by Roald Dahl
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Do you think Roald Dahl might have based the character of Danny’s dad in Danny the Champion of the World on his own father?
‘My father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had. Here is a picture of him.’
‘You might think, if you didn’t know him well, that he was a stern and serious man. He wasn’t. He was actually a wildly funny person. What made him appear so serious was the fact that he never smiled with his mouth. He did it all with his eyes.’
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More About Mama
She was undoubtedly the absolute primary influence on my own life. She had a crystal-clear intellect and a deep interest in almost everything under the sun, from horticulture to cooking to wine to literature to paintings to furniture to birds and dogs and other animals – in other words, in all the lovely things in the world. Her hair, when she let it down, as she did every morning so that she could brush it assiduously, reached three-quarters of the way down her back, and it was always carefully plaited and coiled in a bun on the top of her head.
My mother was widely read. She read the great Norwegian writers in their own language, Ibsen, Hamsun, Undsett and the rest of them, and in English she read the writers of her time, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Kipling etc. When we were young, she told us stories about Norwegian trolls and all the other mythical Norwegian creatures that lived in the dark pine forests, for she was a great teller of tales. Her memory was prodigious and nothing that ever happened to her in her life was forgotten. Embarrassing moments, funny moments, desperate moments were all recounted in every detail and we would listen enthralled.
Kindergarten, 1922–3 (age 6–7)
In 1920, when I was still only three, my mother’s eldest child, my own sister Astri, died from appendicitis. She was seven years old when she died, which was also the age of my own eldest daughter, Olivia, when she died from measles forty-two years later.
Astri was far and away my father’s favourite. 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 afterwards, he did not much care whether he lived or died.
If they had had penicillin in those days, neither appendicitis nor pneumonia would have been so much of a threat, but with no penicillin or any other magical antibiotic cures, pneumonia in particular was a very dangerous illness indeed. The pneumonia patient, on about the fourth or fifth day, would invariably reach what was known as ‘the crisis’. The temperature soared and the pulse became rapid. The patient had to fight to survive. My father refused to fight. 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.
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Roald Dahl dedicated three books to his beloved daughter Olivia. They were James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr Fox and The BFG.
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My mother had now lost a daughter and a husband all in the space of a few weeks. Heaven knows what it must have felt like to be hit with a double catastrophe like this. Here she was, a young Norwegian in a foreign land, suddenly having to face all alone the very gravest problems and responsibilities. She had five children to look after, three of her own and two by her husband’s first wife, and to make matters worse, she herself was expecting another baby in two months’ time. A less courageous woman would almost certainly have sold the house and packed her bags and headed straight back to Norway with the children. Over there in her own country she had her mother and father willing and waiting to help her, as well as her two unmarried sisters. But she refused to take the easy way out. Her husband had always stated most emphatically that he wished all his children to be educated in English schools. They were the best in the world, he used to say. Better by far than the Norwegian ones. Better even than the Welsh ones, despite the fact that he lived in Wales and had his business there. He maintained that there was some kind of magic about English schooling and that the education it provided had caused the inhabitants of a small island to become a great nation and a great Empire and to produce the world’s greatest literature. ‘No child of mine,’ he kept saying, ‘is going to school anywhere else but in England.’ My mother was determined to carry out the wishes of her dead husband.
Photograph © John Williams
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THE DAHL FAMILY MONUMENT In Radyr churchyard, near their home. It reads:
‘In Loving Memory of Harald Dahl who died at Tymynydd April 11th 1920 aged 56 years. And of his daughter Astri who died February 13th 1920 aged 7 years.’
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To accomplish this, she would have to move house from Wales to England, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. She must stay here in Wales for a while longer, where she knew people who could help and advise her, especially her husband’s great friend and partner, Mr Aadnesen. But even if she wasn’t leaving Wales quite yet, it was essential that she move to a smaller and more manageable house. She had enough children to look after without having to bother about a farm as well. So as soon as her fifth child (another daughter) was born, she sold the big house and moved to a smaller one a few miles away in Llandaff. It was called Cumberland Lodge and it was nothing more than a pleasant medium-sized suburban villa. So it was in Llandaff two years later, when I was six years old, that I went to my first school.
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The family moved into Cumberland Lodge at some time in late 1921 or early 1922. The house was at 134 Cardiff Road, not far from their old home in Fairwater Road. It is now part of Howell’s School, next door.
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The school was a kindergarten run by two sisters, Mrs Corfield and Miss Tucker, and it was called Elmtree House. It is astonishing how little one remembers about one’s life before the age of seven or eight. I can tell you all sorts of things that happened to me from eight onwards, but only very few before that. I went for a whole year to Elmtree House but I cannot even remember what my classroom looked like. Nor can I picture the faces of Mrs Corfield or Miss Tucker, although I am sure they were sweet and smiling. I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me at this distance of the school itself.
On the other hand, I can remember very clearly the journeys I made to and from the school because they were so tremendously exciting. Great excitement is probably the only thing that really interests a six-year-old boy and it sticks in his mind. In my case, the excitement centred around my new tricycle. I rode to school on it every day with my eldest sister riding on hers. No grown-ups came with us, and I can remember oh so vividly how the two of us used to go racing at enormous tricycle speeds down the middle of the road and then, most glorious of all, when we came to a corner, we would lean to one side and take it on two wheels. All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whooping their way to school in the centre of the highway.
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Roald Dahl and his sister Alfhild were among the first pupils at Elmtree House. The school started in 1922 – with just five pupils!
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So much, then, for my memories of kindergarten sixty-two years ago. It’s not much, but it’s all there is left.
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A Grand Time
One of my most enduring memories of early childhood was my friendship with Joss Spivvis.
It all started in the early nineteen-twenties, not long after my father and my eldest sister had both died within a few weeks of one another. The remainder of our large family, consisting of my mother and six children, had moved to a house in Llandaff, near Cardiff, which was called Cumberland Lodge.
The gardener that my mother engaged to look after everything outdoors was a short, broad-shouldered, middle-aged Welshman with a pale brown moustache
whose name was Jones. But to us children he very soon became known as Joss Spivvis, or more often simply Joss. And very rapidly Joss became a friend to us all, to my brother and me and my four sisters. Everyone loved him, but I loved him most of all. I adored him. I worshipped him, and whenever I was not at school, I used to follow him around and watch him at his work and listen to him talk.
Endless stories about his young days Joss would tell me as I followed him round the garden. In the summer holidays my mother always took us to Norway, but during the Christmas and Easter hols I was with Joss all the time. I never ate lunch in the house with the family. I ate it with Joss in the harness-room. I would perch on a sack of maize or a bale of straw while Joss sat rather grandly in an old kitchen chair that had arms on it.
And there we sat in the quiet of the harness-room while Joss talked and I listened. One of his favourite subjects was the Cardiff City Football Team, and I was very quickly swept along by his enthusiasm for those heroes of the turf. Cardiff City was a fine club in those days, and if I remember rightly, it was high up in the First Division. Throughout the week, as Saturday came closer and closer, so our excitement grew. The reason was simple. Both of us knew that we were actually going to go to the game together. We always did. Every Saturday afternoon, rain or hail or snow or sleet, Joss and I would go to Ninian Park to see the City play.
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Cardiff City.
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Oh, it was a great day, Saturday. Joss would work in the garden until noon, then I would emerge from the house neatly dressed in my scarlet school-cap, my blazer, my flannel shorts and possibly a navy-blue overcoat, and I would hand over to him a half-crown and a shilling that my mother had given me to pay for us both.
‘Don’t forget to thank your mother,’ he would say to me every time as he slipped the two coins into his pocket.
As we rode the twenty-minute journey from Llandaff to Cardiff in the big red bus, our excitement began to mount, and Joss would tell me about the opposing team for that day and the star players in it who were going to threaten our heroes in Cardiff City. It might be Sheffield Wednesday or West Bromwich Albion or Manchester United or any of the fifteen others, and I would listen and remember every detail of what Joss was saying. The bus took us to within five minutes walk of Ninian Park Football Ground, where the great matches were always played, and outside the Ground we would stop at a whelk-stall that stood near the turnstiles. Joss would have a dish of jellied eels (sixpence) and I would have baked beans and two sausages on a cardboard plate (also sixpence).
Then, with an almost unbearable sense of thrill and rapture, and holding Joss tightly by the hand, I would enter the hallowed portals and we would make our way through the crowd to the highest point of the terraces, behind one of the goal-posts. We had to be high up otherwise I wouldn’t have seen anything.
But oh, it was thrilling to stand there among those thousands of other men cheering our heroes when they did well and groaning when they lost the ball. We knew all the players by name and to this very day, I can still remember the names of three of them. The centre-half for Cardiff was a small bald-headed man whom Joss referred to as Little ’Ardy. His name was Hardy. One of the full-backs was Nelson. The goalkeeper was a giant called Farquarson, which my mother told me was pronounced Farkerson, but which Joss pronounced Far-q-arson. Hardy, Nelson and Farquarson. Look up the records and you’ll find they were there. And when Cardiff scored a goal, I would jump up and down and Joss would wave his cap in the air, shouting, ‘Well played, sir! Well played!’
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Bill Hardy in flight.
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Cardiff City played Sheffield United in the FA Cup Final in 1925. Here, Tom Farquarson hurtles across the goal mouth at Wembley.
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And after it was all over we would take the bus home again, discussing without pause the great spectacle and the famous men we had just been privileged to see.
It was always dark by the time we reached my house, and Joss, standing in the porch with his cap in his hand, would say to my mother, ‘We’re back safe, ma’am. We had a grand time.’
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Jimmy Nelson being carried off the field after losing the FA Cup Final.
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Programme for the FA Cup Final between Cardiff City and Sheffield United in 1925.
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Essential facts for (1920s) fans of Cardiff City:
Nickname: The Bluebirds
Strip: Royal blue shirts and white shorts
Ground: Ninian Park, built in 1909
Best year: 1927 – Cardiff won the FA Cup, beating Arsenal 1–0 at Wembley. It was the first football match to be broadcast on radio by the BBC.
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The bicycle and the sweet-shop
When I was seven, my mother decided I should leave kindergarten and go to a proper boy’s school. By good fortune, there existed a well-known Preparatory School for boys about a mile from our house. It was called Llandaff Cathedral School, and it stood right under the shadow of Llandaff cathedral. Like the cathedral, the school is still there and still flourishing.
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Although the Cathedral School is still going, it moved to new premises in 1958. The buildings which Roald Dahl knew were damaged during an air raid in the Second World War.
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But here again, I can remember very little about the two years I attended Llandaff Cathedral School, between the age of seven and nine. Only two moments remain clearly in my mind. The first lasted not more than five seconds but I will never forget it.
It was my first term and I was walking home alone across the village green after school when suddenly one of the senior twelve-year-old boys came riding full speed down the road on his bicycle about twenty yards away from me. The road was on a hill and the boy was going down the slope, and as he flashed by he started backpedalling very quickly so that the free-wheeling mechanism of his bike made a loud whirring sound. At the same time, he took his hands off the handlebars and folded them casually across his chest. I stopped dead and stared after him. How wonderful he was! How swift and brave and graceful in his long trousers with bicycle-clips around them and his scarlet school cap at a jaunty angle on his head! One day, I told myself, one glorious day I will have a bike like that and I will wear long trousers with bicycle-clips and my school cap will sit jaunty on my head and I will go whizzing down the hill pedalling backwards with no hands on the handlebars!
I promise you that if somebody had caught me by the shoulder at that moment and said to me, ‘What is your greatest wish in life, little boy? What is your absolute ambition? To be a doctor? A fine musician? A painter? A writer? Or the Lord Chancellor?’ I would have answered without hesitation that my only ambition, my hope, my longing was to have a bike like that and to go whizzing down the hill with no hands on the handlebars. It would be fabulous. It made me tremble just to think about it.
My second and only other memory of Llandaff Cathedral School is extremely bizarre. It happened a little over a year later, when I was just nine. By then I had made some friends and when I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys of my own age along the way. After school was over, the same four boys and I would set out together across the village green and through the village itself, heading for home. On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop. No we didn’t, we never passed it. We always stopped. We lingered outside its rather small window gazing in at the big glass jars full of Bull’s-eyes and Old Fashioned Humbugs and Strawberry Bonbons and Glacier Mints and Acid Drops and Pear Drops and Lemon Drops and all the rest of them. Each of us received sixpence a week for pocket-money, and whenever there was any money in our pockets, we would all troop in together to buy a pennyworth of this or that. My own favourites were Sherbet Suckers and Liquorice Bootlaces.
One of the other boys, whose name was Thwait
es, told me I should never eat Liquorice Bootlaces. Thwaites’s father, who was a doctor, had said that they were made from rats’ blood. The father had given his young son a lecture about Liquorice Bootlaces when he had caught him eating one in bed. ‘Every ratcatcher in the country,’ the father had said, ‘takes his rats to the Liquorice Bootlace Factory, and the manager pays tuppence for each rat. Many a ratcatcher has become a millionaire by selling his dead rats to the Factory.’
‘But how do they turn the rats into liquorice?’ the young Thwaites had asked his father.
‘They wait until they’ve got ten thousand rats,’ the father had answered, ‘then they dump them all into a huge shiny steel cauldron and boil them up for several hours. Two men stir the bubbling cauldron with long poles and in the end they have a thick steaming rat-stew. After that, a cruncher is lowered into the cauldron to crunch the bones, and what’s left is a pulpy substance called rat-mash.’