It was a difficult time, when neither mother nor son seems to have understood the other. Both were drinking heavily. Roald may have felt that she was incapable of understanding what he had been through in the war, of comprehending why he had changed. Perhaps Sofie Magdalene felt too that now her beloved “apple” was in his early thirties, he should be married, with a proper job. It is hard to make a judgment as so few clues to her inner world have survived and Roald kept none of the letters she wrote him. Yet circumstantial evidence suggests a need to escape her son occasionally, because throughout the entire period that he was living with her between 1946 and 1951 she rented a cottage in Cornwall: Greystones at Praa Sands, near Land’s End. It was a place to which she could disappear whenever she needed to be alone with her dogs. That streak of melancholy, of a need for isolation, ran deeply through the Dahl genes. It affected Mormor. It affected her daughter Else. And it affected Roald, whose youngest daughter Lucy told me that she thought “depression” was not quite the right term for it. It was more, she felt, a characteristic Nordic need for “dark solitude, wanting to be dark and alone, which is considered these days as depressed. But then,” she continued, “I think, what are the symptoms of depression? Sleep, not wanting to socialize, drinking a lot. He’d fit into all of those categories.”112
The tense claustrophobia of this life with his mother was made most manifest in the last of Dahl’s “personal” stories, People Nowadays, which he later retitled The Soldier. It is a melancholy coda to the flying tales, in which the protagonist, a war veteran, is trapped in a cold and joyless marriage, with a wife who has no understanding of what he has suffered. The setting is a location remarkably like Grange Farm, where “through the open window the unhappy couple could hear the water in the millstream going over the dam far down the valley.” There, the soldier, haunted by recurrent nightmares and hallucinations, starts to lose his mind. He tries to banish them by recalling the happy memories of his childhood, “seaside holidays in the summer, wet sand and red buckets and shrimping nets and the clear small pools and sea anemones and snails and mussels and sometimes one grey translucent shrimp hovering deep down in the beautiful green water.” But his contemptuous wife, with her “hard blue white eyes secret and cunning,” cannot understand his behavior. She offers him no sympathy and only contrives to drive him closer toward madness. Their relationship is described as “strange and difficult.” It used not to be like that, Dahl tells us, but now she is “as strange and difficult as they come.” The soldier loves her despite the fact that she is an “awful, cruel bitch,” and despite the fact that sometimes he gets so angry that he feels violent toward her. In the end, it is his wife who attacks him, smacking her husband across the face “with a quick right hand,” and leaving him crying on the bed.113
It is fiction, of course. But it is more than possible that Dahl was working out a certain aspect of his troubled relationship with his mother in these nine spare pages. The tone of melancholy tenderness, of a love that has soured because the soldier cannot share the intensity of his wartime experiences, was quite out of keeping with the other more fantastical stories he was writing, and for once Ann Watkins missed its point. “It’s a very strange story indeed,” she wrote to him, somewhat patronizingly, when he sent it to her. “When you find out what it means, will you please let me know, dear?”114
Dahl himself escaped for a month to Jamaica in early 1948, flying via Senegal and Brazil, and staying for two weeks with Hemingway at Sir William Stephenson’s house in Hillowton outside Montego Bay—a “dream place” where he went swimming every day on Max Beaverbrook’s private beach. He then travelled east along the north coast of the island to spend a few days with Charles Marsh near Ocho Rios. But he ended up staying as the house guest of Pamela Berry, the Marchioness of Huntly, and making his Jamaican “headquarters” with her.115 The two of them had struck up a friendship on the flight over from Senegal. She was travelling with her two young children—but without her husband, Douglas Gordon, the 12th Marquis of Huntly. Lemina, her seven-year old daughter, recalled that the plane was “so noisy one couldn’t have a normal conversation,” and that “the man sitting across the aisle” had passed her mother a note asking if she played gin rummy.116 She did. Roald and Pam played for six and a half hours. Afterwards he boasted that he had taken more than five pounds off her.117
Returning to England, the drudge of daily existence quickly wore him down again. He was also desperately short of money. Writing from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. to midnight, always “with the blinds drawn and an electric light on,”118 he turned out material faster than he ever would again. But it was no use. He even tried to write a love story, a piece of “frightful bullshit” which, he told Watkins, could be “turned inside out, washed in soapsuds, put through the mangle, rinsed, ironed and dyed the colour of raspberry jam—if that will help to sell it.”119 Even that failed to find a buyer.120 In June, he wrote to Watkins telling her that he was going broke, “literally and literarily,” and that he was thinking of giving up and marrying a rich woman instead.121 He even considered taking a job “with some bastard firm of stockbrokers in an effort to make a lot of money in two years—so that I can then write forever at my leisure.” Yet he was still defiant. “I’m not disillusioned,” he concluded. “I shall continue to write and I truly believe that one day I shall produce a really first-class novel. The stories I’m doing now may not sell, but they are wonderful practice and I learn a little more with each one I do.”122
Then, quite unexpectedly, the tide turned. Collier’s magazine bought the tale about the man who collected little fingers. Dahl immediately spent a large part of his fee on a trip to Paris. A month later, there was even better news. The magazine gave him a bonus of $1,000 for the story because it had been judged the best of the year. The news was a massive confidence boost. Dahl described it as “like a shot of Spanish fly to a tired and worn-out sexual athlete.”123 A few months later, he was offered $2,500 to write a piece about love. He could not believe it. “To dangle so much goddam money before the eyes of a writer … for a few pages of pure crystalline bullshit,” he declared, was a “base crime.” Nevertheless, he admitted, “all whores have their price.” And in this case $2,500 did the trick. “It made me vomit to do it,” he told Watkins when he sent her his piece, “and you know as I do, once a whore, always a whore … but send it to them quick and tell them they can cut this one just as much as they like. And get that dough.”124
The cash from those two stories made Dahl solvent once again. It allowed him to continue writing and sustain his principal daytime pursuit: greyhound racing. This passion was to be one of the main drains on the inheritance his father had left him. At one time Roald had as many as sixteen dogs under the supervision of his trainer, Tommy—an Irishman, with “no teeth and two left eyes and a profound knowledge of all the lousy dirty bastardly tricks in the greyhound racing trade.”125 Dahl rented a cottage in nearby Kirtlington for Tommy and the dogs, and paid him a salary as a trainer, but neither his initial purchase, Snailbox Lady, nor her offspring—which came from the bizarre experiment of mating her with her brother—produced the litters of future champions for which he hoped. Most ended up being given to his mother as pets. However, at Tommy’s suggestion, he travelled to Ireland and acquired a dog called Baytown Lark, which he raced at a dog track near Oxford with great success. Though the dogs consumed only a small amount of his time—when he went up once a week to pay Tommy his wages—they and the cunning, wily folk who hung around them intrigued Dahl hugely and fed his literary imagination. Alfhild recalled with delight the substantial winnings that Baytown Lark provided the whole family after his first race, and vividly recollected how much her brother loved126 the dog-racing fraternity. Alexandra, Asta’s daughter, also recollected that Roald struck up a great friendship with a local butcher’s assistant, Claud Taylor, a man with “very dark hair, almost patent leather,”127 who grazed his bullocks in the orchard at Grange Farm. He would initiate Dahl into many
secret and illicit rural practices, and inspire his next novel.
* The book marked Dahl’s formal break with the RAF Benevolent Fund, which had up until that point received the royalties from all his flying stories. Shortly before V-E Day, he had written to his publisher telling him that he felt he had now “given enough” to the Fund and wanted to start earning money for himself from his literary output—Dahl, Letter to Curtice Hitchcock, 04/20/45—RDMSC RD 1/1/1/191.
† He was probably thinking chiefly of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was living in the United States and whose Pilote de Guerre (Flight to Arras) and Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) had been published in 1942 and 1943, respectively. Curiously, a crashed aeroplane in the African desert also plays a key part in the second tale.
‡ This seriousness of intent did not stop him joking to Marsh that the Russians had “designed an atom bomb to look like a lavatory seat. It has a time fuse attached. It has been installed secretly at UNO headquarters; thus the more constipated the politician the greater the chances he’ll be sitting on it when it goes off”—Dahl, Letter to Charles Marsh, 10/28/46—CMP.
§ Unfortunately Dahl’s letters to Ann Watkins for the year 1947 are unaccountably missing from the collection currently housed at Columbia University.
¶ Dahl later conflated these events, telling Alfred Knopf that he only left Reynal & Hitchcock because “Hitchcock died and the firm disbanded”—Dahl, Letter to Alfred Knopf, 5/13/81—HRCH KNOPF 553.1.
** Dahl lost the prize, which was awarded to a new work by a British writer under thirty-five, on a technicality. After the judges had initially chosen Over to You as the winner, the book was declared ineligible for the competition because the collection had already been published in the United States.
†† Desert Episode would go on to be a great success, selling 35,000 copies in hardback and 450,000 copies in paperback. Greenfield himself would become a well-known literary agent.
‡‡ In a private letter to his old school friend Douglas Highton, Roald described Le Carré as “grossly overrated. Obscurity is never a virtue. He is either too idle or too incompetent to make the story flow. Clarity is the virtue. … He gets himself into a tangle and then skips over the problem.”—Dahl, Letter to Douglas Highton, undated, c. 1984.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Poacher
IN 1975, ROALD DAHL returned to Repton to give a talk. He was nearly sixty years old. In amongst some trenchant criticisms of his old school, he talked at some length about the qualities he felt were necessary in a writer. Fiction writing, he told his audience, was “something you slide into very cautiously and usually through a side door. Only a madman would choose it as the primary way to earn a living until he proved to himself he could bring it off.”1 It was a curious assertion. For Dahl spoke as if he had personally responded to the advice Charles Marsh gave him shortly after he arrived in the United Kingdom and taken “an honest publishing job”2 before writing full time. In reality, he had done the exact opposite, eschewing any kind of desk job and supplementing the small amount of money he earned from writing with the modest (soon to be exhausted) private income from the trust his father had left for him. He might moan and groan to Ann Watkins about the vicissitudes of writing, but his commitment to his craft would never seriously falter. He had been seized by the desire to tell stories and had responded completely to the compulsion. He had become one of his own madmen. Never was this more clearly apparent than when—after the setback of Some Time Never—Dahl decided almost immediately to embark upon another major work of fiction.
He knew from the outset that the book would be quite different from its predecessor—a “good straight novel.”3 Gone was the futuristic setting. Gone was any reference to flying. Gone were the ominous rumblings of nuclear holocaust and human self-destruction. Gone even was the flamboyant satire. Only an acute eye for human cunning and a general air of gloom connected this warts-and-all chronicle of postwar British rural life to its predecessor. Into its fabric he determined to weave all he had learned about greyhounds, poaching, gambling and deception and create a tart comedy of British country manners. The book first began to take shape in May 1948, when he became aware of its themes “maturing slowly in the half-empty barrel of my head.”4 It was a lengthy fermentation. Almost two years later, he had completed only two chapters alongside a mere handful of new short stories.5 Part of this was due to being afflicted with what he called “imaginative constipation”—a time when “nothing, no work, no stories, nothing would come.”6 Part of it was due to self-confessed laziness. But part of it was also due to the fact that he was still suffering chronic back pain, and had been put in an uncomfortable brace to strengthen his spine. Yet, he was still positive. “If things go right,” he told Ann Watkins, “there’s just a chance [the novel] will be a good one. No more satiric or metaphysical bullshit like Gremlins. Just ordinary stuff.”7
This “ordinary” novel would become perhaps the strangest thing he ever wrote—a twisted comic portrait of the four years he spent in Great Missenden and Old Amersham between 1946 and 1950. It is a period that remains shrouded in some obscurity—largely because little documentary evidence of it survives. Roald lived with his mother, so the only letters to her from this period were written on the odd occasions that he travelled abroad. Fortunately, his correspondence with Ann Watkins, and Charles Marsh and Claudia Haines, in New York provides some sort of a window into his thought processes. Yet, as so often with Dahl, these letters often present a front to the world—and usually it is that of entertainer. He is seldom revealing about his interior world, and although the letters are full of gossip, jokes, and information about his writing, there is little about the deep fears and frustrations he was almost certainly feeling, and which, in 1950, would lead to the great crisis of his professional career.
Ann Watkins suspected that the energy of his Washington years had abated somewhat and that he was now often idle; indeed, when Charles Marsh tempted him with a free holiday in 1949, he declined, admitting that he was “lazy enough already.”8 “I’m in a bit of a mess,” he had mournfully confided to Marsh the previous year, “because I’m going through a non money-making period, which doesn’t encourage—and I flourish on encouragement.”9 In place of flying tiny aircraft in exotic locations, in place of life-and-death struggles in the skies, in place of life as a celebrity in Washington, Los Angeles and New York, he had greyhounds, antiques, and gardening. He no longer even had his studio. At the end of 1948, Roald and his increasingly arthritic mother had left Grange Farm and moved four miles southeast, to a “smallish white early Georgian”10 town house on the High Street of Old Amersham, which was less isolated and where she could be nearer the local shops. Asta briefly shared the new house with them as well, but moved out when she got married to the local vet, Alex Anderson. So mother and son were there alone. Amersham was not yet the dormitory suburb it would become later in the fifties when the railway to London was electrified. Then, it was still a thriving ancient market town, with a host of butchers, grocers and greengrocers dotted along the picturesque main street.
Wistaria Cottage, where the Dahls lived, had a modest frontage, but inside the house was large and rambling. Surrounded by two alleyways on either side, it was configured so that there was an independent top-floor flat with a separate entrance from one of the alleys. This was where Roald lived. The position on the High Street suited Sofie Magdalene fine. Dressed in black and speaking in her thick Norwegian accent, Mrs. Dahl soon became something a local character—telling stories, gossiping and making psychic predictions about the future of people she had barely met. Her many eccentricities included subscriptions to the weekly “scandal sheet” the News of the World, and to the monthly naturist magazine Health and Efficiency, which might have been unremarkable in Scandinavia, but in fifties Britain was regarded as semipornographic. Her grandson Nicky Logsdail vividly recalled its photographs, with nipples and pubic areas modestly blanked out, and the frisson this caused
amongst his own friends when the magazine was delivered.11 With some of her new money she also bought a very early black and white television set. Mounted in a grand wood veneer cabinet, her grandchildren clamored to come over and watch it.
The house also had a substantial garden, where Roald and his mother spent many hours planting fruit trees and building an elaborate rockery. A rickety wooden bridge with a flimsy handrail ran from the bottom of the garden across a tiny stream, the Misbourne, which separated the gardens from a large area of common ground, in the middle of which stood a huge elm tree. Sometimes Roald flew model aircraft in the field with his young nephew Nicholas, who recalled his uncle’s shock at discovering that local children had vandalized the ancient tree, lighting a fire in the middle of its huge hollow trunk. Despite his anger at the violation, Roald could not resist taking him into the elm’s burned-out interior to see what it smelled like and whether it had any unusual acoustics. At other times, Roald took the boy out in his customized shiny Vauxhall Cresta to seek for adventure. Nicholas remembered with delight how the local blacksmith turned the car into a “three and a half seater” by welding the front seat further back on the chassis, so that Roald could sit more comfortably. He also recalled that his grandmother would sometimes nag his uncle about why he had not married and advise him about the qualities he should look for in a bride. Roald ignored her. In hindsight, Logsdail had the feeling that his uncle’s womanizing was both serious and secretive.12 His sisters seemed never to know what their brother was up to, and were reduced to gossip and speculation. Their suspicions, for example, that Roald was sleeping with the Logsdails’ Norwegian nanny were confirmed when one day Roald took her up to London “to see the sights.” All she could talk about on her return was the size of the baths at the Savoy Hotel.13
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