Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl

Her stubbornness in doing so may also have been farsighted. Ahead of her, she may have seen the fate that would befall Ellen and Astri, her two younger sisters. They failed to escape their father’s thrall and were destined to live out their entire lives in the parental home. Increasingly eccentric, they became a growing source of curiosity and amusement for their younger relations, who remembered them, either drunk or drugged, sitting on the veranda of their home in Josefinegate, like characters in an Ibsen play, methodically picking maggots out of raspberries with a pin.14

Harald took his new wife to Paris on her honeymoon, kitting her out in the French fashions he adored, and buying her a cape made of black satin that she kept for the rest of her life. They visited his brother Oscar and his wife in La Rochelle, before returning to the Villa Marie. Sofie Magdalene immediately took charge in a manner that was both decisive and somewhat brutal. She turfed the beloved Ganou out of the house, and hired a Norwegian nanny, Birgit, to look after the children. This alienated Ellen and completely traumatized the five-year-old Louis, for whom Ganou had become a surrogate mother. For weeks after she left he would stand at the garden gate looking desperately down Fairwater Road and screaming for her to come back. No longer was French to be spoken at home. From now on, only Norwegian and English were permitted. The sensitive Louis found it hard to cope with these changes and suffered psychologically. Once he appeared on the Dahls’ front doorstep with a classmate who announced to an uncomprehending Sofie Magdalene that the unhappy boy had had “an accident in bags” during a lesson and needed to come home to wash his bottom. Though Louis would in time grow to be fond of his stepmother, these initial experiences caused a fault line between Sofie Magdalene and her stepchildren that would lead to tension later on.

The new bride, however, was deliriously happy in the Villa Marie. Fifty years later she would still describe it as her “dream home” — the place where she had been happiest of all.15 She was soon pregnant and a rejuvenated Harald excitedly insisted that she take a series of “glorious walks” through the surrounding countryside, because he believed these would imbue the unborn child in her womb with a sense of beauty and a love of nature. Within five years Sofie Magdalene had given birth to four children: Astri (1912), Alfhild (1914),§ Roald (1916)16 and Else (1917). All four were indeed to manifest a strong artistic leaning and profound love of the countryside, qualities they shared with both their parents. Nevertheless, the idea that these “glorious walks” had somehow influenced their emotional development became deeply ingrained in their psychologies. Astri was Harald’s favourite. A snapshot of him roaring with delight as his one-year-old daughter takes a puff from his pipe is the only photograph to survive that shows him with anything but a sober, almost sombre, countenance. Roald was named after the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had successfully reached the South Pole in 1911, and whose nephew, Jens, worked briefly for Aadnesen & Dahl during the war.17 He was his mother’s “pride and joy”, her only boy, and therefore treated with special care. His siblings affectionately dubbed him “the apple of the eye”.18

The First World War brought the need for registration cards for Harald and Sofie Magdalene, and resentment among some locals that Norway remained neutral throughout the conflict. Harald and Sofie seem to have been immune from this — perhaps because Harald was working so hard to keep the merchant fleet going. His wartime secretary, J. Harry Williams, recalled Harald as a model employer, conscientious, diligent and responsible. He was “my first ideal”, he told Roald. “Nobody has ever come higher in my experience.”19 Alfhild too remembered her father working long hours, coming home tired late in the evenings, and her mother trying to cheer him up with her Norwegian cooking. The war did no harm to his business and, as it prospered, Harald sold Villa Marie in 1917 and bought Ty Mynydd, a large Victorian farmhouse at Radyr, further out of Cardiff, a few stops down the Taff Vale railway. It had 150 acres of land, its own electricity generator, a laundry and a collection of farm outbuildings that included a working piggery. Roald later recalled with nostalgia its grand lawns and terraces, its numerous servants, and the surrounding fields filled with shire horses, hay wagons, pigs, chickens and milking cows. The purchase of the farm even merited an article in the local press, which described Mr Dahl as a man “with many years association with the shipping trade of South Wales” and “prominent in Docks circles”. “His firm is a very large business,” the article concluded, “especially with Norwegian shipowners, whose vessels have continued to trade with the district all through the war.”20

Harald bought paintings and antique furniture for the new house, and carved wooden picture frames. He collected alpine plants, going out in all weathers to stock the new garden with what he had collected. At one point he also bought his young wife a secondhand De Dion Bouton car, and tried to persuade her to take up driving. It was a mistake. On her way to visit a friend who had just had a baby, she put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and crashed the car into a cartload of eggs. When she finally got to her friend’s house, she found that the baby had died. She never drove again.21 At home, Harald was not the easiest of husbands. He could be withdrawn and undemonstrative, sometimes almost cold, as he absorbed himself in his many private interests. Years later, Sofie Magdalene would tell her granddaughter, Lou Pearl, that at times she even felt frightened of him.22

As 1920 dawned, Harald would have been forgiven for looking back on his life with some satisfaction. He had come a long way since he left his family in Sarpsborg for the delights of bohemian Paris. Business was booming. He had survived the sudden death of his first wife, to find unexpected happiness with Sofie Magdalene. Though he had started his family late — when he was forty — he was now in his mid-fifties and had six happy, healthy multilingual children around him.¶ Two were already at boarding school. His eldest daughter Ellen was at Roedean, a grand English fee-paying school for girls, set high atop a cliff in Sussex overlooking the English Channel, while Louis had just started at nearby Brighton College. If he did not see his younger children as much as he would have liked, he still occasionally found the time to relax and unwind with them — chasing a giggling Alfhild round the dining-room table, for example, while singing Grieg’s Troll Dance at the top of his voice.23

Now Sofie was pregnant again. Everything seemed idyllic. But these halcyon days were not to last. At the beginning of February, Astri, Sofie’s eldest daughter, awoke in the middle of the night with a fierce stomachache. Her younger sister, Alfhild, who shared a room with her, went to fetch her mother, complaining that Astri’s cries of pain were keeping her awake. A doctor was summoned and Astri was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. The doctor operated at home, on the scrubbed nursery table, but by then it was too late. The appendix had burst and Astri had peritonitis. She never came round from the anaesthetic. About a week later, she died from the infection. She was seven years old.

Harald never recovered from the blow. “Astri was far and away my father’s favourite,” Roald wrote in Boy. “He adored her beyond measure, and her sudden death left him literally speechless for days afterwards. He was so overwhelmed with grief that when he himself went down with pneumonia a month or so afterward, he did not much care whether he lived or died.”24 Writing those words, Roald knew only too well what his own father was feeling, for with vicious symmetry, some forty years later, he too was to lose his own eldest daughter — also aged seven. The son’s understanding of his father’s psychology was acute, but he also recalled his father’s anguish from a child’s perspective. He remembered the laurel bushes, which his father had been pruning when he first became ill and which, for the rest of his life, would always be associated with death. And he remembered his father’s refusal to do battle with the disease. The eyes of the adult and child blended together as he described Harald’s death, more than sixty years after it happened. “My father refused to fight,” he wrote. “He was thinking, I am quite sure, of his beloved daughter, and he was wanting to join her in heaven. So he died. He was fifty-seven years old.”25

Wracked with pneumonia, Harald articulated his regrets in his journal, torturing himself for having worked too hard and not having sufficiently enjoyed his dead daughter’s brief life. “How little we understand about putting a price on the world’s many good things? How seldom does the door to our hearts stand wide open? We put the blame on the fact that we have too much to do, that we must have peace and quiet to think and work, and so we shut out the sun. Only when it is too late do we see what we have missed.”26 Ironically, even as he noted these observations, he was unable to change his habits. As the coughing worsened and the fever soared, and as his eldest son Louis cycled around the garden with his five-year-old half sister Alfhild squealing with delight atop the handlebars,27 Harald made minute and fussy adjustments to his will. Attended by two nurses, he cut out a small bequest to a distant cousin and instructed that all death duties arising from any of his other legacies were to be paid by the beneficiaries. Two days later, he was dead. He was buried in the medieval churchyard of St John the Baptist, Radyr, next to his daughter, Astri, on whose grave the earth was still fresh.

Above their joint resting place, not far from a 1,000-year-old yew tree, Sofie Magdalene erected an elaborate pink granite cross. It stands still in the little churchyard that was once surrounded by fields and farmland and is now besieged by an ugly 1970s housing estate. The monument thrusts prominently above the surrounding gravestones, its Celtic ornamentation and circled cross suggesting perhaps a public commitment the Dahl family had made to the Welsh soil in which they had put down their roots. If that was the case, Sofie Magdalene was hedging her bets as well. For she also ensured that both coffins were lined in lead so that they could be dug up and transported back to Norway if she chose to return there in the future.28

The funeral was grand and formal. All the children dressed up. Alfhild wore a specially made check dress, with black bows. She remembered the huge house filled with flowers, the servants all dressed in black, and the heady perfume of the early spring narcissi, which lay strewn in piles upon the coffin. She also remembered the stoicism of her mother. For Sofie Magdalene never showed her pain. Others wept, but she did not. Much rested on her shoulders. She was thirty-five years old and had five children in her care — Ellen (sixteen), Louis (thirteen), Alfhild (five), Roald (three), and Else, barely one. A sixth was on the way. She was already looking forward. She intended to concentrate her energies on the living rather than the dead.

*The church was dismantled, removed from its original site at Bute West Dock in 1987, and rebuilt in the regenerated Cardiff Bay in 1992. Roald Dahl was the first president of the Norwegian Church Preservation Society that supervised the restoration. In the process the building lost its corrugated iron roof and acquired a grander tiled one. It now overlooks Roald Dahl Plass (Plass is Norwegian for “Plaza”), formerly the Oval Basin, which was renamed after the author in 2002.

†The exact links between the Dahls and the Aadnesens are complex and hard to discern. Census records reveal that Harald’s sister Clara Dahl married an Aadnesen and went to live with him in South Africa, where she gave birth to a son, Harald Dahl Aadnesen, in Durban in 1895. Either Aadnesen died or the couple were divorced, for by 1900, Clara was back in Oslo, living with her father and her five-year-old son. By the time Olaus died in 1923, Clara had remarried a local machinist called Siegfried Cammermeyer. Oscar Dahl took a benevolent interest in his nephew, Harald, who spent much time with his own son, Erik. Oscar’s family photograph albums show the two boys playing with each other, skiing in thick snow, and there are several shots of Harald’s wedding in France. What happened after that is unclear. Either Harald died young or his connection with Ludvig Aadnesen became increasingly tenuous. When Ludvig died in Whitchurch, Glamorganshire, in 1956, at the ripe old age of ninety, he left the bulk of his estate to his nieces Helga and Elizabeth and a nephew called Torolf. There was no mention at all of the South African-born Harald.

‡According to Bryony Dahl, most of Marie’s furniture eventually went to her daughter Ellen, who used it to furnish the house in Hampstead, where she lived with her husband Ashley Miles. When Ashley and Ellen died, within a few weeks of each other early in 1988, everything was left to Ashley’s secretary, Barbara Prideaux, who had by then become their carer. She too died shortly afterwards, leaving two Beaurin-Gressier portraits to Bryony. She subsequently sold these along with the two pieces of Marie’s furniture that had been left to her father, Louis: an “elaborate marquetry cabinet” and a “ridiculous marble and ormolu clock” — presumably the Louis XVI timepiece mentioned in the marriage settlement — Bryony Dahl, Conversation with the author, 01/17/08.

§Alfhild was named after Sofie Magdalene’s late brother, Alf, who had died in his twenties. Astri Newman [daughter of Alfhild], Conversation with the author, 10/15/07.

¶Learning two languages at the same time may have been one of the reasons Roald was so slow to start speaking. According to family legend, his first words were a complete sentence, spoken in Norwegian: “Pappa, hvor for har du ikke t0fflene dine pd deg — Daddy, why aren’t you wearingyour slippers?”

CHAPTER THREE

Boy

THE EDWARDIAN CHILDREN’S WRITER Edith Nesbit thought that the most important quality in a good children’s writer was an ability vividly to recall their own childhood. Being able to relate to children as an adult, she believed, was largely unimportant. Roald Dahl could do both. His seductive voice, the subversive twinkle in his eye, and his sense of the comic and curious gave him an ability to mesmerize almost every child who crossed his path — yet he could also remember and reimagine his own childhood with astonishing sharpness. The detail might sometimes be unreliable, but what never failed him was an ability instinctively to recreate and understand the child’s point of view. It was something of which he was very proud. He knew he could do it and that a great many others could not. Sitting in his high-backed faded green armchair by the fire at Gipsy House, a glass of whisky in one hand, he once talked to me about it with considerable pride. “It’s really quite easy,” he would say. “I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.” Or, as his alter ego, Willy Wonka, put it in an early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “In my factory I make things to please children. I don’t care about adults.”1

Dahl seldom dwelt on the traumatic early years of his childhood, and he generally made light of any connection between his fiction and his own life, yet the parallels between the two are intriguing. His fictional childhood bereavements, for example, are never maudlin. His child heroes or heroines always follow the positive pattern that Roald and his own sisters established after their father’s death. Sophie in The BFG has lived in an orphanage almost as long as she can remember, but does not dwell on what might have been. “Oh you poor little scrumplet!” cries the Big Friendly Giant, when he discovers that Sophie has no father or mother. “Is you not missing them very badly?” “Not really,” replies Sophie, “because I never knew them.”2 This pragmatism was characteristic of Dahl himself. Perhaps because he never really knew his father, he does not seem unduly to have felt his absence.

This attitude contributed to an unsentimental, frequently subversive view of families, which was reflected strongly in his children’s fiction. The child always stands at the centre of things. Survival is often his or her main motivation, and enemies are as likely to come from within the family as from outside it.

Sometimes, the enemy is parents themselves — particularly if they are dreary or unimaginative. Occasionally, a good one appears — the “sparky” father figure in Danny the Champion of the World is probably the best example — but more often they feature as a negative force that the child must learn to endure, evade or subvert. To achieve this, the young hero must usually find an unexpected friend, who appreciates that child’s special qualities and allows them to bloom. Charlie Bucket’s soulmate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is neither mother, father, sibling nor schoolmate, but his quirky Grandpa Joe, and ultimately the great chocolate maker Willy Wonka himself. The orphaned narrator of The Witches has a similar relationship with his eccentric Norwegian grandmother. James in James and the Giant Peach finds salvation in nonhuman friends, a group of outsize and wacky bugs, while Sophie in The BFG finds her affinity in the person of a lumbering, good-natured giant. Sophie and James are both orphans and so have no parents to reject. Matilda Wormwood, on the other hand, the child heroine of Dahl’s last major book, Matilda, has parents from hell — conniving, vulgar imbeciles who ignore their daughter and try to crush her love of reading. They are comic caricatures, but also capable of brutal insensitivity, being “so gormless and so wrapped up in their silly little lives” that Dahl doubts they would have noticed had their daughter “crawled into the house with a broken leg”.3 Matilda’s exceptional connection with her teacher Miss Honey is the emotional core of the story, and in the end, she chooses to desert her dysfunctional family to live with her new adult friend — an option many children may have dreamed of in sulkier moments. In each case, the love Dahl celebrates is not the traditional one between parent and child, but a close friendship established by the child, on its own terms, and in an unfamiliar context.

In many instances his books are a kind of imaginative survival manual for children about how to deal with the adult world around them. They offer the vision of an existence freed from parental controls, a world full of imagination and pleasure, where everything is possible. Escapist perhaps, but not sentimental. For Dahl always remembered that children were programmed to be survivors. Several times in conversation he described them as “uncivilized creatures”, engaged in a battle with a world of adults who were constantly telling them what to do. Once, in a radio interview, he even argued that most children unconsciously view their parents as “the enemy” and that there was “a very fine line between loving your parents deeply and resenting them”.4 It was a perception he developed early and one that remained with him until he died. It gave him the confidence to claim, at the end of his life, that he spoke for young people, that he was their advocate in a world that largely ignored them. Indeed, by then he often claimed that he preferred the company of children to that of adults.

Roald himself was blessed with an extraordinarily strong and influential Norwegian mother, who single-handedly raised him and did much to shape his attitudes. He described her as “undoubtedly the primary influence on my own life”, singling out her “crystal clear intellect” and her “deep interest in almost everything under the sun” as two of the qualities he admired most in her. He acknowledged her as the source for his own interest in horticulture, cooking, wine, paintings, furniture and animals. She was the “materfamilias”, his constant reference point and guide.5 “She devoted herself entirely to the children and the home. She had no social life of her own,” recalled her daughter Alfhild, adding that her mother “was very like Roald … a bit secret, a bit private”.6 Sofie Magdalene was undoubtedly a remarkable woman: brave, stubborn, eccentric and determined, a survivor who was able to face almost any difficulty or disaster with equanimity. “Practical and fearless,”7 was how her youngest daughter described her. “Dauntless”8 was the adjective Roald used in Boy, while pointing out that she was always the only member of the family not to get seasick on the two-day ferry crossing from Newcastle to Norway. He admired her toughness, her lack of sentiment, her buccaneering spirit and her laissez-faire attitude toward her offspring. His description of her, a non-swimmer, in a small motorboat, guiding seven children, all without lifebelts, through mountainous waves in the open Norwegian seas was typical. “That was when my mother enjoyed herself most,” he wrote, revelling in behaviour most parents would consider reckless in the extreme. “There were times, I promise you, when the waves were so high that as we slid down into a trough the whole world disappeared from sight. Then up and up the boat would climb, standing almost vertically on its tail, until we reached the crest of the next wave, and then it was like being on the top of a foaming mountain.” Dahl’s description may be exaggerated, childish, but the implied metaphor is telling of his admiration for her as a parent. “It requires great skill to handle a small boat in seas like these,” he concluded, “but my mother knew exactly how to do it and we were never afraid. We loved every minute of it.”9

If his mother was the principal source of Roald’s sense of adventure, she may unwittingly have been the source of some of his talents as a writer as well. For according to Roald’s niece Bryony, Sofie Magdalene was also a born STORYTELLER, and sometimes a gossip too, who enjoyed “weaving fantasies about members of the family, interspersed with downright lies”. Bryony here hints at the division in Sofie Magdalene’s attitude toward her blood children and her stepchildren, to whom one suspects she was always dutiful but less loving. They were usually the victims of her more malicious stories. “She used to have dreams about members of the family and say terrible things about what was going to happen to them,” remembered Bryony, “and she loved to spread foul rumours about.” It seems likely she was the source for the story of Marie Beaurin-Gressier’s abortion and she once put it about the village that her stepson Louis’s wife Meriel (Bryony’s mother) was starving her husband. In hefty old age, confined to a wheelchair and dressed in black, Sofie talked less, but could still petrify her grandchildren and stepgrandchildren. “Witchy”, “terrifying” and “like a spider” were some of the many descriptions of her. But she was not the only fabulist in the family. Alfhild and Roald both quickly honed their skills in that department, under the tutelage of their half sister Ellen, who also enjoyed an exaggerated yarn. Nevertheless, Sofie Magdalene was in a different league. “She was the real STORYTELLER,” Bryony recalled with a wistful chuckle. “I reckon Roald got it all from her.”10 And one of the first and most enduring legends she created for her children was about their father.

Roald was only three years old when his father died. The tales of Harald’s personality and background, both real and invented, became therefore unquestioned, unexamined truths for his children. And Sofie Magdalene was largely responsible for all of them. As the years passed, she gradually cut off contact with almost all the other Dahls, creating a situation where few could contradict her version of events. The entrepreneur who left his family in Norway to find success abroad; the one-armed survivor, undaunted by adversity, who learned to cope with everything life could throw at him; the craftsman/painter living the high life in fin-de-siecle Paris; the lover of nature, the proponent of “glorious walks”; the grieving father, who lost the will to live. All these aspects of Harald’s personality came to acquire talismanic qualities for his young son, who used them to help define himself. In later life, when things got difficult, sometimes he found himself looking for father figures who could measure up to this ideal. But he never inquired too deeply as to the veracity of the stories about his own father. They were too ingrained in his own personality. The legend of Harald, passed on to his children by his devoted wife, was perhaps the most powerful of the many myths of which his mother was the prime architect. Much of what she said, of course, was true. Yet Sofie Magdalene would later admit, in moments of weakness, that her husband had not been an entirely easy man to live with. For her young children, however, and for Roald in particular, Harald would always be the ideal “papa”.