FAMOUS, RICH... AND CURSED
Brutally caned at school, badly injured in an air crash, devastated by the death of his daughter… but Roald Dahl survived to become one of our best-loved authors
BOOK OF THE WEEK
ROALD DAHL: TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED by Matthew Dennison (Head of Zeus £20, 272pp)
You might think Roald Dahl had all the luck. Paperback sales at the time of his death were well over two million a year, with translation deals struck in 58 languages.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory sold more than four million copies in Britain alone and there are now 250 million editions of Dahl’s other titles in print globally. Just last September, Netflix paid the Dahl family £500 million for film rights. Matilda: The Musical has been generating cash for years. I’ve seen it twice myself.
As Matthew Dennison’s sagacious biography demonstrates, however, never was a man more cursed than Roald Dahl.
Things went wrong early. He was born in 1916 in Llandaff, a prosperous district of Cardiff, where his father, Harald, was a wealthy shipbroker, who imported Scandinavian timber for use as pit props in the coal industry. In 1920, Roald’s sevenyear-old sister, Astri, died of a burst appendix, and Harald Dahl immediately dropped dead of grief, technically pneumonia. Roald was scarcely three, and ‘family tragedy imprinted his first horizons’.
What ought to have been an idyllic childhood in a large red-brick villa, with regular holidays to see family in Norway, was interrupted by school. Roald, by his own account, was frequently caned — ‘tears poured down your cheeks in streams and dripped on to the carpet.’ He was singled out, one feels, because he was foreign — a funny name, plus he held a Norwegian rather than British passport.
His teachers were ‘eccentric and bloodthirsty’, just like Miss Trunchbull or The Twits. Adults, in Roald’s writings, are always monstrous and cartoonish — the women with moustaches and ‘a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry’, the men fat and melting ‘like a hot jellyfish’.
WHEN Roald proceeded to Repton in Derbyshire, there was a continuing ‘lasting impression of horror’, the school crammed with cruel authority figures, who sent youngsters ‘groping through an almost limitless black tunnel’ of exams, dull rote learning, meaningless rules and regulations and random beatings.
on the other hand, at 6ft 5in in his midteens, Roald the Viking was hardly tractable. Fellow pupils, as well as staff, found him forbiddingly aloof and arrogant.
He also smoked a clay pipe, rode a motorbike and was not a nice brother. He padded one of his sisters with cushions and ‘shot at her repeatedly with his air rifle’.
Roald didn’t want to go to university and prolong his experience of institutionalised learning. Instead, in the autumn of 1938, he secured employment with the Shell petroleum company in east Africa.
He was responsible for selling fuel oil to farmers scattered across Tanganyika, a country four times the size of the uK — and Roald quite took to the colonial life, learning to speak Swahili and drink whisky on the veranda at sundown. He corresponded with his mother about constipation.
With war declared, he went to Kenya to train as an RAF pilot, living in a tent and washing and shaving ‘in a mugful of one’s own spat-out tooth water’.
Roald ‘took for granted aspects of heroism in his own make-up’, and after a mere eight supervised hours, began flying solo. In September 1940, he crashed in the egyptian desert. Roald’s nose was knocked clean backwards through his face. His skull was fractured and he was ‘paralysed by pain’.
Rescued by a fellow pilot, whom Roald edited out when narrating all these events, he was taken to hospital in Alexandria. His new nose, he said, was modelled on Rudolph Valentino’s.
But fearsome headaches and back problems would persist for the rest of his days, so he was declared medically unfit for further action. By March 1942, Squadron Leader Dahl was in Washington DC as an air attache, drumming up u.S. support for the British war effort.
What this entailed, Dennison suggests, was having lots of affairs with influential heiresses and socialites, such as elizabeth Arden and Clare Boothe Luce. Roald found womanising ‘ridiculously easy, like manipulating puppets’. He also began writing short stories, published to acclaim. It was Dahl who invented gremlins, the unseen imps who infiltrated machines, engines, anything mechanical, mucking everything up by, for example, ‘urinating in your fusebox’.
Gremlins, of course, had caused Roald’s near-fatal plane crash, not his own inexperience and vaingloriousness.
Returning to New York, he worked for periodicals as a shortstory contributor. These later became famous when televised
as Tales of The unexpected. In 1952, he met Patricia Neal, whom he called ‘a spoiled Hollywood actress’. She thought Roald rude and nasty.
But they married, even if Roald struggled with Pat’s fame and she — no puppet to be manipulated — was indignant when he expected her to make his breakfast.
A daughter, olivia, was born in 1955. Though Roald didn’t like a baby’s ‘ whirling blur of wet nappies and vomit and milk and belching and farting’, there were four more children — Tessa, Theo, ophelia and Lucy.
At the age of four months, Theo, when in his pram, was hit by a New York cab. ‘The impact hurled the pram 40ft into the air’, and it slammed into the side of a bus. There followed months, years, of operations and fear.
Theo suffered frequent build-ups of cerebrospinal fluid on the brain — and it was Roald who invented a clog-proof valve, which was patented and accepted for use in neurological surgery.
THEO grew up to become a baker and an antiques dealer, his father investing £100,000 in these schemes. Then, in 1962, olivia, seven, died of measles. ‘ Roald said nothing, was withdrawn, hermetic, lost,’ though olivia survives as the pertinacious heroines in his books, beautifully and sweetly drawn by Quentin Blake. The BFG is dedicated to her memory.
In 1965, having won the oscar for Hud, Pat suffered a massive stroke — a ruptured aneurysm. Doctors predicted severe mental and physical disability, should she survive, but Roald would not accept this. His wife’s complete recovery was now his obsessive concern.
He became Pat’s speech therapist, forcing her to find and form the right words. He made her use her limbs, refusing to allow her help in getting in and out of cars.
Roald’s tough treatment succeeded — though at the cost of exacerbating his tendency to be a bully. He’d always had detractors — publishers and editors, for instance, who feared his ‘ well- deserved reputation for being difficult’.
It also transpired he’d been conducting a clandestine affair for ten years with Felicity ‘ Liccy’ Crosland, Roald’s rationale being ‘lukewarm is no good. Hot is not good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be’. Roald and Pat divorced in 1983. At the age of 67, Roald married Liccy, then 45, who survived as his widow. He died in 1990 of blood cancer, his chief regret being the lack of a knighthood. Pat survived until 2010. Liccy founded the Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity, which provides for specialist nurses in paediatric care.
Dennison’s book makes it entirely clear how, given the unremittingly traumatic biographical background, Roald was drawn to a ‘ belief in fantasy, grotesquerie, magic’. His books are ‘lyrical, hilarious, vivid, unpredictable, tender and utterly absorbing’, revolving around the resilience of children.
‘They love being spooked,’ he said. ‘ They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts ... they love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.’
And as Roald said to Kingsley Amis, in an anecdote not in this biography: ‘The little bastards will swallow anything.’
. ..are you reading now?
I JUST finished a brilliant book this morning that I can’t talk about because it’s fresh off the author’s laptop and hasn’t even been edited yet!
But next off the reading pile is The Choice by Penny Hancock. I’m a huge fan of Penny and it’s been a while since she had a new book out, so I’m very excited to get stuck into this. It’s about the repercussions of a young boy’s disappearance after his grandmother forgets to collect him from school.
. ..would you take to a desert island?
I’M NOT a re-reader or a comfort reader, so I would want to take something big and dense that I’ve been meaning to read for years and never found the time or the courage to pick up. Probably God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. It has been sitting on my bookshelves since 2007 and has even been packed into my suitcase a few times over the years but not yet had its spine cracked.
. . . first gave you the reading bug?
THE seminal books of my childhood, the Narnia books, The Secret Garden, Five Children And It, The Phoenix And The Carpet, etc. all blur into one big thrill of excitement. I can’t actually remember which came first.
In terms of the kind of addictive, gulping down of book after book that
has followed me into adult life, it was absolutely the Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton which inspired that.
I moved onto St Clare’s and felt lost really, for quite a while, until I discovered Agatha Christie at the age of 12.
. ..left you cold?
I WOULD hate to see one of my books listed here, and plenty of books have left me cold but karma compels me not to mention any of them! However, I can safely say that all the books I was made to study at school were killed stone cold dead by the process of being taught them rather than just reading them. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Cider With Rosie and Romeo And Juliet.
I got not an ounce of pleasure out of any of them. I am not a big fan of teaching literature. Nobody writes books the way that people teach them. n The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell, published by Century at £16.99, is out now.