A world of imagination awaits…
…in the landscapes that inspired some of Britain’s greatest storytellers. Hattie Garlick brings next week’s World Book Day alive like never before with a magical mystery tour for you and your children
Do you have a favourite line from a children’s book? I love this, from Roald Dahl’s Matilda: “Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”
So it felt extraordinary when I found myself standing inside the very library in which Matilda found refuge. The library is real. It sits – squat, unglamorous and unassuming – at the top of High Street in Great Missenden, the village in which Dahl lived. Matilda,
of course, is fictional. But the fusing together of the two worlds felt like something akin to magic. As did my children’s excitement about an ordinary municipal library.
“There’s something very powerful that happens when fiction and reality collide,” says Caroline Jones. She is codirector of The Story Museum in Oxford, which reopened last year (only to close again due to the pandemic, of course) following a £6 million redevelopment. It celebrates storytelling in all its forms – from literature and oral traditions to TV, film and games.
When it opens its doors once more (hopefully from May 17), the museum will also run walking tours. “Strolling through Christ Church meadow where Alice once played or looking at a lamppost that might have inspired C S Lewis brings these iconic stories to life for readers of all ages,” says Jones. “And when stories are set free from the page and conjured into the real world, that’s when the magic really starts to happen!”
From playing Poohsticks in Ashdown Forest to Postman Pat-spotting in Cumbria, Britain is full of opportunities to bring books and imaginations alive. My mother, my two children and I could have stuck a pin in a map of
Britain to plan our short literary break, but ultimately, we settled on Roald Dahl country.
The area of Buckinghamshire in which Dahl spent much of his writing life has two truly outstanding children’s museums dedicated to the author – Great Missenden’s Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre and, 20 minutes away by car, The Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery in Aylesbury. Moreover, Dahl himself was constantly inspired by this setting. When looking for the plot for his next book he would, he wrote in 1975: “mooch
around the house, the garden, the countryside, the village streets, searching and searching for this bright and fantastic new idea…” Many such details found their way directly into his novels and, like the library, you can visit them yourself today.
Destination settled upon, we set ourselves homework so fun that even Miss Honey would have been impressed. We read the books and downloaded the story tapes. We watched YouTube videos in which Quentin Blake teaches you to draw Oompa-Loompas and Willy Wonka and streamed all eight of the fabulous films made of Dahl’s books: from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox in 2009 to Nicolas Roeg’s
The Witches in 1990. All excellent lockdown activities, as it would later turn out.
Books, films, animation, illustrations… by the time we left for Great Missenden we had already taken a Willy Wonka tour through the different forms of storytelling and their potential to excite, console and inspire. The 48-hour break seemed to have been stretched to a fortnight, since by the time we pulled up outside the Roald Dahl Museum, we were already so immersed in Dahl that the mere sight of its gates (donated by Warner Brothers, a scaled down model of those in the 2005 film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) sent the children into a state of high excitement.
Inside the converted coach house, they were given their own pencil and small Story Ideas Book to scribble down their thoughts as they arose, just as Dahl himself did. The museum’s three rooms make it perfectly sized for the 12-and-under children at which it is aimed. Don’t be fooled, however. You could easily lose an entire afternoon within. Amply funded by the Dahl family, publishers, charitable foundations and private donors, each room is a complete world – wittily and wonderfully curated, kitted out with sophisticated digital and hands-on exhibits that rivals those put on for families by many of the UK’s leading museums.
My mother and I were gripped by the displays exploring the art of writing, and the curious props and routines Dahl developed around his work. The children took turns at being the Quentin Blake to each other’s Roald Dahl. They climbed inside a replica plane, like the one Dahl flew during the war and sat in Dahl’s chair to test his eccentric set-up for writing (blanket over feet, roll of corrugated card over lap, angled writing board over that). They made their own stop-motion animations, bottled a BFG dream, created poetry with an “automatic grammatizor” and saw it publicly projected on to the gallery floor.
Eventually, we lured them to the café with promises of swishwifflers (coke floats) and fizzlecrumpers (lemonade floats). From there, we picked up two guides to local Dahl “trails”. One took us on a pretty circular walk through nearby Angling Spring and Atkins Woods, the inspiration for Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny the Champion of the World. “I flattened my body against the ground and pressed one side of my face into the brown leaves. The soil below the leaves had a queer pungent smell, like beer,” wrote Dahl in the latter.
The second guide led us round the village itself, and the literary sites still preserved. We spent half an hour taking selfies in front of Danny’s dad’s filling station, Sophie’s “nororphange” and Matilda’s library before finally finding ourselves at Dahl’s own final resting place. In the peaceful graveyard of the village church, the BFG has left giant footprints behind, and a memorial bench is encircled by a quote from The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me:
We have tears in our eyes
As we wave our goodbyes,
We so loved being with you, we
three.
So do please now and then Come and see us again,
The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.
After this, it seemed only right to raise a glass to the great man, at his local The Nag’s Head. Over a house white, and under 15th-century beams, the owner Adam Michaels shared stories about the time when Wes Anderson and Bill Murray sat at these very tables during the press launch of Fantastic Mr Fox (the pub is actually reproduced in the 2009 animation).
Dahl’s magic, it seems, has been cast over the entire village. And indeed, beyond. A 10-minute drive away, in the village of Wendover, we found our accommodation for the night. Badger’s Bower is a tiny, tin tabernacle, fringed by a stream, surrounded by woodland and with all the appearance of having been lifted clean from a Dahl classic.
Inside its heavy church doors there is a single open-plan space, kitted out with a little galley kitchen, a small table and chairs, a free-standing bath and, beneath a stained-glass window, a beautiful big bed, raised high on top of dark wooden drawers. A separate closet loo houses a lavatory and basin. Owners David and Karen provided futons for the children to roll out come bedtime, as well as towels, tea, olive oil, board games and more.
Outside, we had a private, wood-fired hot tub beside the stream, and a firepit around which to eat our supper. The Bower is in fact one of three spaces set within the woodland grounds of Chiltern Yurt Retreat, but you wouldn’t know it. Garden designer Karen has carefully shaped the grounds so that each feels completely removed from the rest of the world. As we ate our steak and chip supper around the fire, it felt as if Mr Fox and his woodland friends were our only close neighbours. And nodding off later, we might have been in Danny the Champion’s gipsy caravan.
The next morning, however, the town called. Aylesbury, another 10-minute drive away, has more going for it than the Bingo Hall for which Matilda’s mother abandons her each day (though you can, and should, tick that off your sightseeing tour too). The Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery is a two-story wing of Bucks County Museum. While the museum at Great Missenden focuses on the art of storytelling, this space uses Dahl’s books to explore science. It is however, equally enchanting.
As at Missenden, every inch of space is decorated to delight little childers in Dahl’s signature playful and naughty spirit. The designers behind the famous Discover Children’s Story Centre in Stratford also had a hand in shaping the space, and it shows. Children are at the heart of curation here.
My kids got on their hands and knees to scrabble through Mr Fox’s tunnel, passing real-life artefacts along the way. Inside the Giant Peach, they learnt about minibeasts and stared down microscopes. Upstairs, a “Mike TV” exhibit allows children to draw their own pictures, project them on to a telly and then insert themselves into their creation, using green screen technology. Even the lift elicited shrieks (I won’t spoil it, but do swot up on Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator first). Dahl would have delighted in seeing the children trooping and whooping around this immersive interpretation of his work. After all, this is the man who wrote for the Oompa-Loompas: “please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place, you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” If any break could persuade you to do so, it is this one.
World Book Day is on March 4