Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography by Matthew Dennison

Author:Matthew Dennison [Dennison, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Historical, History, Europe, Great Britain, 20th Century, Literary Criticism, Children's & Young Adult Literature
ISBN: 9781788549400
Google: s3B8EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Head Of Zeus
Published: 2022-08-04T20:34:08+00:00

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Absent parents fill Roald’s fiction: a mother or father dead, or, like the Wormwoods in Matilda and Billy’s mother in The Minpins, uninterested in their children, or otherwise preoccupied, like the Krankys in George’s Marvellous Medicine and Charlie Bucket’s overworked mother and father, or simply distant, like the mother in a story called ‘The Wish’, ‘far away … looking for her son’, unaware of his fears and torments.37 Overwhelmingly his heroes and heroines are parentless. ‘No one is going to be worrying too much about me,’ the orphan Sophie tells the BFG: the statement applies in equal measure to any number of Roald’s fictional offspring, beginning with Lexington, the ‘beautiful baby boy’ born ‘once upon a time, in the City of New York’ in a cautionary tale from 1960 called ‘Pig’.38 It would not be a criticism that, as children, Olivia, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia or Lucy Dahl could level against their father.

In October 1938, Sofie Magdalene had received a letter from a friend travelling, like Roald, on the SS Mantola to Africa. Describing Roald as ‘very popular with everyone’, she added, ‘Luckily for him he is fond of children & is good with them, for they swarm all over him.’39 Two decades later, Sofie Magdalene was able to judge for herself something of this observation’s accuracy. Roald was thirty-eight when Pat conceived their first child and immediately excited by the prospect of fatherhood. By contrast, Pat would find she struggled as a mother, at one point handing over year-old Olivia to her sister-in-law Else for a period of several weeks. In her autobiography, she remembered Roald as ‘a very maternal daddy’; her career offered lengthy periods of respite from Olivia, then Tessa, who was born two years later.40 Despite a relish for the scatological that peppers his writing, Roald did not enjoy what he labelled newborns’ ‘whirling blur of wet nappies and vomit and milk and belching and farting’; he employed and oversaw a sequence of nurses.41 But his letters written at this time reveal his familiarity with these aspects of childcare: more often than not, it was Roald, not Pat, who ministered to the family that, with Theo’s birth in July 1960, had grown to three.

This succession of new babies interrupted Roald’s writing. In New York, he rented a writing room in an apartment close to the Dahls’ own; in the garden of Little Whitefields, as he had at Grange Farm, he converted an outbuilding to provide a quiet, cut-off place for working. There he could escape from being ‘an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things’; inspired by Dylan Thomas’s converted wooden garage on a Carmarthenshire cliff, the white-painted, brick-built shed served as his writing hut until his death.42 Working there in the summer of 1957, still smarting from The Honeys’ baleful fate, Roald confronted a further, more challenging dilemma: in April, Alfred Knopf had expressed considerable disappointment in a new collection of short stories that included Roald’s

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