It is also possible Dahl did not really “cop out” at all. In his introduction to the history of BSC, which was unofficially published in 1998, the historian Nigel West concluded that the book was completed “in the late summer of 1945.”169 Dahl was in Canada until September 4. His final letter from Camp X does indeed suggest that he may have been leaving early, but no more than a couple of weeks or so. He had been there already for nearly three months. Reading the book as West presents it, the real puzzle would seem to be what he brought to the project at all; apart from one or two examples—such as the description of Drew Pearson—it is hard to see much evidence of his inimitable literary fingerprint on its arid pages. The book contains no dark secrets about atrocities committed on Canadian volunteers, and fails to shed much light even on the operations that might have inspired James Bond. It is mostly a compendium of minutiae, of interest only to a specialized historian. In short, just the kind of book Roald abhorred.
Dahl always remained uncharacteristically circumspect about his wartime intelligence work and it is possible he took secrets with him to his grave. Alfhild recalled that her brother was always “very discreet” about his time with Stephenson. “He didn’t talk to us about it at all,”170 she told me. This attitude was by and large mirrored in Dahl’s reactions to curious outsiders. An early biographer of Stephenson’s recalled that “Dahl checked with what he regarded as the proper authorities before talking,”171 while Bill Macdonald, the most recent biographer of the man called “Intrepid,” who visited Roald shortly before his death in 1990, observed his surprise on discovering how many people were now speaking quite openly about BSC. He pointedly assured Macdonald he was not about to reveal any of his own secrets. “ ‘You won’t get any from me!’ the renowned children’s author said emphatically; and then he paused, and sounded more subdued. ‘It’s a question of honour really.’ ”172
On June 20, 1945, six weeks after V-E Day, Stephenson wrote to Dahl thanking him for what he had done for BSC and summarizing his achievements. “I do not forget,” he noted, “that obligation was already owed to you before you joined us in July of 1944, for during the period of your attachment to the British Embassy, there were many occasions when your cooperation—always unstintingly given—was of great use to us. We had, indeed, sufficient cause to know and value your qualities, and that you have done such a good job in the past year is no matter for surprise.” He went on to praise Dahl’s personal contribution to BSC’s activities as one “of particular significance and value,” and to assure him that his work would “prove of lasting worth,” celebrating Dahl’s “considerable initiative,” his “capacity for handling extremely delicate situations,” his “gift for concise reporting” and his ability “to win the respect and confidence” of his American colleagues.173
The letter was one of many similar ones that Stephenson wrote at the time, but there is little doubt that Dahl had made a significant impression on the Canadian spymaster, who continued to stay in touch for many years after the war was over and invite Dahl to his homes in Jamaica and Bermuda. However, by the end of 1945, Dahl was heartily sick of the Great White Slug. Even New York had begun to lose its appeal. He wrote to his mother that he now found the city “slick and chromium-plated and fast and efficient and unpleasant.”174 A week later, despite the fact that he was staying in Millicent Rogers’s luxurious apartment, complete with Van Goghs, Gauguins and Cézannes, and despite having been approached to work on a ballet of the Gremlins for the New York City Ballet with the choreographer Leonide Massine, he repeated his sentiments. “I do not like New York very much. … There are too many bums and everyone, especially the taxi drivers, are so disagreeable.”175
Dahl finally boarded the Queen Elizabeth at the beginning of February 1946 after four formative years in Washington and New York. There he had mixed with statesmen, movie stars, writers and businessmen, and tasted extremes of wealth and luxury. He had become a man of the world, and consorted with a host of glamorous older women. In the world of diplomacy he had tasted success and failure. He had won the respect of North Americans for his straight talking and his initiative and, at the same time, invited the disdain of many from the English governing classes for his brashness and unpredictability. Crucially, he had discovered that he liked the company of buccaneers: men who enjoyed making decisions, who felt no need to shelter behind authority, and who did not care unduly about criticism. One of them, Charles Marsh, was now both his patron and his best friend. And Dahl had changed. He had not lost the enthusiasm, the joie de vivre, the vivid imagination and the powerful desire to entertain that characterized the young man who six years earlier had boarded the SS Mantola to Tanganyika, but he no longer craved adventure in the same way. He had experienced enough excitement to last a lifetime, while the realities of war had added a cynical, misanthropic and world-weary aspect to his personality. It was writing now that fascinated him.
In old age, Dahl would often reflect that the war burned out his need for the thrill of danger. In his short story Someone Like You (1944), he describes the effect of the war on a young fighter pilot’s personality. “From being a young, bouncing boy, he had become someone old and wise and gentle … he had become old like a tired man of seventy years. He had become so different and he had changed so much that at first it was embarrassing … and it was not easy to know what to say.”176 But while Dahl may have felt the weight of experience on his shoulders, his fascination with politics had not completely vanished. Now, even as his ocean liner steamed across the Atlantic, he saw both his own and his family’s futures blighted by a sinister new threat: the mushroom cloud of imminent nuclear holocaust.
In September 1945, shortly before Henry Wallace wrote President Truman an open letter begging the new president to share his atomic secrets with the Russians, Roald had shared his own fears about the future with the former vice president. Wallace noted that though his friend was now “something of a Russophobe,” current British policy seemed designed to provoke “the maximum distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III.”177 Roald could not but agree with him. The notion that the human race might one day destroy itself haunted him and intensified the struggle between the idealist and the cynic that raged in his mind. In that battle, BSC’s arcane world of disinformation and duplicity had already begun to take on a particularly bitter taste. Nothing would ever change that. Despite his tight-lipped loyalty to his country, from now on the world of covert intelligence would always remain a dirty one. Whatever their consequences, honesty and outspokenness would always be a preferable option. A few weeks before Dahl died, concluding an interview about Bill Stephenson, he admitted that from the whole experience of working with him, he had learned nothing at all of any value “except what I disapprove of—the art of secrecy.”178
* Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook (1879–1964), was minister of supply and aircraft production in the early years of Churchill’s War Cabinet. Dahl himself was convinced that Beaverbrook had advised Churchill on Stephenson’s appointment. “He [Stephenson] was a close friend, a really genuinely close friend of Beaverbrook,” Dahl told Bill Macdonald. “I’ve been in Beaverbrook’s house in Jamaica with him and they were completely like that,” he said crossing his fingers. “A couple of old Canadian millionaires who were both pretty ruthless”—Macdonald, The True Intrepid, p. 242.
† Ivar Bryce (1906–1985) was a wealthy aristocrat of whom Earl Mountbatten was supposed to have remarked: “It’s terrible, the advantages he’s had to overcome.” Dahl found him charming, lazy, but kind—Interview with Roald Dahl, John Pearson Papers, Manuscript Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, cited in Conant, The Irregulars, p. 223.
‡ Grendon Hall and its outbuildings still remain, currently in use as a prison.
§ Curiously, Dahl himself once suggested that he too believed Roosevelt might have known about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor before it occurred. He recalled Stephenson’s claim that
BSC had bugged the hotel room of Saburo Kurusu, a Japanese diplomat who came to Washington in November 1941, and that the exact date of the Pearl Harbor attack had been mentioned in these taped conversations. Transcripts of the recording were apparently forwarded to Roosevelt, who chose to do nothing about it. When asked whether he believed Stephenson’s account, Dahl replied, “I have no way to judge, except Bill didn’t usually tell stories like that.” He also added that “FDR was a very sensible man and I knew him well. I mean there was no way he’d let the Pacific Fleet be destroyed if he could avoid it. The whole thing doesn’t make sense.”—Macdonald, The True Intrepid, p. 239.
¶ Though there’s no evidence that this was not another of Dahl’s exaggerations, it would have been in keeping with Churchill’s character. Churchill was certainly aware of Dahl personally. Dahl for his part kept a note, handwritten on House of Commons notepaper, from the former prime minister in 1949. It read: “Your greetings have given me much pleasure. Thank you so much. Winston S. Churchill”—RDMSC 16/1/2.
** Dahl’s version was never made. Another movie, based on Gibson’s book, was released in 1955.
†† In the deal, various British military bases were leased to the United States in exchange for fifty aging American warships that were essential to the British war effort. According to Dahl, Stephenson himself took a lot of credit for negotiating this deal personally with Roosevelt, maintaining it was “his greatest achievement.” Dahl was skeptical, admitting that he “always doubted” whether Stephenson actually met FDR. For the avoidance of doubt he added: “I did”—Macdonald, The True Intrepid, p. 248.
‡‡ William Welsh (1891–1962) was to resign his commission and join BOAC, the British commercial airline, at the end of 1944. He settled in the United States and married the widow of a U.S. senator. Eventually he became the North American representative for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
¶¶ Rex Benson summarized the embassy’s attitude to Luce when he described her as “a clever hard-boiled ambitious young lady, backed by a wrong-thinking husband for whom success as a big newspaper man and money has been and probably is the main object of living. The less these two try to practise the art of statesmanship the better”—Benson diary, Feb. 8, 1943, cited in Cave Brown, “C,” p. 479.
*** This was probably Lipiodol, a poppy seed oil used as a radio-opaque contrast agent in radiological investigations.
††† John Pearson in his Life of Ian Fleming argues that Fleming completed the training course at Camp X between 1942 and 1943. David Stafford has cast doubts on this, suggesting that Fleming, like Dahl, was a storyteller with a greater penchant for embroidery and exaggeration than for truthful accuracy.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Scholar-Gypsy
THE ENGLAND TO WHICH Dahl returned in February 1946 was a very different place from that he had left in 1938. Many of its cities were desolate and bomb-damaged and its citizens distressed and disillusioned. A once proud empire seemed to be collapsing into a vacuum of insolvency and bureaucracy, where cunning and chicanery were rapidly becoming the norm. Neither Churchill’s “sunlit uplands” nor the “New Jerusalem” ideals of Clement Attlee’s new Socialist Britain were much in evidence, while Dahl’s own fears about the future began to be realized as soon as the war was over, when the United States abruptly terminated financial support for its transatlantic ally, leaving the British economy well-nigh bankrupt. As a consequence, the new Labour government was forced to export as much of the nation’s own produce as it could, while imposing draconian controls on the import of foreign goods. Soon there were food shortages, fuel shortages, and rules for everything. Rationing worsened. Unemployment soared. A crime wave swept the nation. There were queues everywhere.
The writer John Lehmann recalled that it felt as if the British spirit had been crushed by a legion of puritanical officials who believed there was “a virtue in austerity and shabbiness.”1 Staple foods became scarce. Luxuries disappeared altogether. For Elizabeth David, the situation was a “nightmare.”2 Apricots, olives, lemons, almonds, even butter and rice, she recalled, came to be regarded as dirty words, just because they were unobtainable. Power cuts plunged large areas of the country into darkness and cold. Bankers in the City of London were reduced to working by candlelight. Christopher Isherwood, visiting from America, was shocked by what he saw. Gloomy and crumbling, London, he wrote, seemed a “powerfully and continually depressing” place. One of his friends told him that it was now “a dying city.” Another simply described postwar Britain as hell.3
After almost four years of sophisticated metropolitan existence, Dahl opted to live in the countryside, “amongst the cows and the sheep and the slow spoken types with straw in their hair.”4 His second wife Liccy echoed many in his family when she described him as a “countryman through and through,” whose profound love of nature was absolutely central to his character. This went way back into his childhood, perhaps to nostalgic memories of the farm at Radyr. At Repton, his walks and rides through the local countryside had sustained him in dark hours. It was there also that he had found inspiration, excitement, perhaps almost a pattern for his own life, in Matthew Arnold’s poem The Scholar-Gypsy. Its narrative celebrates an “Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,” who, “tired of knocking at preferment’s door,” forsakes the world of the intellect and goes to live with the Gypsies. He roams the world among “that wild brotherhood,” surviving by his wits and remaining always in close touch with the soil.
Roald responded to the poem as viscerally as he did to music. Like a Bach concerto or a Brahms symphony, he told his mother, the work gave him “tickles in the tummy.” Its rejection of the “strange disease of modern life” in favor of the simple pastoral ideal—the “unclouded joy” of being a “truant boy”—was an option that had resonated with Roald since, as a child, he had sat up in the trees, writing his diary and collecting birds’ eggs. It had inspired him again when he was convalescing from his head injuries in Egypt. Now, with the scars of the war weighing on him, both physically and mentally, its 250 lines exerted a powerful attraction on his psyche. The poem’s freewheeling rustic alternative to the dubious glamour of Hollywood, the uncertain allure of London literary circles, and the treacherous corridors of political intrigue gave him, he assured his mother, “exactly the same sensation” as he got when listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.5 It would form the psychological canvas against which he would fashion the rest of his life.
He had returned determined to become a full-time writer, while living off a small RAF invalid pension, “about a thousand quid” from his Shell pension fund,6 and about half of the £5,000 he had inherited from his father’s trust fund. From the large garden of his mother’s house in Grendon Underwood, he also hoped to grow enough food and vegetables to supplement the family’s meager official rations. His first letter to Ann Watkins brimmed over with excitement at the thought of his new life there. He enthused about his “cottage with straw on its roof and all around fields and cows and sheep having lambs and right now a wind like a vacuum-cleaner.”7 Ecstatic descriptions of rooks “frolicking in the trees,”8 apple blossom “like snow,”9 and drunken village types with names like Old Fizzer were to follow in the next weeks.10 Soon he purchased a racing greyhound, a “smasher” called Snailbox Lady, who could run 525 yards in just over thirty seconds, and from which he intended to breed a pack of racing dogs. It added to a domestic menagerie, which already included a duckling called Cholly Knickerbocker, a dachshund called Mrs. Harris, four more assorted dogs, a parrot, a “repressed”11 canary called Admiral Canaris after the former chief of German Military Intelligence, and a naughty young magpie, whom Dahl named Walter Winchell after the American gossip columnist, with whom he had had many dealings in the war. He also acquired a “girlfriend who types,”12 but did not bother to mention her name.
This eccentric Arcadia however was by no means immune to the disillusion that was infecting the rest of the cou
ntry. Dahl was struggling to keep his spirits up and maintain the sense of lightness and whimsy that had been in evidence in some of his early tales, but despair and hopelessness was beginning to animate his fiction. His first collection of short stories, Over to You, had been published in the United States in January 1946, just as he was leaving New York. It should have come out a month earlier, but much to Dahl’s annoyance, his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock—or “Ureynall and Stinkpot,” as Charles Marsh dubbed them13—had delayed publication, which meant that he was forced to leave for England only a few days after the book appeared.* The reviews had been good, but varied. Nona Balakian in the New York Times Book Review celebrated the visionary quality of Dahl’s stories and praised his ability to communicate a “sensation … that has often nothing to do with us as earthbound creatures.” She also commended his ability to inhabit “the narrow margin separating shadow from substance.”14 The New Yorker critic, while complaining that the public had now heard from “a great many writing aviators,”† warmed to Mr. Dahl’s “original turn of mind” and, in particular, to two stories from the collection which were “salted with some good low comedy.”15 Another applauded his “savage and pitiful” humor.16
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