Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  ¶ This was apparently suggested by the English-born Eric Knight, who had written Lassie Come Home, and who would be killed in a plane crash in January 1943. In a letter to his wife on August 17, 1942, Knight wrote: “This noon I talked with Walt. He is receptive and we kid. He wants me to give him opinions on a swell idea—about Gremlins and Fifinellas and Widgets … I suggest he shoots the whole thing as a mixture of real RAF and cartoon—Korkis, “The Trouble with Gremlins.”

  ** In RAF slang, an “erk” was a non-flying member of the air force, usually one of the ground staff.

  † Stansgate (1877–1960), formerly William Wedgwood Benn, had just been raised to the peerage, having been a Labour MP for Manchester Gorton since 1937. Benn was a maverick. Although more than sixty years old when war broke out, he reenlisted in the RAF as a pilot officer in 1940, training as an air gunner and flying on several operational missions before being moved to a desk job when his age was discovered. He was eventually promoted to air commodore.

  ‡ John Gillespie Magee (1922–1941) was an Anglo-American pilot and poet who was killed over Lincolnshire when the Spitfire he was flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force was involved in a midair collision. He was nineteen years old. His sonnet “High Flight” has often since been quoted in the face of air disasters. In his speech following the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, President Reagan reflected that the dead astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to “touch the face of God.”

  § In reality, it seems the young David Lean, who had edited Pygmalion, did most of the direction on Major Barbara, but Pascal paid him $1,000 so that he could have the sole directing credit.

  1

  Olaus Dahl ca.1890. Roald described his paternal grandfather Olaus as a “prosperous merchant who owned a store in Sarpsborg and traded in just about everything from cheese to chicken-wire.” But the records in the parish church in Sarpsborg describe him simply as a “butcher,” while other legal documents refer to him as a “pork butcher and sausage maker.”

  2

  Harald Dahl ca.1895. The one-armed craftsman and painter in his early thirties, shortly after he had arrived in Cardiff from Paris to learn his trade as a shipbroker. “Harald was not the easiest of husbands. He could be withdrawn and undemonstrative.”

  3

  Roald’s mother, the “dauntless … fearless” Sofe Magdalene Dahl, with her son, “the apple,” and dog in the gardens of Ty Mynydd ca.1919. Dahl would later describe her as “undoubtedly the primary influence on my own life.”

  4

  Roald and his three sisters gathering corn in the fields of Ty Mynydd just before it was sold. “Roald later recalled with nostalgia its grand lawns and terraces, its numerous servants, and the surrounding fields filled with shire-horses, hay wagons, pigs, chickens and milking-cows.”

  5

  Asta, Else, Alfhild and Roald Dahl photographed while on holiday in Tenby ca. 1924.

  6

  Roald Dahl with camera at Repton, ca.1932. Photography became his passion. He would write later, “I was the only boy who practised it seriously.”

  7

  Repton headmaster Geoffrey Fisher, photographed by Roald.

  8

  Priory House, summer 1931. Roald Dahl and his friend the bespectacled Michael Arnold stand side by side in the middle row, arms crossed. Seated in the front row is his housemaster S. S. Jenkyns. Next to him, with glasses and cravat, the “supercilious and obnoxious” Hugh Middleton. Jack Mendl is second from the left and W. W. Wilson second from the right in the same row. The senior boys “ruled us with fear,” Dahl would later write.

  9

  Priory House Senior Fives Team 1931. Roald is in the back row on the right, standing behind Jack Mendl.

  10

  Roald Dahl on a rock in the Great Rattling Brook, Newfoundland, 1934. “If some great giant,” Dahl wrote in his diary, “had, in need of a handkerchief, seized up our tent, we would all have drifted away in our sleeping bags.”

  11

  The explorers who went on the “Long March,” Newfoundland, 1934. “Admiral” Murray Levick stands in the middle; to his left, the journalist Dennis Clarke. Roald is third from the right, Dennis Pearl is on the extreme left.

  12

  Tanganyika, 1939. Roald Dahl’s car is about to cross the Wami river on the drive to Nairobi, where his fight training would begin.

  13

  Louis Dahl playing the mouth organ in Norway and looking, as his halfbrother described him, “not unlike a native of Honolulu. Brown granite looks white next to his skin.” He later used the photograph to illustrate Mr. Dippy Dud in Shell magazine.

  14

  Roald and his friend David Powell posing in front of a dartboard on which is taped a poster of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. Dahl was thrown out of the club in Dar es Salaam for similarly throwing darts at a picture of a naked Adolf Hitler.

  15

  Leading Aircraftsman Roald Dahl during flight training, Nairobi, 1939.

  16

  Dahl during further training as a pilot in Habbaniya, Iraq, 1940. With him is fellow trainee “Filthy” Leuchars.

  17

  Dahl washing at the airstrip at Elevsis. It was dotted with tents, temporary latrines, washbasins, and grey corrugated-iron hangars along one side.

  18

  Pilot Officer Roald Dahl, photographed in Palestine, 1941.

  19

  Roald Dahl and Walt Disney with cuddly toys inspired by Dahl’s gremlins. For Dahl, the gremlins were often almost real. Negotiating over movie rights, he wrote to one of Disney’s animators: “My own Number One Gremlin climbed on my shoulder … and whispered, ‘That man does not like us much, shall I fix him?’ But I told him to lay off.”

  20

  The actress Annabella Power, the only one of Dahl’s wartime lovers with whom he felt a real emotional connection, photographed in 1939. She recalled that the two of them often behaved “like naughty schoolboys together.”

  21

  Wing Commander Roald Dahl and his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, in London, 1944. Dahl thought him “a strange and secret man” for whom he felt “overwhelming love and respect.”

  22

  Vice President Henry A. Wallace in 1940. Wallace was perhaps the most left-wing American politician ever to hold high office. A distinguished agronomist, he was also a mystical idealist. Dahl played tennis with him regularly, and connived in making sure that he lost the vice presidential nomination in 1944.

  23

  The movie producer Gabriel Pascal with one of his cows in 1945. Dahl admiringly described Pascal, a native of Transylvania, as “an amazing scoundrel,” “an awful old rogue,” and, in a letter to the U.S. vice president, as “a great man, a very indiscreet great man.”

  24

  The Roosevelts at Hyde Park, 1943, photographed by Dahl. Dahl charmed the president and first lady, acting like a clown when he stayed with them. “I was able to ask pointed questions and get equally pointed replies because, theoretically, I was a nobody,” he recalled.

  25

  Dahl’s friend and mentor Charles Marsh around the time Dahl first met him in 1942.

  26

  Portrait of Roald Dahl taken for the publication of Over to You, 1945.

  27

  Portrait of Roald Dahl ca.1948.

  28

  Portrait of Dahl ca.1951.

  29

  Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal on honeymoon in Rome, 1953. The trip was not a success.

  30

  Patricia Neal and Olivia in the aviary at Gipsy House. The aviary was at one time home to over four hundred homing budgerigars.

  31

  Dahl and Olivia, 1958.

  32

  Pat Neal, Tessa, Sue Denson and Olivia in the nursery at Gipsy House, 1961; baby Theo is in the playpen.

  33

  Pat, Olivia, Roald and Tessa on holiday in Norway, 1958.

  34

  Dahl and Olivia outside the Gyps
y caravan he had bought from his sister Alfhild. It still stands in the garden of Gipsy House.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Secrets and Lies

  DAHL HAD BEEN A rebellious teenager, but his defiance was generally a private affair. At Repton, disguised in waders, helmet, wind jacket and goggles, he had roared noisily through town on his illicit motorbike, relishing the annoyance he caused the masters and exulting in the fact that no one in authority recognized him. Even as an old man, he still savored this gesture which, if discovered, might have led to his being expelled or—at the very least—to one of those “savage beatings that drew blood from your backside.” It was a revealing admission, which spoke eloquently of the strength of his interior world. “I never told anyone, not even my best friend,” he wrote later. “I had learnt even at that tender age that there are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself, and this was the greatest secret I had ever had to keep in my life so far.”1 Yet, among those who knew him best, Dahl was notorious for being leaky. “He regularly betrayed confidences,” his old American friend, Marian Goodman, told me with a chuckle, recalling one incident where Roald destroyed a friendship and wrecked a marriage by an intemperate indiscretion. Mrs. Goodman, who first met Dahl in New York in 1954, also recalled with alarm another occasion where he had tried to entertain a group of people at a dinner party with details of a passion of her own that she had foolishly just confessed to him.2 Eventually she managed to silence him, but only after some effort. His daughter Lucy agreed. “Dad never could keep his mouth shut,” she told me. “He gossiped like a girl.” She found it almost impossible to imagine that her father had worked in any capacity as a spy during the war.3 Yet he did. And for the most part he was scrupulously discreet about it.

  Dahl’s remit in Washington mainly involved dealing with press and public relations, but from the moment he arrived there, he would also have been aware of a complex network of British undercover operations that was being manipulated from New York, by one of the war’s most unusual and eccentric figures—the buccaneering Canadian industrialist and businessman William Stephenson. A former boxing champion and pioneering First World War aviator, by the mid-twenties his business acumen and flair for technical innovation had made him a millionaire several times over. Though small of stature, Stephenson’s ego and his energy reserves were colossal, and he could compel great loyalty. Noël Coward once told Dahl that Stephenson was the only man for whom he would “go through fire and water.”4 He was also sharp, ruthless and prided himself on getting things done. Churchill admired him for these qualities and—probably on the recommendation of his fellow Canadian Max Aitken—selected Stephenson to run a wartime secret service network based in the United States called British Security Coordination (BSC).* Established initially to promote UK interests in the United States and counter Nazi propaganda, BSC soon become involved in more exotic and clandestine activities, which ranged from training spies in a remote camp on the shores of Lake Ontario to publishing horoscopes from Hitler’s former astrologer that predicted the Führer’s imminent demise.

  BSC represented both branches of British secret service in the United States. The first of them, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, was responsible for foreign intelligence and codebreaking. The more glamorous Special Operations Executive, or SOE, had its headquarters in Baker Street, not far from the house where Sherlock Holmes had solved many a fictional riddle. It was nicknamed “Churchill’s Secret Army” and “The Baker Street Irregulars,” and its task was to wage war by all means other than the strictly military—and particularly by espionage and sabotage. Ernest Cuneo, who acted as a liaison between BSC, OSS (the American Secret Service), and the Roosevelt administration, thought Stephenson’s outfit was created in this mold, because it was prepared to go “beyond the legal, the ethical, and the proper” to achieve its ends. Cuneo, who was to become a good friend of Dahl’s, claimed that, among its many activities, BSC “ran espionage agents, tampered with the mails, tapped telephones, smuggled propaganda into the country, disrupted public gatherings, covertly subsidized newspapers, radios, and organizations, perpetrated forgeries—even palming one off on the President of the United States—violated the aliens registration act, shanghaied sailors numerous times, and possibly murdered one or more persons in this country.”5

  Dahl was fascinated by BSC and initially imagined its enigmatic boss, who worked under the code name “Intrepid,” as a “small unknown creature, hiding in a dark room somewhere in New York.”6 Reality was an office on the thirty-fifth floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, from where Stephenson coordinated possibly more than a thousand agents, whose activities were directed toward counteracting the significant element in American politics and society that was either overtly isolationist or simply strongly opposed to Great Britain and its imperial interests. Many of these agents were colorful figures infinitely more to the young Roald Dahl’s taste than dull embassy bureaucrats. The reckless Ivar Bryce,† who once turned a harmless doodle on his office blotter into a map that Stephenson used to “prove” to Roosevelt that the Germans intended to invade Central America, was one example.7 Bryce’s enthusiasm for espionage was already legendary. He had once tried out a new truth drug on his unsuspecting cousin, Bunny Phillips, and nearly killed him in the process. The pollster and future advertising mogul David Ogilvy was another of these intelligence mavericks. “An irreconcilable rebel” and “a misfit,”8 to use his own words, he had run away from his family after flunking out of Oxford University, and worked variously as a cook in a Paris kitchen, a social worker in an Edinburgh slum and a door-to-door salesman hawking Aga stoves, before coming to work for the U.S. pollster George Gallup and eventually for BSC. Finally, there was Bryce’s friend, the handsome playboy Ian Fleming, who delighted in the gadgetry of espionage, and would draw on many of his BSC experiences when he devised his James Bond stories. This nonconformist trio were all Stephenson protégés and Dahl would come to be well acquainted with each of them.

  Exactly how he stumbled into this world is not entirely clear. His sister Alfhild, whose love of a good story often rivalled her brother’s, believed Roald’s links with espionage began shortly after he was invalided back to England in 1941. She described how Roald “got in with a lot of funny people” that winter, largely through Alfred Chenhalls and the gun-making Purdey brothers. She recounted a convoluted tale about an Englishman and his half-German, half-Japanese wife whom Roald met on the boat back from Egypt in 1941. In London, Alf and her sister Else fell in with the couple’s social circle, but began to suspect that they might be spies for the Vichy French. Alf shared her suspicions with Roald, who promptly had them reported to the authorities. Subsequently, she believed her brother had been “followed and watched” by Secret Servicemen before he was eventually sent for training somewhere on the outskirts of London.9 Dahl himself, however, never corroborated this story and the official records suggest that he had little contact with the intelligence world until some months after he arrived in Washington. Still, two pieces of circumstantial evidence suggest that his sister’s memories may not have been as entirely fanciful as they might at first appear.

  In early 1942, Sofie Magdalene and Roald had moved from Ludgershall to nearby Grendon Underwood. It was an important change of location. Station 53a of SOE was based nearby in the grounds of the local big house: Grendon Hall.‡ The station was home to over four hundred signals experts and coders, mostly receiving messages from overseas agents. It was also a training camp for secret agents in France and Norway. Alfhild remembered hearing two trainees speaking Norwegian on the local bus and recalled their shock when she started speaking back to them in their native language. After this incident, she claimed, the entire Dahl family was thoroughly vetted by “Secret Service types.”10 One piece of material evidence also survives that suggests a link between Dahl and Stephenson which predates his arrival in the United States. A memo to Intrepid from a certain “VW” dated February 10, 1942—some
six weeks before Dahl arrived in Washington—has survived among the papers of Stephenson’s first biographer, H. Montgomery Hyde. This memo argues the need for the immediate appointment of a “tough and invigorating personality” to the British press team in the U.S. capital: a man who would contrast with the atmosphere of “almost hermit-like seclusion” currently found there.11 Its author—almost certainly another BSC maverick, the crime writer Valentine Williams, who had arrived in the United States in 1941 to advise Stephenson on “all matters of propaganda”—added that this person should not be one “of the governing class,” but “more or less a man of the people.”12

  If this memo was circulated to Harold Balfour, as it might well have been, it is quite plausible that when, a few days later, Balfour found himself at Pratt’s sitting next to a tall, straight-talking and abrasively iconoclastic former pilot, he realized that in Roald Dahl he had found exactly the “man of the people” Williams was seeking. If so, right from the outset of his time in Washington, Dahl was loosely one of the BSC team—something that he himself perhaps unintentionally corroborated when he told Canadian television in 1974 that he had been working for Stephenson in Washington for a full year before he first met him.13

  Whether Dahl arrived in Washington already attached to the intelligence community or simply as a minor embassy official, his task as air attaché would still largely have been the same: to present the RAF to U.S. public opinion in the most favorable possible light. It was not an easy task, for the anti-British lobby was a powerful and diverse grouping. Significant figures included not only pro-Fascists like the former aviator Charles Lindbergh, and a motley collection of antiwar liberals, but Republican senators such as Gerald Nye, who believed that President Roosevelt himself had connived with the British to allow the U.S. Fleet to be bombed at Pearl Harbor.§ Rex Benson, a senior adviser of Lord Halifax, was shocked to discover that, even in 1942, anti-British sentiment was still the norm at U.S. officer training schools.14