to find that when his mother sees “the scarlet stripes” that evening at bathtime, she marches over to the school to give the headmaster a piece of her mind. No surprise either that, a term later, she takes Roald away from the school. But the outraged Sofie Magdalene does not then send her son to a gentler institution. Instead, she packs him off to St Peter’s, a boarding school, across the Bristol Channel, which would prove to be even more draconian than the one in Llandaff.

The journey was taken on a paddle-steamer that “sloshed and churned” its way through the water from Wales to England for twenty-five minutes, before a taxi ferried boys to the school, which lay just outside the “slightly seedy” Somerset seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare. It was a typical English prep school of the period, as Dahl described it, “a purely money-making business owned and operated by the headmaster”, educating about seventy boys,* aged between eight and thirteen, in a three-storey, ivy-clad Victorian Gothic mansion, surrounded by playing fields, tennis courts and allotments. In hindsight the school was to remind Dahl of “a private lunatic asylum”,²⁰ an opinion corroborated by another celebrated St Peter’s alumnus, some twenty years Dahl’s junior, the writer and comedian John Cleese.²¹ Looking at a faded postcard of the school dining room as it was, one might think it a civilized place. Light floods in through high sash windows onto tables laid with starched white tablecloths. Portraits of notables hang on the walls. Vases of fresh flowers even decorate the tables.

But, if Dahl and his contemporaries are to be believed, this was all a terrible illusion — a temporary image thrown up to persuade potential clients to part with both their offspring and their cash. For, once the parental back was turned, the picture became much uglier. Douglas Highton, Dahl’s best friend for the last two of his four years at the school, agreed with Roald that it was a grim place, describing the headmaster, Mr Francis, as a “beastly cane-happy monster” with a “nasty collection” of rods on top of his bookshelves, who “seemed to enjoy beating little boys on the slightest pretext”. It was an almost entirely male environment. The headmaster kept his “finicky and fussy”²² wife and two unattractive daughters under lock and key, away from the eyes of the boys, and so the only feminine presence was a “female ogre” — the Matron, who “prowled the corridors like a panther” and obviously “disliked small boys very much indeed”.²³

Each boy was assigned one of four curiously named houses into which the school was divided: Duckworth Butterflies, Duckworth Grasshoppers, Crawford Butterflies and Crawford Grasshoppers. Dahl was a Duckworth Butterfly. Competition was encouraged at all levels, as each house vied with the others in both work and games to see who would come out top. Every boy in the school received either stars or stripes for successes or failures in the schoolroom or playing field and these were tallied up at the end of each term, when winners and losers were declared. Three times a year, a twenty-page magazine was professionally published, which formally chronicled and categorized these achievements, listing each boy’s scores in a series of tables. It was taken very seriously. “Congratulations to you all, Butterflies, for you have this term risen from bottom place to second, and you were very nearly top,” declares Duckworth Butterfly housemaster Mr Valentine Corrado in the December 1927 issue, adding grandly, as if reflecting on the outcome of a military battle, “to the very end it was uncertain whether you or the Duckworth Grasshoppers would triumph”.

Corrado, who taught Latin when he was not trying to seduce the school matron,²⁴ was just one of the motley band of five or six schoolmasters who taught there. Most had fought in the First World War, many still hung on to their army rank, and some of them still bore the mental and physical scars of that conflict. All were eccentrics. They stare out of the school photographs that have immortalized them with a melancholy confidence — garbed in heavy tweed, moustaches trimmed, hair slicked back, jaws thrust forward. There is something untrustworthy yet forlorn about them. The shell-shocked grunting bully Captain Lancaster, for example, renamed Captain Hardcastle in Boy, whose thick orange moustache constantly twitched and bristled, or timid Mr S. K. Jopp, nicknamed “Snag” because that was one of his favourite words, who had only one hand and whose face had been deformed by an RAF flying accident.²⁵ It was to this peculiar collection of men, whose pleasures included stamp collecting,²⁶ and chasing the boys around the school on tea trolleys,²⁷ that Sofie Magdalene entrusted her nine-year-old son. Odd though they seemed, they instilled a sense of self-discipline and self-protection into their young charges. “They were tough, those masters,” Roald wrote in Boy, “and if you wanted to survive, you had to become pretty tough too.”²⁸

The boys slept in dormitories. Between fifteen and twenty uncomfortable iron beds were lined up against the walls of each room, and Roald’s first letter home mournfully reported that none of the mattresses had springs.²⁹ Under each was a bedpan (you were not allowed to go to the lavatory at night unless you were ill), and in the middle of the dormitory, a huddle of basins and jugs filled with cold water, for washing. It was a terrible shock for a young boy, used to a warm, comfortable and largely female environment, and Roald was initially homesick. He slept in his bed the wrong way round, facing the window that looked out toward the Bristol Channel, across which lay his home and his family, tantalizingly close, yet completely out of reach. He feigned appendicitis (having seen his half sister operated on at home a few months earlier, he knew the symptoms) and was sent home, where the local doctor in Llandaff quickly discovered his ruse. Another advocate of hardship as essential to the empire-building spirit, he too reinforced Dahl’s survival mentality. “‘I expect you’re homesick,’ he said. I nodded miserably. ‘Everyone is at first,’ he said. ‘You have to stick it out. And don’t blame your mother for sending you away to boarding school. She insisted you were too young, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it, the better for you.’”³⁰ They struck a deal. In return for the doctor pretending he had a severe stomach infection and giving him an extra three days at home, Roald promised him he would go back to St Peter’s and that he would never try the same trick again.

When he returned to Weston-super-Mare, Roald gradually began dealing with his homesickness. His main salvation was sport, something which the boys did almost every day and at which he showed a natural talent. His height and ranginess made him a good rugby player and a competent footballer, cricketer and boxer, though his school report for the summer of 1926 describes him as “overgrown” and “slow”.³¹ His weekly letters home to his mother, however, are brimful of his sporting exploits: swimming lengths of the pool underwater, learning to ride horses, scoring goals in soccer and striking boundaries in cricket. “I hit two sixes,” he writes at one point, explaining dramatically to his mother that “you get a six when the ball goes full pitch into the boundary. One hit the pavilion with a tremendous crash and just missed a window.”³²His height was blamed for a “ponderous” ³³ boxing technique, as were a number of other problems. Sent to a local optician because of recurrent headaches, he was told that there was nothing wrong with his eyes, but that he was “run down, due to growing too quickly”.³⁴

The academic standards at St Peter’s were high and, initially, Roald was thrown in with a group of boys, including Douglas Highton, who were mostly a year and a half older than he was. He struggled to keep up, finding arts subjects — particularly languages — difficult. A report from Easter 1927 described him as “a little on the defensive” and exhorted him “to have more confidence”. “He imagines he is doing badly,” the report continued, “and consequently does badly.”³⁵ So in September 1927 he stayed down in the 4th Form for a term, regaining his self-esteem and earning a record number of stars for Duckworth Butter-flies.† But when he was promoted back to the higher year, things once more became academically difficult and again he became withdrawn. Douglas Highton, whose family lived in Asia Minor, and who was one of the most academic boys in the school, remembered Dahl as an outsider, with few friends. “Roald had a different individuality … he was very much an immigrant from Norway, and I was an immigrant from Turkey, where my mother’s family had been established for about two hundred years. We were both foreigners.” The two misfits became firm friends, walking side-by-side on school trips to Weston-super-Mare, and indulging their mutual contempt for “what we regarded as stupid or unnecessary rules”. They saw themselves as “subversives”, developing a love of word games, enjoying a similar sense of humour, and sharing a sense of “the ridiculous nature of the English”. A sprightly ninety-three when I spoke to him, Highton remembered that — even as a nine-year-old — his friend could be stubborn and dogmatic, “but I didn’t mind,” he continued. “I knew as soon as I met him, this was a chap I wanted to be with.”³⁶

Roald’s letters home from St Peter’s were always written in English, and he later recalled that after the family’s Norwegian nurse left their employment in the mid-1920s, “the whole household started going over to English”.³⁷ For his first year he always signed himself “Boy”. It was the way he had defined himself in a house full of women and it was not until he was almost ten that he started to call himself Roald. The letters reveal many of the enthusiasms that would continue into later life: natural history, collecting (initially stamps and birds’ eggs), food (mostly sweets and chocolates) and sport, where perhaps his most impressive achievement was at conkers.‡ Highton remembers that Roald was an “ace” — selecting his chestnuts “with great care and technical skill” and inventing a process to harden them “to such a degree of indestructibility that he almost always won”.³⁸ One year he was the school champion, writing home to his mother with pride that he had “the highest conker in the school — 273”.³⁹

His tone to her was usually confident, often bossy, and his letters are full of detailed and highly specific instructions and requests. “I’m sending some things out of Toblerone chocolate, if you collect forty of them you get shares in the company,” ⁴⁰ he writes at one point, complaining bitterly at another that the toy submarine she has bought him from Harrods does not dive properly. In this context his mind strays to the store’s famous pet department and he wonders how much a monkey might cost. “It would be rather nice to have one,” he suggests hopefully.⁴¹ Indeed, Roald often seemed more concerned about the well-being of his pets — which included turtles, dogs, rats, tortoises and a salamander — than he was about his family. His occasional letters to his sisters are generally brief and often patronizing. When Alf got a place at Roedean, for example, Roald merely commented: “What a miracle Alfhild has passed … she was jolly lucky; personally I didn’t think she would.”⁴²

Roald was part of a generation of British children for whom the natural world was a source of immense stimulation and pleasure. As he grew up, he was constantly observing the countryside around him — noting unusual phenomena and picking up anything that attracted his attention. His collection of 172 birds’ eggs, lovingly preserved in a glass cabinet with ten drawers, ranged from a tiny wren’s to those of hawks, gulls and carrion crows. The eggs were things of great beauty for him, each with its own unique colours and speckles. Some were collected from sheer cliff faces, others from the tops of tall trees, and he recalled them with great affection. “I could always remember vividly how and where I had found each and every egg,” he wrote a few months before he died, adding that he thought collecting eggs was “an enthralling hobby for a young boy and not, in my opinion, in the least destructive. To open a drawer and see thirty different very beautiful eggs nestling in their compartments on pink cotton-wool was a lovely sight.”⁴³

In childhood, Roald’s curiosity about the world was insatiable, and his letters from St Peter’s reveal clearly how much the natural world meant to him. The “snow-white passages” and “beautiful fossils” in the nearby Mendip caves⁴⁴ counterpoise a lecture on bird legends, in which the boys are told how the thieving blackbird got its black plumage and yellow beak, and — this appealed to him most — how the tiny wren defeated the eagle to become king of the birds. As a correspondent, he treats his mother as someone constantly in need of education, earnestly recounting what he has learned in school: how owls spew up the remains of the food they’ve eaten in pellets,⁴⁵ how kangaroos box, and how, in Nigeria, “black people live in mud huts”.⁴⁶ An eclipse of the sun, which he views through special glasses he has got from a children’s newspaper, fascinates him,⁴⁷ as does the precise means of making fire with wood and a piece of cord.⁴⁸And just in case Sofie Magdalene can’t quite grasp it, he makes a careful series of drawings and diagrams for her. His sense of adventure and curiosity is constantly stimulated. A film of the pilot Alan Cobham’s flight to the Cape of Good Hope,⁴⁹ a lecture by Captain Morris who has been on an expedition to Mount Everest,⁵⁰ and a newsreel about travelling from Tibet to India in a motorcar,⁵¹ compete with a school trip to the caves of the Cheddar Gorge, a nearby local attraction, in a charabanc, where the boys were squashed into the open-topped coach “like sardines in a tin”.⁵²Fire too is another source of wonder and always exciting — even when Roald’s hand is badly burned by a “jackie jumper” firework.⁵³ And, when three shops burn down in the local town, the masters lead a school expedition there the following day so that the boys can inspect the smouldering ruins.⁵⁴

Despite its Spartan discipline, the school exposed its pupils to the classics, to literature and to music. At home Roald had begun by reading Beatrix Potter stories, moving on to A. A. Milne, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which he would later describe as “the most enduring of all children’s books”, and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, however, were the first to leave “a permanent impression”.⁵⁵ They made him laugh, and by the age of nine he had learned them all by heart. St Peter’s pushed him further. By the time he was twelve, Roald was familiar with compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Grieg,⁵⁶ and had encountered many of Shakespeare’s plays, three Dickens novels, Stevenson’s Treasure Island?⁵⁷ and a great deal of Rudyard Kipling. He was already very comfortable with literature. There were books at home and his mother was an avid reader — Horace Walpole, Thomas Hardy and G. K. Chesterton were among her favourites.

Her son’s tastes were catholic, but his preference was generally for exotic tales of action, adventure and the imagination: the adventure stories of G. A. Henty, C. S. Forester, and Henry Rider Haggard, for example, as well as espionage thrillers such as Secret of the Baltic by T. C. Bridges and J. Storer Clouston’s The Spy in Black, a First World War adventure set in the Orkneys that would later become Michael Powell and Emeric Press-burger’s first film. Together with Douglas Highton, Roald also developed a fascination with Victorian ghost stories and Gothic fantasy, which he was to maintain for the rest of his life. The two boys read M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe together, and Roald gave his friend a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 collection of grand guignol short stories Can Such Things Be? as a birthday present. Dahl later admitted that Bierce’s tales of ghosts, ghouls, psychics, robots and werewolves “scared me a lot”,⁵⁸ adding elsewhere that the book was so frightening he “couldn’t turn the light off at night”.⁵⁹ He believed it “profoundly fascinated and probably influenced” him.⁶⁰ The book was so important to him that, almost sixty years later, Roald asked his friend whether he could have it back. Highton obliged and, in return, Roald sent him a signed copy of Boy with a warm dedication apologizing for a few of his more lurid descriptions of St Peter’s. These were, he confessed, “coloured by my natural sense of fantasy”.⁶¹

This love of fantasy did not transfer itself to things medical, for which Dahl was already developing a sharply observant eye. Accident and disease-prone throughout his life, Dahl’s childhood was packed with grisly medical encounters and Boy is full of hair-raising (and mostly true) accounts of these. His nose is “cut clean off” in a car crash and stitched back on by a doctor at home on the kitchen table. Then, on holiday in Norway, a doctor with a “round mirror strapped to his forehead” and a nurse “carrying a red rubber apron and a curved enamel bowl” remove his adenoids without using anaesthetic. Dahl often uses the adjective “curved” when he wants to describe something sinister, while gleaming metal also usually presages pain. Here a “long shiny steel instrument”, with a blade that is “very small, very sharp and very shiny”, disappears high up into the roof of his mouth. The doctor’s hand gives “four or five very quick little twists” and the next moment, “out of my mouth into the basin came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood”.⁶² Looking at the “huge red lumps” that had fallen out of his mouth, Dahl’s first thought was that the doctor had cut out the middle of his head.

Back at school it is not long before he has another encounter with doctor and scalpel. This one has another “long steel handle” and a “small pointed blade”. The young victim in this instance was not Dahl himself, but a fellow patient in the sickroom, Ellis, who has “an immense and angry-looking boil on the inside of his thigh. I saw it,” Roald boasts enthusiastically. “It was as big as a plum and about the same colour.” Ellis’s outraged screams of pain and his floods of tears, as the doctor throws a towel over his patient’s face and lances the purple swelling, driving the knife deep into the boil, provoke no sympathy from either doctor or the “mountainous-bosomed” Matron. “Don’t make such a fuss about nothing,” is all she says. Dahl himself is only marginally more sympathetic, admitting that he thinks the doctor “handled things rather cleverly”. “Pain,” he concludes, “was something we were expected to endure.”⁶³

Some things, however, were too much for his young readers. In the first draft of Boy, for example, Ellis was referred to by his real name, Ford, and Dahl added a coda to the story of the boil-lancing, which he removed before the book was published, almost certainly because he felt it was too sombre and gloomy. Ford survived the boil, he wrote, adding that “tragically it was all for nothing”,⁶⁴ and explaining that, two years later, during an outbreak of measles at the school, the boy died. In this omission also Dahl may well have been being true to his unsentimental child’s eye, for in his letters home from school the death is barely mentioned. His own exploits on horseback and a description of a toy motor canoe, with an automated rower, “whose joints move like real”,⁶⁵ get far more attention.

It is possible too that, in this regard, Roald was looking after his mother by protecting her from bad news. Perhaps he was keeping his word to the doctor in Llandaff, and taking trouble not to worry her. Certainly, his own accidents and ailments are only reported when the patient is on the mend. And there are never any complaints. Instead, he learns early how to use misfortune as entertainment. “On Bristol station,” he tells her, “Hoggart was sick, and when I looked at it, I was sick, but now I am quite all right.”⁶⁶ Moreover, behind the desire to entertain and shock, there are traces of great sensitivity. Writing to comfort his mother on the seventh anniversary of his sister Astri’s death, he comments: “I don’t suppose the grave has ever looked nicer than it does now, with all the heather on it.”⁶⁷ But drama is what excites him most. A trip into Weston to see the Duke and Duchess of York (the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth), who were in town to open a new hospital, is memorable because their train ran someone over and because a local ironmonger got so excited that he fired six blank shots into the air and terrified the nervous duke.⁶⁸ By his final year at St Peter’s in 1929, a thuggish quality was starting to reveal itself. After playing rugby against a local team, Roald writes boastfully of his own school’s “rough plays”, which were strongly censured by the match referee. “We got four of their chaps crying,” he brags to his mother, as if pleased that he can now inflict injury as well as receive it.⁶⁹

By the age of twelve he has also started to notice class and accents, remarking to his mother that the man who cleans his boots calls High-ton “Oiton” and himself “Dorl”,⁷⁰ and that while playing football, he has overheard some navvies arguing with the referee on a neighbouring pitch. Their language fascinates him. “Garn, stop yer gob, ref, or I’ll come along and clump you over the ear!”⁷¹ he records with evident delight. With Highton, he starts doing the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, and experimenting with his own clumsy but original word games. A competitor in the school boxing finals is described as “a lump of very conceited mass”,⁷² while a singer practising in the music room below him is evoked in terms that prefigure some of the language of The BFG. “The noise,” he writes, “closely resembles that of a fly’s kneecap, rattled about in a bilious buttercup, both having kidney trouble and lumbago!”⁷³ His eye for the quirky and absurd is also developing fast. He is intrigued by a letter from his sister Ellen, who had reported seeing “electrified frogs”,⁷⁴ while, in a film about a silver mine, he laughs out loud when he sees “a lot of fat old women” mashing up the slurry “in order to get the silver out”.⁷⁵ Obesity is always a source of comment, usually of amusement and sometimes of condemnation. A passenger at Yatton Station is “at least nine feet around the tummy in circumference”,⁷⁶ and when “two elderly females” come to the school to act out Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Roald observes critically that “the fattest, in a purple dress, didn’t know it well, so had to hold a book all the time”.⁷⁷ Even Sofie Magdalene is not exempt from his fat-detecting eye. In the summer of 1929, while on holiday in Cornwall, he writes to his mother warning her that although they are saving her a large room with a double bed, “I am sure your hips will protrude from each side.”⁷⁸

In April 1927, Sofie Magdalene sold Cumberland Lodge, and the Dahl family moved to Bexley in Kent. The spacious new house, Oak-wood, was only 15 miles from Central London, yet had two acres of tree-filled grounds tended by a gardener called Martin, and, much to Roald’s delight, a hard tennis court.⁷⁹ It had good railway connections to Roedean, where Alfhild was about to start school, and where Sofie Magdalene hoped Else and Asta would shortly follow. The sophisticated maverick Douglas Highton remembered it as “luxurious and civilized” — with a selection of cooked food laid out on the table each morning at breakfast, and a billiard room with full-sized table, which was used each night after a dinner, over which Sofie Magdalene presided in her “gentle and dignified way”.⁸⁰ But a few years later, other more conventional guests found the Dahls running wild. One was amazed at the “filthy language” used by the children, to which their mother “paid no regard”, sitting “stone deaf”, while Roald and his sisters indulged themselves in a torrent of swearing.⁸¹ His youngest sibling, Asta, agreed that the children “didn’t have many restrictions” and that, by English standards, they were kept on a pretty loose leash. Once Roald sent her up a cedar tree in the garden, “absolutely padded out with cushions”, so that he could shoot at his ten-year-old sister with his air rifle and see how far the bullets would penetrate.⁸² She gleefully consented. On another occasion he rigged up an elaborate aerial “chariot” made out of Meccano, containing soup cans of cold water, and suspended it on a long wire so he could “bomb” local ladies, as they walked their dogs along the lane at the bottom of the garden. The result pleased him hugely. “The ladies who had halted and looked up on hearing the rushing noise of my chariot overhead, caught the cascade of water full in their face…. It was tremendous,” Dahl remembered. And, despite his mother’s “steely eye” when she discovered what he had done, “for days afterwards I experienced the pleasant warm glow that comes to all of us when we have brought off a major triumph”.⁸³

If holidays at home were like paradise for the children, going away was even better. Easter was usually spent on the coast of Wales, at the picturesque seaside resort of Tenby, where the family rented a house in the Old Harbour, right on the seafront. There, accompanied by both of their maids from Bexley, Roald took donkey rides on the beach, collected winkles from the rock pools, walked with the dogs on the clifftops, and occasionally took the boat to nearby Caldy Island, where he gathered seabirds’ eggs. He also indulged his rich schoolboy sense of humour. Else, his younger sister, remembers Roald asking her to lean out of the window of the house and shout at the passersby: “One skin, two skin, three skin, four skin!”⁸⁴ without understanding why her brother was rolling on the floor with laughter.

But Tenby was as nothing compared to the summer holidays in Norway. After a candlelit dinner in Oslo, at the home of their Hesselberg grandparents and their two eccentric spinster aunts, the children and their indomitable mother would head off to the coast and the countless islands that lay scattered through the fjords. These afforded endless opportunities for swimming, fishing, sunbathing, eating seafood, and yet more pranks, such as replacing the tobacco in their future brother-in-law’s pipe with goat droppings and waiting to see how he would react when he smoked it. Asta remembered sailing in Louis’s boat The Hard Black Stinker and handing up buckets to be filled with fresh prawns from the returning shrimp boats, while Roald revelled in the lyrical pleasures of fishing. “On our summer holidays in Norway we would often row out into the fjord in the early evenings to fish,” he wrote later. “We dropped anchor and baited our hooks with mussels and let out the lines until the weights hit the bottom. Then, unless we were after flat fish, we pulled our lines up two good arms-lengths above the seabed and waited. Each of us held the line in the proper manner around the back of the first finger with the thumb on top, hardly daring to speak because, although the fjord was deep, we weren’t certain that the fish mightn’t hear us.”⁸⁵

And in the evenings, Sofie Magdalene told stories. Sometimes they were English ones, read from books, but often the fare was darker and more Scandinavian. These were the ones Roald and Alfhild remembered: fairy tales, either freshly invented or adapted from the nineteenth-century collections of Peter Christian Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe.⁸⁶ These ac counts of wicked trolls and other mythical Norwegian creatures that lived in the dark pine forests were unsentimental yarns, usually with a highly developed sense of the fantastical and the grotesque. They featured satires on the consequences of greed, stories about battling giants and cloud monsters, tales of children who soared high into the sky on the backs of eagles, and a series about outsize insects and frogs entitled Have Animals Got Souls? They were to have a profound influence on the young Roald and shape his sense of what a story should be. Fables such as The Boy Who Challenged a Troll to an Eating Competition, The Hare Who Laughed Until His Jaws Cracked and The Tabby Cat Who Ate Too Much overflow with zany black humour. They clearly struck a chord with Roald, for he would reuse their themes and reinvent them in his own manner many years later.

These tales were illustrated by an artist called Theodor Kittelsen. Kit-telsen was a Norwegian mystic — a visionary and fantastical painter, much loved by the Dahls. He was born in 1857 on the west coast of Norway, in Kragero, the birthplace of Ludvig Aadnesen. Like his contemporary Edvard Munch, many of his paintings and illustrations are not for the fainthearted. He too was fascinated by the grotesque. His drawings of the bubonic plague, for example, which raged through medieval Norway, are remarkable for their evocations of death and loneliness in a dark, hostile landscape; yet he was also able to depict the evanescent swiftness of a running stream, the misty stillness of an autumn sunrise, and the strange shapeless wonderland of a familiar human landscape transformed by a heavy fall of snow. His eye is sharply observant, and his sense of humour usually coarse and hard-edged in a way that prefigures Dahl’s own. In Morbid Love, for example, a bedraggled green mosquito and a frog in a crumpled white ball gown embrace by the side of a tranquil blue lake. A distant sun is setting. At the water’s edge stands an empty bottle of wine. Beside it a drained glass lies on its side. The two animal lovers are parting. Both are weeping. But the pathos of this melancholy moment will soon be shattered. For, unbeknown to them, a mischievous crab has emerged from the water and is about to nip the grasshopper’s leg, while on a branch above their heads a warbling bird has just evacuated its bowels. In a moment the resulting mess will splatter all over the lovers’ tear-stained faces.⁸⁷

This dimension of the ironic and absurd masked Kittelsen’s profound fascination for the natural world. A fellow painter, Erik Werenskjold, praised his concern with “man’s pettiness and absurdity, his vindictiveness and jealousy”, which was set against “the lofty and unfathomable grandeur of Nature, as revealed in snowclad mountains, desolate hills or a tiny fragrant blossom”.⁸⁸ This combination of the satirist and the naturalist, the fantasist and the observer, also defined an important aspect of Dahl’s own aesthetic. His sisters, particularly the sharp and observant Alfhild, saw the link at once between their brother’s tales and those Norwegian legends they had been told as children, recognizing in both a distinctive blend of humour and fear, combined with a sense of the solitary majesty of the natural world.⁸⁹ Recalling his childhood diaries, scribbled high up in the branch of an ancient chestnut tree, far away from other humans and deep within the realm of nature, Dahl himself would later write: “In springtime, I was in a cave of green leaves surrounded by hundreds of those wonderful white candles that are the conker trees flowers. In winter it was less mysterious, but even more exciting because I could see the ground miles below me as well as the landscape all around. Sitting there, above the world, I used to write down things that would have made my mother and my sisters stretch their eyes with disbelief had they ever read them. But I knew they wouldn’t.”⁹⁰

This acute sense of the ecstasy and agony of childhood — of the strange opposition of happiness and sadness, reality and fantasy, success and failure — was something that Dahl never forgot. It remained familiar to him all his life. He remembered with ease how a child sees the world, how isolated he or she can feel even within the bosom of the family, how quickly they must adapt to new experiences, and how odd the world of adults can seem when viewed through younger eyes. As he was to write of the young matron at St Peter’s, “it made no difference whether she was twenty-eight or sixty-eight because to us a grown-up was a grown-up and all grownups were dangerous creatures”.⁹¹ In later life, some adults would find this “childish” aspect to his personality irritating. They objected to it either in his writing, which they accused of coarseness and vulgarity, or when it was manifested personally in boastfulness, bragging or contentiousness. Yet, what came with it was an ever present sense of wonder. This imaginative verve was essential to his nature and in many ways, the keystone of all his writing — both for adults and children. It could result in the grotesque and repulsive, for which he would become notorious, but it could also be tender and elegiac, dark and mysterious. Expressed in spare, simple prose that sometimes verged on the poetic, Dahl’s sense of the child’s perspective was always sure-footed, and often immensely powerful. “I cannot possibly describe to you what it felt like to be standing alone in the pitchy blackness of that silent wood in the small hours of the night,” he wrote in Danny the Champion of the World, describing a child who has got lost in the forest. “The sense of loneliness was overwhelming, the silence as deep as death, and the only sounds were the ones I made myself…. I had a queer feeling that the whole wood was listening with me, the trees and the bushes, the little animals hiding in the undergrowth and the birds roosting in the branches. All were listening. Even the silence was listening. Silence was listening to silence.”⁹²

^*Not 150, as Dahl recalls in Boy, p. 72.

^†This was equivalent to year four in current UK educational practice and sixth grade in the United States and Canada.

^‡In the traditional form of the game, as played by generations of schoolchildren, the seed of a horse chestnut, a conker, is suspended on a string and then used to strike another conker similarly suspended. When one of the two is destroyed, the survivor is declared victorious. A winning conker assumes the score of all its victim’s preceding foes.