I Once Met… Roald Dahl
In my Oxfordshire boarding school in the 1960s, we did not have half-terms – merely a couple of ‘leave-out’ days which afforded us just enough time to go absolutely nowhere.
For one of these measly days, a chum invited me to lunch with his uncle at home in Buckinghamshire. A car would be sent for us. And because this fellow knew that one day I wanted to be a writer, he tacked on that this uncle was a published author – name of Roald Dahl.
The year was 1967, and Dahl had not yet become the literary colossus of legend; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in America in 1964, had yet to appear in the UK. But I was a great fan of Dahl’s adult stories in a collection called Kiss Kiss, so I made sure I took along my Penguin copy.
I had never before met an actual author – so I was pretty excited. But when I entered Gipsy House in Great Missenden, it was the smell of roasting beef that most entranced me: we were constantly starving then. In this house there was a wonderful aura of plenty: piles of peaches in a bowl, an open box of chocolates, and decanters glistening in the firelight. Also, seemingly all over the place, were females of every description, all attending to him: daughters? A harem? No idea. Dahl seemed impossibly tall, and was wearing a shabby cardigan that was far too long on him. He didn’t exactly smile at me – it was more a slightly lopsided expression of gentle curiosity. ‘I feel so sorry for you,’ he said. I didn’t blame him – I felt sorry for myself. ‘Because,’ he went on, ‘you are compelled to attend a boarding school. I absolutely detested mine. Do grown men hit you with a stick?’ They did, I confirmed – and one of them was a monk; this seemed to appal him. Over the marvellous lunch, Dahl was chatting to me and his nephew quite as if we were his adult and intellectual equals – and we were just 17. ‘Would you like more claret?’ he asked.
I would. I had never tasted wine before, and found I rather loved it.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘will you join me in a cigar?’
Up till then, I had only puffed on the odd quite loathsome Gold Leaf. He cut the end of the huge Havana and carefully lit it for me. Did he want me to turn green, cough up my guts and rush from the room? Such a scene would certainly have appealed to him. But I really took to it – as well as to the second Cognac. ‘Do you like Ian Fleming?’ he asked. ‘Very much,’ I said. ‘Oh, I don’t. I’ve just written a screenplay for a Bond film, you know.’
This would have been You Only Live Twice, released later that year. He then inscribed my Penguin: ‘To Sir Joseph, with fond wishes.’ I have it still.
I never again encountered Roald Dahl – but, years later, Kingsley Amis told me that Dahl had asked him why he never wrote children’s books.
‘You should, you know,’ he said to Kingsley. ‘Those little bastards – they’ll swallow anything.’