In July 1943 Roald was invited to join Secretary to the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Crown Princess Martha of Norway for a weekend at Hyde Park, President Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson River. Roald penned a memorable account of his time there—written both for his family and for the staff at the embassy. His observations teem with details about the President’s life there: the small baths in the guest rooms, the sulfurous smell that permeated the water supply, or the eccentric behavior of the Roosevelts’ Aberdeen terrier Fala. Yet, under the mask of “clown,” like a fool at a medieval court, Roald was also uniquely able to ask innocent and uninhibited questions of senior American politicians.64
Roosevelt was aware that his comments to Roald would be reported back to British strategists and probably to Churchill himself, but there was clearly a connection between the two men and also one between Roald and Eleanor Roosevelt. Roald reveled in the President “regaling his guests with rather crude stories about dead men,”65 and in Roosevelt’s attempts to outrun his bodyguards in his invalid car. But the Assistant Air Attaché’s flippant manner and the perception that he was acting above his station riled his superiors. And in October, he was told his work in the USA had finished. He was sent back to England. He had been sacked.
His homecoming however was a short one. Roald’s society contacts and his access to the highest echelons of American government had been recognized in Whitehall—possibly even by Churchill himself—as being immensely useful to the British war effort. So he was almost immediately re-recruited by the unorthodox Canadian spymaster William Stephenson to work for British Security Co-ordination in New York.
Stephenson had established British Security Co-ordination to go “beyond the legal, the ethical, and the proper” to achieve its ends, which were essentially the propagation of British wartime interests within America.66 Ernest Cuneo, who acted as a liaison between BSC, OSS (the American Secret Service), and the Roosevelt administration, claimed that, among its many activities, BSC “ran espionage agents, tampered with the mails, tapped telephones, smuggled propaganda into the country, disrupted public gatherings, covertly subsidized newspapers, radios, and organizations, perpetrated forgeries—even palming one off on the President of the United States—violated the aliens registration act, shanghaied sailors numerous times, and possibly murdered one or more persons in this country.”67
Stephenson recognized that an outspoken young maverick like Roald could go places and say things that more circumspect career government officials, mindful of status and discretion, would find impossible. And Roald was instantly fascinated by Stephenson and BSC. But its top-secret business naturally found no place in his letters to Sofie Magdalene, which became blander—at least in terms of political gossip—as a consequence. It is probably the reason why Wallace’s demotion from the vice presidency following the election at the end of 1944 and Roosevelt’s own death shortly afterward get such brief attention. But by then Roald too was unwell.
Throughout 1944 and 1945 Roald suffered terribly from back pain, as a result of his flying injuries. So his friend Charles Marsh eventually arranged—and paid—for him to be operated on by a top American surgeon called Arthur Scott, who ran a very modern clinic in Temple, Texas. Roald was fascinated by the novelty and innovation he encountered there, but his surgery required two lengthy visits and, as he was recuperating, he got acute appendicitis. He ended the war in Canada, part of a small team charged with writing the history of BSC. Unsurprisingly, this task did not inspire him.
After winding up his work in Canada, he returned to England briefly in October 1945, but he flew back to New York again for the publication of his first book, a collection of flying stories entitled Over to You. At the age of twenty-nine, he was now clear that his vocation was to be a writer and, as the war ended, he had little trouble taking the decision to leave the RAF and attempt a career as a novelist.
On the jacket of Over to You he penned a short biographical blurb. It’s an entertaining summary of his life to date, his priorities and an unequivocal statement of how much writing now meant to him.
My mother and father were Norwegians. The first language I ever spoke was Norwegian. The best-looking girl I have seen was Greek. After that I was sent to East Africa and learned to speak Swahili and drink whisky. Out there I had a dog and two cats. The dog was called Dog Samka. One of the cats was called Mrs. Taubsypuss and the other Oscar. When the war broke out I joined the RAF and learned still another language. We flew quite a lot in the Mediterranean and I was shot down. I got a cracked skull which seemed to qualify me for being sent to Washington. There I began to write some stories in the evenings. Now I have become quite excited about it and writing stories is the only other thing that I want to do.68
July 8th 1943
Washington
Dear Mama
I have dictated a brief summary of my short visit to Hyde Park for the Ambassador and others, and I am going to send you a copy with this letter, which is going to save me an awful lot of writing. There is nothing secret in it at all because any conversations which I have recorded were made quite informally to a group of people.
I saw a great deal of Kronprinsesse Martha and her children, and I thought they were all charming. I am going up to stay a night with her on Long Island if I have to go to New York sometime and can manage to get away. The children were great fun, particularly Prince Harald, who spends his time throwing himself into the swimming pool from the diving board. I think he will make a good King one day . . .
Lots of love to all
Roald
A WEEKEND AT HYDE PARK
I went into the bathroom and turned on the water. There was a smell of rotten eggs. It was a very strong smell indeed. I shouted through the door to Richard, ‘This bathroom smells of rotten eggs.’ He said, ‘they [the Roosevelts] are on the porch just below us and can hear every word you are saying.’ I said, ‘oh,’ and we left it at that . . .
As a matter of fact the water in the house was full of sulphur and it took a bit of getting used to, but I believe it was very good for the complexion . . .
The next morning I had a bath. The bathtub was so small that I couldn’t get my knees under the water, but that didn’t matter. Later I was putting on my shirt and the phone on my bed rang, I took it.
‘This is Henry Morgenthau, is Mrs. Roosevelt there?’
I said, ‘No, she’s not in this bedroom.’ He said, ‘oh well, do you think you can find her?’ I said, ‘yes,’ and put on my trousers and padded downstairs to tell her. She was making toast.
Back in the bedroom the voices of Mrs. R. and Henry Morgenthau were coming through loudly on the receiver, which I had left lying on the table, and reverberating around the room like a couple foghorns . . .
Later in the morning, we went to bathe in the swimming pool where young Prince Harald and princesses Astrid and Ragnhild of Norway were already frolicking about.
Mrs. Roosevelt said we were going to have a picnic lunch in the garden with Franklin. At one o’clock an old Ford car came bouncing over the grass, driving furiously with two other cars full of the toughest looking thugs I’ve ever seen in hot pursuit. The president was driving the old Ford, which is especially built so that the throttle and the clutch and everything else can be operated with his hands. In it also was Crown Princess Martha. Henry Morgenthau turned up a little later and we had a very pleasant lunch on the grass.
Young Prince Harald had a big piece of glass chipped out of his bottle of Coca-Cola, and I told him that the president had eaten it. Didn’t he know that the president ate glass? He said, ‘no’, and went and asked him. The president said of course he ate glass every evening. It made him sharp.
The president looked to me like the most tired man I have ever seen, but he was relaxing and seemed to be enjoying himself.
Henry Morgenthau’s trousers were half unbuttoned, but no one said anything to him about it . . .
We had dinn
er and drove home. On the way it was interesting to note the intricate Secret Service system which protects the estate while the president is there. Everywhere there were soldiers and at most of the corners there was a telephone box. The moment the car left the big house a man picked up the receiver and phoned down to the next box low along the line, saying that Mrs. R. was on the way, and so on down the route.
We talked a little before we went to bed . . .
[The next day] The president was looking, in my opinion, at least twice as young and half as tired as the day before. He was in fine form and sat at the head of the table regaling his guests with rather crude stories about dead men.
It started with Mrs. R saying to him that they’ll open great uncle so-and-so’s vault, oughtn’t we, and see whether he was really inside?
The president said, I know the last time we opened the vault, the end of the coffin came off and as we went in, the dead man’s head rolled out.
Amidst exclamations of horror, he went on by saying that he knew some very good stories about dead men. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘a long time ago I was dining in the British Embassy when I met a young fellow who was assistant naval attaché. This was in 1906 and that man’s name was—[I’ve forgotten it, but I was struck, as on many other occasions, by the president’s amazing memory for names and dates] . . . I said to this young fellow,’ he went on, ‘are you any relation to General -----, who fought in our Civil War?’
The young man said, ‘Yes, he was my grandfather. And do you know that he is buried in our local churchyard in Surrey at home?’ I said that was most interesting, but how did they manage to transport the body, because it gets pretty hot around here.
The young man said, ‘they transported him from the field of battle where he was slain in a cask of rum. The cask was lashed to the main mast and he was taken over like that. When the cask arrived at the family seat, his relations thought they would like to have a look at the body so they opened the cask. The rum had all gone and grandfather was in a rather shocking state. As a matter of fact they found the sailors had drilled a hole in the cask and drunk the rum on the way over.’
Mrs. Roosevelt started telling a lot of funny stories about sleepwalking . . . Mrs. Roosevelt said, ‘well, Franklin used always to walk in his sleep when he was younger. Once during the time when we used to own an old Ford in the early days of motoring, I wakened up and found him standing at the end of his bed turning an imaginary cranking wheel as hard as he could and saying, “The damn thing won’t start.”’
‘I said,’ she went on, ‘Franklin, if you get into the car I will help you start it. Whereupon he got back into bed and held an imaginary steering wheel, whilst I had to go out in front and pretend to do the cranking. Finally he went back to sleep. In the morning he remembered nothing about it.’
After a little while he started holding forth on his position in relation to the people of the country. ‘They have,’ he said, ‘seen so much of me and had me for so long that they will now do anything for a change. They’re restless because they have nothing against me, but they have, as I said, seen so much of me that they want someone else. They just want a change. But mark my words, after two years they will be shouting and yelling to get back to what they had before . . .’
The president, on Sunday at any rate, gave me the impression of being fairly happy about things in general and he did not seem over-worried. Mrs. R had said earlier in the day that the troubles on the home front were not worrying him unduly; he was too much of an old hand for that. His policy was to sit back and let everyone talk themselves to a standstill. It certainly seemed, however, this weekend that that was what he was doing . . .
Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, 1943. Photo taken by Roald Dahl. Roald acted like a clown when he stayed with the President. “I was able to ask pointed questions and get equally pointed replies because, theoretically, I was a nobody,” he recalled.
July 17th 1943
Washington D.C.
Dear Mama
I must say your garden sounds wonderful. I am particularly pleased about the raspberries. Tell me whether ours are better than Alf’s or not. If they are not I shall lose faith in scientific gardening, because I’m sure I put much more manure on ours and dug the trenches much deeper . . .
Last Saturday afternoon I took time off at 5 p.m. for a game of tennis with Halifax and Vice Pres. Wallace and another American from the State Dept. called Finlater. Finlater and I beat Halifax and Wallace 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.
There’s been a lot of rumpus over here lately with Wallace and Roosevelt. I was with Wallace the night before last when he got the news that he’d been turned out of the Bureau of Economic Warfare by the President. Things really began to hum and I spent the evening answering telephone calls from 8 p.m. till 1 a.m.; it has not all blown over yet. Wallace has temporarily lost prestige, but I think he’s on the way up the ladder—not down it, as so many people seem to think.
Last Sunday afternoon we played baseball against the Americans and beat them easily. I hit a home run! If you know what that means; the only one of the afternoon, and it was very pleasant to be sure.
I got kicked out of my house yesterday by the owners, who said that they wanted to go back and live in it. That was bad because houses are impossible to find in Washington these days. But I was very lucky. My pet house agent has already rung me up and asked if I object to living in a house where there was a murder last week. I said no, I didn’t object. One can’t be fussy here now. I signed the lease and took the house without ever having seen it. If I had waited long enough to do that someone else would have had it. I’m going to see it this evening.
The murder was a big story in the papers last week. A man shot a girl in the living room, then shot himself through the head. He took two shots to kill the girl and two shots to kill himself, so I gathered that he wasn’t a very good marksman. Anyway I’m told that the mess has been cleared up and I will move in tomorrow.
It’s rather like the story of the man who was fished out of the river nearly drowned here not long ago. The man who fished him out said, ‘What’s your address?’ The dying man just managed to whisper it before he expired and his rescuer rushed off to the address and said to the landlady—‘Mr. Rappaport has drowned, can I have his flat?’ ‘No,’ said the landlady, ‘the man who pushed him in has already taken it.’
So you see what the housing problem is like here!
It is very very hot here today, and I’m beginning to look forward to my first holiday which I hope to be able to take towards the end of August.
Here are a few photos—not very good, of our weekend.
Lots of love to all
Roald
July 23rd
Washington
Dear Mama
I’ve got a bloody awful cold, but it’s the first that I’ve had this year.
Meanwhile you may be pleased to hear that after a little deliberation I decided not to go into that house where there was a murder and a suicide. The last time I went to look at it there was still quite a bit of blood and stuff about, plus bullet holes in the ceiling, and what with one thing and another I thought I’d rather not spend my evenings alone there! I’d signed the lease, but it was a very simple matter to get rid of it again. There were hundreds of people ready to take it. So at the moment I have moved in on the Air Attaché, Air Commodore Blackford, who is an extremely nice man. I got him quite a nice house when he arrived—3 bedrooms, and with my wireless and records in the living room it is all very pleasant until I find myself something else—but there is no hurry.
Last night he made me sniff large quantities of salt water up my nose for my cold, which doesn’t seem to have done it any good.
The first night I was there I came home at 10 p.m. and found the house on fire. There was an armchair in the middle of the room completely ablaze. He had left a cigarette end on the cushion! I couldn�
��t find anything to put it out with except a teapot and I couldn’t see very much anyway, because of the smoke. But eventually after making about 75 journeys to the kitchen with the bloody teapot full of water, I got the matter under control . . .
Lots of love to all
Roald
August 28th 1943
Washington
Dear Mama
This morning I was woken up at 7 by a peculiar tapping noise which seemed to be going on and on in the room, accompanied by squeaks. I sat up in bed and saw, sitting on the ground a very old, a very very old grey squirrel. He was bouncing up and down on his hind legs and protesting vigorously at something or other at the same time. I said, ‘What do you want,’ but he didn’t answer. So I got up and went down to the kitchen to get him something to eat. He followed me down and sat on the top of the open door watching. I gave him some toast which he wouldn’t have—then a sort of mouldy potato chip which he held in both hands and nibbled, but threw away almost at once. At last I found some walnuts and he sat down and began to eat. Now he pays regular visits, and his name, by the way, is Sigismund the Squirrel.
I am very glad to hear that the raspberries were good. I have a keen personal interest in them . . .
Lots of love to all
Roald
October 19th
Washington
Dear Mama
It’s getting bloody cold here again, and I expect that it’s doing the same with you. The trees are very beautiful—because the leaves turn so many more different colours in the autumn over here than they do at home. But soon they’ll all be gone.
Very busy week this has been, working both in and out of the office. On Monday and Tuesday I had dinner with Thomas Mann, whose books you’ve probably read. I liked him very much although I didn’t agree entirely with some of his views about post-war German reconstruction.
Anyway, we swapped books. He gave me three signed copies of his and I gave him The Gremlins!
Love from Boy Page 19
