Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl

Harald undoubtedly had a hard childhood. In Boy, Roald tells the gruesome story of how, aged fourteen, his father fell off the roof of the family home, where he was repairing loose tiles, and broke his arm. A drunken doctor then misdiagnosed a dislocated shoulder, summoning two men off the street to help him put the shoulder into place. As they forcibly manipulated young Harald’s arm, splinters of bone started to poke through the boy’s skin. Eventually the arm had to be amputated at the elbow. Dahl tells the tale with his usual lack of sentiment, explaining how his father made light of his disability — sharpening a prong of his fork so he could eat one-handed, and learning to do almost everything he wanted, except cutting the top off a hard-boiled egg, with a single hand. It’s a good tale. Suspiciously good. So it is not surprising to discover that Roald confessed to one of his American editors, Stephen Roxburgh at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, that he had invented much of it and that he had particularly enjoyed devising the detail of the sharpened fork.20 Photographs confirm that his father’s arm was certainly amputated. But it’s also possible that Dahl’s version of the accident hid a more squalid domestic truth and that it was a drunken parent rather than a drunken doctor who was responsible for the amputation. We don’t know if Harald was a fabricator of the truth — his wife certainly was, and she was the one who passed the family legends down to Roald — but he was studious, thoughtful, and had a passion for beautiful things. He had little in common with his father: the obstinate and rough-hewn butcher, who squandered his money betting on local trotting races.21

Harald and his brother Oscar must have elected to leave Norway some time in the 1880s. Writing a hundred years later, Roald describes the decision in characteristically simple terms:

My father was a year or so older than his brother Oscar, but they were exceptionally close and soon after they left school they went for a long walk together to plan their future. They decided that a small town like Sarpsborg in a small country like Norway was no place to make a fortune. So what they must do, they agreed, was to go away to one of the big countries, either to England or France, where opportunities to make good would be boundless. 22

Both went to Paris, but their motivations for leaving were almost certainly more complex than Roald made out. To begin with, the two brothers were nothing like the same age. There was a seven-year gap between them. So, even if Oscar had just left school when he departed for France, Harald would have been a young man in his twenties. The fact that Roald also maintained his grandfather “forbade” his two sons to leave and that the two men were forced to “run away”23 suggests it took a while for the slow-burning Harald to pluck up the courage and defy him. Two more of Olaus and Ellen’s children also left Norway at this time: Clara went to South Africa and Olga to Denmark. Only Ragna and her youngest brother, Truls, stayed behind. Truls became his father’s apprentice and eventually took over the butcher’s shop, staying with him, one suspects, largely for business reasons.

The two older Dahl brothers left Norway on a boat. It’s quite possible they worked on ships for a considerable period of time before they ended up in Paris, for both of them later went into careers that involved quite detailed knowledge of shipping. What exactly they did when they got to the French capital remains unclear. Family legend has it that they went there to be both artists and entrepreneurs — an improbable combination of skills perhaps, but one that would define Roald, in whose mind there was always a natural link between making art and making money. It was the same with his elder sister Alfhild. Sitting in the garden of her house in the Chiltern Hills, a stone’s throw away from where her brother lived, her weathered features broke into a wrinkly grin as she recalled her father and uncle, seventy years earlier. “They left Norway to become artists, you see,” she told me. “They went to make their fortune. They just assumed they could do it.”24 It was as if her brother were speaking. The crackly voice, the clipped, matter-of fact delivery, the wry chuckle.

The big picture, too, is similarly vivid and compelling, always uncluttered with qualifications or a surfeit of detail. For Alfhild, Harald and Oscar were typical Nordic bohemians, who came to Paris for its glamour, its freedom, and its artistic energy. Fictionalized versions of these Scandinavian visitors appear in literature of that period — Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, or Louise Strandberg in Victoria Benedictsson’s play The Enchantment. They left the stern world of the North for a “great, free glorious life”25 among the boulevards and cafes, where geniuses mixed cheek-by-jowl with the indigent, where anarchists plotted social revolution, and where painting was in a ferment of change that had not been seen in one place since Renaissance Florence.

Fading sepia photographs give us a glimpse of the lost world they lived in: days at the races, fancy-dress parties, lunches on summer lawns in Compiegne and Neuilly. And then they painted. It was the golden age of Norwegian painting, and in Paris Harald would almost certainly have mixed with the leading Scandinavian painters of the day, including Edvard Munch and Frits Thaulow. Not that Harald was a modernist. He was a craftsman, who carved mirrors, picture frames and mantelpieces, and painted rural scenes. A few examples of his work survive — subtle, well-crafted landscapes in the Scandinavian naturalistic style. At Gipsy House, one of them, an impressionistic pastel in green, blue and brown, still hangs by Liccy Dahl’s bedside. It is reminiscent of the dismal rural setting from which Harald’s father had fled. A clump of straggly spruces tremble by the side of a placid lake, like a skeletal family tentatively approaching the chilly waters. No sunlight illuminates the scene, nor is there any sense of human habitation. In the foreground, reeds are tugged by a gust of wind. In the background, the bare mountains rise up into the haze toward the distant sky.

The visual arts were an important and little understood aspect of Roald Dahl’s life and formed a continuous counterpoise to his literary activities. All his life he bought and sold paintings, furniture and jewellery — sometimes to supplement his literary earnings. He even opened an antique shop. That connection between business and art, which came as naturally to him as breathing, would puzzle and irritate many of Dahl’s English literary contemporaries, who resented his skill at making money and disliked the pride he took in his own financial successes. It frequently caused misunderstandings. The British novelist Kingsley Amis was typical. In his memoirs, he described his only meeting with Dahl. It was at a party given by Tom Stoppard in the early 1970s. There, Roald apparently suggested to Amis that, if he was suffering from “financial problems”, he should consider writing a children’s book, and went on to describe how he might go about doing so. Amis, who had no interest in children’s fiction, felt he was being patronized by Dahl’s suggestion that his own writing was not bringing him enough money. Dahl, for his part, was in precisely the kind of English literary environment he loathed. He knew that Amis, like most of the guests, did not respect children’s writing as proper literature and this attitude made him feel vulnerable. Drunk and ill at ease, he probably felt that the only way to keep his head up with Amis was to talk money. The clash of attitudes was bitter and fundamental. Noting that Dahl departed by helicopter, Amis concluded: “I watched the television news that night, but there was no report of a famous children’s author being killed in a helicopter crash.”26

The need for financial success was in Roald’s blood. His father and his uncle Oscar had both evolved into shrewd businessmen. When the two brothers eventually separated in Paris, Oscar travelled to La Rochelle, on the west coast of France, with his new wife, Therese Billotte, whom he had rescued from a fire in 1897 at the Bazar de la Charite. As with the fire in Grue, this had killed over one hundred people.27 Billotte was from a family of painters. Her grandfather was the French writer and artist Eugene Fromentin, most famous for his naturalistic depictions of life in North Africa, while her uncle, Rene Billotte, was a commercial landscape painter, whose murals of exotic scenes still decorate Le Train Bleu, the elaborate gilded dining room of Paris’s main railway station to the South, the Gare de Lyon. In La Rochelle, Oscar started a company of fishing trawlers called Pecheurs d’Atlantique. His fleet began the practice of canning its catch on board ship, and became so successful that Roald could justifiably boast after the war that his uncle was “the wealthiest man in town”.28 With the money he made, Oscar indulged himself. He purchased the Hôtel Pascaud, an elegant eighteenth-century town house, and filled it with exquisite objects. Roald would later fondly describe it as “a museum dedicated to beauty”.29

Oscar was a complex character. He was an aesthete but, like his father Olaus, also something of a bully. Roald would always have a turbulent relationship with him. During the war Oscar remained in Occupied France, collaborating with the Nazis, while his son fought in the Resistance. One family legend has it that, after the war was over, he was publicly tarred and feathered by a group of bitter locals and that father and son never spoke again. However, what is certain is that this exotic French uncle, with his Viking appearance and fastidious taste, left an indelible impression on his young nephew — if only for his facial hair.

My late uncle Oscar… had a massive hairy moustache, and at meals he used to fish out of his pocket an elongated silver scoop with a small handle on it. This was called a moustache-strainer and he used to hold it over his moustache with his left hand as he spooned his soup into his mouth with his right. This did prevent the hair-ends from becoming saturated with lobster bisque … but I used to say to myself, “Why (doesn’t he just clip the hairs shorter? Or better still, just shave the (damn thing off altogether and be done with it?” But then Uncle Oscar was the sort of man who used to remove his false teeth at the end of dinner and rinse them in his finger-bowl? 30

Harald’s temperament, like his moustache, was less extrovert than his brother’s. And he remained in Paris a little longer. However, some time in the 1890s, when he decided that he was tired of the vie bohemienne, he headed not to La Rochelle but to South Wales, to the coal metropolis of Cardiff, where he had heard that enterprising Norwegians could make their fortune.

*Most of the Vaernes farmlands have now been subsumed into Trondheim Airport, but the actual building Hans Theodor owned is still standing. He is buried nearby in the cemetery of Vaernes Church.

†Confusingly, the capital of Norway has undergone several changes of name. Ancient Norse Oslo was renamed Christiania in 1624 after King Christian IV of Norway rebuilt it following a disastrous fire. In 1878, Christiania was refashioned as Kristiania, and in 1925, the city became Oslo once again.

CHAPTER TWO

Shutting Out the Sun

THE HISTORY OF TRADING between Norway and South Wales goes back well over a thousand years. Medieval chroniclers writing of the land of Morgannwg, now Glamorgan, in the period between the Roman settlement and the Norman Conquest celebrated the visits of Norwegian traders, comparing them favourably to the “black heathens”,1 the Danes, whose intentions often seemed more inclined toward rape and pillage than commerce. Curiously, recent evidence suggests that Welsh men and women, captured in the valleys and sold into slavery, may have been the first major commodity exported from Wales to Norway;2 however, by the mid-nineteenth century, trade in human souls had given way to a sophisticated, booming and lucrative business relationship based on timber, steel and above all, coal. Boats from Norway, already the third largest merchant fleet in the world, arrived in Cardiff with timber, mostly to use as pit props (which the Welsh miners called “Norways”), and left carrying coal and steel to all parts of the globe. In twenty years the city’s population doubled as it became the world’s major supplier of coal. By 1900, Cardiff was exporting 5 million tons of coal annually from more than 14 miles of seething dockside wharfage. Two thirds of these exports left in Norwegian-owned vessels. The city was consequently awash with commercial opportunities for an enterprising, intelligent young expatriate, tired of his sojourn in Paris and eager to make his fortune.

Cardiff, of course, already boasted a considerable number of resident Norwegian nationals. But the majority were transient sailors. In 1868, the Norwegian Mission to Seamen had constructed a little wooden church between the East and West Docks on land donated by the Marquis of Bute. It was a place of worship, but also a place where the ships’ crews, many of whom were as young as fourteen, could relax and read Norwegian books and newspapers, while the cargo on their boats was loaded and unloaded. A model ship hung from the ceiling, and the walls were decorated with Scandinavian landscapes and pictures of the royal families of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The tables were even decorated with miniature Norwegian flags.

Up to 75,000 seamen passed through the Mission’s doors each year, eager for reminders of home in this hostile industrial environment. The docks were noisy, filthy, and could be terrifying — particularly to anyone from a rural background. An experienced Norwegian sea captain described the city: “It’s not difficult to find Cardiff from the sea,” he told his young nephew, who was about to sail there for the first time; “you just look for a very black sky — that’s the coal dust. In the middle of the dust, there is a white building, the Norwegian Seamen’s Church. When we see that we know we are home.”3 The tiny church, with its plucky spire, quickly became a symbol for the Norwegian community in Cardiff, although most who settled there integrated with the local Welsh community, and used it simply for births, marriages and deaths.4 Today it stands restored, looking out at redeveloped Cardiff Bay, as if saluting the most famous of its congregation, who was christened there in the autumn of 1916, and whose name now graces the public area between the church and the grey slate, golden steel modernity of the new Wales Millennium Centre: Roald Dahl.*

Exactly when Harald Dahl arrived in South Wales is not clear. He does not figure in the UK census of 1891; however, by 1897 a mustachioed and dapper Harald is posing for a portrait photographer in Newport, some 15 miles along the coast from Cardiff. His long, flat face, round forehead and confident, sardonic eyes bear little resemblance to the oafish features of his father, which scowl out of an earlier page in the same family photograph album.5 It’s likely that this photograph of Harald, despatched to sisters and friends in Paris, was taken not long after he arrived in the Cardiff area and began learning his trade in shipping. In 1901 the census records that he was still single, working as a shipbroker’s manager and lodging near the docks in a small redbrick terrace at No. 3, Charles Place, Barry, in the house of a retired land steward called William Adam, his wife Mary and their two adult daughters. Yet, despite his relocation to South Wales, a significant part of Harald’s heart had remained in France. He had fallen in love with a glamorous doe-eyed Parisian beauty named Marie Beaurin-Gressier. Later in the summer of 1901, he returned to Paris and married her.

Her granddaughter Bryony describes Marie as coming from “a posh ancien régime family that had become rather impoverished and down on its luck”.6 Certainly, the Beaurin-Gressiers were not bourgeois. Though they had houses in Paris and in the country, near Compiègne, they seemed more inclined to sport and leisure than to commerce. Rugby was a dominating interest. Two of Marie’s brothers, Guillaume and Charles, played for Paris Stade Français, the latter representing his country twice against England, while one of her sisters married the captain of the French team that won a gold medal at the 1900 Olympics. Another sister went to Algeria and married an Arab. Another brother ran a well-known Parisian fish restaurant. Yet another was an auctioneer. Marie was the most beautiful. Waiflike, elfin and delicate, she had a pale complexion, a mop of thick dark hair and sad, serious eyes. Fifteen years her senior, Harald must have had enormous charm, as well as good financial prospects, to succeed in stealing her away from her warm and adoring family. A snapshot of her on her wedding day, on a sunny veranda in the French countryside, beaming with delight and surrounded by admirers, suggests that she was very much in love. But it also suggests her innocence. She can surely have had little sense of what life in industrial Cardiff would offer her. Perhaps to counteract any potential feelings of homesickness, Marie brought some reminders of France with her to South Wales. Her trousseau boasted a diverse collection of jewellery, paintings and furniture, including a rosewood bedstead, various antique tables, chairs, secretaires, cabinets, an astronomical clock and an elaborate Louis XVI timepiece. Touchingly there was also a gilt mirror “carved by Mr Dahl and presented to Mrs Dahl”.7

Shortly after the newlyweds returned to Cardiff, Harald went into business with another expatriate Norwegian, three years younger than he was: Ludvig Aadnesen. The two men had become acquainted with each other in Paris, but the Aadnesens, who came from Tvedestrand, near Krager0, the birthplace of Edvard Munch, were already part of Harald’s extended family. One of them had married Harald’s sister Clara, and emigrated to South Africa with her.† Ludvig, a lifelong bachelor, shared Harald’s fascination for painting and became his confidant and closest friend.

Financially, it was a good move. Over the next two decades the ship-broking firm of Aadnesen & Dahl, which supplied the ships that arrived in the docks with fuel and a host of other items, would expand from its small room in Bute Street to acquire offices in Newport, Swansea and Port Talbot, as well as large premises in Cardiff, which at one point also housed the Norwegian Consulate. Gradually the partnership began to trade in coal as well as simply supplying ships, and both men became rich. Dahl and Aadnesen were business partners, but they were also immensely close, and Ludvig occupied “an incredibly special place” 8 in Harald’s affections. In the family he was always referred to as “Parrain” (the French for “Godfather”), and when Harald died, he bequeathed to his “good old friend and partner” the only named object in his will: a painting by Frits Thaulow called Harbour Scene. The painting, now lost, must have symbolized many shared memories for the two men. It spoke, of course, of ships and the sea that had caused them both to move to Wales, but it also evoked their youth together in Norway.

Harald’s marriage to Marie began promisingly. He rented an Arts and Crafts seafront house near the docks in Barry, round the corner from where he had been lodging, with a first-floor balcony that offered a fine view of the bay. There, their first child, Ellen Marguerite, named after Harald’s mother, was born in 1903, and a son Louis, named perhaps after her elder brother, three years later in 1906. Those are the bare statistics. Yet while archival research can reconstruct the landmark events of a vanished life — its births, marriages and deaths — it cannot bring to life the personality that lived between these records without more personal, idiosyncratic evidence. Harald left diaries, letters, paintings, odd pieces of carving, and other artefacts that hint at his character. The contents of the expensive French leather wallet that was in his pocket when he died, for example, now carefully preserved at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, complete with postal orders and railway season ticket, testify both to his good taste and meticulous habits. Of Marie, however, nothing remains. Even the gilt mirror is no longer in the family.‡ It is consequently hard to hypothesize how she coped with her new life in Barry. But it’s more than likely she suffered. Far away from her family and from the world she loved, the grime and dust of Cardiff Docks must have seemed a poor replacement for the elegance of Paris or the delights of summer days in Compiègne. Living with a Norwegian husband, fifteen years older than she was and accustomed to solitude, also cannot have been easy.

On October 16, 1907, while heavily pregnant with their third child, Marie died. She was twenty-nine years old. Her death certificate indicates that she collapsed and died of a massive haemorrhage caused by placenta praevia — an obstetric complication, where the placenta lies low in the uterus and can shear off from it, causing sometimes fatal bleeding. Someone called Mary Henrich, probably a nurse or nanny as she was also living at the house, was present when Marie died and reported her death to the authorities. Marie’s granddaugther Bryony however remembers a rumour whispered in the family (perhaps stemming from Roald’s mother, Sofie Magdalene) that Marie had been depressed and died from a failed abortion.9 While it is possible that an attempt to terminate the pregnancy artificially might produce similar symptoms to placenta praevia haemorrhage, the risks for the abortionist if the pregnancy was advanced would have been enormous. So, unless Marie had attempted somehow to do it herself, the official version seems a good deal more plausible.

Marie’s death left Harald devastated. He had almost completed building a splendid new whitewashed house for his family, far from the commotion and noise of the docks, in leafy Llandaff — a medieval town that the railway had made a suburb of Cardiff. Harald had designed many of the building’s details himself and proudly named his new home “Villa Marie” in honour of his young wife. Sadly, she never saw it finished. It survives today, though its name has changed,10 but its steeply sloping gables and idiosyncratic Arts and Crafts appearance, with leaded windows and faux medieval buttresses, suggest how much Harald himself had contributed to the design and how much he must have looked forward to a settled and happy family life there. Instead, at forty-four, he found himself suddenly on his own — left to raise two tiny children, aged three and one, neither of whom would ever remember the dusky, wide-eyed waif whose beauty had so bewitched him.

Following Marie’s death, her mother Ganou came over from Paris to help look after Ellen and Louis. Harald drowned his sorrows in hard work, spending long hours in his office and obsessively tending Villa Marie’s substantial garden.11 Four years passed. Then, one summer, Harald went away to visit his sister Olga, who was now living in Denmark.12 Whether he was lonely and went consciously in search of a new bride, as Roald maintained in his memoir Boy, is uncertain, but it was in Denmark, not Norway, as Roald later claimed, that the Dahls and the Hesselbergs finally connected. Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, who was visiting friends, had strong, almost masculine features that were in sharp contrast to Marie’s delicate, almost doll-like appearance. Within a matter of weeks she and Harald were engaged.

It was a convenient match for both of them. She was twenty-six years old, sturdy, strong-willed and eager to break the tie with her parents. He was prosperous, established, and old enough to have been her father. Harald however had to overcome strong opposition from Sofie Magdalene’s parents. Karl Laurits and his wife Ellen were by now wealthy in their own right. He was treasurer of the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund and both were very controlling personalities. Their only son had recently died, and their three daughters were now the focus of their attention. Sofie Magdalene was considered the least attractive of them, and felt herself in some ways the “Cinderella” of the trio.13 Nevertheless Karl Laurits was disconcerted that his eldest wanted to marry a man only ten years younger than he was. Worse still was the fact that she planned to leave Kristiania and live in Wales. But Sofie Magdalene was determined, and her parents were eventually forced to consent grudgingly to the wedding.