Also by Donald Sturrock
Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl
(HarperCollins, 2010)
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Donald Sturrock
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To extraordinary mothers, everywhere
CONTENTS
Also by Donald Sturrock
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Index of Locations
Map: Roald Dahl, The International Letter Writer, 1925–1965
Introduction
A Note on Spelling and Punctuation
1. 1925–1929 “Send me some conkers”
2. 1930–1934 “Graggers on your eggs”
3. 1935–1939 “Another iced lager”
4. 1939–1940 “Thoroughly good for the soul”
Map: Roald Dahl’s War, 1939–1941
5. 1940–1942 “Don’t worry”
6. 1942–1943 “Teeth like piano keys”
7. 1943–1945 “A good time was had by all”
Epilogue, 1946–1965 “I won’t write often”
Acknowledgments
Sources and Illustration Credits
Notes
About the Author
INDEX OF LOCATIONS
St. Peter’s School, Weston-super-Mare
Repton School, Derby
RMS Nova Scotia
Norway
Newfoundland, Canada
SS Mantola
Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika
Nairobi, Kenya
Habbaniya, Iraq
Gen. Hospital, Middle East Command, Egypt
Ismailia, Egypt
Washington
Los Angeles, USA
Texas, USA
New York, USA
Roald’s writing hut, Buckinghamshire
Roald’s first letter home, written in 1925. “In order to please the dangerous Headmaster who was leaning over our shoulder,” he later wrote, “we would say splendid things about the school and go on about how lovely the masters were.”
INTRODUCTION
Roald Dahl is widely acknowledged as one of the very greatest children’s writers. Yet he was a strangely reluctant traveler on the road to that destiny. It was only when he was in his forties that he attempted to write a book for children. And, for many years before that, he appeared to have no aspirations to become a writer at all. He ascribed this sudden change of gear to a “monumental bash on the head” he had sustained as a wartime fighter pilot in 1940. Crashing his plane in the Libyan desert, he believed, had not only given him something to write about, but the resultant head injuries had also changed his personality, liberating his desire to write. The observation was perhaps disingenuous. For, while Roald did indeed show little interest in writing as a way of earning his living until 1942, he had, since childhood, been practicing his craft in another context: writing letters to his mother, Sofie Magdalene.
These letters are remarkable. More than 600 in total, they span a forty-year period, beginning in 1925 when, as a nine-year-old, Roald was sent away to boarding school and ending in 1965, two years before his mother’s death. Sofie Magdalene carefully kept each one, and most of their envelopes, holding on to them despite wartime bombings and many subsequent house moves. In his memoir of childhood, Boy, Roald movingly described how he discovered them:
My mother . . . kept every one of these letters, binding them carefully in neat bundles with green tape, but this was her own secret. She never told me she was doing it. In 1967, when she knew she was dying, I was in hospital, in Oxford, having a serious operation on my spine and I was unable to write to her, so she had a telephone specially installed beside my bed in order that she might have one last conversation with me. She didn’t tell me she was dying nor did anyone else for that matter because I was in a fairly serious condition myself at the time. She simply asked me how I was and hoped I would get better soon and sent me her love. I had no idea she would die the next day, but she knew all right and she wanted to reach out and speak to me for one last time. When I recovered and went home, I was given this vast collection of my letters . . .1
Roald was given the cache of letters he had written to his mother after her death in 1967. They cover a period of forty years between 1925 and 1965.
The larger part of them—and the most intriguing—were written before 1946, when Roald’s first collection of short stories was published and he returned home from the USA to live with Sofie Magdalene in rural Buckinghamshire. They are of considerable biographical interest as they provide a comprehensive and fascinating account of Roald’s school days in the 1920s and 1930s, of his time in Tanganyika just before the outbreak of war, of his training as a fighter pilot in Iraq and Egypt, and of how he saw action in Greece and Palestine. They chronicle his time as a diplomat in Washington too, and his foray into intelligence work in New York, as well as recording in fresh detail how his career as a writer began.
All the letters share the intimate perspective of only son to single mother. And though Roald’s personality comes across in bold colors, Sofie Magdalene’s is more mysterious. For her side of the correspondence is entirely missing.
She was born in Oslo in 1884 to solid middle-class parents. Her father, Karl Laurits Hesselberg, trained as a scientist, then studied law and eventually went to work as an administrator in the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund. He rose to become its treasurer. Her mother, Ellen Wallace, was a descendant of the medieval Scottish rebel William Wallace, whose family had fled to Norway after the English crushed the rebellion.
Karl Laurits and Ellen—the ‘Bestepeople’ as Roald sometimes affectionately called them—were controlling parents and by Sofie Magdalene’s mid-twenties neither she, her brother Alf, nor her two sisters were married. Then in 1911, while visiting friends in Denmark, she met a wealthy Norwegian widower, more than twenty years her senior. His name was Harald Dahl. He was on holiday from Cardiff, where he was joint owner of a successful shipbroking business. Within a matter of weeks, Sofie Magdalene and Harald were engaged.
She was twenty-six years old, sturdy, strong-willed, and eager to break the tie with her parents. They reluctantly consented to the wedding, though they disapproved of their daughter marrying a man old enough to be her father and of her abandoning Oslo to live in Cardiff. Perhaps Sofie Magdalene foresaw the fate that would befall her two younger sisters, Roald’s aunts, Tante Ellen and Tante Astrid? They failed to escape their father’s thrall and were destined to live out their entire lives in the parental home in Josefinegate, like forlorn characters in an Ibsen play. Other members of Roald’s family remembered them with a mixture of amusement and curiosity, either drunk or drugged, methodically picking maggots out of raspberries with a pin.2
Roald with his elder sister Alfhild and younger sisters Else and Asta on holiday in Norway, probably in 1925. “We all spoke Norwegian and all our relations lived over there,” he would write in Boy. “So, in a way, goin
g to Norway every summer was like going home.”
Sofie Magdalene arrived in Cardiff after a short honeymoon in Paris and immediately took charge of her new home. Harald had two children, Ellen and Louis, from his first marriage to his Parisian wife, Marie. Since her death they had been cared for by Marie’s mother, Ganou. Sofie Magdalene acted swiftly, summarily kicking Ganou out, and hiring a Norwegian nanny, Birgit, to look after the children. French was banned. From now on only Norwegian and English were permitted in the house.
Within five years Sofie Magdalene had given birth to four children of her own: Astri (1912), Alfhild (1914), Roald (1916), and Else (1917). Asta, a fifth and the youngest, was born after Harald’s death in 1920. Roald was named after the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had successfully reached the South Pole in 1911, and whose nephew, Jens, worked briefly for Harald’s firm, Aadnesen and Dahl, during the First World War.3 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.”4
The First World War meant registration cards for Harald and Sofie Magdalene, as both were still Norwegian nationals, but it did no harm to Harald’s business and, in 1917, he bought a large Victorian farmhouse at nearby Radyr. 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. But Harald was not the easiest of husbands. He could be withdrawn and undemonstrative, sometimes almost cold. Years later, Sofie Magdalene wrote to Roald’s friend, Claudia Marsh, confiding that her husband could be “difficult if the babies made a noise to disturb his work.”5 She even told her granddaughter, Lou Pearl, that at times she felt frightened of him.6
At the beginning of February 1920 Astri, the eldest daughter, was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. The doctor operated at home, on the scrubbed nursery table, but it was too late. The appendix had burst and Astri contracted peritonitis. 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 favorite,” Roald wrote in Boy. “He adored her beyond measure, and her sudden death left him literally speechless for days afterward. 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.”7 Writing those words, Roald knew only too well what his father was feeling, for some forty years later, he too was to lose his own eldest daughter—also aged seven. “My father refused to fight,” he concluded. “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.”8
Sofie Magdalene, his widow, was thirty-five years old. But she was independent and determined. She was also something of a spiritualist and mystic, believing that fate had determined a role for her. And she bravely seized her destiny, single-handedly raising Roald and his sisters and decisively shaping their attitudes. “Practical and fearless,”9 was how her youngest daughter described her. “Dauntless”10 was the adjective Roald used in Boy. He admired her toughness, her lack of sentiment, her buccaneering spirit and her laissez-faire attitude toward her offspring, describing her as “undoubtedly the primary influence on my own life,”11 and singling out her “crystal clear intellect”12 and her “deep interest in almost everything under the sun”13 as two of her most admirable qualities. He acknowledged her as the source for his own interest in horticulture, cooking, wine, paintings, furniture and animals. She was the “mater familias,” his constant reference-point and guide.
Roald’s mother, Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, before her marriage to Roald’s father, Harald. Roald would later describe her as “undoubtedly the primary influence on my own life.”
Sofie Magdalene never remarried. “She devoted herself entirely to the children and the home,” recalled her daughter Alfhild, adding that her mother “was very like Roald . . . a bit secret, a bit private.”14 Soon after Harald’s death she sold the farmhouse in Radyr and moved to Cumberland Lodge, a town house in nearby Llandaff. Though considerably smaller, the house had several acres of grounds and was staffed by two maids and a full-time gardener. In 1927, when Roald was eleven, the family moved to a rambling house in Bexley, some twenty miles south of London, where they lived in similar style until wartime bombing raids forced them to evacuate to rural Buckinghamshire.
Sadly, not one of Sofie Magdalene’s letters to Roald has escaped the vicissitudes of time. From the handful of her own letters to other people that have survived, one can see that she writes in a clear, lucid, elegant style, much like her son, though it is sometimes evident that English was not her first language. Yet even so, her powerful, pragmatic, unshockable personality emerges strongly, if only by inference, through her son’s correspondence.
Sofie Magdalene was a remarkable mother. She was calm. She stayed behind the scenes. She sought no public acknowledgement of the sacrifices she made for her family. Indeed it was not until Roald was an old man that he wrote about her directly—in Boy (1984) and in Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991). But from the beginning of Roald’s writing career to the end, she was present in his fiction: whether as the anxious mother desperately identifying herself with her bomber pilot son in Only This (1942), or as the wise, imperturbable grandmother in The Witches (1983). She was a catalyst too—in ways she probably did not fully appreciate. As a young boy, Roald had been fired by her tales of Norse mystery and magic and by her gossipy love of human frailty and weakness. As he grew into adulthood, he sought to return the compliment, entertaining her with his own stories and observations. Sofie Magdalene was Roald’s first audience, but she was also his unacknowledged inspiration to become a writer. One might say Roald’s own career as a storyteller begins in these letters.
—
The idea of publishing some of the letters was first discussed in the early 1980s, when Roald was working on his own autobiographical reminiscences, Boy. His editor at Jonathan Cape, Valerie Kettley, was so fascinated by them, she sent an internal memo to her boss, Tom Maschler. “I read every one of the boyhood letters and enjoyed doing so enormously,” she told him, “and the more I think about them the more I think it would be a pity to disperse them in Boy. They would, of course, be amusing, but their real value and impact to my mind would be dissipated, because I’m doubtful that the younger end of the readership for this book would appreciate them to the full. They really deserve to be read in sequence (selected of course) when they give a wonderful picture of an emerging personality and growth in every direction . . . Has Roald considered this, do you know . . . ?”15
Roald and his elder sister Alfhild.
Stephen Roxburgh, Roald’s editor in New York, agreed. Roxburgh had been the first person, other than Roald, to look through the letters since Sofie Magdalene’s death, and thought they told an amazing story. “I hope some day something can be done with the letters,” he commented. “They constitute a remarkable archive chronicling Roald’s growth as a person and a writer, and give a vivid portrait of a period and place. Perhaps you can think of a way to use them some time in the future?”16
Now, more than thirty years later, in his centenary year, that prospect has at last become a reality. Now we too can revisit the experiences that formed Roald—whether at school, in Africa, as a fighter pilot in the Middle East or a diplomat in Washington. Stepping into Sofie Magdalene’s shoes, we can experience his adventures, recounted in his own unique voice: a delightful and sometimes disconcerting mixture of honesty, humor, earthiness, and fantasy. And, as we do so, we will be aware of something she was not; that we are watching the world’s favorite storyteller emerge as a writer.
A NOTE ON SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION
In a public letter Roald wrote to schoolchildren
in 1984, shortly before Boy was published, he talked about his childhood letters and the fact that some of them would appear in his new book. “They are so badly written and badly spelled they will make you laugh,” he told his audience.17 Roald’s poor spelling continued right through his life—as did his misuse of the apostrophe—and, after hours of careful transcription of these errors, I have taken the decision to correct his spelling. At least for the adult letters. I did this because while, in small doses, his spelling mistakes can be amusing, over the span of a long book such as this, they can become irritating too. I imagined Roald looking over my shoulder as I worked—a bit like Mr. Francis, his fearsome headmaster at St. Peter’s—and as I did so, I felt sure this is what he would have wanted.
For the record, an ellipsis within the body of an individual letter almost always indicates an internal cut.
CHAPTER 1
—
“Send me some conkers”
1925–1929
School, on the whole, was not a happy experience for Roald. In the summer of 1925 Sofie Magdalene removed her eight-year-old son from the Cathedral School in Llandaff, Cardiff, because the headmaster had savagely beaten him. Perversely, she then dispatched him to an even more Spartan educational establishment across the Bristol Channel, in Somerset. She told Roald that she was doing this because she had promised her dying husband that she would not return to Norway until she had given all their children an English boarding-school education.
Roald would later vividly recreate his life at St. Peter’s School, in the run-down seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare (or Weston-super-Mud as he often described it), in his memoir of childhood, Boy. He would also use the experience in a more fantastical light in his final children’s novel, Matilda. Though a glorious piece of exaggerated invention, Crunchem Hall—whose terrifying headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, dominates the book—bears some striking similarities to St. Peter’s, both in appearance and in the rules of its scary headmaster, Mr. Alban J. Francis, which foreshadowed those of the Trunchbull. Never argue. Never answer back. Always do as I say.
Love from Boy Page 1
