I
1916–1930
‘I do not remember much of it; not before anyway; not until it happened.’
‘I GOT IT all wrong,’ commented Roald Dahl of his first draft of Matilda, his last full-length novel for children. He identified his mistakes in constructing his original story: ‘The parents were normal. No good. The school was ordinary. No good.’1
Neither is a criticism that can be levelled at Roald Dahl’s own childhood – parents or schooling. His enterprising father Harald was a perfectionist: exacting, undemonstrative (as Roald would prove), acquisitive but conscientious, the eldest child of an enormously tall, feckless Norwegian provincial butcher – like the husband in Roald’s story ‘Genesis and Catastrophe’, ‘an arrogant, overbearing, bullying … drunkard’2 – and, following bungled treatment of a teenage accident, an amputee, but shrewd, determined and, in time, rich. From his native Norway, intent on becoming an artist, Harald had travelled to Paris. From Paris he moved to the docklands of south Wales, in the late nineteenth century a centre for coal exports, dependent on Scandinavian timber for the pit props known as ‘Norways’. There, some time in the 1890s, he set aside bohemianism. In Bute Street, Cardiff, with a distant kinsman and fellow Norwegian, Ludwig Aadnesen, he founded a company of shipbrokers that bore both their names, Aadnesen & Dahl. The process of personal reinvention was as thorough as ecdysis: enthusiastically Harald embraced commerce and Britishness. In insular times, he retained aspects of an outsider’s status, passed on in varying degrees to his family. All his children, including Roald, were baptized in the small white Norwegian church in Cardiff docks that still stands today, though religion scarcely touched their family life; throughout his childhood Roald held a Norwegian but not a British passport, and his first sentence, uttered at the age of two, was in Norwegian not English. Harald died in the spring of 1920, when Roald was three and a half. Weeks before, his eldest daughter Astri, ‘far and away’ his favourite child, had died at the young age of seven.3 His shipbroking fortune amounted to £150,000, equivalent at current values to nearly £7 million, a more than comfortable nest egg for his grieving family. Among the death bed promises he extracted from his wife was an assurance that his children would be educated in England. Family tragedy – a father and sister lost – imprinted Roald’s first horizons. From the outset his was not an ordinary childhood.
Among Harald Dahl’s legacies to Roald were aesthetic sensibilities (carefully cultivated) and a love of nature; the ‘many curious objects’ that cluttered the table in Roald’s writing hut as an adult included a silver and tortoiseshell paper knife of Harald’s.4 A conscientious philanthropist, in the winter of 1918 Harald had been listed among leading donors to a fund ‘for the relief of distress’ caused by Spanish flu in Cardiff; the following year, he had subscribed £25 to an appeal for a Welsh national war memorial.5 Romantic for all his shrewdness, he had named his son after his hero, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole. Adventure and philanthropy would play their part in Roald’s life, too. Harald had been married twice. His first wife, Marie Beaurrin-Gressier, died in 1907, leaving behind Roald’s half-siblings, Ellen and Louis.
Any memory of Harald was overshadowed for Roald by his mother. Harald’s second wife, Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, was a stubborn, strong, private woman in her mid-thirties. In her children’s assessment ‘dauntless’, ‘practical and fearless’, Sofie Magdalene was also Norwegian, by nature mystic, gossipy, occasionally impractical but without feyness, omnivorous in her curiosity about the world around her, the cornerstone and, as he remembered it, primary influence of Roald’s fatherless boyhood.6 On Harald’s death, save her deathbed promise about schooling, she might have recrossed the North Sea to her homeland, taking with her Roald, his sisters Alfhild and Else, and her unborn child. Instead, the heavily pregnant widow stayed in south Wales, in the large farmhouse in Radyr, west of Cardiff, bought by Harald in 1917. In the autumn she gave birth to her last child, Asta. Like Mrs Fox in Fantastic Mr Fox, she ‘gathered her four children close to her and held them tight’.7 Friendless but apparently unweeping, assisted by a Norwegian nanny called Birgit and comforted by busyness and a Pekinese (a breed Roald later disdained), Sofie Magdalene rooted herself in this alien landscape and the ugly house of tall chimneys and half-timbered dormers that Roald recalled as ‘mighty … with turrets on its roof and with majestic lawns and terraces all around it’, and, beyond, woodland, pasture, ‘haymaking, hay wagons and horses’ and, at harvest time, fields of corn stooks through which the children wandered at will; and dependents including ‘a ploughman and a cowman and a couple of gardeners and all manner of servants in the house itself’.8 ‘She refused to take the easy way out,’ Roald remembered: she was his first and, bar himself, most enduring hero.9 (One of her granddaughters, by contrast, remembered her more ambiguously as ‘the steely Norwegian widow’.)10 To her children she spoke English as well as Norwegian, a factor in Roald’s subsequent identity as ‘very English, you know, born and bred, in spite of my name’, ‘an Englishman who lives in England’.11 Undoubtedly, her stern lack of sentiment and physical reserve contributed to Roald’s inability, regretted by his daughter Tessa, to express affection physically, the swiftness with which he became ‘totally untactile’.12
Harald’s will denied Sofie Magdalene financial independence. Its terms required her to seek authorization from her fellow trustees Ludvig Aadnesen and Harald’s brother Oscar, who lived in France, even for nugatory expenses. Its effect was twofold: unnecessary complications, including sharp exchanges between Harald’s widow, Aadnesen and Oscar Dahl, and a suggestion that there was less money than there undoubtedly was. Within a year, Sofie Magdalene had sold Ty Mynydd and its 150 acres, shearing herself of the burden of farm ownership. With her family of six, she returned to nearby village-like Llandaff – Roald’s birthplace, on 13 September 1916, at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road. The Dahls’ new home, Roald’s third, was Cumberland Lodge, now a nursery school, smaller than Ty Mynydd. For Roald, looking back, it was ‘nothing more than a pleasant medium-sized suburban villa’: substantial, red brick and undistinguished, with large gardens of tall hedges, doily-patterned rosebeds, cricket nets.13 He omits – because he took them for granted – mention of the house’s many books or the clutch of garden buildings in which the children played unsupervised. Before his fifth birthday Roald had lost father, sister and a small boy’s Eden of wide-open spaces, cattle, horses, pigs and chickens; in their wake vanished some of the easy certainties of conventional middle-class childhood. Of the children who people his novels, none possesses two loving parents and material security, or enjoys unchallenged the freewheeling joys of country life that always delighted Roald. Although Roald was too young to notice it, his father’s death also loosened the family’s rootedness in Wales. By choice, Harald had established his business in Cardiff. With her children and stepchildren, Sofie Magdalene remained in Llandaff, in the north of the city, until 1927, when she moved to Bexley in Kent. Her engagement with the country of her short marriage was circumscribed. Every Easter, she took a rented house in the Old Harbour at Tenby. There, the steep cliffs and Caldy Island a boat ride away offered seabirds’ nests for plunder for the collection of birds’ eggs Roald housed in wooden drawers lined with pink cotton wool; he climbed with a teaspoon in his pocket, using this to lift the eggs, ‘so as not to leave the human finger smell behind on the other eggs because this might make the mother desert’; on Caldy Island cliffs his prizes included a guillemot’s egg.14 Instead Sofie Magdalene’s outlook was by turns Scandinavian and Anglocentric: she read Ibsen, Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset, and Galsworthy, Bennett and Kipling; Hardy and Chesterton were her favourites. Roald’s ‘insider/outsider’ status – a wealthy non-Briton, born in Wales of Norwegian parents, mostly educated in English preparatory and public schools, but fatherless – had deep roots. His repeated assertions of his ‘Englishness’ as an adult obscured ambivalence: contempt colours his description, for example, of the English upper middle classes, to which he appeared to belong, as ‘smooth, well mannered, overweight, loud-voiced and infinitely dull’.15
The nameless boy narrator of The Witches is seven when a car crash kills both his parents. Roald was half this age when Harald Dahl died of pneumonia (and, possibly, following Astri’s death from appendicitis, a broken heart). In the novel, the boy’s grandmother hugs him through the first devastated night. Thereafter, ‘in order that we might both try to forget our great sadness, [she] started telling me stories’.16 Dahl family legend invests Sofie Magdalene with a similar role. In place of easy embraces, she distracted her children with tales, ‘Norwegian stories … to do with trolls and the dark winters’, and a rosy account of Harald; Roald remembered her as ‘a great teller of tales’ to whom her children listened enthralled.17 Did it work? Roald would almost certainly have argued that he survived because children are shaped for survival. For her part, total absorption in her role as mother – ‘the matriarch, the materfamilias’, as Roald described her – gave a purpose to Sofie Magdalene’s own continuance.18 With good reason, Roald suspected the element of need in his mother’s wholehearted focus on her offspring, something approaching ‘the deep conscious knowing that there was nothing else to live for except this’ that he attributes to a doting mother in an early short story.19 Her response spawned other consequences. Storytelling, especially about their own family, became integral to her relationship with Roald. Sofie Magdalene’s determination to keep Harald alive for Roald made mother and son conspirators in a partial fiction on which, in the short term, both depended; stories – which demand the listener’s imaginative engagement for their reality – played their part in ordering Roald’s world. From his first separation from Sofie Magdalene, at preparatory school, Roald in turn made use of vivid anecdotes and commentary boisterously laced with slang to construct a part-fictionalized version of himself intended to reassure his mother and, in a pose of indomitability to which he would resort lifelong, bolster himself. His relationship with Sofie Magdalene was the closest of Roald’s childhood. His sisters considered them remarkably alike.20 Alfhild remembered Roald as ‘what we called the apple of her [Sofie Magdalene’s] eye. We always teased him, he was known as “the Apple”.’21 Semi-truths, like Sofie Magdalene’s ‘Harald’, forged a pattern for Roald’s remembering – unapologetically, he excused himself later as merely making ‘the Truth a little more interesting’.22 A part of him would continue to claim for himself the role of ‘apple’ in key relationships. In his family life, he never willingly forfeited the status of pivotal male – Harald’s by right – thrust upon him from childhood.
Else described the Norwegian folklore to which Sofie Magdalene introduced her children as ‘peculiar [and] sort of morbid’, ‘all about witches, for Norway, with its black forests and icy mountains, is where the first witches came from’, or like the shadowy stories of the recently deceased Jonas Lie, based on the legends of Norway’s north-western province of Nordland, which Roald continued to admire: a portrait of Lie hung in the sitting room of Gipsy House, Roald’s home from 1954.23 She recited nursery rhymes, which delighted Roald, especially his favourite, ‘Little Boy Blue’, with its sheep and cows and meadow of haystacks, like his first memories of Ty Mynydd; as an adult he rewrote a selection in characteristically mischievous vein, including ‘Hey diddle diddle’ and ‘I had a little nut tree’. At school, Roald wrote a spirited defence of nursery rhymes’ ‘concise description of a simple thing, leaving a vivid picture … in the memory of the reader’, a technique at which he himself came to excel; he argued for a link between early exposure to nursery rhymes and imagination. Confronted by a grandfather clock, suggested the teenage Roald, the child who has learned nursery rhymes ‘weaves a halo of romance’ around it. ‘Shivering with excitement’, he or she peeps inside the clock in the hope of glimpsing the mouse they have heard about in ‘Hickory, Dickory Dock’. The non-learner of rhymes, by contrast, grows up to be a non-reader, always for Roald an indictment: ‘the sort of person who simply cannot think of what there is to say at a tea party’.24
As a writer for adults and children, Roald Dahl conjures worlds in which men and women, boys and girls frequently ‘shiver with excitement’; his narrators delight in spying out mice inside metaphorical clocks. All too often excitement gives way to catastrophe, like the joyful new parents shot by New York policemen in a short story called ‘Pig’, or gluttonous Augustus Gloop confronted by a river of chocolate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, with dire consequences, ‘deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach’.25 In every case, as Roald’s readers learn quickly, excitement’s coda is unexpected. This swiftness of reversal is central to his plotting and the stories’ world view. Personal experience, beginning with the unremembered traumas of his father and sister’s deaths, would convince Roald of the ubiquity of caprice in human lives. Nursery rhymes, fairytales and folklore provided his first introduction to unanticipated, frequently fearsome outcomes, tropes that played their part in shaping his fictional vision.
Like other authors of children’s fiction, Roald prided himself on the vividness of his childhood recall. Remembering was selective. An entry he would make in one of the writer’s notebooks he called his ‘ideas books’ for ‘a story with a young child and his thoughts’ points to his conviction, even before he began writing for children, that he could reconnect with his own former thoughts; with the exception of Esio Trot, his stories for younger readers employ a double narrative perspective, balancing a child’s thoughts with Roald’s own adult outlook.26 Yet of the experience of Elm Tree House kindergarten, close to Cumberland Lodge in Llandaff, beginning when he was six, Roald remembered little: the excitement of his journey there by tricycle with Alfhild, pedalling too quickly on the empty roads of the 1920s, leaning sharp into corners, balancing on two wheels; and, less appealingly, since neither Sofie Magdalene nor Birgit had taught him to read, the forty minutes he stayed behind each afternoon ‘for extra lessons in reading because I was so backward’, and the fear that followed, returning home on winter afternoons, of the black trees that overhung dark lanes, rustling in invisible winds.27 With the exception of Matilda Wormwood, the five-year-old prodigy in Matilda, Roald’s child heroes are at least seven, the age at which his own sharpest recollections began. His clearest early memories were of an ex-miner called Jones. Known to Roald and his sisters as ‘Joss Spivvis’, Jones was ‘a short, broad-shouldered, middle-aged Welshman with a pale brown moustache’ employed by Sofie Magdalene as a gardener.28 A shared enthusiasm for Cardiff City football club and, in Roald’s case, hero worship, sealed their friendship: Jones’s account of rescuing his pit pony from an escape of flammable gas when he was eleven thrilled his boy-listener. Six days out of seven, in the musty privacy of the Cumberland Lodge tackroom, gardener and boy shared the lunch prepared for them by Mrs Jones: four buttered Crawford’s crackers each ‘and two large hunks of Cheddar cheese’. Roald used his penknife to slice the cheese, copying Jones. He ‘perched on a sack of maize or a bale of straw while Joss sat rather grandly in an old kitchen chair that had arms on it’.29 ‘Endless’ were the stories the Welshman told his acolyte in their shared male sanctums of tackroom and potting shed.30 Private enclosures full of storytelling would feature prominently in Roald’s life.
The versions of his memories that Roald preserved in his ideas books, in his extensive notes on writing for children and in autobiographical work like Boy and Memories with Food at Gipsy House suggest an upbringing marked by the same oscillations of wonder and alarm, excitement and boredom, fear and self-dramatization that crisscross the majority of childhoods. (In Roald’s case, the sense of wonder, along with the self-dramatizing impulse, persisted, and his contemporaries considered that his family circumstances added up to ‘an unhappy early life’.)31 ‘I know that young people have just as many worries as grown-ups,’ Roald wrote as an adult. He recorded his response, aged eight, to a clockwork motorboat bath toy that sank after developing a leak: ‘For many weeks after that, I would lie in my bath worrying about whether my own skin would develop a leak in it just as the little boat’s had done, and I felt certain my body would fill with water and I would sink or die. But it never happened and I marvelled at the watertightness of the skin that covered my body.’32 The older Roald takes seriously his child-self’s certainty of fatal waterlogging: he makes clear that his ‘worrying’ overshadowed subsequent marvelling. This empathy with a child’s conviction of vulnerability splices all his stories of children pitted against horrible grown-ups: it is the quality in his fiction that has convinced generations of child readers that, in a world of adult menace, the author is on their side. That the child ricochets so swiftly from terror to ecstasy, anxiety to reassurance, collapse to exultation, in no way diminishes the acuteness of his or her fear, Roald understood. His understanding was grounded in remembering.
To Roald, it was natural that each summer Sofie Magdalene took her children to Norway. He described it as ‘like going home’: ‘We all spoke Norwegian and all our relations lived over there.’33 Only later did he sense the chilly torpor of his grandparents’ house in Oslo’s Josefines Gate, with its large, heavily curtained rooms like those inhabited by the narrator’s grandmother in The Witches: eventually, he recognized it as the ‘quiet, gloomy … neat and polished’ backdrop to the lifelong imprisonment of his spinster aunts, Ellen and Astri, prevented by their father’s force of will from marrying or leaving home.34 In the short term, it was the scene of affectionate embraces and celebratory feasts, culminating in ‘tremendous craggy mountain[s] of home-made ice-cream’, and reached only after days of travel: trains from Wales to London and London to Newcastle, followed by a stomach-lurching two-day ferry shunt to the Norwegian capital, known until 1925 as Christiania.35 In Boy, Roald’s novel-length account of his childhood, Dahl’s grandparents – ‘Bestepapa’ and ‘Bestemama’ – are figures of children’s fiction, white-haired and wrinkled, his grandmother in a rocking chair, his grandfather smoking a clay pipe. Their encounters were brief, lasting no more than half a day, dominated by the set-piece splendid lunch, complete with Norwegian-style toasts and salutations. Grandparents are significant in Roald’s children’s fiction; he saw little of his own. Those impressions he did retain were coloured by memories of food and the excitement of the family caravanserai: Sofie Magdalene, her children, stepchildren, their nanny and an extra friend each for Ellen and Louis, a party that required three taxis for the connecting journeys from railway stations to docks, Josefines Gate and Oslo’s Grand Hotel.
After the Hesselberg house, the final destination for mother, nanny, six children and add-ons was the island of Tjome, a day-long steamer trip across the Oslo-fjord. This last watery passage signalled the holidays proper, a crossing from the everyday to the fantastical. Again it was enlivened by Sofie Magdalene’s storytelling – steeping her children in myths of the seas and mountains and the ‘swirling mists and ghostly vapours’ that Roald recycled as Dream Country in The BFG, making up new stories and retelling the popular, Grimm-inspired folk tales of Norwegian authors Asbjørnsen and Moe, including ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ and ‘The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body’ – as well as by her exploits that, in Roald’s accounts, were intrepid, exhilarating, heroic: in a temperamental motorboat in open water, cleaving towering waves in pursuit of deserted islands for bathing and picnics, Sofie Magdalene imperturbable at the tiller, her children without lifejackets clinging to the boat’s sides, and Nanny praying for safety, while the white-painted craft dramatically plunged and soared. Roald called Tjome ‘the magic island’; he remembered it as ‘the greatest place on earth’.36 His ingredients for ‘the perfect life for a small boy’, described in James and the Giant Peach – ‘a beautiful house beside the sea … plenty of other children for him to play with … the sandy beach for him to run about on, and the ocean to paddle in’ – resemble those of his own childhood holidays.37 ‘What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky,’ Roald insisted in Danny the Champion of the World.38 Sofie Magdalene’s sparkiness was sealed for her son in those Norwegian summers of the 1920s, when, on the islands of the Oslo-fjord, she combined the roles of mother and father: energetic, brave, unselfish.
‘I dreamed of an iceberg. It was a large iceberg, which floated lazily on a cold ocean, as if in sleep,’ Roald wrote, in a teenage essay called ‘Dreams’.39 Within living memory was the sinking of the Titanic. In Tjome and the Oslo-fjord, the reality of icebergs was more vivid for Roald than for contemporaries raised on reports of nautical disaster. In Norway, the landscape of folklore merged with his surrounds; even the souvenirs Roald chose suggested a place wilder and untamed: a reindeer’s antler paper knife, a toy seal made from seal skin. Annually, the magic island replaced the vanished idyll of Ty Mynydd: ‘there were the wooden skeletons of shipwrecked boats … and wild raspberries, and mussels clinging to the rocks … and shaggy long-haired goats, and even sheep’.40 At sunrise, as he wrote later, were ‘bits of pale gold … flying among delicate, frosty-white flakes of cloud, and over to one side the rim of the morning sun … coming up red as blood’; there were fairground rides in fishing villages, wooden roundabouts operated by hand.41 In the summer of 1927, Roald found a chrysalis there; back at home, in a small pot in the garden, he waited for it to hatch.42 Tjome dissolved the bounds between the visible and the fantastical, one source of the magic realism of Roald’s writing.
In time, Norwegian summers offset the horror of Roald’s school days. A century ago, boys’ schools enmeshed their charges in vortices of rules and proscriptions, quick to punish, including canings and beatings, kindness at a premium. Roald’s first experience of the ‘English’ schooling system so admired by Harald was the cathedral school in Llandaff, then in buildings close to the cathedral itself. It was the same school that Louis had attended, and convenient. Faithful to her husband’s choice, Sofie Magdalene experienced few qualms transferring Roald from Elm Tree House. He would leave after only two years, in 1925, following corporal punishment so brutal that his mother withdrew him on principle. Her stand proved counter-productive. A reluctant solution on Sofie Magdalene’s part, made under pressure from the family doctor, boarding school succeeded day school. St Peter’s, Weston-super-Mare, across the Bristol Channel from Cardiff, emerges from Roald’s accounts as joyless and brutish. Its headmaster set the template for Dahl teachers: a ‘monster’, ‘beastly [and] cane-happy’ – like Miss Trunchbull, who terrorizes Matilda, ‘eccentric and bloodthirsty’.43
‘I’m afraid I like strong contrasts,’ explained Roald, at the end of his life. ‘I like villains to be terrible and good people to be very good.’44 He learned the starkness of the contrast between villainy and goodness at school. In the overwhelmingly female environment of Cumberland Lodge, Roald’s special position as Sofie Magdalene’s only son conferred privileged status. It did not take him long to discover that, at the all-boys St Peter’s, his sex – along with every other pupil – indicated to a common room of First World War veterans an almost certain predisposition to wrongdoing. At home Roald was cheerfully unruly, energetic, independent. Exposure to Norse myths encouraged a relish for the cataclysmic. He disliked Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, for example, published when he was fourteen, on the grounds that it was ‘too soft’, but delighted in the grizzly didacticism of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, which he had learned by heart by his ninth birthday.45 Sometimes his derring-do involved his sisters: he padded Asta with cushions, then, to their shared delight, shot at her repeatedly with his air rifle, curious to see how far the pellets would penetrate. Sofie Magdalene’s parenting was liberal, unconventional, even lax – she once told Roald his gym shoes ‘smelt like a cat’s crap’ – but none of Roald’s schools offered vents for high spirits.46 A schism divided home and classroom. ‘A foreigner [who] didn’t understand how British schools were run’ in Roald’s version of his departure from the cathedral school, Sofie Magdalene had done little to prepare her ‘Apple’ for schools’ pettifogging discipline, the ‘rules and still more rules that had to be obeyed’, the self-luxuriating regimentation against which Roald jibbed for the next decade and beyond.47 How different it was from the rapscallion vim and excitement of life at Cumberland Lodge: Saturday football matches at Ninian Park with Spivvis and the comfortable fug of the tackroom or sheltering from the rain in the potting shed; taking pot shots at Asta; or the visit Roald made with Sofie Magdalene to the Lake District to visit Beatrix Potter’s house.48 In the garden, familiar from The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck, he glimpsed Potter herself.
It was a prank leading to a beating that brought about Roald’s move to St Peter’s, aged nine, in the autumn of 1925: Sofie Magdalene’s horrified response to Roald’s bruised and weal-striped bottom, after four strokes of the headmaster’s cane. In Boy, Roald’s retelling is in line with his views about writing for children. Its ‘strong contrasts’ are between his own haplessness and the dyed-in-the-wool nastiness of the story’s villains: the hag-like owner of a sweet shop, Mrs Pratchett, and the trigger-happy headmaster, Mr Coombes, repeatedly likened to a giant, ‘well practised and [with] a splendid arm’ for caning.49 With four friends, Roald decides to pay back Mrs Pratchett’s persistent unfriendliness. As in fairytales and folklore, unexpected reversals upset his plan. Briefly the hero of the hour, who punishes his tormentor by concealing a dead mouse in one of her sweet jars, the Roald of the story is transformed into a contrite murderer when the old woman apparently dies of a heart attack brought on by shock. But Mrs Pratchett is anything but dead, and hell bent on revenge. All five boys are harshly beaten. A wizened Welsh Madame Defarge, ‘with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry’, Mrs Pratchett watches their suffering gleefully from a seat nearby.50 Her viciousness and Mr Coombe’s sadism confer on Roald an alternative, more sober heroism as suffering martyr. Like Charlie Bucket and protagonists in many of his short stories for adults, the Roald of ‘The Great Mouse Plot’ is powerless in the face of unfolding events. His power is as storyteller.
‘The Great Mouse Plot’ is a writer’s act of remembrance, edited and recoloured for the marketplace. But Roald did indeed take first steps towards his future calling in Llandaff. Not only was he exposed, quite unprepared, to unfairness; ‘at the age of eight,’ he remembered, ‘I became a mad diary enthusiast’. In a Letts pocket diary with a green leather cover, given to him as a present, he began to record his ‘thoughts and hopes and anything important that had happened to me … in the past twenty-four hours’; for his ninth birthday he asked for a larger diary.51 Afterwards he explained his enjoyment: ‘I felt that I was writing not exactly history but anyway the history of my own small life.’52 In the unpredictable, unaccommodating world of school, without autonomy, intimidated and unsettled, Roald constructed an account of his days. In this narrative he placed himself centrally, acknowledging his smallness nevertheless, a mixture of childish braggadocio and uncertainty that would recur. He determined that his diary must be ‘a very secret thing’, a means of preserving through private swagger and concealment the view of himself he had previously taken for granted. At home for the holidays he hid it ‘in a waterproof tin which I tied with string to the very highest branch of a massive conker tree at the bottom of our garden. I knew it was safe there because none of my sisters had a hope of climbing so high.’53 From the outset, his picture of the world around him was drawn with bold brushstrokes, including ‘things that would have made my mother and sisters stretch their eyes in disbelief had they ever read them’.54 For the rest of his life he retained a childlike disdain for the ordinary, relishing the sort of detail that stretches the eye in disbelief; his writing frequently included protests against unfairness. His writing room then was a horse chestnut tree in his mother’s garden, an eyrie among the topmost branches: in springtime ‘a cave of green leaves surrounded by those wonderful white candles’.55 In this lofty perch, his invisibility thrilled him; in his diary’s pages he lived unfettered, beyond observation or criticism, reality invented and perfected and clandestine. In his fiction, fantasy and self-invention repeatedly overlap: to uproarious applause unprepossessing Mr Botibol conducts his imaginary orchestra; secretly, playboy-turned-philanthropist Henry Sugar endows orphanages across the globe. Roald never outgrew this impulse. Late in life he regretted that ‘those secret diaries I kept so carefully in my youth’ were lost.56
*
Least among Roald’s gripes about St Peter’s was the lumpy porridge. He brushed aside the seediness of Weston-super-Mare, where boys walked along the concrete slipway at Anchor Head, jumping among the rocks, or, in full school uniform, along the vastness of the sands, or played with clockwork boats in a boating pond and walked to Sunday services at ‘All Stinks’: All Saints church, Anglo-Catholic and aswirl with incense.57 Uppermost, the brutality of masters towards boys, ‘the fear of the dreaded cane [that] hung over us like the fear of death all the time’, one result of a point of view Roald later attributed to The Grand High Witch in The Witches that ‘children are rrree-volting!’.58 Caning dominates Roald’s recorded memories of St Peter’s, as it blackened his memories of his public school, Repton: an abiding cruelty that permanently shaped his views of authority, and accounts for the humiliated teachers of his children’s fiction, beginning with Mrs Winter in The Magic Finger. He was affronted, appalled, agonized by the shaming and injustice of caning; he chronicled its torments unrelentingly. ‘We were caned for doing everything that it was natural for small boys to do,’ he wrote in an essay published in 1977, still uncomprehending after half a century.59 Even after a lifetime, he described St Peter’s as ‘my dreaded boarding school’.60
His first term was a nightmare of homesickness. He drew minuscule comfort from ensuring that, wherever his dormitory, he positioned himself in his bed so that he could look out of the window; he slept facing the sea and, on the ‘pale and milky’ horizon, Wales and Llandaff and Sofie Magdalene and his sisters. The nastiness of masters and matron astonished him and, taught alongside boys a year older, he struggled with some of his lessons. After his first fortnight, he faked symptoms of appendicitis and won a brief reprieve: three extra days at home. He locked his diary in his tuckbox. Yet the older Roald admitted that Boy’s gaudier passages were ‘coloured by my natural sense of fantasy’ and the reality of much of his time at St Peter’s was more varied and less ghoulish.61 His weekly letters home fizz with enthusiasm – about the natural world, a craze for rollerskating, the progress of his stamp collection. They are full of requests for food, books, his riding breeches, a torch bulb, even conkers, as well as news of his best friend, Douglas Highton, brought up in Turkey and therefore, like Roald, an outsider in St Peter’s small, enclosed ‘English’ world. He chronicles the childhood ailments that rampaged through the eighty or so pupils, and boasts of his sporting prowess, including at conkers. (Even sixty years later he would claim that, ‘at the ages of eight, nine and ten’, conkers ‘brought sunshine to our lives during the dreary autumn term’.)62 He describes the weather, theatrical performances, the appearance and quirks of masters and a programme of talks on subjects from bird legends to Chinese medicine; bossily he passes on to Sofie Magdalene tidbits of new knowledge, even resorting to diagrams. Alfhild receives a present of £2 from Ludwig Aadnesen, and a guileless Roald is predictably envious. Some letters affirm the bond between mother and son: he tells Sofie Magdalene that he has finished reading a Norse fairytale, East of the Sun and West of the Moon; he asks about flowers on his sister Astri’s grave, his pets, an orange tree he had planted at home, and Jones the gardener; he mentions letters from Bestepapa and his aunt Astrid. Until around the time of his tenth birthday, he signed his letters with the name Sofie Magdalene used for him: ‘Boy’ – as reassuring to the writer as to the recipient, a role as much as a name and one that played its part in shaping his letter-writing persona of amiable boisterousness and bravado. Buoyant with slang – ‘topphole’, ‘topping’, ‘terrific’, ‘a lucky dog’ – his letters gave voice to an image of himself that was as important to Roald as to the mother whom he shielded from his unhappiness, a version of the ‘Roald’ of his secret diaries, like Sofie Magdalene’s edited memories of Harald; ebullient and unstoppable, with interests he later listed as ‘New inventions … Eccentricity … Secret information’.63 The letters’ vigour and directness foreshadow his adult writing. Afterwards Roald enjoyed quoting school reports that poured scorn on his achievements in English, his own belated redress to disillusionment. He chose selectively. His half-term report from St Peter’s in the summer of 1927, for example, described his performance as ‘very fair’.
As much as he could, he read. Books of his own choosing: spy stories and tales of adventure, including standard schoolboy fodder of the time, G. A. Henty and the early novels of C. S. Forester; Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy thrilled him. Like Matilda he rated The Secret Garden ‘best of all’.64 He developed a taste for ghost stories. A collection published by Ambrose Bierce thirty years earlier ‘profoundly fascinated’ him; later, without success, he attempted his own.65 He read with absorption and viscerally: he would describe a sensation of ‘tickles in the tummy’ reading poetry.66 Looking back, he inventoried a child’s requirements of fiction: he himself was the child reader he conjured. ‘They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.’67 Thanks to St Peter’s, his own tastes expanded. Before his eleventh birthday he had made first sorties into Dickens and Shakespeare and, he told Sofie Magdalene, read Treasure Island; he learned five new words a day and ‘clear cut … rules of spelling, vocabulary, grammar, reading and writing’.68 Early in 1927, he wrote his first story, ‘The Kumbak II’, using a fountain pen given to him by Sofie Magdalene for Christmas: it describes a machine invented by the narrator’s ‘Uncle Aristotle’ that uses radio technology to tune into conversations from the past in ‘olden-day language’. By the time he left St Peter’s, Roald had enjoyed moments of genuine happiness too, thanks to ‘a great and gifted teacher, a scholar and a lover of English Literature’: long-haired, yellow-toothed, eccentrically dressed Mrs O’Connor, who visited St Peter’s senior boys on Saturday mornings. Over three years, Mrs O’Connor introduced Roald and his contemporaries to her own version of the story of English, beginning with the Anglo-Saxons and culminating in the Victorian novel. To her an older Roald credited his ‘avid and insatiable read[ing] of good writing’.69 Of course it played its part in his own success. Good writing, he would claim with forthright exaggeration, ‘comes automatically from reading’.70