VII
1957–1965
‘And a crazy man running it?’
‘DO YOU REMEMBER talking about a children’s book you had in mind?’ Sheila St Lawrence wrote to Roald on 5 June 1957.1 Six weeks had passed since Alfred Knopf had informed Roald that the stories he had submitted for consideration as Kiss Kiss inspired ‘a feeling of let-down’.2 St Lawrence’s motives were compassionate and canny. ‘I know you are worried and deeply concerned at the Knopf and New Yorker reactions,’ she continued; but she had read The Gremlins and discerned in what she called Roald’s ‘fantasy writing’ a rewarding, almost certainly profitable way forward for an author whose career, despite successes, continued to falter. Emolliently she told Roald that The Gremlins’ popularity ‘would indicate that you have a bent in this direction and a ready audience to welcome such a book’. She suggested that the short story format that had served him well had become ‘imprisoning’. Roald ignored her.
His change of heart was gradual. In one of his ideas books, on a page headed ‘People’, Roald experimented with imagery to describe faces, each simile a foreshadowing of the style of his later children’s books: ‘A pale grey face like a bowl of porridge’, ‘A face like an old sea boot’, ‘A nose like a bathroom tap/the tap in the bathroom’, ‘A small crooked mouth, shaped like a keyhole’.3 Once ideas for short stories had dotted the books’ lined pages: ‘Do a murder with the leg of lamb from the deep freeze’ (‘Lamb to the Slaughter’); ‘The woman who stuck her head through a Henry Moore & couldn’t get it out’ (‘Neck’); ‘The pornographic bookseller who watches for the death of clergymen, then sends widow a bill and list of porno books’ (‘The Bookseller’).4 In their place appeared the kernels from which children’s books would emerge, like the note on a ‘boy who tips up glass’, to which Roald added, ‘Jimmy felt a little peculiar. Had he done it? Had he really?’, a precursor to Matilda.5 Once, as if ready now to cross this creative Rubicon, Roald wrote, ‘It’s time to do a children’s book,’ and the idea with which he toyed transported him back more than thirty years to ‘The Kumbak II’, in which Uncle Aristotle’s listening machine enabled the solving of a murder: ‘A murder handbook. A boy and a girl become murder detectives.’6 In fact, the children’s book on which Roald embarked, encouraged on and off by Sheila St Lawrence for the better part of a decade in what she called her ‘letters in 1950–51–52 hounding you to do just such a book’, came closest to a note for a story about an enormous cherry: ‘Man who grew cherry the size of a grapefruit’.7
It was not an accident that much of Roald’s preliminary thinking about the story that became James and the Giant Peach happened in Norway. In the summer of 1959, the Dahls, with their nanny Susan Denson, were on holiday. For Roald, magic swirled through the contours of the familiar landscape, shaped by his memories of childhood holidays and redolent of Sofie Magdalene’s storytelling and the myths of the north, complete with giants and uncontrollable natural forces, shape-shifting, metamorphoses and the lurking menace of land, sea and sky. Once Norway had been a catalyst for Roald’s childhood happiness; now, in the company of Pat and the two infant daughters to whom he would dedicate the story, it provided succour again. In the orchard at Little Whitefields, Roald had found himself looking at a cherry tree. What would happen, he wondered, if the cherries were to grow and grow and not stop growing? He asked the same question about apples and pears. And then he thought of a peach. He thought about animals, too. To his daughter Ophelia he would later explain his decision to write about ‘little things like earthworms and centipedes and spiders’ as shaped by a conviction that Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne had already centred stories on other animals: ‘I remember saying to myself, “I don’t want creatures that have been used before in children’s books. I don’t want bunny rabbits or squirrels or Mr Toad or little mice. I want new creatures.’8 Roald did not begin writing straightaway. This came afterwards, following the autumn return to New York, where the story itself reaches its happy-ever-after conclusion, and the novel’s first draft, including doggerel inspired by the Cautionary Tales he had learned as a child, was complete by the spring of 1960. At the end of April, Sheila St Lawrence had read the second draft. In an enthusiastic letter full of praise for the client whose receptiveness to extravagant flattery she understood well after an association stretching back more than a decade, she congratulated Roald on having successfully made the transition from adult to children’s fiction. Her letter, which pleased Roald, represented a highwater mark in a relationship that would swiftly be soured by his decision to take the handling of his foreign rights away from the Watkins Agency to his new British agents.
In hindsight, Roald’s decision was a slight to St Lawrence, insensitively handled, that he may have regretted, but events in 1960 forced conventional niceties from his mind. Although Alfred Knopf acclaimed Roald’s manuscript as destined to become ‘a little classic’, it would be many months before he was able to direct his thoughts to the forthcoming publication of his first full-length novel for children and what became, though he did not suspect it, the business of the remainder of his life.9
*
The new story on which Roald began work in 1960, a successor to James and the Giant Peach, would occupy him for three years and run to six drafts. As first conceived, it included detective story elements; its hero, called Charlie, as he would remain, was a ‘small negro boy’, whose adventures were partly a result of mistaken identity. The novel’s setting was a chocolate factory, its presiding deity a quicksilver inventor whose mercurial ingenuity appealed to Roald: he would create a second similar character in a story he did not complete – Mr Billy Bubbler, ‘the cleverest man in the world’, who created ‘Bubblers Magic Concrete Sweets’ and ‘Magic Hole-filling Sweets’ through the wizardry of a machine Roald himself would have coveted, ‘Bubblers Instant Chocolate-Making Machine’, a remarkable contraption able to make chocolate from mud.10
Afterwards Roald described the Charlie story as he first conceived it: ‘a little boy who was going round a chocolate factory and he accidentally fell into a big tub of melted chocolate and got sucked into the machine that made chocolate figures and couldn’t get out’. ‘I got everything wrong,’ he commented.
Pat was pregnant for the third time as Roald worked on his first draft. Sexual attraction maintained a bond between the couple whose marriage had come so close to unravelling; the separations of their working lives and their sense of themselves as a family contributed a greater semblance of compatibility. In the spring they returned to Great Missenden. From his sister Alfhild and her husband Leslie Hansen, Roald had bought a gipsy caravan that stood now in the garden: shortly he would rename Little Whitefields ‘Gipsy House’. Already, though building work remained ongoing, it was at Gipsy House that Roald was happiest. In the summer of 1960, able to work in his hut in the garden, to look out – as he walked from the house to the hut – on new plantings of roses, cattle in the fields beyond and ducks on the grass, bright shoots of young spinach in the vegetable beds and, in branches in the orchard, blue and green budgerigars that roosted in a new octagonal birdhouse, his happiness appeared complete: he had restored the vanished Eden of Ty Mynedd in a corner of the Home Counties in which his mother and all three of his sisters were close at hand. What’s more, he had peopled it with daughters to whom he was devoted, Olivia ‘beautiful and willowy, translucent and glowing’, Tessa ‘sweet and chubby’; as Tessa would remember, ‘his entire being was engrossed in the building of his family’.11 Then, on 30 July, Pat gave birth to a son: Theo Matthew Roald.
Perhaps only an accident could have destroyed Roald’s tranquillity so dramatically. That this happened in New York worked to complete his disillusionment with the city that, so recently, had showered him with blessings. Its victim then was four-month-old Theo.
At lunchtime, on 5 December, Susan Denson had collected Tessa from nursery school. She was pushing Theo in his pram, Tessa holding her hand, struggling too with a friend’s dog. At the corner of Madison and 85th Street, when the lights changed, she stepped out into the road. The taxi that hit Theo’s pram, driving too fast, accelerated rather than braking on collision. The impact hurled the pram 40 feet into the air and flung it against the side of a bus. The force crushed Theo’s skull. An ambulance hastened baby, nanny and Tessa to Lenox Hill Hospital. By the time Roald and Pat arrived, Theo ‘was in a state of deep shock, colourless, high pulse, temp 102 degrees’.12 Hospital staff assumed he would die.
In its casual but devastating brutality, it was a scenario that resembled the black caprice of one of Roald’s own stories. Roald, however, did not respond as a writer: emotionally or imaginatively. His response was that of Sofie Magdalene’s ‘Boy’, a sole male accustomed to taking charge. He set aside assumptions that Theo would die to find instead means of ensuring he lived. An X-ray revealed multiple fractures to the skull but no significant internal injuries. Roald telephoned friends of Pat’s, doctors Edmund Goodman and Bill Watson. By evening, four doctors were overseeing Theo’s treatment. Predictably they disagreed on ways forward. Roald did not leave Theo’s side. His role as arbitrator was self-appointed, characteristic of his habit of asserting control and his need for action. Ed Goodman remembered that Roald ‘kept things moving’. After three days, appalled by squabbling doctors and inept nurses, but reassured by a lowering of Theo’s temperature, Roald initiated a move to Ed Goodman’s hospital, Columbia Presbyterian, where operations drained fluid from Theo’s skull and, closely monitored, he remained for two weeks in an oxygen tent.
Uncertainty brought Roald and Pat together (Tessa’s trauma would be slower to unspool: ‘the devastation is beyond a small child’s comprehension,’ she wrote in 1988).13 Before Christmas, Theo was released from hospital, where medical bills were already considerable, but his recovery was fraught with frightening setbacks: build-ups of cerebrospinal fluid pressing on the brain that rendered him silent, unseeing, unmoving. Every time this happened, he was hurried back to hospital for the fluid to be drained, at risk of blindness, brain damage and death. Doctors attempted to prevent further build-ups by fitting a drainage tube into his heart to enable reabsorption of the fluid. Every time the tube blocked, making another operation necessary. And each time the stakes were raised, the chances lower of restoring Theo’s sight and brain function. It would continue for nine months.
The Dahls did not remain in New York. In May they made the customary crossing to Britain, Roald restless, at odds with the big, busy, dangerous city. At Gipsy House, Theo’s tube blocked again. ‘I couldn’t believe that with everything science had come up with, they couldn’t produce one little clog-proof tube,’ Roald reflected; a little clog-proof tube became his mission.14 It took two years. Although he subsequently downplayed his own part in the process, it was Roald’s determination to find a non-blocking shunt to divert cerebrospinal fluid from the brain that drove development of the Wade-Dahl-Till valve afterwards manufactured and distributed globally on a not-for-profit basis. He brought together Kenneth Till, the paediatric neurosurgeon in charge of Theo at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and a toymaker from whom he had bought model aeroplanes for his nephew, Nicholas Logsdail, Else’s son. Stanley Wade’s particular skill was for minutely accurate metal turning. Roald labelled him ‘a retired fellow with nothing much to do’, a description that recalls the high-handedness with which, at school, the teenage essay-writer had addressed a pavement artist.15 Roald involved himself closely in the two men’s progress: intermediary, inspirer, inventor. Theo’s own shunt would be removed for the last time in the autumn of 1963.
The process of collaboration seemed to prove to Roald his ability to shape events by force of will, an illusion that was important to him throughout his life. Inertia and impotence frustrated him: his choice was always for action, his role, as his sister Alfhild explained, that of ‘a big man, you know, a man who could cope’.16 In the summer of 1961, as Theo made tentative steps towards recovery, Roald continued to work on the story he called Charlie’s Chocolate Boy. Flashing lights rigged up in his writing hut alerted him to anything untoward in the nursery. Immolation in his writing offered Roald fragile escapism. With its roots in the brown cardboard boxes delivered to The Priory at Repton by Cadbury’s for testing, and Roald’s early dreams of inventing new tuppenny chocolate bars, his story explored disparate facets of himself. His active participation in the stages of Theo’s recovery suggests a Willy Wonka role, the smilingly uncompromising magician-cum-impresario whose autonomy expressed itself in determined lawless iconoclasm, but Roald, whose life had been shaped by personal encounters, above all his friendship with Charles Marsh, had as much in common with Charlie: a home- and family-loving outsider, wide-eyed and hungry, marked by a resilient sense of wonder. Both characters share their creator’s belief in magic.
The need to believe was powerful that summer. Financial reward did not motivate Roald’s writing and rewriting of Charlie’s Chocolate Boy then any more than it prompted the walks in the gathering dusk on which he took Olivia and Tessa, telling them stories as night noises clustered in the trees and the fading light gave credence to fantastical tales; despite positive reviews, sales of James and the Giant Peach were modest. Roald distracted himself by restoring the frame of ‘a very fine eighteenth-century mirror’. He took pleasure in his proficiency at the painstaking processes of water gilding. With the rigour he customarily applied to his short-lived hobbies, he had learned to water gild a decade ago at specialist framers, H. J. Spiller in Beak Street, taking detailed notes to which he referred now. ‘Mr Spiller’, he remembered, ‘allowed me to pay his senior craftsman quite a lot of money in order to teach me for hours.’17 At the childrens’ bedtime he recited nursery rhymes, revisited his own childhood reciting Hillaire Belloc, read aloud from Beatrix Potter. Once, while they slept, he wrote Olivia and Tessa’s names in weedkiller on the lawn outside their bedroom window. The following morning, he told them it was the work of fairies.
In July, Roald, Pat, Olivia, Tessa and Theo, who was well enough to learn to walk, went to Norway. They did not then return to New York. Undoubtedly Roald was the driving force behind their full-time move to Gipsy House; Olivia seconded her father’s enthusiasm, drawing a picture of birds and trees and ‘very tiny, in one corner ... a skyscraper and a garbage can. She wrote on it, “It’s much better in England.”’18 In the spirit of amity between husband and wife that was the positive legacy of Theo’s illness and their coming together over their shared fears, Pat told journalists of her happiness at living permanently in the country; it was mostly true. To a greater extent than previously, Roald’s family life had taken on a settled quality: a new annexe, begun in the late spring of 1961, continued Gipsy House’s transformation into the sort of home Roald had anticipated, busy with children, sisters, friends and a shifting cast of animals, including the puppy acquired a year before. On this new stage set, Pat had changed too. ‘I did the cooking, I did the children, keeping the house, the garden, the weeds,’ she would claim, a view others considered rosy.19
Yet it proved a fragile idyll. Roald’s elder daughter, Olivia, died of measles on 17 November 1962. She was seven, the same age as Roald’s eldest sister, Astri, whom he had been too young to remember. Like Astri’s, her death was unexpected; like hers, it could have been prevented by medical intervention. A note from Olivia’s preparatory school headmistress at the beginning of the month had warned of a measles outbreak; Roald and Pat’s concerns were for vulnerable Theo. Measles inoculation was still uncommon, and doses of the gamma globulin antibodies to prevent it in limited supply. Pat successfully obtained serum for Theo; Olivia caught measles and, in isolation from her siblings, the illness ran its course. Roald taught her to play chess; he teased her for her ‘polka dots’.20 ‘I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it,’ he wrote long afterwards.
Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. ‘Are you feeling all right?’, I asked her. ‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.21
She had contracted an inflammation of the brain called measles encephalitis, an outcome unlikely with the preventative of gamma globulin.
Four decades earlier, Harald Dahl had died in the wake of his favourite daughter’s death. Roald’s was a death of the heart, its imprint indelible. In a story he had written in 1944 about a mother contemplating the death of her fighter pilot son, he allowed her the bleakest conclusion: ‘If something did happen, then you too would be dead.’22 In November 1962, Roald had yet to recover from the strain of Theo’s long illness: in the wake of Olivia’s death, what Pat described as an ‘avalanche of anger and frustration’ expressed itself in silence.23 Roald said nothing: withdrawn, hermetic, lost. He turned to his mother, who had suffered similarly, but not Pat, whose grief matched his own; no longer bound to Pat by the shared anxieties of Theo’s accident, he railed at her tentative conviction of a reunion with Olivia in an afterlife. He shielded none of his family from the force of his wordless sorrow. For years he had taken painkillers for his back; now he increased his dose, again he began drinking heavily. The result, wrote Tessa, was a family that ‘toppled unwittingly over the edge of a jagged cliff face into a canyon of darkness which was filled with such sadness, such total devastation that we would never recover’.24
Roald divided his time between his writing hut, where nothing came between him and the magnitude of his suffering, and the garden he laid out around Olivia’s grave beside the church in neighbouring Little Missenden where all three children had been christened. In a green-covered exercise book, he wrote a terse account of the final hospital dash and Olivia’s death – ‘I kissed her. She was still warm. I went out’ – then firmly he hid the book from sight, its existence unknown to his family until his own death, and he hung up a painting of Olivia, which remained in place, visible from his writing chair, through three decades.25 Like the painting, to which, in this way, Pat was denied access, Olivia’s garden was a focus of private communing. A morbid grandeur characterized its conception. Roald took advice from one of the country’s foremost experts in alpine plants, Valerie Finnis, afterwards a recipient of the Royal Horticultural Society’s prestigious Royal Victoria Medal. Finnis, based nearby in Oxfordshire, advised on the garden’s 200 plants. That creation and maintenance were labour-intensive suited Roald’s purpose. Roald claimed he ‘was in a kind of daze’: at Pat’s suggestion, he contacted his former headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher, who, the previous year, had retired as Archbishop of Canterbury, but though he thanked Fisher for his help and sent him copies of two of his collections of stories, Roald derived little comfort from their meeting and none of the certainties he had sought concerning eternal life.26 There had always been a gossamer quality to his religious faith: with Olivia’s death, his doubts coalesced into non-belief. Over time, a creed of his own, rooted in kindness and respect for the natural world, alongside a truculently child-like sense of wonder, sustained him: the doctrine of good thoughts versus ugly thoughts that he expounded in The Twits. But not yet. To friends Pat lamented the solitariness of Roald’s working life, which provided no distractions from his sorrow. Roald applied himself to understanding the exact nature of Olivia’s susceptibility, on the surface a facts-based, coolly rational reaction akin to his response to the problem of Theo’s shunt. The swiftness of her death had debarred him from action to safeguard her: retrospectively – fruitlessly – he struggled to fill the gaps in his knowledge, certain of a connection between measles encephalitis and Olivia’s repeated non-reaction to smallpox vaccinations that would explain and make sense of what had happened. His correspondence with leading specialists lasted as long as his grief. Perhaps he meant to make amends through investigations likely to benefit others; perhaps a sense of guilt – undeserved but powerful – demanded slaking by reassurance that nothing could have been foretold.
‘My daughter was congenitally immune to smallpox (no vaccination ever took) and being immune to smallpox she was susceptible to encephalitis,’ Roald wrote to Dr John Adams of the department of paediatrics at the University of California in 1966. ‘Has anyone checked up the smallpox vaccination history of recent cases of encephalitis …? There is a clue here, I’m certain of it.’27
For more than twenty years Roald’s letters pursued the missing clue, ‘like a blind man who looks towards something but does not see’, but no answers lessened his grief.28 Even in his own last illness, contemplation of Olivia’s death left him wordless.
*
Roald’s sadness plays no part in the novel whose title he had changed that summer to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Joyfully, the adventure prefigured in his ideas book as ‘a chocolate factory that makes fantastic and marvellous things – and a crazy man running it’ celebrated his lifelong love of chocolate and the boundless ingenuity of its imperious wizard inventor.29 The novel rewards good behaviour and, in Charlie’s selection as Willy Wonka’s heir, holds out a promise for the future. When it was finished, Roald accepted what he called a ‘monstrous bribe’: ‘A big New York publisher had the idea of asking a selected number of the so-called best novelists writing in the English language each to write for them a short children’s book, and a large enough advance was offered to tempt most of the candidates into having a go.’30 Roald’s own go became The Magic Finger, originally called The Almost Ducks, completed in the bleakness of a winter in which everything numbed him save the quickness of his grief. For the first time his heroine is a girl: she is the age Olivia would have been at the book’s completion. The story’s protest against shooting would shape Roald’s later novel, Danny the Champion of the World. ‘I have yet to be convinced that a man has the right to kill the anopheles mosquito merely because his strength and brains enable him to do so, or to kill any other animal, reptile or insect,’ Roald wrote in his ideas book. ‘Obviously it is murder.’31 Like other authors’ offerings in an ill-fated project, The Magic Finger foundered, rights reverted back to Roald, and the book was not published until 1966. Five years after he had begun work on James and the Giant Peach, Roald still had only one children’s novel in print, and no interest from British publishers. Nor had he published a single story for adult readers during the same period. In a plaintive letter to Alfred Knopf, he resorted to oenophile imagery: the bottle of short story inspiration, he wrote, now contained only sediment.32
Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that, in April 1964, reporting on the plan by Great Missenden Parish Council to oppose Roald’s application to transform a garage in the village into an antiques shop to raise funds for a children’s charity, the Buckinghamshire Examiner should describe him again as the ‘husband of actress Patricia Neal’.33 Roald could not protest: weeks before, Pat had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress for a film called Hud, shot in Texas in June 1962. Days later, eight months pregnant and asleep in the early hours of the morning, she learned by telephone that she had won. At Roald’s suggestion, his old flame Annabella accepted the award on Pat’s behalf. Despite the lingering trauma of Olivia’s death, it was a moment of straightforward happiness for Pat, consolidated the following month with the birth of her fourth child, a daughter whom the Dahls called Ophelia, like Olivia a Shakespearean name. Roald’s own good news lacked the public acclaim of Pat’s Academy Awards success, which he envied her. In January, he had rejected an offer of a quick settlement on the part of film giant MGM. Both he and Pat believed the studio’s script for a film called 36 Hours plagiarized one of Roald’s wartime short stories. Roald was determined MGM would pay for its theft and refused to accept less than $25,000. ‘It is not often in a lifetime that a storywriter has a full movie based on his story,’ he wrote to Mike Watkins, his agent since Sheila St Lawrence’s departure to live in Ireland with her family.34 Watkins wavered, but as so often in his literary dealings, Roald had no intention of capitulating. His obduracy paid off: in April, MGM transferred $30,000 into a bank account for Roald’s children. This sum comfortably exceeded his current earnings from his children’s fiction, which he described, in a statement he would later be forced to rescind, as ‘an uneconomic diversion’.35 Publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Knopf in October, however, offered a tentative foretaste of things to come: within a month, an initial print run of 10,000 copies had sold out. Closer to home, Hamish Hamilton turned down the book. Chatto & Windus reached the same decision months later. ‘I refuse to be rejected right and left,’ a peevish Roald had told his British agent Laurence Pollinger with customary imperiousness, but he was in no position to lay down conditions.36
For Roald, the crisis in his professional life persisted even as Pat’s star continued to rise. He denied any element of commercial compromise in a story of voyeuristic titillation, ‘The Visitor’, which the men’s magazine Playboy accepted for publication early in 1965, following its rejection by the New Yorker. To a request for his photograph from the magazine’s fiction editor Ray Russell, Roald responded good-humouredly: ‘Having seen some of the astonishing photographs in your magazine lately, I am ashamed to be able only to send you this ordinary thing. If there had been time I’d have had one taken emerging like Brunhilde from my bath amid clouds of steam with nothing but a loofa to hide my privates.’37 In his flippancy was no trace of foreboding.
Disaster, when it struck, was instant and unexpected: its reverberations would impact on Roald’s family even beyond his death. The victim on this occasion was Pat. It happened in Los Angeles, in mid-February 1965, four days into filming a new picture by John Ford called Seven Women. Pat was three months pregnant, a secret shared only with Roald. Neither she nor her unborn baby died, but it was Pat, not the baby, who would require nursing for weeks and months and years to come.