Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl

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.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.