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We So Loved Being With You

1983–1990

‘Even in my old age I’m always winning.’

‘I USED TO TRAVEL around quite a bit, talking to teachers and schools,’ Roald wrote on 28 January 1985, in response to a child’s invitation to visit her school in Bromsgrove, ‘but I’m now 68 years old with two steel hips and a spine that is beginning to act up on me after six laminectomies, therefore bucketing around the country does me no good at all.’¹ Increasingly Roald would complain about his physical creakiness, but the seven years of his marriage to Liccy were to prove remarkably fertile, producing, among other writings, a series of bestselling novels for children and successful forays into fictionalized autobiography.

In 1983, the novel Roald had dedicated to Liccy won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award; The Witches also prompted accusations of misogyny. Roald was unperturbed. None of its characters loomed larger for him than the grandmother: based on an elderly Sofie Magdalene, a hieratic figure in her wheelchair in the conservatory of her annexe at Else’s house, her long hair coiled on top of her head, he imagined her ‘tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body which was smothered in grey lace … majestic in her armchair, filling every inch of it’.² His most frightening story in its graphic portrayal of the witches’ malevolence and their ugliness, The Witches was also, as Roald knew, his most tender. The love between the boy and his grandmother, which survives the boy’s transformation into a mouse, moved Roald as much as any of his readers. Outside the novel, even marriage to Liccy did not immediately bring Roald that respite the mouse-boy enjoys, where he ‘shut [his] eyes and thought of nothing and felt at peace with the world’.³ Instead, after turbulent decades, it yielded orderliness – emotional as well as physical – in which his genius flourished: his last years witnessed creative and commercial apotheosis, including children’s fiction of lasting merit. In the summer of 1988, Roald wrote a poem, ‘Where art thou, Mother Christmas?’, for a Christmas card to raise funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital: such was his popularity that printers Richard Clay Limited agreed to print a million of the cards for free. In January 1990, Matilda, Danny the Champion of the World, The BFG and The Witches occupied the first four places in The Bookseller’s chart of bestselling children’s fiction; figures sent to Roald at the beginning of that month calculated his paperback sales for the previous year at 2,383,518 books. Success on this scale transformed him into a publishing phenomenon. His marriage to Liccy transformed him in other ways: he became less testy, more demonstrative, as serene as an immoderate nature that revelled in provocation could be.

Forcefully he continued to dominate his family. In public, he theorized extensively on the craft of writing for children, magus-like in his pronouncements. He craved public honours, in particular a knighthood, and literary esteem. Denied both – in 1985 he turned down the lesser award of an OBE – he insisted that writing for children outstripped the difficulties of adult fiction and that, in his own case, he enjoyed special insight into children’s thoughts and feelings. His riposte to the critics who ignored him was lofty dismissal: ‘I make things to please children. I don’t care about grown-ups,’ he wrote, not quite truthfully.⁴ Happiness did not entirely temper his irascibility or heedless bullish combativeness. He remained egotistical. In 1988, he instructed the National Curriculum English Working Group that ‘all teachers should read passages of good literature to their classes, right up to age sixteen. Choose an absorbing, well-written short story that is guaranteed to hold the attention of the class.’ Among the five examples he recommended was a story of his own from Someone Like You.⁵ He was vainglorious: even his dreams were of victories, as he told an interviewer in 1988:

I spend my life having dreams of glory. Even in my old age I’m always winning the golf open championships or tennis at Wimbledon or something like that. I go through long thinks about this, lying in the dark when I’m … trying to get to sleep in bed. Every little detail of what happens … [I] dream up that I’ve beaten them all and everyone’s surprised.⁶

He continued to court controversy, including to his own detriment, most notably in the polemic he published in the Literary Review in August 1983. A review of an illustrated account of the recent invasion of Beirut by Israel, it was a heartfelt but misconceived protest. In the short term, it earned Roald obloquy from several quarters, even death threats; in the long term, the shadow of anti-Semitism would generate opprobrium that continues today and, late in 2020, forced an apology from Roald’s family on his official website. Neither short- nor long-term reaction had been Roald’s intention: he was clear, he claimed, that his dislike was for Israel not Jews. In a letter to The Times, he explained, ‘I am anti-Israeli now because I am anti-killing, and in recent years they have killed more human beings than any other country on earth.’ He added that he himself had ‘quite a few pints of Jewish blood in my own veins through my Norwegian grandmother, Hesselberg, and my great-great-grandfather, who was called Preuss’.⁷ Not everyone accepted a distinction that suggests equivocation. Statements throughout his life do indeed suggest antipathy to Jews: as long ago as 1951, Ann Watkins had suggested Roald modify the anti-Jewishness of characters in Fifty Thousand Frogskins.⁸ As the controversy gathered momentum in the late summer of 1983, Roald fanned the flames: to the New Statesman he described ‘a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke a certain animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews … Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.’⁹ Six years later, he adopted a similarly obstreperous, uncompromising stance after again jumping into hot water. In another letter to The Times, criticizing Salman Rushdie when The Satanic Verses earned the novelist a fatwa, Roald compared Rushdie unfavourably to Degas, ‘who had more art in his little fingernail than Rushdie has in his entire body’.¹⁰ To observers, Roald appeared to cultivate conflict and abrasiveness: outside sensitive areas, its effect was not always to give offence. Ahead of a visit to Gipsy House by journalist Angela Levin, Roald set out the terms of their meeting: ‘We’ll chat, I’ll give you a grotty omelette and it would help if you bugger off soon after two.’¹¹ Levin recognized the posturing behind his curmudgeonliness.

Despite divisiveness, Roald’s last years were more often characterized by partnerships. In place of the vanished relationships with his mother, Charles Marsh, who had died in 1964, and Pat, Roald remained close to his sisters, all of whom lived within easy reach of Gipsy House. His marriage to Liccy sustained him on many levels: ‘She fed him with such affection and cared for him with so much devotion that his heart sang,’ Tessa wrote fulsomely; ‘it is she we must give thanks to for Matilda’.¹² A neighbour suggested that Liccy’s gift to Roald was ‘inner peace’: it did not preclude what Liccy herself cautiously labelled rattiness.¹³ For others, Roald glowed with his love for her. Liccy’s redecoration of Gipsy House, extending to significant remodelling (much to Roald’s chagrin at the time), ultimately imposed the well-ordered tranquillity a tired, older Roald needed and craved.¹⁴ The unabashed admiration, support and guidance of Roald’s long-term editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, and, for a briefer period, the obsessive, enthusiastic, constructive ‘super-editing’ of Stephen Roxburgh at his American publishers Farrar, Straus & Giroux, facilitated and fine-tuned the burst of creative energy that may have surprised Roald himself and accounted for new titles in his run of what were by now spectacularly successful children’s books – among them Matilda quickly attained the classic status of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny the Champion of the World and The BFG. Roald’s working partnership with illustrator Quentin Blake, initiated by Maschler in the late 1970s, when Blake was still at the Royal College of Art and Maschler commissioned illustrations for The Enormous Crocodile, enriched his children’s books, expressing in a different idiom their combination of otherworldly mischief and spirited fantasy, and came to invest a disparate output with visual coherence.

Neither the admiration of his collaborators nor Liccy’s loving kindness, however, could lessen Roald’s physical suffering. Pain had become a way of life. In 1981, he told Pat he was ‘never out of it unless I am sitting or lying down, and then only half the time’; inevitably its impact was more than physical.¹⁵ That he was frequently bedridden may have prompted the backward glance that colours much of his later writing. Stephen Roxburgh had only recently completed detailed and comprehensive work on Roald’s manuscript of The BFG when Roald had presented him with the second full-length children’s novel Roxburgh edited, The Witches. As first written, the novel had begun with a fictionalized retelling of Roald’s childhood. Some details remain in the published novel, like the boy’s pleasure in his treehouse that recalls the secret thrills Roald experienced as an eight-year-old diary writer hiding aloft from his sisters: ‘It was lovely being high up there in that conker tree, all alone with the pale young leaves coming out everywhere around me’; the flavour of Roald’s childhood emerges in pre-war slang: ‘That’s perfectly beastly!’¹⁶ Roxburgh’s decision to separate much of the autobiographical material from Roald’s fictional plot, itself partly inspired by Sofie Magdalene’s long ago tales of witches and hags, had enabled him to suggest to Roald an alternative use for these sections of his manuscript, namely two volumes of autobiography written for his child readers. Over the next three years these became Boy and Going Solo, swashbuckling narratives of Roald’s life up to 1942, published in 1984 and 1986 respectively. In both, Roald exaggerated real-life events in line with his habit of ‘mak[ing] the Truth a little more interesting’: the books took no account of grey areas.¹⁷ Roald justified his approach by insisting that children ‘tend to see things in black and white’, much as he did himself.¹⁸

Time and again, this was true of his outlook on the world around him. His polarized perspective – clear in his statements about Israel – generated conflict in Roald’s friendships, among his family and in relationships in his working life. Like his association with his last Knopf editor, Bob Gottlieb, Roald’s partnership with Stephen Roxburgh unravelled. Roxburgh’s response to Roald’s last full-length children’s novel, Matilda, sounded the death knell. In its first draft, the story bore few resemblances to the novel that was eventually published: there was a rough, sketchy, unfinished quality to the writing and construction, and the story, about a wicked little girl rigging a horse race, lacked charm. Roald knew this, but did not consider it Roxburgh’s place to make clear the extent to which he shared this view. Three times Roxburgh travelled from New York to Buckinghamshire to work on the novel with Roald; the process exhausted Roald, and the two men argued. In the finished manuscript, Matilda recognizes, ‘as Napoleon once said’, that ‘the only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is … to counter-attack’.¹⁹ With his revisions complete, Roald counter-attacked, quibbling over contractual details. It provided him with a reason to leave Farrar, Straus & Giroux and escape Roxburgh’s cool appraisal, which had hurt (and irritated) him. Instead Viking published Matilda in America. Its remarkable popularity on both sides of the Atlantic vindicated both men: as rewritten, the novel benefited from Roxburgh’s editorial eye as well as Roald’s fund of invention and feeling. Matilda, Roald told the Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, sold ‘well over 100,000 copies’ in hardback in its first year; paperback sales exceeded 500,000 in six months.²⁰

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The benignity of Roald’s second marriage enabled him to enjoy the pleasures he had described to Pat in the letter he wrote on his return from Martha’s Vineyard. He spent most of his time at Gipsy House, its walls hung with the mirrors he had restored twenty years ago and a collection of paintings that thrilled him, ‘complimentary newspaper reviews, poems by his children … spectacular collages by children all over the world based on many of his books’ and the enormous calendar that hung behind the dining room door; when he was well enough, seven days a week he walked the narrow garden path to his writing hut, with its bright yellow door, carrying with him a flask of coffee.²¹ Public prominence and commercial success kept Roald’s post bag full. At the long pine table in the dining room, his Jack Russell, Chopper, sitting on his knee, he dictated responses to his secretary, Wendy Kress; he continued to reply to many of the letters sent to him by children and teachers, evolving a formula to amuse: ‘Hello, handsome Mr Johnson, and all the clever children who wrote me such lovely letters.’²² His letters, like his books, sought to enter fully into a child’s world, devoid of cynicism, full of magic: he told the seven-year-old girl who, inspired by The BFG, sent him one of her dreams in a bottle in February 1989, ‘You are the first person in the world who has sent me one of these and it intrigued me very much. I also liked the dream. Tonight I shall go down to the village and blow it through the bedroom window of some sleeping child and see if it works.’²³ Author Brough Girling invited Roald to become chairman of a school-based reading campaign, Readathon: Roald agreed ‘as long as I don’t have to do anything’.²⁴ Letters arrived from the parents of children in hospital: in return Roald dispatched copies of his books, signed books sent to him, or suggested a visit when the child was well enough. ‘If it would help to cheer her up, you could by all means pop over here and I will sign her books,’ he wrote to a mother whose daughter was suffering from chronic renal failure.²⁵ Olivia’s death never left him. In 1988, he wrote a letter for a pamphlet produced by public health authorities in England, encouraging parents to have their children vaccinated against measles. He described the rapid course of Olivia’s death and his attachment to her memory:

I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was James and the Giant Peach. That was when she was still alive. The second was The BFG, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.

There was to be one last tragedy: the death, as a result of an aneurysm caused by an undiagnosed brain tumour, of Liccy’s youngest daughter, Lorina, in February 1990. She was twenty-seven. Liccy’s devastation, like his own at Olivia’s death, could not be remedied by Roald’s doctrine of ‘doing’. In hindsight, his family came to regard Lorina’s death as signposting Roald’s own descent: in its aftermath the pace of his physical decline appeared to quicken. His bones ached, he was troubled by problems with his eyes. Liccy remained his lodestar, both the centre and the substance of his world. His decision, announced bluntly to his children – with predictable repercussions – that he would leave everything to Liccy was evidence of his devotion to her, as well as the trust he placed in her. He knew that, after his death, life would not imitate art: Liccy was not the stepmother of fairytales or Roald-style stories, she would share her inheritance with his four children, as indeed she has. He asked his daughter Ophelia to write his official biography, a task she accepted but did not complete.

Roald finished his last children’s book, The Minpins, a romantic, lyrical, otherworldly story, over the course of 1990; he described it as ‘a sort of fairy-tale’. Suffering from anaemia, ‘a bit off colour … feeling sleepy when I shouldn’t have been and without that lovely old bubbly energy that drives one to write books and drink gin and chase after girls’, he marshalled all his faltering energies to complete it.²⁶ Tests revealed that Roald was suffering from a form of leukaemia called myelofibrosis, for which there was no certain cure. His response was steadfast. Once he had held in check any pity he felt for Pat in her illness; he did not succumb to self-pity now. Indeed he may have underestimated the odds he battled. His introduction to the Roald Dahl Newsletter, written in August 1990, had an upbeat quality:

I’m told that if my bone-marrow factory refuses to go back to work properly they can still go on topping me up like this more or less for ever, anyway for quite a few more years. So don’t put me into the grave quite yet. I usually manage to climb out again. I’ve done it many times before.²⁷

In the event the illness moved quickly: by the autumn his hospital stays were repeated and frequent. He was admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford for the last time in the middle of November and died in the early hours of the morning on 22 November. His final full-length sentence offered shreds of comfort to those around the bedside: ‘I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much.’²⁸ Like the Giraffe and the Pelly and Me in the story of the same name that he wrote for younger readers in 1984, he might have added, ‘We so loved being with you.’

His affairs were in order, including, over the course of this final year, a reconciliation with Pat of her instigating, and at the end he kept faith with the uncomplaining philosophy to which he had clung throughout a life whose rich rewards had been balanced by searing vicissitudes: ‘Life, after all, is exactly like a game of snakes-and-ladders, full of pitfalls as well as surprises, and we simply have to learn to cope with them both.’²⁹

*

Only the man had died – husband, father, brother: his work lived on. Despite her devastation, Liccy had no choice but to apply herself to Roald’s public legacy and administration of his literary estate. She admitted her shock at his death in a letter written soon afterwards, adding that ‘life must go on and I am starting a Roald Dahl Foundation, which we hope to get off the ground in a year-and-a-half’s time’.³⁰ In the thirty years since its inception, the Foundation, later renamed Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity and, since 2017, under royal patronage, has funded eighty specialist nurses supporting and caring for seriously ill children across the United Kingdom.

Months before his death, Tessa described her father as ‘an immensely important writer who, for the last 20 years, has filled children with spark and imagination’.³¹ Others – mostly outside the literary establishment, which rejected Roald’s claim that writing for children outstripped the demands of adult fiction – readily agreed, and have continued to do so. The Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery in Aylesbury, which opened in his adopted Buckinghamshire in 1996, the plaza named after him in 2000 in Cardiff, the city of his birth, and a series of commemorative stamps issued by the Royal Mail in 2012 testify to Roald’s posthumous renown and continuing popularity. In 2016, the centenary of his birth was widely celebrated. Among Christmas television offerings that year was the BBC’s animated version of Revolting Rhymes, while ‘The Great Mouse Plot’, part of Boy, published as a stand-alone World Book Day title, comfortably outsold its competitors. By 2016, it was no longer possible to detail Roald’s sales figures with any accuracy: The Bookseller suggested ‘a conservative estimate’ of more than 250 million books, with the author’s titles in print in fifty-eight languages across the globe.³² Two years earlier, however, the Royal Mint Advisory Committee had rejected plans for a centenary coin issue on the grounds that Roald was ‘associated with antisemitism and not regarded as an author of the highest reputation’.³³

Sensibilities in the third decade of the twenty-first century differ markedly from those of the pre-war world of Roald’s childhood, when he listened on Sofie Magdalene’s knee to nursery rhymes and Norse folklore, stories by Beatrix Potter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, and through teachers including Mrs O’Connor and John Crommelin-Brown first encountered classic works in a literary canon that has since been challenged and in part reordered. In this altered climate, liberal shibboleths have little truck with former renown; his detractors question the continuance of Roald’s prominence. The stain of anti-Semitism will not disappear; there will be other accusations, also damaging. But in September 2021, streaming giant Netflix acquired from Roald’s family the Roald Dahl Story Company, including the rights to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny the Champion of the World, The BFG and Matilda, for a sum reportedly ‘a little over’ £500 million.³⁴ ‘Good novels are essential to most of us,’ wrote the schoolboy Roald in an essay about children’s reading.³⁵ They became his life’s work and remain his lasting legacy.