Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  Knopf’s decision came in the course of a leisurely correspondence with his author, much of it about wine. The older man was planning a trip to Burgundy and the Gironde to see the vintage, and he and Dahl traded oenophiliac anecdotes. Dahl had bought an odd lot of claret at a London auction, where it went cheap because the labels had rotted away. As he began to open the bottles, the names on the corks revealed that the wines were first-class—Margaux, Lafite—and of vintages dating back to before the First World War. “Rather fun,” he lordily boasted.

  With Knopf’s staff, Dahl’s tone now was an even more pronounced mixture of the jokey and the grand. He was understandably impatient at their request for yet another potted autobiography, and under “Brief summary of principal occupations” entered that he had run the harem of an Arab sheikh in the 1930s. But this good humor soon faded, and when he was asked to name authors and critics who might supply a phrase or two to be used in advertising the book, he complained that publishers “are doing this to me all the time and I hate it. The book they send me usually stinks and I have to tell them so.” The blurb writers also asked for a brief description of James and the Giant Peach, so that they wouldn’t misrepresent it. He answered menacingly, “You won’t.”

  There was good reason for his self-confidence. He had already finished the first draft of another story he had been telling to the girls, which he provisionally titled “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy.”43 This was at the end of August 1960. Roald and Pat were then at Great Missenden with the girls and the new baby, Theo—now a month old. Life was not perfect perhaps, but in the light of the tragedies that were to follow, it would soon seem to have been.

  8

  Punishment and Pain, Unhappiness and Despair

  Roald Dahl longed to be powerful enough to be able to conquer illness and other misfortunes. Whether or not the dream stemmed from the early deaths of his sister and his father, he was fascinated by medicine and often said he wished he had become a doctor. In Manhattan, through Patricia Neal, he became very friendly with a successful surgeon, Dr. Edmund Goodman.1 Dr. Goodman still lives with his wife, Marian, on the north shore of Long Island, on the estate of Averell Harriman, who was one of his first private patients. The Goodmans were friendly with another couple, the Cusicks, and as all three families had children of similar ages, they saw a lot of each other. Mrs. Goodman stresses two things about Dahl: he was wonderful with children, to whom (particularly Missy Cusick2) “he would tell marvellous stories … and be in total communication with them.” And he would have excelled as a physician.

  The storyteller and the healer manqué were one and the same. Dahl’s children’s books are full of wizards and magicians—the old man in James and the Giant Peach, Mr. Willy Wonka, the BFG with his dream potions—and their child equivalents, such as the girl with the Magic Finger and Matilda. Dahl had no truck with the iconoclastic attitude of writers like L. Frank Baum, whose wizard-ruler of Oz is exposed as no more than an anxious little bald old humbug. Dahl’s magicians make mistakes, and some of them (particularly Mr. Willy Wonka and George in George’s Marvellous Medicine) are cavalier in their dealings with inconvenient people, but they are still heroes and heroines. He himself often said that he dreamed dreams of glory: literally so, according to Neal. “When he went to bed, he would make himself go to sleep by being a hero. Let’s say there was a game which he played beautifully, and they needed someone. Roald would come forward and say ‘I will play’—and they would win.”3

  For the moment, his triumphs were confined to games (one of the pursuits he shared with Ed Goodman was golf) and to the social contests he liked to arrange, whether or not the participants knew what was going on. One friend of Pat’s remembers having dinner with him sometime around 1960 and his delightedly recounting a trick he had recently played. He had bought some very good wine, drunk it, kept the bottles, filled them with the cheapest stuff he could find, and served them to his unwitting and politely admiring guests. She found it “appalling and indicative of Roald” that he wanted “to diminish and demean people, and to crow about it.” Well, it was only a joke. Other acquaintances saw something at least as analytical as ill humored in Dahl’s tricks—an interest, as one of them put it, in seeing “what effect they had on one. He was detached from it. He did things sometimes almost like a scientist.”4

  In the light of future events, it would become harder than ever to separate the detached, parascientific, sometimes cruel-seeming Dahl from the kindly magician, the bully from the hero. But his first big challenge was the accident to the four-month-old Theo, to whom Dahl was unambiguously devoted. Whomever else Dahl bullied, Theo wasn’t among them.

  He was Dahl’s only son. Put another way, he was the only person to whom Dahl could be what he himself had lacked most of his own childhood: a boy’s father. The doctors said Theo was going to die.5 His pram had been hit by a cab on the corner of Eighty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue, as the nanny pushed it across the street, bringing Tessa home from her nursery school for lunch. The taxi threw the pram into the side of a bus, crushing the child inside. Pat was out shopping nearby and heard the sirens.

  An ambulance took Theo to Lenox Hill Hospital, where, by a miserable coincidence, Pat’s old friend Dashiell Hammett was dying of cancer. Ed Goodman, along with the Dahls’ pediatrician, saw the baby there. His skull was broken in many places, and there was a “tremendous neurological deficit.”6

  Dahl’s instinct in this emergency was to become increasingly typical of him: put yourself in charge, and get all the help you can from anyone you know. He didn’t trust the treatment Theo was getting—particularly after a nurse mistakenly gave the baby an overdose of anticonvulsant, which the doctors had to pump out. Within three days he and Pat, driven by Harvey Orkin, took the baby away through the snow to Goodman’s own hospital, Columbia Presbyterian.

  One result of Theo’s injuries was that he developed hydrocephalus, a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid which puts pressure on the brain. To drain it, a neurosurgeon used a relatively new technique, which involved running a thin tube from his head into a vein, where the fluid would be dispersed into the bloodstream.7 This was the best available technology at the time, in spite of a problem which no one had been able to solve. The tube contained a one-way valve, which kept clogging. Whenever this happened, the baby developed a fever, became temporarily blind, and had to be operated on again so that the tube and valve could be changed. As it became clear that Theo would live, his parents grew increasingly anxious about the dangers of these repeated invasions.

  They stayed at the hospital in relays, having left Olivia and Tessa with friends. According to Pat, “It was, paradoxically, one of the most married times in our life together.”8 But Roald was sure that there was something more to be done. The affectionate Goodmans remember: “Any new problem aroused this wonderful curiosity he had, as well as deep feeling.… He kept things moving. Roald always did that. Nothing was ever stagnant with him. He wanted to find out if there was anything to be done and to do it or to try and get someone to get at it.”

  What Dahl wanted to find out in this instance was whether the problem with the valve was unique to Theo and, if not, whether anyone had come up with a better remedy. He made contact with institutions and experts concerned with hydrocephalus and discovered that thousands of children were in a similar plight. No one knew of a device which worked better.

  Theo came home to East Eighty-first Street in January. Today, a big, sensitive, slow-speaking man in his thirties, he lives with his stepmother in the family home at Great Missenden, where he manages a normal existence working as a supervisor at a nearby supermarket and keeping up the neighborly snooker game instituted by his father. In the winter of 1960–61, no such happy outcome could have been predicted. Theo needed continual attention and suffered frequent, terrifying relapses. His parents’ anxiety was compounded by the fact that Olivia and Tessa were still making the same daily journey to school. And if New York now seemed a dangerous place to live, medical bil
ls of over $12,000 (in today’s terms, ten times more)9 showed how expensive it could be, also. It was not clear how much was covered by insurance.

  To raise money not only Patricia Neal but Dahl himself did TV performances—in his case, hosting, Hitchcock-style, a drama series called Way Out. Hideously, the long-planned opening episode was based on his story about brain surgery, “William and Mary.” Dahl didn’t object, but, although he was a heavy smoker, refused to let his introduction be turned into a commercial in which he lit one of the sponsor’s brand of cigarettes.10 Meanwhile, new stories inevitably proved even less possible to write than before, and he longed to get everyone back to England, where medical treatment was free, where they would all be close to his mother and sisters, and where he could escape into the security of his shed. His wife, although she saw the necessity, was less keen. She was now able to find work in England as well as in the States, but most of her close friends were American and she needed their emotional support. However, in mid-April, Dahl told Alfred Knopf that they were leaving for Buckinghamshire. They would be there, he said, for at least the whole of the summer, and until further notice.11

  Great Missenden felt, as he knew it would, like the safest place in the world. The narrow High Street of shops and pubs wound along its shallow valley through the Chiltern Hills—once the main route between Aylesbury and London. Fields and woods sloped up all around. On one hillside, the gray flint-and-stone parish church with its squat, awkwardly shaped tower rose above the roofs of the abbey mansion. Most of the other village houses were tiny, lined up in terraces of red-and-ocher brick: a door, a window, two windows above, then the same again, all beneath a continuous uneven roof of tiles or slate. They opened straight onto the narrow pavement, as did the familiar pubs and shops—the butcher’s, the baker’s, the ironmonger’s, with its tall old oil pumps narrowing the entrance.

  Behind the main street, the buildings were more widely spaced, and the houses had gardens at the front as well as the back. They were still very small, and it was only by comparison with them that Little Whitefield looked like more than a cottage. It is white, slated, originally symmetrical, with a garden all around, and a brick wall around the garden: a house of the kind a child might draw. At one stage in its history, it had been known as Gipsy House—a contradiction which suited the much-traveling yet home-loving Dahls. The name also prevented confusion with Else’s place, Whitefields, so they adopted it in 1963.12

  In the village it was known that he wrote and she acted, but relatively few people in England had yet heard the name Roald Dahl, and even Patricia Neal wasn’t particularly famous there. The couple were well enough liked, not least because, in extending the house and garden, they helped to provide employment. A local builder, Wally Saunders, gradually became a full-time member of the household staff. “As the family grew,” he later recalled on a television program about Patricia Neal, “so the house did. And, you know, it was ‘Pull that wall down and build up that one,’ and perhaps the next year it would be just the opposite; you know, ‘Put that wall back and pull that one down, we made a mistake, we took the wrong one down.’”13

  When, later, Dahl bought a billiard table and had a regular game at Gipsy House, Wally was usually one of the players. Some visitors were unimpressed by what they saw as Dahl’s attempt at “the Hemingway buddy thing,” but he really liked to spend time with workingmen, going to the dog races or playing darts. And where, as with Claud’s cattle, he saw a chance to help, he was sometimes able, through the Marshes’ Public Welfare Foundation, to provide it. Gratitude, then, as well as sympathy, surrounded the couple when they brought Theo home, and they quickly settled into a protective local routine. Tessa was enrolled for the following term at Gateway School, a private nursery in the village; Olivia at Godstowe, a traditional preparatory school for girls a short drive away in High Wycombe. Their father’s share as a chauffeur in one of the Godstowe car pools was duly organized. Meanwhile, summer was coming. To cheer up Olivia and Tessa, who—particularly the latter—showed signs of having been traumatized by their brother’s accident, the ever-energetic Dahl took them and other members of the family on various expeditions. A favorite was flying model gliders on a hillside near Amersham. He met another enthusiast there, a hydraulic engineer named Stanley Wade, whose hobby was to make miniature engines for toy airplanes.

  Practical people like Wade were among those with whom Dahl always got on best locally. Dahl hated the English obsession with class (although, with his usual contradictoriness, he also partly shared it: he was infatuated with titles and complained to friends that Asta’s husband, Alex Anderson, with whom he didn’t get on, was a mere vet14). Among the financially better-off of his neighbors, he preferred sophisticated business people like the Stewart-Libertys to the gentry who shot and hunted. Some of the latter reciprocated his distrust. In “up-county” Buckinghamshire circles, according to one former neighbor, there were people who wouldn’t have him in the house—perhaps because the more hidebound they were, the more he went out of his way to offend them. In the early 1960s, it would have been hard to find a society less adventurous within similar reach of London. As the neighbor says, “Roald used to like to shock, and go to a smart dinner party and say something simply frightful.”

  That spring and summer, making himself agreeable stood lower than usual on Dahl’s list of priorities. His main concern was still with the valve in Theo’s head. Dahl now knew that three main problems were involved.15 Two were related to the surgical operation itself. As the tube containing the valve was inserted into the cerebral ventricle, small particles of organic matter were liable to get into it. Even if it remained clear, there was danger that the end of the tube would rest too close to the choroid plexus, the structure of blood vessels which generates the cerebrospinal fluid. When this happened, pieces of the choroid plexus might, over time, break off into the tube. Either way, when solid matter entered the valve, it became blocked and infection developed.

  The existing valve was a simple affair, a short length of silicone rubber tubing with a tiny rubber dome at each end, slit to let out the fluid. Solid matter couldn’t easily escape through the opening, and if it did, another problem was exacerbated. This was that the dome was unreliable in its main job—preventing blood from returning into the valve, where it coagulated.

  The Dahls had been referred by Theo’s surgeon in New York to a specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. He was a senior man, unacquainted with new treatment for hydrocephalus and unimpressed by its success rate. He passed Theo on to a junior colleague, a neurosurgical consultant then in his early forties named Kenneth Till.

  All of Till’s patients were children, most of them suffering from potentially fatal conditions. He was accustomed to meeting distraught parents. He would explain to them what he proposed. Here was the problem, this was what he would like to do about it, these were the possible outcomes. Did he have their permission? Often the answer would be no more than a desperate shrug.

  Dahl was different—to Till, refreshingly, fascinatingly, and helpfully different. He had had plenty of firsthand experience of hospitals. He read up on everything for himself and was, in Till’s estimation, “very knowledgeable.” There was also a psychological detachment. “He had the coolness—I think this perhaps is the word—the coolness to want to know the pros and cons, the whys and wherefores. He didn’t have to hold himself in.”16

  Whenever Dahl didn’t understand what Till proposed, he would make him draw it for him. He studied the problem incessantly and came up with two ideas. One was simple but frightening: that since the draining system seemed to be harmful to Theo, perhaps they should try just taking it out and see what happened. The other was to devise a better valve. Then he remembered his aircraft-modeling acquaintance Stanley Wade and put the problem to him.

  Within a month, Wade had designed a prototype. It consisted of a cylinder about seven millimeters in diameter and four centimeters long. Inside were two stainless-st
eel shutters, each consisting of a disk held within a cage, which allowed both fluid and small solid particles to pass around it in one direction but which closed tight if any pressure was exerted in the other. Wade also offered a solution to the problem of inserting the tube itself into the brain. He constructed a thin implement of hollow steel, with a flexible extractor to remove any plug of organic material before the permanent tube was introduced through it.

  Dahl, Wade, and Kenneth Till met regularly at Little Whitefield to discuss progress—and also to fly Wade’s airplanes. Till remembers an occasion when one disappeared into a nearby field and Olivia brightly parroted her father: “It’s in the bloody cabbages.”

  Most medical breakthroughs are expensive: there are development costs, inventors hope to make their fortunes, everyone involved has to be paid. In this case, the men agreed that if the valve was successful, it should be priced at no more than would cover the manufacturing and administrative outlay. Experiments were carried out for free by engineering firms with which Wade had connections. The fact that no serious money was involved also saved time. Little more than a year after the family’s return to England, a patent application had been lodged for the Wade-Dahl-Till Valve. In June 1962, Dahl wrote to Alfred Knopf, telling him that the first valve had been inserted into a child’s head at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. So far, there had been no setbacks. He added buoyantly, “You should see the apple blossom in our orchard this morning.”17

  Within eighteen months, the valve was on the market at less than a third of the price of its earlier rival. It came to be exported all over the world, and Kenneth Till reckons that before it was superseded, it was used to treat 2,000 to 3,000 children. Some people still have it in their heads today.