Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  It was about coming home. Coming home to his sisters, to his beloved mother and to the Buckinghamshire countryside that he had yet to taste, but which would become his own favorite landscape. His sisters Else and Asta described this false ending as “slushy” and “sentimental.”39 Yet those closing pages of Going Solo are charged with genuine emotion. An emotion so powerful that when, shortly after they were written, Dahl read them in public, to an audience at the National Theatre in London, his daughter Ophelia remembered him crying.40 It was perhaps the only time he ever showed emotion like that in public. His tears were testimony to the power of his relationship with his mother, and of the emotion of homecoming itself after three years away in which he had tasted the strange, exhilarating and disturbing experiences of war. “They never recede with time,” he once wrote of these tumultuous events. “They were so vivid and violent that they remain etched on the memory like something that happened last month.”41

  Dahl’s time as an active fighter pilot lasted barely a month, but those thirty-two days reconfirmed him both as a loner and as a survivor. They gave him the need to write as well as something to write about. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine any of Dahl’s first stories being written without his experience as a flyer. All of them are intimately bound up with it. Many touch on the ecstasy of flying itself. Others deal with the confused tangle of human emotions he experienced in that short but intense four weeks in Greece. Most reveal a deeply fatalistic streak, so much so that one is tempted to wonder whether writing them may initially have been a kind of therapy, a way of making some sort of sense out of the muddle of conflicting emotions to which he had been exposed. Later, that act of writing would become habitual, a necessary escape from another reality. Then his claustrophobic, dark writing hut itself became a surrogate cockpit—a place where, in “tight, warm, dark”42 surroundings, he could reconnect with that potent mixture of excitement, fear, beauty, horror, humor, wonder and exaltation that he had felt as a fighter pilot and that first animated his desire to tell stories. There, he could let his guard down. There, he surely penned that list of pilots in his address book, with the number of kills beside each name and an X against those who had died in combat.

  Each name must have reminded him of the hard reality that lay behind so much of his literary fantasy. Some were the briefest imaginable record of a human life that had been extinguished in a random and unnecessary manner, perhaps by the tiniest jink on an aerial turn or the slightest misjudgment of pressure from a foot on the rudder bar. The list may even have become a kind of talisman. A covenant, almost, between the writer and his past; between Roald and those who had not been so fortunate as he. In that sense it may even represent the very germ of his literary imagination.

  * With his broad shoulders and bushy mustache, Tap Jones was clearly the model for Monkey, the squadron leader in Dahl’s unpublished short story, The Ginger Cat. There Dahl describes him as “a big fine man with a black moustache”—RDMSC 5/14/1–3.

  † These “kills,” reported in Going Solo and confirmed in Dahl’s logbook whose entries were signed off by “Tap” Jones, are not mentioned in 80 Squadron’s operations record book, which credits all nine confirmed successes on those days to other pilots. Yet in this instance Dahl’s own account is probably the more reliable. The squadron’s own records were destroyed before they left Greece, so reconstructing what actually happened there relied largely on intelligence summaries and on the vagaries of human memory. Individual logbooks were rarely used, although these often provided the most accurate firsthand evidence of events.

  ‡ Harold Matson, Letter to RD, 18/05/42—RDMSC RD 1/1/1/4. Dahl later rewrote A Piece of Cake, removing Oofy completely, and replacing him with another pilot alter ego called Peter, who was based on Douglas McDonald. One senses that many of the characters in his early stories—Fin, Stuffy, the Monkey, and the Stag, for example—were based on pilots he had met during his short time in 80 Squadron.

  § Though he regularly misspells Pattle’s name in his logbook, Dahl agreed with those who hailed the South African ace as the “top-scoring” RAF pilot of the war—See Christopher Shores, Brian Cull and Nicola Malizia, Air War for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete 1940–1941 (London: Grub Street, 1987).

  ¶ Shores, Hill and Malizia describe the raid as taking place on the following morning, but Dahl’s logbook makes clear it happened that evening.

  ** Interestingly, Dahl recounts this story the other way round in his short story Katina. There he is given the package in Elevsis by a man “in civilian clothes” and carrying “a revolver in one hand and a small bag in the other”—Collected Stories, p. 42.

  †† Perhaps Dahl remembered this detail and used it as the inspiration for the child Katina, who at the climax of the short story he named after her stands amidst the flames at Argos and shakes her fist in anger at the attacking German planes. Ironically, Dahl was probably unaware that John Grigson, the pompous air commodore who had asked him to fly back to Elevsis with that secret package, was also identified by Bill Vale as the symbol of this futile resistance. In the center of the field, with rifle to shoulder and aircraftman to load for him, the two men stood “as calmly as if they were on the grouse moors, while the 109s fairly plastered the place”—Wisdom, Wings Over Olympus, p. 199.

  ‡‡ Coke was “almost inevitably” killed in action later that year—Going Solo, p. 201.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Alive but Earthbound

  SOFIE MAGDALENE WAS AN incurable optimist. All through the summer of 1939, despite constant pressure to move from Bexley to the remote seaside resort of Tenby, where the family had spent so many holidays together, she remained determined to sit out the war in her big, rambling home with her two younger daughters and their menagerie of animals, believing that somehow she would manage to evade the German bombers there. For a while, it looked as if her stubbornness would pay off, as the “Phoney War,” which had begun in September that year, continued on into winter and then into spring. Spring even moved into early summer with none of the predicted German attacks. Food rationing and blackout restrictions aside, for the average British civilian there was little tangible sense of being involved in military conflict. Moreover, as long as Neville Chamberlain remained prime minister, there was still an outside chance that some sort of peace might eventually be concluded with the Nazis.

  Ironically for the Dahls, the series of events that precipitated the end of this twilight war began when the Nazis invaded Norway on April 10, 1940. In response, the British despatched an Expeditionary Force there to support their new Norwegian allies, but the short-lived campaign was so badly planned and mismanaged that, a month later, it forced Chamberlain’s resignation. After a short struggle for the premiership with Viscount Halifax, Chamberlain’s aloof and patrician foreign secretary, Winston Churchill, the maverick leader of the anti-Nazi Conservative faction in Parliament, emerged as the new prime minister. The same day that he entered Downing Street as the leader of a new all-party wartime government, Hitler invaded Luxemburg, Holland and Belgium. Within forty-eight hours, German Panzer divisions were pushing into France. As French defenses collapsed, almost a quarter of a million British troops had to be evacuated back to the United Kingdom from Dunkirk. By mid-June, Paris was occupied, and France on the brink of surrender that became reality a few days later. Suddenly Britain was alone. On June 18, Churchill announced to the nation grimly that the Battle of France was over and that the Battle of Britain was surely about to begin. Nevertheless, as British forces retreated from mainland Europe, he brushed aside any suggestion of making peace with the Nazis. “We shall fight on,” he declared. Hitler felt he had no option but to launch his attack on Britain.

  Listening to the news from his training base in Iraq, Dahl was desperate. On June 8, he wrote to his sister Else’s fiancé, a fellow RAF pilot named John Logsdail, asking him to try again where he had failed and persuade his mother to move either to Wales or Cornwall. His logic was clear. He knew that Bexley lay clos
e to two potential targets: Woolwich Arsenal and the Vickers Armament works in nearby Crayford. He also suspected that the German bombing was likely to be ill-directed, and that his mother’s house would almost certainly be hit in the raids. “You probably feel as worried about it as I do,” he wrote his future brother-in-law. “No one will realise that there is any danger of a bomb actually dropping on or near their own house until it happens, and there is therefore a very natural tendency to sit back and say ‘It’s not worth moving.’ ”1 But neither Roald nor John Logsdail could influence Sofie Magdalene and her two younger daughters, Else and Asta, who remained determined to stay in Kent.

  In early July, as Dahl was completing his flying training, the first air skirmishes of the Battle of Britain began. The following month, the Luftwaffe were bombing air bases all over southern England. Their intention was to knock out British coastal defenses prior to a land invasion, Operation Sealion, that Hitler had planned for later that autumn. But they failed to achieve their aim. The success of the British fighter pilots in fighting off their German aggressors took Hitler, and perhaps the British themselves, somewhat by surprise. With their highly maneuverable Hurricanes and Spitfires, assisted by the invention of radar, the RAF prevailed to such an extent that by the second week of September, Hitler was forced to change his tactics. Abandoning his assault on strategic airfields, and in direct response to an RAF raid on Berlin, which had killed ten civilians, he decided to weaken British morale by deliberately bombing civilian targets. Thus began the long-feared Blitz.

  Shortly after teatime on Saturday, September 7, an eerie, endless droning filled the London air, and the clear late summer skies over the capital were darkened by countless black dots, swarming in from the south and east. For roughly an hour, more than three hundred bombers, in two waves, turned large areas of the London docks into wastelands of fire and rubble. Eyewitnesses described it as a kind of medieval vision of hell. Flames leapt hundreds of feet into the sky as warehouses filled with sugar, wheat, timber and paint were set ablaze. Oil depots exploded, sending viscous dark torrents of burning tar flowing into the debris-ridden streets. Water pipes and gas mains were destroyed, telephone communications severed. Barges, freed from their moorings, became floating infernos of destruction, drifting up and down the Thames at the mercy of the tide. Every fire engine in London was summoned to the disaster, but often the firefighters could do nothing but let the buildings burn.

  Then, at around eight o’clock in the evening, the German bombers returned. This time the raid lasted more than eight hours and now, as Dahl had predicted, Woolwich Arsenal was hit. Storehouses of high explosives erupted, causing thunderclaps that could be heard all over southeast England and shattered windows for miles around. The all-clear was not sounded until almost 5 a.m. In the morning, Churchill came to the East End of London to inspect the damage and was reduced to tears by what he saw. Fourteen hundred people had been killed. And later that day the bombers came again. More than two hundred of them this time, in a nine-hour raid. It was the beginning of fifty-seven consecutive days of aerial bombing on London. The East End got the worst of it, but the bombs fell everywhere. Many ancient and much-loved buildings disappeared. The Chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed. Buckingham Palace was hit. No one was unaffected. For most of London’s residents, it was an autumn where, as the writer Elizabeth Bowen remembered, leaves were always “swept up with glass in them.”2

  Sofie Magdalene, with Else and Asta, both now in their early twenties, bravely endured these early raids. For about a week they sheltered in the cellar of their big Victorian house in Bexley. One night five small bombs fell in the garden and shattered all the windows. The next day, to keep out rain and maintain the blackout, they prized linoleum up from the kitchen floor, cut it to size and nailed it into the empty window frames. Another night, while they were trying to sleep on their camp beds, a rogue bomb sent one of the ceilings crashing down above them. There was little they could do about that. The cellar, however, was well supplied with high-quality champagne and cognac, so, as the bombs fell down around them, and the night sky to the north was illuminated by the red glow of a burning London, they kept up their spirits with large amounts of fine alcohol—“drinking ourselves silly,” as Asta put it, and doing their best to calm the nerves of their seven agitated and excitable dogs.

  For ten days they lived like this. At that point, the British Army took the decision out of Sofie Magdalene’s hands, requisitioning the house—apparently for use as an officers’ mess.3 She had twelve hours to leave and find alternative accommodation. Tenby and Cornwall (Roald’s preferred choices) were rejected. Instead, Sofie Magdalene turned to her eldest daughter, Alfhild, who the previous year had married Leslie Hansen, a Danish neighbor of theirs in Bexley, and was now living some 40 miles northwest of London in Ludgershall. Alfhild quickly persuaded a farmer in nearby Quainton to let her family stay as paying guests on his farm. So, after putting what remained of their paintings and furniture into storage in a local barn,* the three women piled a few necessities into their little Wolseley Hornet, and set off with their dogs for Buckinghamshire.4

  To get there, they travelled straight through London—the most direct route, but also by far the most dangerous. They had to drive through bomb-damaged streets, negotiate burst water mains, avoid smoldering buildings and keep a lookout for unexploded ordnance. Street signs had been removed to make navigation difficult for an invading German army, so finding their way was fraught with complications. Furthermore, the Dahls (with the exception of Roald) were still alien nationals and, as such, liable to be viewed with suspicion by the authorities. None of them yet had British passports. They also had to face the possibility of getting caught in an air raid—a potential threat that soon turned into reality when the sirens sounded midway through their journey. With characteristic pluck, the three women stuck out the raid in their car, because the shelters would not accept animals and none of them wanted to abandon their dogs. They were lucky. No bombs fell close by. When they finally arrived at Woodlands Farm in Quainton, they were exhausted. Their 75-mile journey had taken the best part of a day. But their troubles were not over. The farmer’s wife balked at the number of animals, and, after a few days, Sofie Magdalene had to move on again.5

  To make matters worse, the terms of her late husband’s will made it difficult for Sofie Magdalene to rent, let alone buy, a home. The strictures of the family trust were already onerous and had certainly made no provision for a war that had already caused the loss of her one major asset, the family home. Even before the outbreak of hostilities, Sofie Magdalene had been finding it difficult to deal with her two other trustees, whose consent was required before any money could be released from the fund. Ludvig Aadnesen was now an old man and often travelling in Norway or France. He was difficult to contact, while her brother-in-law, Oscar, was frequently unhelpful and sometimes mean. Moreover, as the value of shares in Aadnesen & Dahl declined in the late 1930s, so did the family wealth. Sofie Magdalene was forced to reduce the household drastically. By the time war broke out, her only remaining servant was a gardener. Now, deprived of her only significant asset (there was no compensation for a requisitioned home), she faced serious financial difficulties. Fortunately, Alfhild, now married and of age, was able to help. Realizing some of her own capital in the trust, she bought her mother a redbrick thatched cottage opposite Wayside Farm, in Ludgershall, from the niece of General Alan Brooke—the man who was shortly to become Churchill’s senior military adviser. It cost £700.

  By the end of 1940, Sofie Magdalene was beginning to feel more settled. On New Year’s Eve, she presided over Else’s wedding to John Logsdail at the church in Ludgershall. It was a quiet family occasion. The young couple had bought themselves a house in nearby Grendon Underwood, so mother and her three daughters were still all within five miles of each other. Soon, Sofie Magdalene too would move into the village. As Norway and Britain were now Allies, restrictions on what Norwegian citizens could do for th
e war effort were lifted and Roald’s siblings had more options than to “test gas-masks in the gas chambers.”6 Alfhild became a Land Girl, helping with agricultural production; Else honed her skills as a metalworker, making field kitchens for the army; while Asta, emulating her brother, eventually joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAFs), where she worked as a radio operator, before helping to set up the gigantic barrage balloons whose thick metal cables were designed to protect London from low-level aerial bombardment. Eventually the Dahl sisters would all obtain UK passports. Sofie Magdalene alone remained the foreigner, continuing to report to the local police each week. Alfhild’s daughter, Astri Newman, remembered her grandmother in the late forties as “very foreign in her appearance and in the way she spoke,” but also “very outgoing and very much at home” in the Buckinghamshire countryside.7

  Roald, on the other hand, understandably felt somewhat dislocated when he returned to England in the autumn of 1941. Gone was the security of the grand house in Bexley, with his pack of siblings roaring around its spacious corridors, rooms and gardens. In its place a small sixteenth-century thatched cottage in a rural village of no more than a hundred people, many of whom lived without mains drainage. His role in his own family had diminished, too. His mother had learned to live without him, as had Alfhild and Else, now married with homes of their own. Even his younger sister, the headstrong Asta, was frequently away. Roald missed the sense of freedom, glamour and adventure he had experienced as a pilot, and, while he busied himself in his mother’s garden, planting vegetables and a raspberry bed of which he was particularly proud, he found it hard to adjust to being an invalid. Moreover, wartime Britain, with its stern regime of food rationing and its culture of austerity, shocked and frustrated him after the plenty of Africa and the Middle East. And he found his mother’s cottage a difficult place in which to live—largely because of the cramped rooms and lack of privacy.8