Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 9

THE HISTORY OF TRADING between Norway and South Wales goes back well over a thousand years. Medieval chroniclers writing of the land of Morgannwg, now Glamorgan, in the period between the Roman settlement and the Norman Conquest celebrated the visits of Norwegian traders, comparing them favourably to the “black heathens”,¹ the Danes, whose intentions often seemed more inclined toward rape and pillage than commerce. Curiously, recent evidence suggests that Welsh men and women, captured in the valleys and sold into slavery, may have been the first major commodity exported from Wales to Norway;² however, by the mid-nineteenth century, trade in human souls had given way to a sophisticated, booming and lucrative business relationship based on timber, steel and above all, coal. Boats from Norway, already the third largest merchant fleet in the world, arrived in Cardiff with timber, mostly to use as pit props (which the Welsh miners called “Norways”), and left carrying coal and steel to all parts of the globe. In twenty years the city’s population doubled as it became the world’s major supplier of coal. By 1900, Cardiff was exporting 5 million tons of coal annually from more than 14 miles of seething dockside wharfage. Two thirds of these exports left in Norwegian-owned vessels. The city was consequently awash with commercial opportunities for an enterprising, intelligent young expatriate, tired of his sojourn in Paris and eager to make his fortune.

Cardiff, of course, already boasted a considerable number of resident Norwegian nationals. But the majority were transient sailors. In 1868, the Norwegian Mission to Seamen had constructed a little wooden church between the East and West Docks on land donated by the Marquis of Bute. It was a place of worship, but also a place where the ships’ crews, many of whom were as young as fourteen, could relax and read Norwegian books and newspapers, while the cargo on their boats was loaded and unloaded. A model ship hung from the ceiling, and the walls were decorated with Scandinavian landscapes and pictures of the royal families of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The tables were even decorated with miniature Norwegian flags.

Up to 75,000 seamen passed through the Mission’s doors each year, eager for reminders of home in this hostile industrial environment. The docks were noisy, filthy, and could be terrifying — particularly to anyone from a rural background. An experienced Norwegian sea captain described the city: “It’s not difficult to find Cardiff from the sea,” he told his young nephew, who was about to sail there for the first time; “you just look for a very black sky — that’s the coal dust. In the middle of the dust, there is a white building, the Norwegian Seamen’s Church. When we see that we know we are home.”³ The tiny church, with its plucky spire, quickly became a symbol for the Norwegian community in Cardiff, although most who settled there integrated with the local Welsh community, and used it simply for births, marriages and deaths.⁴ Today it stands restored, looking out at redeveloped Cardiff Bay, as if saluting the most famous of its congregation, who was christened there in the autumn of 1916, and whose name now graces the public area between the church and the grey slate, golden steel modernity of the new Wales Millennium Centre: Roald Dahl.*

Exactly when Harald Dahl arrived in South Wales is not clear. He does not figure in the UK census of 1891; however, by 1897 a mustachioed and dapper Harald is posing for a portrait photographer in Newport, some 15 miles along the coast from Cardiff. His long, flat face, round forehead and confident, sardonic eyes bear little resemblance to the oafish features of his father, which scowl out of an earlier page in the same family photograph album.⁵ It’s likely that this photograph of Harald, despatched to sisters and friends in Paris, was taken not long after he arrived in the Cardiff area and began learning his trade in shipping. In 1901 the census records that he was still single, working as a shipbroker’s manager and lodging near the docks in a small redbrick terrace at No. 3, Charles Place, Barry, in the house of a retired land steward called William Adam, his wife Mary and their two adult daughters. Yet, despite his relocation to South Wales, a significant part of Harald’s heart had remained in France. He had fallen in love with a glamorous doe-eyed Parisian beauty named Marie Beaurin-Gressier. Later in the summer of 1901, he returned to Paris and married her.

Her granddaughter Bryony describes Marie as coming from “a posh ancien régime family that had become rather impoverished and down on its luck”.⁶ Certainly, the Beaurin-Gressiers were not bourgeois. Though they had houses in Paris and in the country, near Compiègne, they seemed more inclined to sport and leisure than to commerce. Rugby was a dominating interest. Two of Marie’s brothers, Guillaume and Charles, played for Paris Stade Français, the latter representing his country twice against England, while one of her sisters married the captain of the French team that won a gold medal at the 1900 Olympics. Another sister went to Algeria and married an Arab. Another brother ran a well-known Parisian fish restaurant. Yet another was an auctioneer. Marie was the most beautiful. Waiflike, elfin and delicate, she had a pale complexion, a mop of thick dark hair and sad, serious eyes. Fifteen years her senior, Harald must have had enormous charm, as well as good financial prospects, to succeed in stealing her away from her warm and adoring family. A snapshot of her on her wedding day, on a sunny veranda in the French countryside, beaming with delight and surrounded by admirers, suggests that she was very much in love. But it also suggests her innocence. She can surely have had little sense of what life in industrial Cardiff would offer her. Perhaps to counteract any potential feelings of homesickness, Marie brought some reminders of France with her to South Wales. Her trousseau boasted a diverse collection of jewellery, paintings and furniture, including a rosewood bedstead, various antique tables, chairs, secretaires, cabinets, an astronomical clock and an elaborate Louis XVI timepiece. Touchingly there was also a gilt mirror “carved by Mr Dahl and presented to Mrs Dahl”.⁷

Shortly after the newlyweds returned to Cardiff, Harald went into business with another expatriate Norwegian, three years younger than he was: Ludvig Aadnesen. The two men had become acquainted with each other in Paris, but the Aadnesens, who came from Tvedestrand, near Krager0, the birthplace of Edvard Munch, were already part of Harald’s extended family. One of them had married Harald’s sister Clara, and emigrated to South Africa with her.† Ludvig, a lifelong bachelor, shared Harald’s fascination for painting and became his confidant and closest friend.

Financially, it was a good move. Over the next two decades the ship-broking firm of Aadnesen & Dahl, which supplied the ships that arrived in the docks with fuel and a host of other items, would expand from its small room in Bute Street to acquire offices in Newport, Swansea and Port Talbot, as well as large premises in Cardiff, which at one point also housed the Norwegian Consulate. Gradually the partnership began to trade in coal as well as simply supplying ships, and both men became rich. Dahl and Aadnesen were business partners, but they were also immensely close, and Ludvig occupied “an incredibly special place” ⁸ in Harald’s affections. In the family he was always referred to as “Parrain” (the French for “Godfather”), and when Harald died, he bequeathed to his “good old friend and partner” the only named object in his will: a painting by Frits Thaulow called Harbour Scene. The painting, now lost, must have symbolized many shared memories for the two men. It spoke, of course, of ships and the sea that had caused them both to move to Wales, but it also evoked their youth together in Norway.

Harald’s marriage to Marie began promisingly. He rented an Arts and Crafts seafront house near the docks in Barry, round the corner from where he had been lodging, with a first-floor balcony that offered a fine view of the bay. There, their first child, Ellen Marguerite, named after Harald’s mother, was born in 1903, and a son Louis, named perhaps after her elder brother, three years later in 1906. Those are the bare statistics. Yet while archival research can reconstruct the landmark events of a vanished life — its births, marriages and deaths — it cannot bring to life the personality that lived between these records without more personal, idiosyncratic evidence. Harald left diaries, letters, paintings, odd pieces of carving, and other artefacts that hint at his character. The contents of the expensive French leather wallet that was in his pocket when he died, for example, now carefully preserved at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, complete with postal orders and railway season ticket, testify both to his good taste and meticulous habits. Of Marie, however, nothing remains. Even the gilt mirror is no longer in the family.‡ It is consequently hard to hypothesize how she coped with her new life in Barry. But it’s more than likely she suffered. Far away from her family and from the world she loved, the grime and dust of Cardiff Docks must have seemed a poor replacement for the elegance of Paris or the delights of summer days in Compiègne. Living with a Norwegian husband, fifteen years older than she was and accustomed to solitude, also cannot have been easy.

On October 16, 1907, while heavily pregnant with their third child, Marie died. She was twenty-nine years old. Her death certificate indicates that she collapsed and died of a massive haemorrhage caused by placenta praevia — an obstetric complication, where the placenta lies low in the uterus and can shear off from it, causing sometimes fatal bleeding. Someone called Mary Henrich, probably a nurse or nanny as she was also living at the house, was present when Marie died and reported her death to the authorities. Marie’s granddaugther Bryony however remembers a rumour whispered in the family (perhaps stemming from Roald’s mother, Sofie Magdalene) that Marie had been depressed and died from a failed abortion.⁹ While it is possible that an attempt to terminate the pregnancy artificially might produce similar symptoms to placenta praevia haemorrhage, the risks for the abortionist if the pregnancy was advanced would have been enormous. So, unless Marie had attempted somehow to do it herself, the official version seems a good deal more plausible.

Marie’s death left Harald devastated. He had almost completed building a splendid new whitewashed house for his family, far from the commotion and noise of the docks, in leafy Llandaff — a medieval town that the railway had made a suburb of Cardiff. Harald had designed many of the building’s details himself and proudly named his new home “Villa Marie” in honour of his young wife. Sadly, she never saw it finished. It survives today, though its name has changed,¹⁰ but its steeply sloping gables and idiosyncratic Arts and Crafts appearance, with leaded windows and faux medieval buttresses, suggest how much Harald himself had contributed to the design and how much he must have looked forward to a settled and happy family life there. Instead, at forty-four, he found himself suddenly on his own — left to raise two tiny children, aged three and one, neither of whom would ever remember the dusky, wide-eyed waif whose beauty had so bewitched him.

Following Marie’s death, her mother Ganou came over from Paris to help look after Ellen and Louis. Harald drowned his sorrows in hard work, spending long hours in his office and obsessively tending Villa Marie’s substantial garden.¹¹ Four years passed. Then, one summer, Harald went away to visit his sister Olga, who was now living in Denmark.¹² Whether he was lonely and went consciously in search of a new bride, as Roald maintained in his memoir Boy, is uncertain, but it was in Denmark, not Norway, as Roald later claimed, that the Dahls and the Hesselbergs finally connected. Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, who was visiting friends, had strong, almost masculine features that were in sharp contrast to Marie’s delicate, almost doll-like appearance. Within a matter of weeks she and Harald were engaged.

It was a convenient match for both of them. She was twenty-six years old, sturdy, strong-willed and eager to break the tie with her parents. He was prosperous, established, and old enough to have been her father. Harald however had to overcome strong opposition from Sofie Magdalene’s parents. Karl Laurits and his wife Ellen were by now wealthy in their own right. He was treasurer of the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund and both were very controlling personalities. Their only son had recently died, and their three daughters were now the focus of their attention. Sofie Magdalene was considered the least attractive of them, and felt herself in some ways the “Cinderella” of the trio.¹³ Nevertheless Karl Laurits was disconcerted that his eldest wanted to marry a man only ten years younger than he was. Worse still was the fact that she planned to leave Kristiania and live in Wales. But Sofie Magdalene was determined, and her parents were eventually forced to consent grudgingly to the wedding.

Her stubbornness in doing so may also have been farsighted. Ahead of her, she may have seen the fate that would befall Ellen and Astri, her two younger sisters. They failed to escape their father’s thrall and were destined to live out their entire lives in the parental home. Increasingly eccentric, they became a growing source of curiosity and amusement for their younger relations, who remembered them, either drunk or drugged, sitting on the veranda of their home in Josefinegate, like characters in an Ibsen play, methodically picking maggots out of raspberries with a pin.¹⁴

Harald took his new wife to Paris on her honeymoon, kitting her out in the French fashions he adored, and buying her a cape made of black satin that she kept for the rest of her life. They visited his brother Oscar and his wife in La Rochelle, before returning to the Villa Marie. Sofie Magdalene immediately took charge in a manner that was both decisive and somewhat brutal. She turfed the beloved Ganou out of the house, and hired a Norwegian nanny, Birgit, to look after the children. This alienated Ellen and completely traumatized the five-year-old Louis, for whom Ganou had become a surrogate mother. For weeks after she left he would stand at the garden gate looking desperately down Fairwater Road and screaming for her to come back. No longer was French to be spoken at home. From now on, only Norwegian and English were permitted. The sensitive Louis found it hard to cope with these changes and suffered psychologically. Once he appeared on the Dahls’ front doorstep with a classmate who announced to an uncomprehending Sofie Magdalene that the unhappy boy had had “an accident in bags” during a lesson and needed to come home to wash his bottom. Though Louis would in time grow to be fond of his stepmother, these initial experiences caused a fault line between Sofie Magdalene and her stepchildren that would lead to tension later on.

The new bride, however, was deliriously happy in the Villa Marie. Fifty years later she would still describe it as her “dream home” — the place where she had been happiest of all.¹⁵ She was soon pregnant and a rejuvenated Harald excitedly insisted that she take a series of “glorious walks” through the surrounding countryside, because he believed these would imbue the unborn child in her womb with a sense of beauty and a love of nature. Within five years Sofie Magdalene had given birth to four children: Astri (1912), Alfhild (1914),§ Roald (1916)¹⁶ and Else (1917). All four were indeed to manifest a strong artistic leaning and profound love of the countryside, qualities they shared with both their parents. Nevertheless, the idea that these “glorious walks” had somehow influenced their emotional development became deeply ingrained in their psychologies. Astri was Harald’s favourite. A snapshot of him roaring with delight as his one-year-old daughter takes a puff from his pipe is the only photograph to survive that shows him with anything but a sober, almost sombre, countenance. Roald was named after the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had successfully reached the South Pole in 1911, and whose nephew, Jens, worked briefly for Aadnesen & Dahl during the war.¹⁷ He was his mother’s “pride and joy”, her only boy, and therefore treated with special care. His siblings affectionately dubbed him “the apple of the eye”.¹⁸

The First World War brought the need for registration cards for Harald and Sofie Magdalene, and resentment among some locals that Norway remained neutral throughout the conflict. Harald and Sofie seem to have been immune from this — perhaps because Harald was working so hard to keep the merchant fleet going. His wartime secretary, J. Harry Williams, recalled Harald as a model employer, conscientious, diligent and responsible. He was “my first ideal”, he told Roald. “Nobody has ever come higher in my experience.”¹⁹ Alfhild too remembered her father working long hours, coming home tired late in the evenings, and her mother trying to cheer him up with her Norwegian cooking. The war did no harm to his business and, as it prospered, Harald sold Villa Marie in 1917 and bought Ty Mynydd, a large Victorian farmhouse at Radyr, further out of Cardiff, a few stops down the Taff Vale railway. It had 150 acres of land, its own electricity generator, a laundry and a collection of farm outbuildings that included a working piggery. Roald later recalled with nostalgia its grand lawns and terraces, its numerous servants, and the surrounding fields filled with shire horses, hay wagons, pigs, chickens and milking cows. The purchase of the farm even merited an article in the local press, which described Mr Dahl as a man “with many years association with the shipping trade of South Wales” and “prominent in Docks circles”. “His firm is a very large business,” the article concluded, “especially with Norwegian shipowners, whose vessels have continued to trade with the district all through the war.”²⁰

Harald bought paintings and antique furniture for the new house, and carved wooden picture frames. He collected alpine plants, going out in all weathers to stock the new garden with what he had collected. At one point he also bought his young wife a secondhand De Dion Bouton car, and tried to persuade her to take up driving. It was a mistake. On her way to visit a friend who had just had a baby, she put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and crashed the car into a cartload of eggs. When she finally got to her friend’s house, she found that the baby had died. She never drove again.²¹ At home, Harald was not the easiest of husbands. He could be withdrawn and undemonstrative, sometimes almost cold, as he absorbed himself in his many private interests. Years later, Sofie Magdalene would tell her granddaughter, Lou Pearl, that at times she even felt frightened of him.²²

As 1920 dawned, Harald would have been forgiven for looking back on his life with some satisfaction. He had come a long way since he left his family in Sarpsborg for the delights of bohemian Paris. Business was booming. He had survived the sudden death of his first wife, to find unexpected happiness with Sofie Magdalene. Though he had started his family late — when he was forty — he was now in his mid-fifties and had six happy, healthy multilingual children around him.¶ Two were already at boarding school. His eldest daughter Ellen was at Roedean, a grand English fee-paying school for girls, set high atop a cliff in Sussex overlooking the English Channel, while Louis had just started at nearby Brighton College. If he did not see his younger children as much as he would have liked, he still occasionally found the time to relax and unwind with them — chasing a giggling Alfhild round the dining-room table, for example, while singing Grieg’s Troll Dance at the top of his voice.²³

Now Sofie was pregnant again. Everything seemed idyllic. But these halcyon days were not to last. At the beginning of February, Astri, Sofie’s eldest daughter, awoke in the middle of the night with a fierce stomachache. Her younger sister, Alfhild, who shared a room with her, went to fetch her mother, complaining that Astri’s cries of pain were keeping her awake. A doctor was summoned and Astri was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. The doctor operated at home, on the scrubbed nursery table, but by then it was too late. The appendix had burst and Astri had peritonitis. She never came round from the anaesthetic. About a week later, she died from the infection. She was seven years old.

Harald never recovered from the blow. “Astri was far and away my father’s favourite,” Roald wrote in Boy. “He adored her beyond measure, and her sudden death left him literally speechless for days afterwards. He was so overwhelmed with grief that when he himself went down with pneumonia a month or so afterward, he did not much care whether he lived or died.”²⁴ Writing those words, Roald knew only too well what his own father was feeling, for with vicious symmetry, some forty years later, he too was to lose his own eldest daughter — also aged seven. The son’s understanding of his father’s psychology was acute, but he also recalled his father’s anguish from a child’s perspective. He remembered the laurel bushes, which his father had been pruning when he first became ill and which, for the rest of his life, would always be associated with death. And he remembered his father’s refusal to do battle with the disease. The eyes of the adult and child blended together as he described Harald’s death, more than sixty years after it happened. “My father refused to fight,” he wrote. “He was thinking, I am quite sure, of his beloved daughter, and he was wanting to join her in heaven. So he died. He was fifty-seven years old.”²⁵

Wracked with pneumonia, Harald articulated his regrets in his journal, torturing himself for having worked too hard and not having sufficiently enjoyed his dead daughter’s brief life. “How little we understand about putting a price on the world’s many good things? How seldom does the door to our hearts stand wide open? We put the blame on the fact that we have too much to do, that we must have peace and quiet to think and work, and so we shut out the sun. Only when it is too late do we see what we have missed.”²⁶ Ironically, even as he noted these observations, he was unable to change his habits. As the coughing worsened and the fever soared, and as his eldest son Louis cycled around the garden with his five-year-old half sister Alfhild squealing with delight atop the handlebars,²⁷ Harald made minute and fussy adjustments to his will. Attended by two nurses, he cut out a small bequest to a distant cousin and instructed that all death duties arising from any of his other legacies were to be paid by the beneficiaries. Two days later, he was dead. He was buried in the medieval churchyard of St John the Baptist, Radyr, next to his daughter, Astri, on whose grave the earth was still fresh.

Above their joint resting place, not far from a 1,000-year-old yew tree, Sofie Magdalene erected an elaborate pink granite cross. It stands still in the little churchyard that was once surrounded by fields and farmland and is now besieged by an ugly 1970s housing estate. The monument thrusts prominently above the surrounding gravestones, its Celtic ornamentation and circled cross suggesting perhaps a public commitment the Dahl family had made to the Welsh soil in which they had put down their roots. If that was the case, Sofie Magdalene was hedging her bets as well. For she also ensured that both coffins were lined in lead so that they could be dug up and transported back to Norway if she chose to return there in the future.²⁸

The funeral was grand and formal. All the children dressed up. Alfhild wore a specially made check dress, with black bows. She remembered the huge house filled with flowers, the servants all dressed in black, and the heady perfume of the early spring narcissi, which lay strewn in piles upon the coffin. She also remembered the stoicism of her mother. For Sofie Magdalene never showed her pain. Others wept, but she did not. Much rested on her shoulders. She was thirty-five years old and had five children in her care — Ellen (sixteen), Louis (thirteen), Alfhild (five), Roald (three), and Else, barely one. A sixth was on the way. She was already looking forward. She intended to concentrate her energies on the living rather than the dead.

^*The church was dismantled, removed from its original site at Bute West Dock in 1987, and rebuilt in the regenerated Cardiff Bay in 1992. Roald Dahl was the first president of the Norwegian Church Preservation Society that supervised the restoration. In the process the building lost its corrugated iron roof and acquired a grander tiled one. It now overlooks Roald Dahl Plass (Plass is Norwegian for “Plaza”), formerly the Oval Basin, which was renamed after the author in 2002.

^†The exact links between the Dahls and the Aadnesens are complex and hard to discern. Census records reveal that Harald’s sister Clara Dahl married an Aadnesen and went to live with him in South Africa, where she gave birth to a son, Harald Dahl Aadnesen, in Durban in 1895. Either Aadnesen died or the couple were divorced, for by 1900, Clara was back in Oslo, living with her father and her five-year-old son. By the time Olaus died in 1923, Clara had remarried a local machinist called Siegfried Cammermeyer. Oscar Dahl took a benevolent interest in his nephew, Harald, who spent much time with his own son, Erik. Oscar’s family photograph albums show the two boys playing with each other, skiing in thick snow, and there are several shots of Harald’s wedding in France. What happened after that is unclear. Either Harald died young or his connection with Ludvig Aadnesen became increasingly tenuous. When Ludvig died in Whitchurch, Glamorganshire, in 1956, at the ripe old age of ninety, he left the bulk of his estate to his nieces Helga and Elizabeth and a nephew called Torolf. There was no mention at all of the South African-born Harald.

^‡According to Bryony Dahl, most of Marie’s furniture eventually went to her daughter Ellen, who used it to furnish the house in Hampstead, where she lived with her husband Ashley Miles. When Ashley and Ellen died, within a few weeks of each other early in 1988, everything was left to Ashley’s secretary, Barbara Prideaux, who had by then become their carer. She too died shortly afterwards, leaving two Beaurin-Gressier portraits to Bryony. She subsequently sold these along with the two pieces of Marie’s furniture that had been left to her father, Louis: an “elaborate marquetry cabinet” and a “ridiculous marble and ormolu clock” — presumably the Louis XVI timepiece mentioned in the marriage settlement — Bryony Dahl, Conversation with the author, 01/17/08.

^§Alfhild was named after Sofie Magdalene’s late brother, Alf, who had died in his twenties. Astri Newman [daughter of Alfhild], Conversation with the author, 10/15/07.

^¶Learning two languages at the same time may have been one of the reasons Roald was so slow to start speaking. According to family legend, his first words were a complete sentence, spoken in Norwegian: “Pappa, hvor for har du ikke t0fflene dine pd deg — Daddy, why aren’t you wearingyour slippers?”