Love from Boy

by Donald Sturrock

  I broke my ankle two weeks ago in the snow and forgot to tell you. I went to a place I know and got an X-ray for five dollars, and the doctor friend read it for me. They wanted to take me to hospital and put the bloody thing in plaster, but I refused. It’s mending now, but it hurt like hell for twelve days, walking on it.

  Please thank Asta for her letter, arrived today. Everyone else here is well.

  Love

  Roald

  Theo’s accident confirmed Roald in his view that New York was no place to raise a family and from then on Great Missenden became his permanent year-round base. He had constructed a writing hut in the orchard at the bottom of his garden as a sanctuary from his children and was just beginning to settle into a new story there, when, in 1962, he was stricken by the greatest misfortune of his life. His eldest daughter Olivia died unexpectedly of complications from measles. She was seven years old. Sofie Magdalene had of course gone through the same experience herself forty years earlier, yet there was little she could do to help him. From her annex in Else’s house, ten minutes’ drive away, she gave him what solace she could. But only time could ever begin to heal that wound.

  1964 was a happier year. It saw the birth of another daughter, Ophelia, the publication of Roald’s second children’s story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Pat winning a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Hud. But the following February the family faced the third of its terrible reversals. Three months pregnant with their fifth child, Pat suffered a major stroke in Los Angeles, while shooting John Ford’s last movie, Seven Women. She was in a coma for three weeks. On February 20th the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that there was “little hope” for her. Two days later Variety ran the headline, “Film Actress Patricia Neal Dies at 39.”

  Roald, Theo, and a young friend laying flowers on the intricate alpine garden Roald constructed around his seven-year-old daughter Olivia’s grave. On the headstone was carved the inscription “She stands before me as a living child.”

  But Pat was a fighter. She did not die. On March 10th, almost three weeks after the hemorrhage that nearly killed her, she began to regain consciousness. Her doctors had warned Roald that if Pat came out of the coma she was likely to be “a vegetable” for the rest of her life, but Roald was determined that he would do whatever he could to restore her health. His pioneering intensive therapy yielded amazing results and within three years Pat was back at work and had even been nominated for another Oscar. Her baby, Lucy, had been delivered safely in the summer of 1965.

  Throughout the early stages of her recovery, Roald wrote regularly to Sofie Magdalene, informing his eighty-year-old mother of Pat’s progress with characteristic bluntness and lack of sentimentality. The childish need to sugarcoat adversity and protect her from bad news had given way to the understanding that she was someone on whom he could always rely for clear-headed advice and assistance. Mother and son were made of the same material and shared the same practical outlook on life. This was the final crisis they would face together.

  Saturday

  13515 Romany Drive

  Pacific Palisades

  California

  Dear Mama

  It happened like this: Pat came home from the studio at around 5:30. She felt good. At six she had one martini. At six-thirty she went upstairs to bath Tessa. Five minutes later, Sheena called me up. I found her sitting on the bed. She said, ‘I have a terrible pain between the eyes, and I’ve been having hallucinations. I think I am ill.’ I at once found the home phone number of a neuro-surgeon I’ve been working with on our valve (a top neurosurgeon in Los Angeles), and I called him. I said, ‘Come at once.’ As I was speaking to him, Pat lost consciousness and was sick. Charles Carton (the neurosurgeon) said he would send an ambulance at once and he himself would go to the Emergency entrance of the U.C.L.A. Hospital. The ambulance came in 10 minutes. I rode in it with Pat. We got her to the hospital altogether within 25 minutes of her feeling the pain. Charles Carton was waiting. By then Pat had come round and could talk, but her memory had gone. Dr Carton examined her. He said he found no real evidence of cerebral haemorrhage. ‘Perhaps she has had a seizure,’ he said. The fact was that we had got her there so quickly that the real signs (stiff neck etc.) hadn’t had time to develop. I went in to see her. While I was there, she had another haemorrhage and passed out. I called in Dr. Carton. He did a spinal tap on the spot. It showed the spinal fluid scarlet with blood. He rushed her up to X-ray. They injected contrast medium into her neck arteries and took photos. While they were taking them, she had her third and largest haemorrhage. The X-raying took 2 ½ hours. When I was called in to inspect the pictures, it was about 10.30pm. They showed a massive haemorrhage in an artery over the left frontal lobe. Dr Carton said to me, ‘If we operate she will probably not survive. Her respiratory system will pack up.’ I said, ‘What will happen if you don’t operate?’ He said, ‘Then she will die for certain.’ So I said, ‘You must operate at once.’ He agreed. It took an hour to prepare her for the op., and they actually started at midnight. At seven in the morning it was finished, including a tracheotomy, and they brought her up into the ‘Intensive Care Unit’. She had stood it well. Lungs still functioning etc.

  This morning, ten days later, she is, as you know, still unconscious. But there are signs of her beginning to come closer to the surface. She opens an eye occasionally (though probably doesn’t register anything she sees), and she squeezes one’s hand, though here again, it is doubtful if this is anything more than an involuntary action.

  This morning’s spinal tap showed the fluid becoming far clearer and less bloody. And now all we can do is wait and see.

  She has very little use of her right side, right arm and leg, but there is some response in it to stimulation. The left side is okay. The face is unaffected and looks normal. But the hemisphere where the bleeding took place is the speech control, and that may well be damaged. That, of course, is looking far ahead. The first thing is to get her back to consciousness.

  Sheena, Angela, and masses of friends have all been wonderful.* There is no trouble about running the house. I am mostly at the hospital. I get there first at 6.30 a.m., see the doctors, come back for breakfast, then return. I make my last visit at 10 p.m., and stay till 11.

  Tessa is very good, but obviously disturbed. We are keeping her busy. She goes out all the time to play with friends’ children when she is not at school. She goes to school mornings only, and comes home for lunch. Theo also goes to nursery school mornings.

  That’s about all except that Pat couldn’t be in a better hospital. She’s getting fantastic attention, and every possible medical aid.

  I won’t write often. Cables and telephone are better.

  I don’t know what to say about the work on our house. My inclination is to let them go on with it, and if that is what they are doing, and if they are prepared to do it, I would let them go ahead.

  Love to all

  Roald

  Roald’s very last letter to his mother dates from this period. It was written just before he returned home from Pacific Palisades with Pat and the children. A British magazine had offered to redecorate Gipsy House while the family were away. Sofie Magdalene was keeping an eye on the progress of the works and wrote to him warning him that she did not think he would like what the decorators were doing. They were stripping out old floorboards and antique tiles, installing bookcases with fake books, and painting the walls brown. Roald assured her that everything would be okay. But it wasn’t. When he returned home, he found that—just as his mother had warned him—he had to undo almost everything that had been changed. He later complained to the magazine that the walls had been painted “the colour of elephant’s turds.”70

  Despite age and infirmity, Sofie Magdalene could still teach her headstrong son a thing or two. He knew that. And so did she. Roald paid a moving tribute to her in the cookbook he wrote with his second wife, Liccy, j
ust before he died in 1990:

  She was the matriarch, the mater familias, and her children radiated around her like planets round a sun. In some families children rebel and go as far away as possible from the parents, especially after they are married, because mothers-in-law are not always popular in the household. But with Mama’s children and their marriage partners there was a genuine desire to keep this remarkable old parent within reach.71

  When Sofie Magdalene herself had died twenty-three years earlier, in 1967, Roald had been in hospital and too ill to attend her funeral. His sisters scattered her ashes near the grave in Radyr where her husband Harald and her daughter Astri were buried. Roald did not mourn her. Indeed it was twenty years before he visited the gravesite. Her redoubtable spirit surely continued within him. Yet the absence of any of her letters in Roald’s archive is perplexing. For a man who kept so much correspondence, it is doubly surprising that not one letter survived and it leaves one wondering, who was this mysterious, missing correspondent?

  Of course, his side of the correspondence reveals much about her. She was private. She could be obstinate. She shared his fascination with invention, his scurrilous sense of humor and delight in a dirty joke. She gave wise advice and unstinting love. She celebrated self-control and lack of sentimentality. She was calm and level-headed in a crisis. Through war and separation, right up to her own end, she was a loyal, tireless, phlegmatic, and unshockable correspondent.

  In all this, mother and son were very much alike. In their later correspondence there is often a confessional tone, a sense that Roald is talking to himself. His letters are honest, unvarnished, almost like entries in a diary. The famous Dahl imagination, the sense of wonder and fantasy, the madcap humor, the naughtiness—the elements, in short, that characterize his children’s fiction—are almost entirely absent. By contrast, the earlier letters—which make up the bulk of this collection—are quite different. They are brimful of these qualities.

  In this they reflect the fact that Sofie Magdalene was Roald’s first reader. More than anyone else, it was she who encouraged him to tell stories and nourished his desire to fabricate, exaggerate, and entertain. Reading these letters, one often has the impression of a writer flexing his storytelling muscles, a sense that a literary apprentice is rehearsing, practicing, honing his craft. To use an analogy that Roald himself might have appreciated, we are watching a trainee pilot preparing to fly solo. In this, Sofie Magdalene was an essential and invaluable foil. Without her unique sensibility to guide him, Roald might have returned to work for Shell after the war and eventually retired as a senior executive to play golf, drink whisky, and crack jokes. Such timeless tales as The BFG, Matilda, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Witches might never have seen the light of day.

  Thankfully that did not happen. And Sofie Magdalene, who would probably have preferred her son to work in an oil company, instead became unwitting midwife to his development as a writer. Without her correspondence and without the vicissitudes of war, Roald might never have embraced that literary destiny his 1938 horoscope had predicted. And, for that, we all have reason to be grateful.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the work of many hands. Thanks are due in particular to Rachel White, the archivist of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, and to her predecessor Jane Branfield for making the letters and so many photographs available to me over the course of the last ten years. Barney Samson and Diane Sullivan kindly helped in the transcriptions of the originals. I owe a lot to their patience, care and industry.

  Over an even longer period, many members of Roald’s family helped me put the letters in context, most notably Roald’s three sisters Alfhild, Else, and Asta, who kindly gave me long interviews before they died. I used these in my biography Storyteller and the information gathered from them has been invaluable to this book as well. Roald’s children Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy also gave generously of their time, as did both of Roald’s wives, Patricia Neal and Liccy Dahl. Ophelia, in particular, was a huge force of encouragement behind the scenes. Roald’s nephew Nicholas Logsdail and his nieces Alexandra Anderson, Anna Corrie, Astrid Newman, and Lou Pearl gave me invaluable assistance as well. I am grateful to all of them for their support.

  I also owe thanks to others, who I consulted while researching Storyteller and whose interviews helped put letters in context. These include: Jonathan Cuneo, Nancy Deuchar, Tim Fisher, Deb Ford, Douglas Highton, and Charles Pringle.

  From the Roald Dahl Literary Estate, Amanda Conquy supported my initial proposal for a book of Roald’s letters and her successor, Roald’s grandson, Luke Kelly, has been the most intelligent, sensible, sensitive, and perceptive of collaborators imaginable. I feel immensely lucky to have had his involvement on this intriguing and strangely daunting project.

  Kate Craigie, Nick Davies, and Rosie Gailer at John Murray have worked tirelessly to make the book happen as have my agent Caroline Dawnay and her assistant Sophie Scard and Anthony Goff at David Higham. I owe them all thanks, as I do to Justin Somper and John Collins for their energy and enthusiasm in promoting it. I am grateful too to the design team at Sunshine for their clear and witty maps and icons. In New York, David Rosenthal, Sarah Hochman, Katie Zaborsky, and Terezia Cicelova at Blue Rider have also been hugely supportive.

  Most of all, thanks are due to Jake Wilson, whose tireless investigations, painstaking research, and acute attention to detail have helped make this book what it is.

  I am grateful to Walt Disney for permission to reproduce photographs and images connected with The Gremlins.

  SOURCES AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Almost all the letters, photographs, and illustrations in Love from Boy come courtesy of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden (RDMSC). It is the source of many of the references as well. Other reference sources used include The Public Record Office (PRO), The Farrar, Straus and Giroux Archives in New York (FSG), The Watkins Loomis Collection in the Library of Columbia University, New York (WLC), the archives of Jonathan Cape at Reading University, and the private papers of Charles Marsh, the custody of which is currently in the hands of his great grandson, Andrew Haskell.

  Photograph of Montgomery Blair High School Victory Corps, here, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington (LC-USE6-D-006480), photograph by Howard Lieberman. Photograph of Roald Dahl and Ernest Hemingway, here © Bettman/Corbis. Sketches and photographs, here and here © Disney Enterprises, Inc. Photograph of Pat Neal (pregnant) and Roald in the conservatory of Sofie Magdalene’s house, here, by Leonard McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Roald Dahl, Boy, Jonathan Cape, 1984, pp.76–7.

  2. Tessa Dahl, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 22 October 2007; Astri Newman, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 15 October 2007 and Else Logsdail, “Casseroled Ptarmigan” in Felicity and Roald Dahl, Memories with Food at Gipsy House, London, Viking, 1991, reprinted as The Roald Dahl Cookbook, Penguin, 1996, p.61.

  3. J. Harry Williams, letter to Roald Dahl, 2 October 1976—Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre RD 16/1/2.

  4. Alfhild Hansen, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 7 August 1992.

  5. Sofie Magdalene Dahl, letter to Claudia Marsh, 16 January 1955—Andrew Haskell Collection.

  6. Louise Pearl, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 9 May 2008.

  7. Roald Dahl, Boy, p.21.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Asta Anderson, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 1997.

  10. Roald Dahl, Boy, p.53.

  11. Felicity and Roald Dahl, Memories with Food at Gipsy House, p.65.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Alfhild Hansen, interviewed in A Dose of Dahl’s Magic Medicine, 28 September 1986.

  15. Valerie Kettley, internal memo to Tom Maschler—Jonathan Cape archive, “Boy” file, University of Reading. />
  16. Stephen Roxburgh, memo to Tom Maschleer—Jonathan Cape “Boy” file, University of Reading.

  A NOTE ON SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION

  17. Roald Dahl, letter to schoolchildren, 17 April 1984—RDMSC.

  CHAPTER 1. 1925–1929

  “Send me some conkers”

  18. Roald Dahl, Boy, p.81.

  19. Ibid., p.72.

  20. Ibid., p.73.

  21. Douglas Highton (1915–2013), interview with Donald Sturrock, 8 November 2007.

  22. Roald Dahl, Boy, p.77.

  23. Roald Dahl, Matilda, London, Jonathan Cape, 1988, p.106.

  24. Ibid., p.109.

  25. Ibid., p.117.

  CHAPTER 2. 1930–1934

  “Graggers on your eggs”

  26. Air Marshal Sir Charles Pringle, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 5 December 2007.

  27. Tim Fisher, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 17 September 2007.

  28. Roald Dahl, Boy, p.128.

  29. Roald Dahl, Boy (First Draft)—RDMSC RD 2/23/1/166.

  30. Ibid.—RDMSC RD 2/23/1/159.

  31. Sofie Magdalene Dahl, postcards to Else Dahl, 27 June 1930—RDMSC RD 20/9/2 and RD 20/9/3.

  32. Air Marshal Sir Charles Pringle, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 5 December 2007.

  33. Nancy Deuchar (née Jenkyns), conversation with Donald Sturrock, 4 December 2007.