“A little magic can take you a long way.”
Such was the motto of Roald Dahl, a man whose troubled beginnings – not unlike those experienced by the characters in his books – could not quell the curious, childlike mind that allowed him to transport so many young readers to the fantastic, wonderful worlds of Matilda, Willy Wonka, Fantastic Mr Fox, and so many more of his iconic creations.
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Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents on September 13, 1916. His first language was Norwegian; a language he would continue to speak at home with his parents and three sisters. Dahl was raised Lutheran, worshipping at the local Norwegian Church.
He suffered loss at an early age. In 1920, sister Astri died from appendicitis, mere weeks before his father succumbed to pneumonia. His mother was faced with the difficult choice of returning to family in Norway or remaining in Wales, soon deciding on the latter to allow her children to be educated in what her husband had believed to be the best schools in the world.
Dahl developed a reputation as a miscreant while studying at the Cathedral School in Llandaff. Most notably, at age eight, he put a dead mouse into a jar of gobstoppers at a local candy store owned by the “mean and loathsome” Mrs Pratchett. When caught, Dahl and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster. Years later, a plaque would be placed on the former store commemorating the prank.
He was no better at home, nor on the family’s overseas holidays. On one occasion, he replaced the tobacco in a Norwegian relative’s pipe with goat droppings.
Unhappy with her son’s behaviour, Dahl’s mother had him sent to St Peter’s boarding school. The terrible experiences he faced at the school would come to inspire many of the macabre settings and vicious personalities found within his work. Every week, Dahl would send his mother a letter every week, but the school made sure he never got to express his unhappiness.
At the age of 13, he attended the Repton School in Derbyshire, where he excelled at sports, and developed a passion for photography and literature, though his own writing was said to leave a lot to be desired. “”I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended,” an English teacher wrote in his report card.
While at Repton, Dahl had the privilege, alongside other students, of testing new chocolates sent by the Cadbury company. Dahl dreamt of one day creating chocolate of his own that would win over Mr Cadbury himself; a dream that would later inspire Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
As Dahl neared the conclusion of his education, his mother offered to send him to Cambridge or Oxford if he improved his grades. Dahl replied, “No thank you. I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China”.
So he did. Less than two years after graduation, his took part in an expedition of Newfoundland with the Public Schools Exploring Society, and would later work for Shell Petroleum in Tanzania. There, he lived in luxury, and would often come into contact with the dangerous wildlife of the region.
Still, it wasn’t enough adventure for Dahl. After two years in the post, he joined the Royal Air Force, and was flying solo after less than eight hours of experience at the controls of his Tiger Moth.
In 1940, while in transit from Egypt to Libya, Dahl crash landed after being accidentally directed into no man’s land between Allied and Italian forces. He fractured his skull, destroyed his nose, and was temporarily blinded. Fortunately, he managed to crawl out of the wreckage, passing out just after the plane caught fire, and was rescued by friendly forces.
Spinal surgery, a hip replacement, and five months later, Dahl returned to duty, and saw action over Greece. At one point, his flew missions every day over a period of four weeks. Eventually, Dahl was relieved from combat service after suffering from extreme headaches that caused him to lose consciousness.
Dahl was one of the lucky ones. Of the 16 other pilots he initially tested with, only three others survived the war.
Upon return to the UK, Dahl planned to work as a flight instructor, but was instead appointed assistant air attache at the British Embassy in the USA.
“I’d just come from the war. People were getting killed. I had been flying around, seeing horrible things. Now, almost instantly, I found myself in the middle of a pre-war cocktail party in America.”
It was less than half a year since the Pearl Harbor attack, and Dahl’s job saw him giving speeches about his war service designed to inspire those Americans who were still reticent about their country’s involvement in WWII. He hated it.
Not long after arriving, however, Dahl met novelist C. S. Forester, who encouraged him to write about his experiences. Forester would go on to publish Dahl’s story as Shot Down Over Libya (a dramatic title that drastically contrasted with Dahl’s true-to-life narrative) in The Saturday Evening Post on the 1st of August, 1942.
He wrote his first children’s book the following year. The Gremlins told the tale of the wily creatures of Royal Air Force folklore who were said to be responsible for problems that occurred in the aircraft. A copy was sent to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who read it to her family. Walt Disney bought the rights to the book, though a film was never produced.
Dahl left the RAF in August 1946, qualified as a flying ace due to his record of five aerial victories.
Over the next five decades, Dahl would go on to write 18 more novels, 16 of which were for children. Many of his most famous books would be released by acclaimed publication company Alfred A. Knopf. These would include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Fantastic Mr Fox. Dahl was also responsible for such classics as The BFG, The Witches, and Matilda.
Dahl’s fiction for children was lively, and sentimental. His protagonists were children or those with an innocent, youthful outlook on the world, while the antagonists tended to be vicious, often violent, adults. He never shied away from what he saw as the reality of children, however, and so his writing tended towards the darkly humorous. Few children who read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory forget the part in which Augustus Gloop tries to drink from the chocolate river and is almost turned into fudge as punishment for his gluttony.
Quentin Blake, who provided the illustrations for many of Dahl’s work, puts much of the writer’s appeal down to his ability to connect with children’s imaginations. “He was mischievous. A grown-up being mischievous. He addresses you, a child, as somebody who knows about the world. He was a grown-up – and he was bigger than most – who is on your side. That must have something to do with it.”
When not writing children’s novels, Dahl created content for adults. His collection of short stories, Kiss Kiss, won great acclaim, and he also found success having stories published in magazines such as Playboy, The New Yorker, and Ladies Home Journal.
Dahl also collaborated on screenplays, including adaptations of Ian Fleming novels in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. He was working on a cinematic version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but failed to meet deadlines. Dahl disowned the movie on its release.
Though he would work in the medium, Dahl would claim that television was one of the greatest threats to a child’s development. This belief made its way into some of his stories, most notably in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,
And children hitting you with sticks-
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They’ll now begin to feel the need
Of having something to read.
And once they start — oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They’ll grow so keen
They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.”
Outside of the realm of words, Dahl found love with actress Patricia Neal in the 1950s. They had five children together.
When the third of these children, Theo, suffered from hydrocephalus – often described as ‘water on the brain’ – as a result of his carriage being struck by a taxi in New York City, Dahl became involved in helping create the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, an invention that has gone on to alleviate the condition in almost 3000 children around the world.
The following year, his oldest child Olivia died from measles. The death left Dahl “limp with despair”. He would later become an advocate for immunisation, and dedicated his 1982 book The BFG to her.
In 1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child. Dahl oversaw her rehabilitation, and helped her relearn to walk and talk.
They divorced in 1983, and that same year he married Felicity ‘Liccy’ Crosland. She moved in with him to his Buckinghamshire home, ‘Gipsy House’, that year.
“We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.”
Roald Dahl died in 1990 of a blood disease. He was buried with his snooker cues, some burgundy, chocolates, pencils, and a power saw. To this day, children continue to leave toys and flowers upon his grave.
Dahl’s work amounted in the publication of 19 novels, 13 collections of short stories, three poems, 12 scripts, and 9 non-fiction books.
His books have sold over 200 million copies in almost 60 languages, making him one of the world’s best-selling authors. He received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1983, and was named Children’s Author of the Year at the British Book Awards upon his death.
Several charities have been established in his name, including Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity, which provides care and support for seriously ill children in the UK.
Like his incredible characters, Roald Dahl is sure to live on in the minds of young and old for many generations to come. After all, “A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”