Eventually, though, the tragedies were too much for Roald and for a long time he was very, very depressed. One way he and Pat found some hope was by helping other children through charity work.
Then the third tragedy hit: Pat became very seriously ill. She suffered a huge stroke. A stroke can mean different things to different people, depending on how severe it is. Some might find that they stop being able to use parts of their body. They might find that they can’t speak or walk properly. Pat’s stroke looked like it might be one of the worst.
But Roald wasn’t going to be beaten. He decided to get Pat better, introducing what looked to some like a military regime – a round of exercises and activity that could never for one day, one hour, one moment stop. Roald was in charge. He gave the orders and it was Pat’s job to obey them. This, Roald said, was the only way she could get better.
It sounds like a strange fairy tale, but amazingly and incredibly she did get better. Patricia Neal even went back to acting. It’s such a fascinating story that a film was made about it!
Meanwhile, there were four children who needed to be looked after. Friends of the children tell stories about how amazing Roald seemed to them. Here was this incredibly tall, gangly man who was full of hobbies and stories. He was always tinkering about with bits of old furniture, listening to music, talking about art or famous people he knew. And he did unbelievably naughty things. In a restaurant, he might ask what the ‘special’ was. Then, when the waiter told him, he would say in a loud voice so that the whole restaurant could hear, ‘Don’t ever get the “special”, it’s probably last night’s leftovers. They only tell you it’s the “special” so that they can get rid of it!’
And there was always the chocolate. From his schooldays at Repton, which wasn’t far from the Cadbury’s factory at Bournville, Roald loved chocolate. So he had a box at the main table in the house that was always packed full of chocolate bars. After every meal, the box was circulated around the table and he would even give a few Smarties to his beloved dog Chopper.
And, talking of chocolate, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was to become his most famous book of all. In America there were plans to turn it into a film. Suddenly everyone was talking about Roald Dahl – but unfortunately not in a good way. Back then, in the 1960s, American Civil Rights activists were trying to make sure black people and white people were treated equally. Many thought that the Oompa- Loompas made black people sound silly, undignified and inferior. Some organizations said that no way should a film version of this book be made. Roald agreed to turn the Oompa-Loompas into white characters, and the film – under the slightly different title of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – went into production.
I don’t think Roald Dahl invented the Oompa Loompas to cause offence. He was not the type of person who would do things like that. But I do think that perhaps he hadn’t realized how certain words, pictures, images and ways of saying things suggest to children that some people are superior and some inferior.
None of this was to stop Roald Dahl from writing and telling stories. Sometimes, he would wake the children – and any of their friends who were staying for a sleepover – and take them for midnight walks down the lane to the arch under the railway, tell them a scary story or two and then march them back to bed.
Then, instead of going to work, like most of the other dads nearby seemed to do, he either pottered about in the house or walked up the garden to his special hut, to write.
By the end of the 1970s Roald had published five more books for children, which were The Magic Finger, Fantastic Mr Fox, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Danny the Champion of the World and The Enormous Crocodile.
At this point in time, Roald and Pat’s life together was drifting apart and in 1983 they were divorced. Later that year Roald married Felicity, who is usually called Liccy (pronounced ‘Lissy’). Roald’s new wife had three children of her own, so now there were seven children.
In 1977 Roald became a grandfather too. His daughter Tessa had a baby girl: Sophie. She heard the early versions of The BFG and the Sophie in the book is named after her. One of the ways Roald got his granddaughter interested in the idea of a big friendly giant who collects dreams was first to tell her the story and then, at night, to climb up a ladder and appear at her bedroom window, just like the BFG!
Can you imagine lying in bed upstairs, when suddenly you see your granddad looking through the window …?
People who visited the Dahl house at this time spoke of how full of people it always seemed to be. It was rowdy and rude, with lots of jokes and noise and music. It rather looks as if Roald had made another Dahl gang, a bit like the family he grew up in.
By the 1980s Roald was world-famous. Millions of people were reading his books, watching his TV programmes and seeing films that he had been involved with. Many people knew that he was often in pain because of his injuries from the plane crash. And some people knew that inside must be hidden away the many things that made him sad.
I once saw him at a big book festival organized by his publisher Puffin Books. It was wonderful to watch hundreds, probably thousands of children trying to get into a hall to hear him read from his latest book. I sneaked in and realized that everyone was listening. And I remember thinking that there was something both sad and funny about his eyebrows. If you lift up your eyebrows, you can do it in a way that makes people laugh, because you look so surprised. And you can also do it in a way that looks sad, as if life has taken you by surprise in a not-very-nice way … I remember thinking that Roald Dahl’s face and his eyebrows were like this.
Each time a new book came out there was a WHOOP across the world. Children loved them. A few days later, they would be telling each other about the incredible things they’d read – about Bruce Bogtrotter and the enormous chocolate cake from Matilda or maybe the amazing whizzpopping scene in front of … no … surely not … the Queen? Not any old imaginary queen, but the real Queen. No way! Yes! Really? Yes!!
Ask any writer what it’s like when people are reading and enjoying and talking about your book and they will probably reply that it’s one of the best feelings in the world. I certainly think so. And I’m sure Roald Dahl felt the same.
Roald Dahl in his writing hut
Chapter 10
How He Wrote Books
How did Roald Dahl go about writing such fabulously original and funny – and really quite rude – books, one after another?
First, he always did things in the same way. For most of his life, Roald liked writing with a yellow pencil called a Dixon Ticonderoga 1388-2 5/10, medium. (Try saying that quickly!) He wrote on American yellow legal pads, which were sent to him from New York City. It may come as no surprise to learn that yellow was his favourite colour.
Next, he had a special place where he wrote. He and a builder friend built a little brick hut in his garden in Great Missenden. Inside he put things that he liked and he arranged his chair – which had a hole cut in just the right place so that it didn’t press on his injured back – to be in the perfect spot, with a special board across the arms of the chair for him to rest his paper on.
When he was writing a book, Roald would walk through the garden to his hut, close the door and no one was allowed to disturb him. Well, that’s how it was supposed to be, but you know better than me what children are like! Yes, they would occasionally pop in and out but I imagine the only creatures most likely to see Roald Dahl at work were the cows in the next door field. If they had peeped through the window, they would have seen Roald scribbling away with his pencil on his yellow paper. Usually, he did his writing only in the morning and in the late afternoon, which would leave him free to do all the other business and fun things during the rest of the day.
Inside his hut, Roald went into a kind of trance. He concentrated so hard that he could whisk himself away to all sorts of different places in his mind – visiting scenes and people and things, both real and imaginary. It was here that he came up with plots and plans and
schemes – the wicked tricks that happen so often in his stories. He had a notebook to capture his ideas and whenever he thought of something, he scribbled it down. Then, later, if he was wondering what to write next, he could comb through his notebook, looking for ideas.
Most writers I know have notebooks. I do. I sometimes think that I have a notebook because I’m afraid that I’ll forget things. That’s not such a crazy idea, because writing was invented as a way of remembering things. And maybe that’s what Roald was doing – trying to hang on to his thoughts and memories. He was always on the lookout for stuff that would surprise his readers, even if it was shocking or disgusting. Sometimes, he was just capturing a bit of language. I imagine that he thought something like this: I like that … I like the way it sounds … I like the image it conjures up in my mind … I mustn’t forget that … I’ll put that in my ideas book because it might come in handy when I’m trying to describe someone in a story. I can’t tell you if Roald really thought that, but I can tell you that I do.
Like a lot of writers, when Roald was in the middle of writing a book he could be quite twitchy and irritable. Why? To me, it’s because the book feels like unfinished business. I am nervous about whether it will work out or not. I worry if I get stuck or if I think that this book is not turning out as well as the last book. Half of me wants to show the book to other people, the other half thinks that if I show it to someone else, they’ll blow away the magic that’s making the book happen in the first place or they’ll suggest something that will send the story off in totally the wrong direction.
After he’d finished a book and sent it off to the publisher, instead of dancing with relief, Roald would be worried. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever write anything again, and the thought of this made him grumpy. But, as we know, he did go on and on writing, and with the books came stupendous success.
I’m guessing that you’ve read a few of them (see the whole list on page 160) and I’m also guessing that you have favourite scenes, favourite people and also characters you most like to hate and despise. I hope so, because I think that’s part of the fun in reading. But was Roald Dahl trying to say something to us with all with these books?
In Matilda, Roald seems to be saying over and over again, ‘Don’t forget to read books!’ But there’s a LOT more going on. He paints a picture of a school that is so horrible and a teacher who is so lovely that it’s almost as if he’s dreaming of the perfect school – one where every teacher is as nice and as kind to children as Miss Honey. And what about Matilda’s parents? Is he saying that children deserve better parents than these and that if they don’t have them, and if they read and read and read, they can get themselves a better life?
And then there’s Danny the Champion of the World. I like this book a lot. It’s a story about people who don’t have very much and people who have too much. There’s a father and son who get on really well and together they play an amazing trick that … well, I couldn’t possibly say. If you’ve read the book, you’ll KNOW. If you haven’t, go and find a copy at once. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. But despite this fabulous, amazing plot that I’m not going to tell you about, Roald wrote something else that he would repeat over and over again. Danny’s dad was ‘sparky’ and Roald said that parents should always try to be sparky. What do you think he meant?
When The Twits and George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Witches came out, some people started to wonder just how beastly Roald Dahl could get. Were all his books going to be full of incurably horrible characters? And was destroying them the only way to stop them being so despicable? Some people said that too many of these nasty people were women.
Once again, Roald found himself arguing with his critics. He told them that in his books he had horrible women and nice women. And hadn’t all stories for children always been like this? In particular, some critics picked out the passage at the beginning of The Witches where he says that any woman you meet could turn out to be a witch. Was he trying to make children suspicious of women?
Look at Grandmamma in The Witches, he and his defenders said. Look at Sophie in The BFG. They were both clever, tender female characters. And he would go on to write about Matilda and Miss Honey in Matilda too.
Now, I’ll let you into a secret. Did you know that writers don’t always get a story right the first time round? It’s true. They might try out a storyline and if they or the people who help make the books (the agents, editors and publishers) don’t think that the storyline works, they try another one. It’s a bit like going to a clothes shop, trying on an outfit, looking in the mirror, deciding if you like what you’re wearing, listening to what other people think and then trying on something else. It rarely comes out right the first time. A book is really the end of a long and winding road. Roald wrote several drafts and it often took him over a year to finish a whole story.
Here are some of the storylines that Roald tried out and then scrapped. Which do you prefer – the early storyline or the version that made it into a book?
James and the Giant Peach
The original cast list starred a Hairy Green Caterpillar and an Earwig. But there was no Old-Green-Grasshopper, no Miss Spider and no Glow-worm either.
The Enormous Crocodile
The crocodile is whirled up into the sky by Trunky the elephant, but instead of hitting the sun he falls safely to earth.
The Twits
Mr and Mrs Twit are stuck upside-down forever.
George’s Marvellous Medicine
At the end of the book, Grandma is still incredibly tall.
The Witches
Bruno the mouse became a spy for the British government.
Matilda
Instead of being good, Matilda was the wickedest child in the world. Meanwhile, her parents were really nice and longsuffering. Miss Honey didn’t even exist. And there was no Miss Trunchbull either. Instead, there was a teacher called Miss Hayes, who loved betting on horses. Matilda used her special powers to make sure that the horse she wanted to win was first past the post. And that was what kept her from going to prison! In the end this really dreadful Matilda died in a car crash. Oh dear.
Looking at some of Roald’s early drafts reminds me that he tried very, very, very hard indeed to make you laugh, make you surprised, make you amazed. Perhaps you think that writing is pretty easy – all you have to do is sit on your backside scribbling a few words down. Well, I’m not going to say it’s the hardest thing in the world to do. But I will say that Roald Dahl was a writer who tried hard, day after day after day, to make the stories work. If you really like his books – perhaps love them – then that’s because of this hard work. You can’t see the hard work, because reading is about fun and enjoyment and interest. And that is part of the magic of writing.
What is it about the way Roald Dahl wrote that makes his books such fun? I think there are LOTS of things he does to entertain his readers. You might think of totally different things. But that’s what is so splendid about books – there are no right answers. Everyone is allowed to have their own ideas about what is and what isn’t GREAT.
First, let’s peek inside the pages of Matilda. Here, the terrible Miss Trunchbull is confronting poor Bruce Bogtrotter:
His plump flabby face had turned grey with fearful apprehension. His stockings hung about his ankles.
‘This clot,’ boomed the Headmistress, pointing the riding-crop at him like a rapier, ‘this black-head, this foul carbuncle, this poisonous pustule that you see before you is none other than a disgusting criminal, a denizen of the underworld, a member of the Mafia!’
‘Who, me?’ Bruce Bogtrotter said, looking genuinely puzzled.
‘A thief!’ the Trunchbull screamed. ‘A crook! A pirate! A brigand! A rustler!’
‘Steady on,’ the boy said, ‘I mean, dash it all, Headmistress.’
‘Do you deny it, you miserable little gumboil? Do you plead not guilty?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the boy said,
more puzzled than ever.
I love all the different names Miss Trunchbull calls Bruce Bogtrotter. But in real life, people don’t usually talk like this. Try it. Pretend you’re really angry about something or somebody and make a list of insults. It’s actually quite hard. But it’s very entertaining. This kind of writing is called exaggeration or hyperbole, which is pronounced ‘high-per-bolly’ – a word that I’m sure Roald would have loved.
Flip back a few pages to the very beginning of Matilda.
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful. Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It’s the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their revolting offspring, that we start shouting, ‘Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!’
A fun thing to do with writing like this is to think about who’s speaking. Is it Roald Dahl? Maybe … except Matilda is fiction and Roald was absolutely real. In most storybooks, the person telling the story is usually someone pretending to be the author – as if it’s a diary or a memoire – or a kind of invisible storyteller who isn’t a character, just someone who can magically tell us what’s happening.
One of the really intriguing things about Roald Dahl’s books is that he liked to say Roald-Dahlish things and do the invisible-storytelling thing, sometimes in the same book, sometimes on the same page. What’s more, the Roald-Dahl-ish things are often rude, funny, amazing or totally outrageous.
Fantastic Mr Dahl Page 7