IV

Stalky

1940–1943

‘Very colourful and rather unusual scenes.’

AS A WELL-KNOWN children’s writer in the 1980s, Roald reimagined a collection of fairytales in verse. ‘I guess you think you know this story. You don’t,’ he teased readers at the beginning of his ‘revolting’ Cinderella.¹

The desire to confound expectation, linked to dogmatic, uninhibited, sometimes taunting, sometimes teasing inclinations, was characteristic: he felt the same of readers’ assumptions about himself. For the Roald who became the world’s most commercially successful children’s author – a grandfatherly figure of stooping height and long cardigans, ‘old and bent and crinkly faced’, as he imagined himself – near-fatal heroism was a key ingredient in his own unexpected life story.²

He cherished his brush with death. Sofie Magdalene, he claimed, taught all her children ‘always [to] treat dangerous situations as great adventures’, and Roald reimagined the most dangerous moment of his life accordingly.³ On the table in his writing hut in the garden of Gipsy House in years to come, Roald’s miscellany of Roaldiana included a stone fragment of cuneiform script he had found on his trip to Babylon during pilot training in Iraq; above his chair he fixed a card with a picture of a Gloster Gladiator given to him by his second wife Liccy. Like other objects in his writing hut, visible reminders of his pilot training and his plane crash constituted a segment in Roald’s personal jigsaw puzzle. He had destroyed his plane and almost destroyed himself, but events in the Libyan desert in the autumn of 1940, which he summarized as ‘a monumental bump’ and ‘the great bash’ on the head, proved the principal turning point in his life.⁴ A year later, his active service ended. Then a chance encounter in a different continent encouraged him to record his experiences. Unplanned and mostly unpremeditated, he discovered he had become a writer, the very outcome predicted for him the previous decade by the astrologer consulted by Sofie Magdalene: his flying accident supplied his earliest material. Roald admitted of this career switch, at the end of his life, that ‘there was quite a bit of good fortune involved’.⁵ Mostly he preferred to attribute it to possible physiological changes in the wake of his wartime injuries. He found another explanation in astrology, writing that Virgoans, of whom he was one, ‘often develop surprising artistic qualities when they get older’.⁶ Both interpretations invested his writer’s calling with an otherworldly alchemy that appealed to competitive instincts in Roald.

In the first instance were slow weeks of recovery in the Anglo-Swiss Hospital in Alexandria. Doctors doubted Roald’s ability to recover: he was sightless and all but immobile. If he shared their misgivings, he held out nevertheless for the possibility, however slight, of a return to active service, characteristic stubbornness on the part of a man disinclined to acknowledge frailty. To his sister Asta he dictated a telegram: ‘Only concussion broken nose. Absolutely okay soon.’⁷ In fact he was plagued by loss of memory, extreme tiredness and fearsome headaches that would persist. A plastic surgeon rebuilt his nose, taking as his model, Roald claimed, film star Rudolph Valentino. Roald thanked the nurses who looked after him with presents of gold watches. Later stages of his convalescence had a sybaritic aspect. In the home of wealthy British expats Teddy and Dorothy Peel, Roald encountered for the first time the comforts of the rich that would always attract him (even when the rich themselves goaded him to contempt).

He was declared fit to return to service in February 1941. As he wrote to Else, uppermost among his thoughts was his desire to rejoin his squadron. This happened two months later, after two weeks training flying a Mark I Hurricane. His destination then was Greece, invaded by Germany on 6 April. With no experience of combat, Roald would take his place among pilots from 80 and 33 Squadrons engaged in ferocious conflict over Athens and its harbour at Piraeus, a ‘tiny band of Hurricane pilots … taking on an overwhelming force of the Luftwaffe who were pushing into Greece preparatory to taking Crete,’ as his widow described events in a letter to The Times on the fiftieth anniversary in 1991.⁸ Setting off from Fouka the previous autumn, Roald may have had a sense of invulnerability. Months later, his anticipation was febrile. His recovery, he knew, was incomplete and his training in flying Hurricanes no more than rudimentary; he continued to suffer debilitating headaches.

Roald described what happened in Greece to Sofie Magdalene the following month. Passages in his letters were matter of fact, sparsely descriptive. At times a mixture of understatement and exaggeration betrayed his unsettlement in the aftermath of long, frenetic, tense, angry, excited, uncertain days in the air that, at least once, left him so physically shaken he was unable to light his cigarette. ‘It wasn’t much fun taking on half the German Air Force with literally a handful of fighters,’ he told his mother.⁹ On 16 April, he shot down his first enemy plane. He did the same two days later. He killed again in the main engagement on 20 April. An unequal contest in which British planes were significantly outnumbered, the Battle of Athens claimed the lives of four of the fifteen RAF pilots who took to the sky. In Going Solo, Roald’s account of this ‘long-lasting dog fight’ has a breathless excitability; he would remember it as ‘in a way the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life’.¹⁰ But he would also conclude that the sense of detachment he had developed to shield him at St Peter’s and Repton hardened in the wake of battle, a quality that would play its part in his relationships. Days later, with other survivors, Roald was flown back to Egypt. He returned to the Peels in Alexandria. Within less than a month, he had rejoined remnants of 80 Squadron in Haifa, in British Palestine. On this occasion, Vichy French were the target. Roald shot down at least two French planes, but he was struggling against a different enemy. Searing headaches caused temporary blackouts flying; doctors declared him unfit for action. He could not protest, despite overwhelming disappointment. Much later, he would suggest that his forced exit from the arena of war brought to an end youthful combativeness.¹¹ In fact, in Libya, Greece and Palestine, he had absorbed unwelcome lessons: his own undoubted bravery and skilfulness as a pilot, partnered with flashes of physical impuissance. The disappointment of this antithesis – heroism versus pregnability – would further harden his detachment. His later statement that ‘I don’t think one ever gets over anything … You have just got to go on’, ostensibly about family tragedy, also reflected his response to his enforced grounding.¹²

A neighbour in the village of Grendon Underwood described the home to which Roald returned as ‘a small old cottage with few facilities’.¹³ Thatched, half-timbered and white-painted, half-hidden behind thick hedges, Sofie Magdalene’s first Buckinghamshire cottage had little in common with Oakwood or Cumberland Lodge bar its large garden, and even less that recalled the landscape of citrus groves and fig trees on the margins of the Mediterranean that Roald had left behind. Nor, following the marriages of Alfhild, Else and Louis, was the cottage a nexus for Dahl siblings and half-siblings as Roald remembered. In his description of his homecoming in Going Solo, the only reunion Roald mentions is with Sofie Magdalene, throwing himself into her arms as he stepped from the bus that had brought him on the last stage of his journey. She alone was there to greet him. ‘I flew down the steps of the bus into the arms of the waiting mother,’ Roald wrote, and in his description of the longed-for moment ‘my mother’ has become ‘the mother’.¹⁴ His relationship with Sofie Magdalene remained his strongest emotional connection: after three years’ absence, she had become the archetype of every maternal instinct he craved. Her vigil at the garden gate suggests that Roald was still her ‘Apple’, his own use of the definite article that his chiefest need was for the reassurance that only his mother could provide. In ‘Only This’, the story in which he imagined a mother’s feelings for her pilot son, the son in question is an only child, his mother’s single focus. Her thoughts of him fill her remote cottage – like Sofie Magdalene’s, a honeycomb of small rooms.

Yet home life proved as changed as every other aspect of wartime existence. With its noisy wooden staircase and low ceilings, Grendon Cottage seemed to shrink Dahl family life, much as Roald would conclude that his own life had shrunk. Here was no space for a dark room, no studio for Louis, and Alfhild and Else’s duets were consigned to memory. Only months before, driving from Alexandria to Haifa, Roald had exulted in the luxury of solitude. ‘I had never before been totally without sight of another human being for a full day and a night,’ he wrote, secure in his return to the unsettling but vivid routine of ‘flying around [seeing] all sorts of horrible things happening’, certain that busyness and purpose awaited him.¹⁵ Now he lacked both. As much as when he lay unseeing in his hospital bed in Alexandria, his burned face bound in bandages, unable to move, Roald was in limbo. He turned his attention to his mother’s garden, digging deep trenches for raspberry canes, preparing the ground thoroughly. ‘Every year or two he would become immersed in a new hobby,’ one of his daughters wrote later of a loosely fictionalized version of Roald.¹⁶ In this instance, Roald needed more than a hobby. Soon gardening gave way to something entirely unexpected.

*

On 24 March 1942, Roald received a diplomatic identification card from the Foreign Office. Three days later, he set sail from Glasgow for Canada. His destination was the British Embassy in Washington. His appointment as assistant air attaché by Harold Balfour, Churchill’s under-secretary of state for air, was one, he suggested, he had accepted reluctantly. In years to come, the minutiae of this twist of fortune did not concern Roald unduly – as he wrote in The Minpins, ‘sometimes mysteries are more intriguing than explanations’.¹⁷ Serendipity played its part: dinner at Pratt’s, the gentlemen’s club in London; at the single table in the club’s basement dining room Balfour and Roald, who had not met before, seated next to one another.

The Washington that greeted Roald in the spring of 1942 was cheerful with cherry blossom. Shops, restaurants and taxis were all busy, wartime privations unthought of. In a country still volubly isolationist, opposed in many quarters to intervention in what was widely regarded as an overseas conflict, Roald’s appointment was concerned with public relations. Tall, handsome, a uniformed RAF mannequin, his remit was to play his part in embassy efforts to promote US support for Britain’s war effort. Beyond his good looks and attachment to the RAF it was an ill-fitting appointment for Roald, with his poor track record of esprit de corps, his casual brusquerie and strong sense of himself. A fighter pilot in North Africa and Greece, he had delighted in belonging to a fraternity bonded by purpose and shared risks, and his airborne autonomy. Like the empty chatter of the Dar es Salaam Club, the frigid hierarchies and stilted protocols of the British Embassy provoked Roald to speedy disgruntlement. He disliked the ambassador, Lord Halifax, a former viceroy of India, aloof and Edwardian, and he jibbed at expectations that he would fritter his evenings charming Washington’s ‘cocktail mob’ or, like a latter-day bard, accepting ‘boring invitations from social hostesses’ in order to pass on anecdotes of pilots’ derring-do.¹⁸ Less than a year out of active service, he remained entrenched in a wartime mentality, cut off from embassy hands and ‘po-faced, cod-eyed’ party-going Americans by a gulf of harsh experience and stark reminders in the form of punishing headaches.¹⁹ That he became as a result in his own words ‘rather outspoken and brash’ appears inevitable.²⁰ Here were grounds for the impatience with empty chatter that later led him to cut out of the New York Times a quotation from Jonathan Swift’s ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’ of 1706: ‘The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter’.²¹ Small recompense were the duty-free whisky and diplomatic immunity from motoring fines of which he boasted to Sofie Magdalene, the ready availability of pre-war luxuries, like the boxes of chocolate he arranged to be sent at intervals to his mother and sisters, evenings of poker at the University Club or a routine that began at ten o’clock each morning, assisted by a Canadian secretary, and whenever possible, ended like his days in Tanganyika, with whisky and gramophone records and the consolation of his own company.

It was in Washington, however, that Roald discovered at first hand the power of his own storytelling. In a school essay about nursery rhymes he had commended the impact of bold narratives like those that had enthralled him at Sofie Magdalene’s knee. In Washington, he himself became the storyteller, tasked with selling to hard-nosed isolationists a version of RAF bravery worth paying for. He undertook evening speaking engagements to politely detached audiences; and within days of his arrival, he met the first of the professional storytellers who, he claimed, changed his life.²² Their encounter was unexpected and, initially, disappointing. The man himself was ‘very small … with thick steel-rimmed spectacles’, a hesitant shuffle and ‘nothing in the least unusual about him’.²³ He appeared in Roald’s office in the embassy annexe that housed the Air Mission, in pursuit of a flying story for the influential weekly magazine the Saturday Evening Post. He invited Roald to tell him his most exciting adventure over lunch; he revealed himself as the novelist C. S. Forester, then working in the States for the British Ministry of Information. Suddenly Roald, who had read Forester since his schooldays, was ‘churning with excitement’. As he recounted events thirty years later, excitement muddled him. He failed to give a good account of himself, distracted by smoked salmon and roast duck and partly, he explained, because ‘I have never been much good at telling stories aloud’.²⁴ He offered to write down what had happened to him in the hours from his departure from Fouka and to send Forester his jottings for the novelist to rewrite, and the same evening he did just this in the comfort of his room in the Willard Hotel. He wrote quickly. At midnight, after five hours, the story was finished. Roald remembered its genesis as life-changing, akin to a mystical experience, a sensation like ‘float[ing] back in time … the hand that held the pencil mov[ing] back and forth across each page’ as if invisibly propelled.²⁵ An astonished Forester did not consider rewriting it. Instead he passed it to his agent, Harold Matson, who sold it to the Post on Roald’s behalf. It was published on 1 August over two pages, complete with colour illustration.

The Saturday Evening Post wanted propagandist reportage. While claiming it as ‘a factual report on Libyan air fighting’, it Americanized Roald’s account to guarantee its readers’ sympathies. Editors retitled the piece ‘Shot Down Over Libya’, a distortion and the only revision in which Roald acquiesced. Perhaps its chipper film-voiceover style came to irritate him: ‘It was getting hot in the cockpit. My shirt and pants were dark with sweat and I smelt like hell. You can’t take a bath in four pints of water a day when you’ve got to use it for drinking as well, at least, I can’t because I’m pretty big.’²⁶ For the most part Roald responded angrily to editorial interventions, undeterred by his own status as newcomer, uncowed by the Post’s Olympian clout. Later, still disgruntled, he rewrote the piece, restored its original title, ‘A Piece of Cake’, and included it in his collection of flying stories, Over to You. He told his mother that the magazine’s editors had ‘half ruined’ his efforts.²⁷

‘All my adult life,’ wrote Roald in 1988, ‘I have worked alone in one small room … I cannot suddenly adjust to … listening to a dozen different people voicing their views.’²⁸ Metaphorically Roald shut himself into a room from which he excluded dissenting voices from the outset: his confidence in his work was immense and, as all his publishers would be forced to recognize, he never rated contradictory views as highly as his own. In this instance, he offered his mother a defensive-sounding apologia: the story was ‘purely in my line of duty, because they say it does a lot of good with the American public’; with customary boastfulness, he added ‘the Saturday Evening Post is the widest read magazine in America with a circulation of about 4 million. I am told that it’s every author’s ambition to get a story therein.’²⁹ Neither then, on the brink of his twenty-sixth birthday, nor at any point afterwards would publication alone satisfy Roald’s vision of himself. He required his writing to be prominent, praised and, above all, profitable.

And he worked hard to these ends. He wrote carefully, for much of the time slowly; he researched thoroughly; and he set about his work with conviction. Published anonymously as an account by ‘an RAF pilot at present in this country for medical reasons’, ‘Shot Down Over Libya’ earned Roald $187.50, the commendations of Harold Matson and his mother’s pride. Outwardly, Roald’s life did not change. The change was within himself: a restored certainty that banished the shadow of his crash landing in the desert, and the troubling vision of ordinariness that had assailed him in Grendon Underwood, digging trenches for raspberry canes in his mother’s garden while a distant war pursued its course without him.

In novel called My Uncle Oswald, published in 1979, Roald would suggest that at least one kind of success is acquired ‘by chicanery, by talent, by inspired judgement or by luck’.³⁰ The vector for change in his own case was a forty-page manuscript inspired by RAF mythology that showcased his talent for vivid fantasy and tight plotting: what happened next was a combination of luck and, arguably, inspired judgement in accurately reading the zeitgeist. At the end of June, Roald told Sofie Magdalene that, in his lunch hour ‘and in spare moments because I’m pretty busy’, he had written 7,000 words about ‘little types with horns and a long tail who walk about on the wings of your aircraft boring holes in the fuselage and urinating in your fuse-box’.³¹ He described it as ‘a sort of fairy tale’.³² Its subjects were gremlins, characters ‘“well-known” by the entire RAF’, in Roald’s estimate ‘a very real and considerable part of the conversation of every RAF pilot in the world’.³³ His decision to place them in a ‘beautiful green wood far up in the North’ points to his early steeping in Norse tales and his love of the country: his story begins ‘in early autumn, when the chestnuts [are] ripening and the apples [are] beginning to drop off the trees’ – September, his birthday month, which he called ‘the Month of the Conker’.³⁴ Roald annotated inkblots on the same letter with the explanation ‘a gremlin walked across the page after bathing in my ink bottle’; his gremlins wore suction boots and green bowler hats, like the Minpins in the last of his children’s stories, who are ‘curiously old-fashioned’ in dress and ‘[walk] up and down almost vertical [tree] branches without the slightest trouble’, wearing suction boots that resemble green wellingtons.³⁵ His absorption was whole-hearted, as his story of gremlin-like Minpins four decades later indicates; in his imagination, fact and fiction elided. In September, he claimed he ‘really [did] know what [gremlins] look like, having seen a great number of them in my time’.³⁶ The recipients of such assurances were understandably wrongfooted.

With cheerful determination, Roald had set his sights on magazine publication. To Sofie Magdalene, he hazarded likely payment at $500, equivalent to around £125. Immersion in his fantasy of diminutive mischief-makers leavened June evenings in Roald’s rented house in Georgetown, in north-west Washington. Writing was escapist, returning him to 80 Squadron: fleeting release from his headaches, which continued ‘fairly active’ throughout that summer, and the polished banalities of the embassy and his work for the Air Mission.³⁷ He wrote whenever he could, mostly in the evening.³⁸

Without the intervention of a British businessman, founder of a cinema company in Dover, employed during the war at the New York-based British Information Services, ‘Gremlin Lore’ might have remained a whimsical wartime magazine piece. Sidney Bernstein read Roald’s story and promptly dispatched it to Walt Disney. Bernstein had previously advised on the screenplay for MGM’s blockbuster wartime romance Mrs Miniver, released to commercial and critical acclaim only weeks before Roald completed his typescript. Terms of Roald’s employment required him to show material intended for publication to his superiors in both Washington and London. Several reacted to ‘Gremlin Lore’ with bafflement, but Bernstein identified in Roald’s story propaganda as potent as Mrs Miniver. Walt Disney agreed. His interest in Roald’s gremlins, described by Roald as a ‘shock’, was immediate. ‘If he really means business,’ Roald wrote to his mother, with a characteristic leap, ‘it will become worth many thousands of dollars.’³⁹

Recommending his collection of flying stories, Over to You, a reviewer in a provincial newspaper described Roald in 1946 as ‘an onlooker who sees very colourful and rather unusual scenes’, a verdict as accurate of Roald’s gremlin story as his flying stories, and equally true of his accounts of his own life.⁴⁰ His first skirmish with Hollywood undoubtedly proved both colourful and unusual. At the outset the view of a Disney employee that Roald did ‘not regard himself as a professional writer’ was misleading in its suggestion of naivety.⁴¹ As in his dealings with the Saturday Evening Post, Roald’s response to Disney’s overtures was assertive and unrelenting: he was still the very tall boy, arrogant, opinionated and stubborn, who had alienated masters at Repton. Disney himself responded positively to the young man’s combination of brazen confidence and charm; unable to pronounce ‘Roald’, he called him ‘Stalky’. Flattered, an excited Roald remained nevertheless determined to exercise tight control over any collaboration with the Hollywood giant. He had already decided to allocate profits to the RAF Benevolent Fund, beginning with wireless sets for squadrons in the Middle East.

The contract Roald eventually negotiated – helped by New York lawyer and general counsel to the Democratic National Committee Sol Rosenblatt – did indeed grant him high levels of control over any gremlins film made by Disney. In the meantime, Disney’s practised publicity machine promoted its new project with gusto. Gremlin characters featured in advertisements, a comic strip appeared called ‘The Three Little Gremlins’, there were ‘gremlin’ hats and a big band tune by Buddy Tate, ‘Dance of the Gremlins’; a version of Roald’s story published in Cosmopolitan in December described its unnamed author as a ‘noted gremlinologist’. The $50,000 spent by Disney over the next eighteen months included, in November 1942, a two-week visit by Roald, at Walt’s invitation, to the company’s Burbank studios and a second visit five months later. On both occasions Roald was put up in the Beverly Hills Hotel and provided with a car. He spent his days in meetings with Walt Disney or working alongside Disney artists to produce the illustrated storybook published in April 1943 as The Gremlins. In November, Walt threw a party for his newest protégé. Hollywood stars appeared as gremlins: Charlie Chaplin, Spencer Tracy, Dorothy Lamour and Mrs Miniver leading lady, Greer Garson. In contrast to his attitude to embassy-sponsored social life in Washington, Roald appeared determined to enjoy himself. ‘All the girls went crazy for him,’ one of Disney’s illustrators remembered.⁴² Roald’s first fling was with an actress called Phyllis Brooks, shortly to retire from films at the age of thirty. His description for Sofie Magdalene of an evening spent with Ginger Rogers was coyly – or complacently – ambiguous. He flirted with Marlene Dietrich. As he had since school, he made sense of increasingly out-of-the-ordinary occurrences in the orderly narrative of his letters to his mother.

But in his relationship with his host, Roald apparently had no intention of acknowledging himself the junior partner. As in his dealings with the Saturday Evening Post, he dug in his heels in defence of what he had written. Disagreements focused on gremlins’ appearances: the illustrations produced by Disney artists omitted both their tails and their green bowler hats. Roald resisted compromise; Disney himself set aside the younger man’s objections. Not for the last time, Roald refused to concede defeat. His attitude was both proprietorial and protective, his story a hymn to his love of flying and his continuing loyalty to the RAF and his fellow pilots ‘all born to fly, higher than the highest high’.⁴³ A copy of The Gremlins signed by Roald in June 1943 preserves his irritation and his intransigence. On the title page he altered the illustration for the book’s recipient. ‘There should be a bowler hat and a tail,’ he wrote alongside it, and he added both with bold strokes of his pen. Yet fledgling author and Hollywood behemoth were unequal sparring partners: Roald was powerless to prevent Disney from abandoning the project. In December 1943, after protracted to-ing and fro-ing, Walt informed Roald there would be no film. American cinema-goers, polls suggested, had tired of war material.

*

Roald’s brush with Hollywood transformed him into a published author and, in his agent’s assessment, an ‘almost instantaneous success’; it introduced him to a rarefied neverland of partying film stars; it convinced him of a role for himself in Anglo-American relations and the creative and commercial possibilities of his own imaginings.⁴⁴ For a young man inclined to self-importance, the chances of emerging unscathed were slight.

That Roald’s behaviour fell foul of the embassy’s code of polite restraint is no cause for surprise. He had only ever trimmed his behaviour in line with expectations within his own family or the RAF. Disappointed in his pilot’s career, still troubled by his injuries, impatient of diplomatic niceties, convinced of his own special abilities and certain he deserved a level of recognition that embassy mandarins denied him, swaggering Roald ruffled feathers. To himself he explained his attitude to negotiations with Disney as motivated by a determination to obtain best possible terms for the RAF Benevolent Fund; Roald gave away the fees he received for short stories, including $1,000 received from the Ladies’ Home Journal in November, which he gave to an RAF widow in Washington whose husband had been killed in a car crash. Yet among his colleagues in the Air Mission and beyond were those unaware of his habitual generosity, who preferred to castigate him as conceited and self-seeking.

Roald’s Achilles heel, however, was to prove his trump card. His gremlins won him influential admirers. Among them were the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, from whom Roald’s present of a signed copy of his book for her grandchildren elicited an invitation to visit, and a maverick Hungarian film producer, Gabriel Pascal. Pascal had recently directed a successful film adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. In a reprise of Roald’s first meeting with C. S. Forester, he unveiled his latest plan to Roald over lunch, having presented himself, uninvited and unknown, at his office. In Roald the gremlinologist Pascal decided he had discerned a kindred spirit: he asked him to write the screenplay for ‘an enormous film about the world and good and evil’.⁴⁵ Pascal’s own powerful supporters included the vice president, Henry Wallace. Lunch with Wallace followed the next day. Wallace reiterated Pascal’s request that Roald write the film’s script; politician and airman talked into the early evening. As Roald explained to his mother, so easily and unexpectedly did a twenty-six-year-old invalided flight lieutenant find himself ‘in very high circles – so bloody high that sometimes it is difficult to see the ground’.⁴⁶

In the event, following the death of its producer in a plane crash, Pascal’s film came to nothing. By contrast, Roald’s friendship with Wallace flourished. It brought him into contact with the man he would afterwards describe as his best friend in the world, a like-minded iconoclast, Charles Marsh. Thirty years Roald’s senior, a self-made newspaper magnate turned philanthropist, Marsh was to become the father figure Roald had never had: brash, appealingly bombastic, self-important, public-spirited and, to Roald, witty, kind and extraordinarily generous.