Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Grendon Cottage is still much as it was seventy years ago—quaint and rambling, with thick, dark thatch and impossibly low ceilings. The garden is smaller and less tranquil today, because much of the land was sold off after the war to help build a new village school. Nevertheless, the place still feels quintessentially rural, and though the village has grown in recent years, it still feels not much more than the “piddling little place” one of its wartime inhabitants remembered—with a pub, a church, a tiny school, a few shops and some thirty thatched cottages, in one of which Shakespeare was reputed to have stayed.9 It was the embodiment of a sleepy English village and Roald loved that.

  One evening, Else introduced her brother to another RAF pilot, who lived in a particularly ancient wattle-and-daub house a short walk away, with his young wife and two small boys. He ran a flying training school nearby at Weston-on-the-Green and the two men struck up a friendship. Then, a few weeks after they met, the young pilot was killed in a midair collision over the airfield. Strikingly, Roald responded to the disaster by concentrating his energies on the children rather than on his friend’s bereaved wife. Every afternoon he would wander down the road and comfort the two boys by creating an alternative, imaginary fictional reality for them. Under the canopy of an enormous elm, he enthralled them with a series of tales about gremlins, the mischievous horned creatures that RAF pilots blamed for mechanical failure in their planes. Jeremy, the elder of the two, still remembers these afternoons with the gigantic storyteller as “quite magical.”10 His aunt, Pauline Hearne, also recollected that children seemed mysteriously drawn to Roald, who told her he was much happier talking to them than he was dealing with adults. She was probably the first of many who would describe him as “a kind of Pied Piper.”11

  For their part, his family found Roald changed by his three-year absence. Some of his good humor seemed to have disappeared and, as Alfhild remembered, he had begun hiding things about himself. In particular, she resented the fact that he began to deny his Scandinavian origins. She blamed the RAF for that. “ ‘I’m just an ordinary British fellow,’ ” she recalled him once saying to a friend of hers. “No, you’re not,” she thought. “You’re Norwegian. Like I am.” It was a tension that was to haunt Dahl all his life, and one perhaps that he, unlike his siblings, never quite resolved. He remained proud of his Norwegian blood, but he also felt himself culturally British. In Greece he had been prepared repeatedly to risk his life for his adopted country, and had thrived on a sense of belonging to the RAF community. Despite his criticisms of some of the decisions made by its top brass, it was perhaps the first British institution that had accepted him and of which, at least on the front line, he had felt completely a part. Now that sense of community had been taken away from him, along with the spiritual succor of flying that had meant so much to him. He missed both terribly. As he was to write with characteristic hyperbole the following year, “to a pilot, being alive but earthbound is worse than not being alive at all.”12 He also had to make a big decision about his future. Neither of his two most likely career options—taking a desk job in the RAF or becoming a flying instructor—appealed to him in the slightest, while other possibilities were very thin on the ground.

  Exactly how Dahl fell into the world of public relations and intelligence work is almost impossible to establish with any degree of certainty, as there is so little firsthand evidence. Dahl himself was strikingly reticent on the subject. When he did speak, his tone was characteristically casual. He told two interviewers in the early 1970s that he had been stationed at an RAF training camp in Uxbridge, just outside London, trying to get fit enough to become a flying instructor, and that one of his fellow officers, “a middle-aged, baldheaded fellow,” had invited him to supper one evening in late March 1942, at the intimate basement dining table of Pratt’s, one of London’s smallest and most exclusive all-male clubs.13 There, while the servants were “sizzling lamb chops over a wooden fire,”14 he met the witty and convivial former First World War flying ace, Harold Balfour, who was now a Conservative member of Parliament and under secretary for air—a junior ministerial post created to support the man who was responsible for the RAF in Churchill’s War Cabinet.† Dahl impressed Balfour with his sophisticated and amusing conversation, his exuberant battle stories—and his skill at bridge. The minister, it seems, was looking for someone charismatic to fly the RAF flag in the United States, and so the following day he summoned Dahl to his Whitehall office and told him that he would be joining the staff of the British Embassy in Washington, as assistant air attaché.15

  Initially, Dahl was not at all keen to go. “ ‘Oh no, sir, please, sir—anything but that, sir!’ ” was his response.16 But Balfour was insistent, and three days later Dahl, now with diplomatic stamps in his passport, was on a train to Glasgow, where he boarded a requisitioned Polish ship, the SS Batori,17 bound for Canada. He dismissed most of his fellow passengers as the usual British “types,” who could think of nothing but “eating themselves silly” and then complaining of chronic constipation.18 However, two unusual RAF men did intrigue him. One was his eccentric intelligence officer from 80 Squadron in Haifa, who always travelled with an imaginary dog called Rex;‡ the other was an ex-pilot, the dashing and witty Douglas Bisgood, who had raced motorcars at Brooklands, and become notorious for coining his own squadron’s unofficial motto, “Semper in Excreta”—or “Always in the shit.” Bisgood, too, was an invalid and on his way to work as a flying instructor in Canada. But he was also a man after Dahl’s own heart—a Battle of Britain veteran, who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross and survived a head-on Hurricane crash. It was a significant meeting. The two men spent much of the sea voyage trading stories about gremlins. Dahl was already fascinated by the folklore that had grown up around the little imps and had begun to invent stories about them. Bisgood too had devised his own gremlin subculture. Together they let their sense of fantasy run free. By the end of the journey both had become true “gremlinologists,” to use a phrase that Dahl would later make his own.

  He arrived in Canada on April 14, 1942, and was immediately intrigued by the difference between the culture of plenty he found in North America and the starved, meager life he had left behind in England. A local newspaper with forty pages in it, people eating ice cream in the snow, and grown men drinking bottles of milk with a straw were just three of the many things that struck him as curious. On the sleeper train from Halifax to Montreal he was impressed by the comfortable beds, the vast menu, the iced drinks, and the enormous number of “gadgets” on board—including air conditioning, spittoons, thermos flasks and under-floor heating. At the Ritz Carlton, a “swank joint” in Montreal, where he was lodged for a night, he was by turns fascinated and appalled by the conspicuous consumption he found there. As he sent his mother a birthday telegram and posted off her first monthly food parcel of cheese, chocolate, marmalade and lemons, he also wrote describing his evening meal in the hotel, which included “lettuce hearts like giant cabbages” and “steaks like doormats, only thicker,” served by men wearing “fantastic gold and diamond rings” whose teeth were “like piano keys.” Around him buzzed hordes of alluring “females [with] baby faces” who, he admitted slyly, look like they are “strolling from the bathroom into the bedroom—and they usually are.”19 The pace and energy of life excited him, as did the hotel elevator, which travelled ten floors in five seconds. “You usually arrive at a place well before you get there,” he joked to his mother, “and you start to get ready to go after you’ve left.”20 The next morning he took a train down to Washington, crossing into the United States on a bitterly cold spring day and continuing on via New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. By the time he arrived at the Willard Hotel in D.C., where he would be lodging until he found himself an apartment, winter chill had given way to balmy spring. As he noted with delight, “the whole place is covered with the most magnificent double cherry blossom.”21

  Roald liked Washington. It was civilized. And most of its inhabitants were eag
er to talk to the tall, handsome pilot in his unfamiliar uniform. Indeed, they would often stop him in the street to ask him all about it, which was exactly what the British authorities wanted, because one of Dahl’s principal functions as an assistant air attaché was to use his experiences as a wounded fighter pilot to help tie the Americans ever more closely into the British war effort. Only four months earlier the Japanese raid on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor had destroyed five warships, almost two hundred aircraft, and killed more than two thousand men. This act of aggression had finally brought the United States into a war that many of its citizens had desperately tried to avoid, believing that American interests were best served by remaining neutral. Within weeks of the attack, Winston Churchill flew over to Washington to show solidarity with the American people and ensure that President Roosevelt’s war aims were synchronized as much as possible with his own. Speaking to Congress, Churchill stressed his own American roots and the need for his former kinsmen to abandon isolationism and lead the free world to a common victory against Nazism. The United States, he confidently declared to Congress on December 26, 1941, had “drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.” Despite this trenchant rhetoric, that scabbard was never entirely out of sight. Isolationism and antiimperial sentiment remained still a potent force in American politics. Dahl would be part of a team based at the British Embassy whose job was to ensure that—as far as possible—the exponents of these ideas were neutralized.

  His office was in the Air Mission, a nondescript annex of the British Embassy, a grand neoclassical villa designed in the mid-1920s by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. The building, which also served as the ambassador’s residence, consciously evoked the appearance of an English country house from the early eighteenth century, with red bricks, tall chimneys, and elaborate formal gardens. It was the perfect setting for the effete, tight-lipped, fox-hunting ambassador, Lord Halifax. A former Viceroy of India, who as foreign secretary had been one of the architects of the British government’s policy of appeasing Hitler, his power within the Conservative Party was such that Churchill felt compelled to keep him in that role for nine months, before deftly sidelining him to Washington. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, then working as the embassy’s information officer, likened his boss to the provost of an Oxford college, “very grand, very viceregal”22 and “not of this century.”23 Dahl, who sometimes played tennis with Halifax and was his polar opposite in terms of personality, described him initially as “a courtly English gentleman.” That reaction was magnified among Americans, where a contemporary profile in Time magazine described the ambassador drily as “obviously not the kind of man who ever could or ever would quite clear his throat of British phlegm.”24 In his letters home, each one opened and read by the censor, Roald damned his boss with faint praise, describing him simply as “nice” and “decent” with seldom an exuberant word and never one of affection.

  He had to hit the ground running. Within a week of his arrival at the Air Mission, he was speaking about his experiences in Greece to the Masonic Lodge of West Orange, New Jersey, with a further three lectures scheduled for the following ten days in Washington and New York.25 He did not enjoy it. After the extreme experiences he had encountered as a flyer, he concluded that he had landed “a most ungodly unimportant job.” His brief, ironically, was not to tell the truth but to create the right image. And, on this subject, even for someone with great gifts of fantasy, this was a difficult task. “I’d just come from the war. People were getting killed. I had been flying around, seeing horrible things,” he later admitted to William Stevenson. “Now, almost instantly, I found myself in the middle of a pre-war cocktail mob in America. I had to dress up in ghastly gold braid and tassels. The result was, I became rather outspoken and brash.”26 It was hardly surprising. The embassy was snobbish, humorless, hierarchical and studiedly intellectual—in short it was just the kind of place Dahl loathed. His colleagues who worked in the Lutyens grandeur of the main building also regarded the poky quarters of the Air Mission with something close to condescension. They looked down on it, Isaiah Berlin recalled, “rather as a grammar school was looked on by public schoolboys, at least in those days.”27 This attitude must have rankled with Dahl. The embassy’s strutting and posturing, its luxury and safety, its chicanery, contrasted horribly with the bloody immediacy of war he had witnessed in Greece and Palestine, while the glib haughtiness of those who had not risked their own lives for the war effort threw the memories of those who had died in 80 Squadron ever more sharply into focus.

  Then, ten days after he had arrived in the capital, a short, bespectacled man in his mid-forties shuffled into the young air attaché’s office. It was the British novelist C. S. Forester, whose swashbuckling tales of maritime adventure had enthralled Roald as an adolescent. Forester was now living in Washington and trying to help the British war effort. He had been commissioned to write a story based on Dahl’s flying experiences for the Saturday Evening Post, a high-profile American weekly magazine with a circulation of over 3 million. The magazine’s editorial line had, at least until Pearl Harbor, been largely isolationist, but it was now fully committed to the U.S. war effort. Dahl later admitted he was a trifle disappointed by the novelist’s nondescript appearance and particularly by his thick steel-rimmed spectacles. “I expected sparks to have been shooting out of his head, or at the very least he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim,”28 he wrote, observing in the same breath that there are always two sides to any writer of fiction, the ordinary exterior and the extraordinary interior—a tension that the flamboyant and showy Dahl would sometimes find harder to resolve than the retiring inventor of Captain Hornblower. Forester took the young attaché out to lunch in a local French restaurant. There, while both enjoyed a hearty roast duck, Dahl offered to save the writer the trouble of making notes and eating at the same time by writing up his experiences himself and sending them on to Forester the next day.

  That evening, true to his word, Dahl started to write. In his story Lucky Break, he describes the experience as a kind of epiphany. With a glass of Portuguese brandy in his hand “to keep him going,” he found himself transforming his own experiences and observations into the imaginative landscape of prose. Almost inevitably, the tale of an inexperienced pilot who lost his way and crash-landed his plane unsuccessfully became the story of a battle-hardened flyer trying to land an aeroplane that had been badly damaged by enemy fire. He simply could not help himself. “For the first time in my life,” he admitted, “I became totally absorbed in what I was doing.” In five hours he had finished. He had written neither notes, nor a piece of journalism, but a story. He called it A Piece of Cake.§ The next day he sent it on to Forester, and a few days later Forester’s secretary wrote to him with the news that his agent Harold Matson had sold it to the Saturday Evening Post. Dahl later claimed he was paid $1,000 for it.29 This was an exaggeration. He was actually paid $300, which was reduced to only $187.50 after the agent took his commission and the Internal Revenue Service had taken off tax.30 Matson was nonetheless impressed, describing the tale to Forester’s secretary as “a remarkable piece” and Dahl as “a natural writer of superior quality.”31 Roald would also later claim that the magazine had published the story without changing a word.32 This too was inaccurate. In reality he quickly became involved in a tussle over numerous details which the editors wanted to alter. They had deleted expletives and cut out RAF slang, proposing a number of American substitutions he considered completely inappropriate. Already immensely confident about his writing, soon he was penning an angry letter complaining about their insensitivity and lack of respect for his style.

  Matson did his best to help his client out, but the aim of the story was propaganda. As a result, the piece that was eventually published in the Saturday Evening Post on August 1, 1942, was markedly different from that Dahl had initially submitted. That final version, entitled Shot Down Over Libya, carried the byline: “a fact
ual report written by a pilot officer presently invalided in the USA.” None of his initial drafts of the story have survived,33 so whether this angle was added by the wartime editors in an attempt to make the story “more dramatic,” as Dahl later claimed,34 or whether he encouraged it himself remains unclear. In any event, Dahl probably felt that being shot down was an improvement on a crash-landing and that a tale of a successful RAF raid on a squadron of Italian planes was preferable in every respect to one about youth, insecurity, incompetence and bad judgment. He was irritated by the change of title, which accentuated the journalistic aspect of the piece, and he described the editor’s decision to alter it as “bloody.” He also remained insistent that it should be published anonymously—almost certainly because he knew how far supposed fact had sailed into the territory of fiction. As Dahl reminded his mother, the piece had been written solely “to impress the American public and to do some good over here.”35 Its accuracy was not important. He had written it “purely in my line of duty.”36