Fantastic Mr Dahl

by Michael Rosen

  His proper title was Assistant Air Attaché, but REALLY Roald Dahl was a spy. This must have come in very handy indeed when he was writing the screenplay for the James Bond film – You Only Live Twice.

  The Toilet-seat Warmer!

  It’s true. This was Roald’s job when he was at school. The toilets were in an unheated outhouse and in winter he had to wipe the frost off the toilet seat and then warm up the seat for one of the Boazers (prefects).

  The Writer

  Do you think this was Roald’s favourite job of all? I do.

  Roald Dahl’s passport

  Chapter 7

  War Hero and Spy

  It was March 1941. Roald was twenty-five and an RAF pilot once more, who soared through the sky in a Mark I Hurricane, a modern, fast-flying machine, doing his bit to win the war against Germany and her allies.

  The Battle of Britain, a battle fought in the skies in 1940 between the Germans and the British, helped to glamorize all RAF pilots, no matter where they flew. This is partly because the pilots did what very few people in the 1940s had experienced: flying fast and high. Another reason – and it’s a sad and awful reason – is that so many of these very young men were shot down in their planes and killed. So, just being alive meant that there was something almost magical about them. If they had survived the many dangers of flying in wartime, surely they could survive anything?

  When I was a boy, we imitated these pilots with our toy planes, looping the loop and making ack-ack-ack noises as we shot down the imaginary enemy. In the movies we watched, the men were always handsome, calm and brave. And women always fell in love with them. At school, if one of our teachers had been in the RAF during the war, we knew that he’d been to places and seen things that were more incredible than we could imagine. We also knew that he must be full of stories, just like those in our adventure books and comics, where the pilot sat in his cockpit, his helmet on, enemy planes in the sky behind him, shouting out to his tail gunner, ‘Let him have it, Binky!’ And then the air would be full of zigzag lines and noises like ‘BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!’ and the next picture would show a plume of smoke in the sky.

  Whether he liked it or not, Roald became one of these hero-like characters. Although he didn’t fly in the Battle of Britain itself, he and his fellow pilots – all members of 80 Squadron – fought a series of brave air battles, mostly above Greece. At the time, he wrote about what was happening in letters to his mother and to his friends.

  Of all the shocking things that happened, death affected him the most – the deaths of his young friends and the deaths of the young men he had to kill. His way of coping was by trying to be indifferent, or not caring. Whether he managed this or not, I don’t know. Perhaps he was very good at pretending that he didn’t care. But later in life, as he wrote more and more, at least some of that indifference – real or otherwise – vanished. He had to care about his characters – Matilda, Danny, Sophie and the rest – so that when we read about them in his books we care about them too. On the other hand, he wrote Dirty Beasts and Revolting Rhymes and one of the reasons why those poems are so funny is that people die or do horrible things to each other in ways that don’t really seem to matter. Those poems seem to me to almost laugh at death. Perhaps this is what Roald Dahl learned to do in the midst of all that sadness and loss when he was a pilot during the war. What do you think?

  Roald’s crash had left him with terrible headaches and, after a year of active service, these headaches grew so bad that he had to be sent home. He had been away from his mother and his sisters for three years. After everything he and they had been through, their reunion must have been a very emotional experience. Many years later, when he was reading aloud the last chapter of his second autobiography, Going Solo, to an audience at the National Theatre in London, his daughter Ophelia saw him crying. It seems as if that sadness still remained many years later.

  What was left of Roald’s old house had been taken over by the British Army. (As the country was at war, the army could do that at any time.) His new home was now a strange, much smaller, older house in a little village called Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire and it was here that he planned to spend time recovering from the war … except, he couldn’t do that. Just because the RAF had sent Roald back to England didn’t mean that they were finished with him. Not yet. There were plenty of jobs on the ground for him, like helping the RAF to find and train more pilots. But this wasn’t really what Roald wanted to do.

  What happened next was like something out of a James Bond movie. A member of parliament took Roald out for a meal in a tiny, very posh gentlemen’s club. It was a strange and secretive meeting in which Roald was offered a job at the British Embassy in Washington, USA. He would be called an Assistant Air Attaché. This hush-hush job offer must have been very exciting for someone like Roald, who loved tricks, plots and plans. But what would he actually be doing?

  In March 1942 the USA had only just joined in the war. Most people in Britain had desperately wanted such a big, rich and powerful nation to become involved because they would be able to supply millions of soldiers, planes, boats and tanks. But the Americans were still very divided about the war. Some had always thought that they should join in, while others thought that they definitely shouldn’t.

  The British government, headed by Winston Churchill, decided that they needed some of their own people in the USA, people whose role would be to keep America on Britain’s side in the war. And it was Roald’s job to encourage very powerful people in the American government to support Britain, reminding them what the RAF was doing and making sure that stories showing what a terrible time the British people were having got into the American newspapers.

  It would also be Roald’s job to report back to Churchill and his ministers on the mood of the country – whether the Americans were more or less keen to support Britain, whether there was any gossip from people in high places that Britain needed to know about.

  Roald’s new job looked like a lot of fun – dinner parties, tennis matches, barbecues, late-night chats with newspaper reporters and long conversations about going up in planes and being brave. But, underneath the glitz and the socializing, it was really all about collecting and sending out information. This job has a name: intelligence. And the fantastically exciting word for it is ‘spying’. Roald Dahl had become a spy. He would work for the British government by spying on the USA, a country that was, to a large extent, friends with Britain.

  So off he went. He travelled by train to Glasgow in Scotland, where he boarded a ship and headed off across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. Then he went by train from Montreal to Washington, DC, to stay in the Willard Hotel until he found an apartment.

  And that’s how Roald added something else to the amazing list that people tend to put after his name – you know the sort of thing: ‘Roald Dahl, world-famous bestselling writer, war hero and spy …’

  Roald was about to begin the next chapter in his life, in a place where things were very different from what he was used to. And, talking of chapters, it really does seem that Roald Dahl was someone whose life was a series of wildly different chapters. It was as if he finished one adventure and then started on another straight away, in a new place and with new people. I don’t know if that’s something he created for himself or if life just kept happening to him that way. What do you think?

  Roald Dahl, trainee pilot, Iraq, 1940

  Roald Dahl in his writing hut

  The Writer

  Roald Dahl in the RAF

  Chapter 8

  Gremlins

  I once watched a documentary that claimed polar bears survive because they are endlessly curious. It showed a polar bear coming up to a camera and sniffing it and poking it. I think writers are a bit like polar bears. They are forever sniffing out things, listening and remembering, so that they can turn them into stories, which they sell and that helps them make a living, which means that they survive too!

  On the way to his top-secret job in North Americ
a, Roald met someone called Douglas Bisgood, a wounded pilot like him. Douglas had fought in the Battle of Britain and before that he had been a racing car driver. As the two men headed across the Atlantic, they joked and gossiped together.

  During the war, RAF pilots became famous for inventing their own slang – special words and ways of saying things. For example, a plane was a ‘crate’ and a crash was a ‘prang’. Put that together and they might say, ‘Did you hear about Lofty? He pranged his crate …’ These pilots, who were living life on the edge, never knowing which flight might be their last, also seemed to have invented their own folklore. They made up stories about little mischievous imp-like creatures who lived in and around the planes, often making the aircraft go horribly wrong but sometimes protecting the pilots. They called them ‘gremlins’.

  For someone on the verge of becoming a writer, this sort of thing is treasure! Roald’s mother had once filled his young head with stories of the trolls and giants of Norwegian folklore. Now, on the deck of the SS Batori, Roald and Douglas swapped folklore and made up new stories about gremlins. Sounds like good fun to me.

  In Washington, Roald found himself far away from the dangerous world of the fighter pilot and far away from hungry, bombed-out, war-torn London. There were massive amounts of food and drink, and lots of parties. He had oodles of time to listen to his beloved music. All he had to do was give speeches about the great work that the RAF was doing and keep his ear to the ground. Roald had to play the part of a handsome, brave, British chap who had done his best to win the war. It wasn’t difficult, because he was and he had.

  Meanwhile, inside his head, the gremlins were stirring. And Roald couldn’t keep them to himself. He wrote to a magazine about his idea:

  ‘The gremlins comprise a very real and considerable part of the conversation of every RAF pilot in the world. Every pilot knows what a gremlin is and every one of them talks about gremlins every day of their lives.’ Gremlins, he said, were ‘little types with horns and a long tail, who walk about on the wings of your aircraft boring holes in the fuselage and urinating in your fuse-box’.

  This is the Roald Dahl I recognize – the Roald Dahl who writes about amazing, funny, odd creatures, making it seem as if they’re part of everyday life and – guess what – doing something rude!

  Next, he got down to writing an actual story. He called the gremlins’ wives ‘Fifinellas’ and their children ‘Widgets’ or ‘Flipperty-Gibbets’. They lived in a ‘beautiful green wood far up in the North. They could walk up and down trees in their special suction boots’. Then horrible humans came and chopped down their trees so that they could build factories and roads and airports. So the gremlins took revenge! They attached themselves to planes and caused accidents. They moved mountains so that the planes would fly straight into them. And they made tiny holes in the side of a plane flown by a pilot called Gus. But Gus was wily and inventive. He fed the gremlins postage stamps and played tricks on them. And, in the end, they become friends.

  Roald had created a story – a good story. But what was he to do with it? How could he turn it into a book?

  First, believe it or not, he had to show the story to his bosses for their approval because he was still working for the RAF and everything he did, said and wrote belonged to them. Then he sent it to a magazine where it was published for the first time.

  Most writers will tell you that they had a lucky break. Perhaps someone sitting at a desk or next to them on a train or at a party was just the right person at just the right time to help. And perhaps this someone not only was able to see something good in the writing but was also in a job where they could help the story to get out there. For Roald, this someone was a friend who knew the famous film-maker Walt Disney. Walt Disney read Roald’s gremlin story and cabled back a message saying that he was interested in turning it into a movie.

  WOW. How cool is that!

  I don’t know what Roald did when he heard this. I like to think that he jumped up and down, ran round the block, rang his mother and sisters in England and threw a party. But if he did, he kept it quiet. He was pleased. But he didn’t let himself get carried away.

  Roald was invited to Hollywood. He took leave from his job and, before he knew it, he was in the most glamorous place on earth, meeting top movie stars, like the great silent-movie actor Charlie Chaplin. They thought Roald was funny and cute and quite extraordinary, with a really cool accent. They’d read his story. And they loved it. It wasn’t long before Disney ‘shot a test reel’ – that’s a try-out bit of film.

  But, although The Gremlins had become his very first book and it was going to be a Walt Disney movie, Roald wasn’t happy. He didn’t particularly like the Disney drawings or the toy gremlins you could buy in the shops. And he found out that Walt Disney himself was worrying whether the time had passed for this kind of film about pilots in the war. Eventually, Disney gave up on the project and told Roald that he wasn’t going to finish the movie. That was it. The End.

  Except it wasn’t The End.

  Roald Dahl was nearly twenty-seven years old and now ready to become a great writer. All he needed was a place to write, time to write and enough reasons to go on writing.

  It was really The Beginning …

  Things you might not know about Roald Dahl

  1. His favourite sound was the piano.

  2. His favourite TV programme was the News.

  3. His most frightening moment was in his Hurricane plane, 1941, RAF.

  4. If he had not been a writer, he would have been a doctor.

  5. He owned a hundred budgerigars.

  6. His favourite smell was frying bacon.

  7. He loathed Christmas.

  8. He loved Easter.

  9. In the churchyard at Great Missenden, GIANT footprints lead to his grave.

  10. He liked to play Scrabble, but wasn’t very good at it because of his apalling appaling terrible spelling!

  Roald Dahl’s family tree

  Chapter 9

  Family

  In 1946, a few months after the war had ended, Roald returned home to England and, for the next four years, lived with his mother in her house in Buckinghamshire. He began to write short stories for adults and sent them to his agent in America, where they were published. Roald went back to live in New York in 1951 and a year later met a famous actress called Patricia Neal. They fell in love, and in 1953 got married and returned to England to live in Gispy House near to Roald’s mother in Great Missenden. But they didn’t live there all the time. Instead, the couple travelled to and fro between Britain and the USA so that Pat could act in films, TV programmes and plays. At the same time, they brought up their children, who came along in the following order: Olivia (1955), Tessa (1957), Theo (1960), Ophelia (1964) and Lucy (1965). The childcare was shared between Pat, Roald and a nanny. Sometimes, Pat worked in the USA while Roald stayed in England, at home with the children. Sometimes, they all went to the USA together. Life was very glamorous and exciting.

  Meanwhile, Roald was still writing stories for adults. They were full of strange and mysterious goings-on, and characters with nasty or odd ways of thinking and behaving. He loved that kind of fiction, and so did the many Roald Dahl fans who gobbled it up. So, if he was doing well with this type of story, why did he begin writing for children instead? I think that spending so much time around his own children as they grew up might be one of the reasons why Roald became a children’s writer.

  In his notebook Roald began to jot down ideas and plots for children’s stories. On one occasion he stood looking at the fruit in his garden. Why, he wondered, did the apples and pears in his garden stop growing? Why didn’t they just go on and on and on growing? And what if, instead of apples or pears, it was a peach? This was how James and the Giant Peach started out and in 1961 it became the first of his books for children to be published.

  It would be wonderful to imagine that Roald Dahl’s life went on in a magical storybook way, but three tragic events then took plac
e that would have a huge effect on him.

  When Theo was four months old, his pram was hit by a taxi in New York City. He suffered terrible head injuries and had to be nursed carefully for years. But, despite many complications, he survived. Roald became very involved with his son’s treatment. He worked with a brilliant toymaker and a surgeon to invent a tiny device that would drain the fluid that sometimes builds up after such accidents out of a patient’s brain. This became known as the Dahl–Wade–Till valve. Although it was never used on Theo, the valve was used to treat nearly three thousand children all over the world. Somehow, and without any proper training in science or technology, Roald Dahl had become a great inventor.

  Roald continued to look after the children when Pat was away filming, as well as working on his next story for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But then in 1962 a second tragedy occurred. Olivia died from complications from measles – she was just seven years old. This was exactly the same age that Roald’s sister Astri had been when she died. Perhaps that helped him, perhaps not. It’s certainly something he thought about, as he mentions the coincidence of ages in Boy.

  I can see some of this in close focus. I had a son who died and the same thing had happened to my father too. He had a son who died before I was born. I’ve a funny feeling that both Roald and I coped with all the sadness and rage and disbelief in a similar fashion. Roald tried very hard to understand how and why Olivia died. He tried to be scientific about it, writing down in a calm, factual manner the exact sequence of events that led to her death. Afterwards, he was determined to make sure that other children received the measles vaccine.