Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Roald rushed the baby back to hospital. Ed Goodman recalled that when he examined him, his head felt “like a bag of marbles.”38 The pressure of the buildup of fluid around the brain, he told Dahl, carried with it a severe risk not only of permanent blindness but also of retardation and even death. The doctors immediately extracted the liquid, and fitted a tube to drain any further fluid directly into his heart, where it could easily be reabsorbed. Initially, they were doubtful that the child’s sight would return, but it did, and eventually Theo was declared fit enough to go back home on January 14, 1961. No sooner had he got home than his sight began to deteriorate again. The shunt—the internal drainage tube into his heart—had blocked. Once more the surgeons operated and cleared the blockage. Once more Theo’s sight returned, though “much impaired.”39

  It was a pattern that would repeat itself. Each time, Roald and Pat hoped that Theo’s body would start absorbing the cerebrospinal fluid naturally and that the implanted tube would become redundant. Each time, their hopes were to be dashed. Theo would come home, appear to be doing fine, then he would lose his sight because the tube had blocked. He would be rushed back into hospital for surgery, often convulsing, leaving his parents to face once more his “huge, desolate, bewildered eyes”40 when he awoke in the emergency room. Six times in the next nine months, the same thing happened. Every time, there was a chance that Theo’s sight would not return, that his brain damage would be worse. After the second emergency, the tube was inserted into the pleura—the membrane around his lung—which involved particularly invasive surgery. It was, as Roald told his mother, with uncharacteristic frankness, “very distressing, the whole thing.”41

  Dahl, of course, was not one to sit back and let things take their course. As soon as he realized that the defective valve was the problem, he abandoned his writing and began to work out how he might improve the situation. He swiftly became something of an expert. On February 18 he wrote his mother: “I don’t think much of the tubes that they use here for this work, particularly the valve at the lower end, which is meant to open up between 40 mm and 80 mm water column pressure. This valve is literally nothing but a slit in the plastic tube. … Do they have anything better in England, something less likely to block and clog?”42 Sofie Magdalene, now confined to an electric wheelchair but still the materfamilias, asked her stepdaughter Ellen’s husband, Ashley Miles, now director of the Lister Institute, for advice. Miles put them in touch with a Scottish neurosurgeon called Wylie McKissock, who had performed similar operations in Britain, but using a different valve. When the family returned to England in May and Theo suffered another relapse in Great Missenden, McKissock fitted this alternative valve, but it too failed to function effectively. Then he tried removing the shunt entirely, in the hope that the hydrocephalus would no longer occur. But this also proved ineffective and the old shunt was installed once more.

  But Roald remained determined to find a technical solution to the shunt’s deficiencies and quietly worked out what he thought was needed. With typical resourcefulness, he contacted a man with whom he had first corresponded in 1950, when he wanted to buy a miniature steam engine as a present for his nephew Nicholas.43 Stanley Wade was no ordinary toymaker. He was a craftsman, a self-effacing perfectionist. Ophelia remembered him as “a short, quiet man with twitchy lips that he continually pursed and relaxed.”44 Roald himself described Wade as “a brilliant metal turner, who could turn a minute steel component to an accuracy of ten thousandths of a millimetre.”45 His specialty was making model aeroplane engines and, in particular, the tiny hydraulic pumps that supplied his little aircraft with fuel. These never blocked. When Roald explained his son’s problem and asked Wade if he could build something to the specifications Theo required, Wade told him he thought he could.

  By this time, too, Dahl had found a kindred spirit in one of McKissock’s protégés, a pioneering pediatric neurosurgeon called Kenneth Till, who was consultant at London’s premier hospital for sick children in Great Ormond Street and would become Theo’s consultant. Till listened with patience to Roald’s proposal to design a new valve, and then invited Dahl and Stanley Wade to come and watch him operate, so they could see exactly what was required. Till was impressed by Dahl’s knowledge, his grasp of the issues, his tenacity and his psychological detachment. “He had this coolness,” he recalled, “I think this perhaps is the word—the coolness to want to know the pros and cons, the whys and wherefores. He didn’t have to hold himself in.”46

  Roald struggled to keep writing that summer. He and Pat had arranged a rudimentary communication system between the house and the hut, with a switch in the main house and a flashing light bulb in the hut. One flash was a minor disturbance; two flashes an emergency. The light often flashed twice. In October 1961, Theo nearly died again. He was rushed to hospital in London, suffering from a collapsed lung, and immediately had a double operation to remove the tube and drain the lung. Nine “terrible” days followed with Roald and Pat enduring a “nightmare of suspense in hospital wards and dark, sleazy hotel-rooms near the hospital.” Theo was constantly in pain, crying, vomiting and thrashing in his cot, as the doctors hoped against hope that perhaps this time he would recover without the need of the drainage shunt and an eighth craniotomy. But it was not to be. His head began to swell once more and so a new tube was fitted—still with an old-style valve because the Dahl-Wade-Till version was not yet ready. His recovery was by no means certain. Yet the “small pale baby with an indomitable spirit and a tremendous constitution, swathed in bandages, and surrounded by tubes and drips,”47 pulled through once again. By January 1962 he was back home, but his state of health kept Roald and Pat “on the jump constantly.”48

  Within a year, the Dahl-Wade-Till (DWT) valve was ready. “No more than two centimetres long with six tiny moving steel parts inside it,”49 Till fitted it for the first time on a one-year-old child in May 1962. And it worked perfectly. As he reported in The Lancet, the invention was characterized by “low resistance, ease of sterilisation, no reflux, robust construction, and negligible risk of blockage.”50 It was a massive improvement on what had existed previously, and had been realized almost entirely by Dahl’s practical initiative and his refusal to accept the status quo. The DWT valve proved a huge advance in treating similar conditions, and because Dahl, Wade and Till had agreed not to make any money from their invention, it cost less than a third of its more inferior predecessors. Before it was eventually superseded, the valve was used successfully on almost three thousand children around the world. Some people may even still have one in their heads today.

  It was partly this fascination with invention that drew Roald to the medical world. In Going Solo, he would write that all his life he had taken “an intense and inquisitive interest in every form of medicine,”51 and he often described himself as “a frustrated doctor.”52 He had an immensely detached view of his own body and was very amenable to using it for medical experiments. In 1952, for example, he offered himself “as a guinea pig” to Presbyterian Hospital for an electogastrogram. “They are trying out a new machine for plotting electrically what goes on in the stomach,” he told his mother. “They stuffed the tube up my nose and right down into the stomach and left it there for two hours. It was rather unpleasant, mainly because of my broken nose, but on the whole not bad and very interesting. The machine said there was nothing wrong with my own stomach, but I’m going again because they find out a lot each time about what’s going wrong with the machine.”53 Ed Goodman, the doctor who had performed this procedure, admired his friend’s “insatiable curiosity” and agreed that in a different life, he would have made a marvelous doctor.54 When his sense of fancy overreached itself, Roald even seemed to believe he was one. His second wife, Liccy, told me that once on a long-distance flight, when there was a medical emergency and the steward asked whether there was a doctor on board, she had to restrain him physically from getting up to answer the call.

  Being a medical expert was another of what Roald c
alled his “dreams of glory”: childlike insomniac fantasies about the brilliant amateur who rises to the needs of the occasion and outdoes the great professional. Usually these reveries were sporting in nature, but they could also be more diverse. The idea of the amateur doctor, rising from his seat to diagnose the sick passenger’s illness and effect a brilliant cure, would greatly have appealed to him. He had huge respect for doctors, and particularly for those who pioneered new treatments. But he was also not above teasing them. In George’s Marvellous Medicine (1981), a young boy devises a complex potion to cure his cantankerous old grandmother of all her illnesses. The “medicine” is concocted from a crazy mixture of household items, including gloss paint, shaving cream, engine oil, antifreeze, shoe polish and dog flea powder. Dahl dedicated it to “doctors everywhere.”55

  Alongside this scientific streak went another, more illogical, which had its roots in the psychic leanings of his mother. The pragmatic rationalist also had a powerful sense of fatalism and destiny. He told his Manhattan neighbor, Sonia Austrian, that he was convinced the city of New York was in some way to blame for Theo’s accident.56 Pat, by contrast, was desperate to ascribe human blame for the accident and sometimes felt a “sickening clutch of hate” toward her nanny. She was haunted by not knowing what exactly had happened on that corner, and she remained uncertain that Susan was not in some way responsible for Theo’s accident. Roald, on the other hand, seems not to have worried about this. He told Pat it would be both cruel and pointless to fire Susan.57 He took no legal action. Instead, he told his daughter Tessa that he believed a painting of a peacock he had recently purchased was probably responsible. He thought the bird was unlucky. It represented a city whose attractions had now fi-nally withered and from which he longed to escape. He wanted to move permanently back to England.

  When the Dahls returned to Great Missenden in May 1961, White-field Cottage had changed once more. A local builder, Wally Saunders, had constructed a new annex on the east side of the house. Intended as a guest wing, almost immediately Roald began to use it as a room where he could work on antique restoration. Sue Denson recalled how much energy he put into restoring the frame of the huge Chippendale mirror and Alan Higgin remembered Roald teaching him how to regild it. He had already remodelled the garden, planting it with vegetables and more than two hundred native roses. Through its paths roamed a large menagerie of animals, including tortoises, bantam hens, and a “fucking awful insolent gigantic black rabbit,”58 which lived wild in the orchard. Roald tried halfheartedly and unsuccessfully to run it over with Olivia’s tricycle, because it kept eating his vegetables. Most striking perhaps was the elaborate birdhouse, which his brother-in-law Leslie had designed. It was filled with parakeets and four hundred homing budgerigars that flew around the countryside during the day and returned home to roost at night. The birds were a constant source of amusement and fascination to him. “Pat is sitting this moment—and has been for the last hour—on a stool in the aviary,” Roald joked to Sheila St. Lawrence in 1959, “watching the parakeets fighting and fucking. Twenty-five nest boxes. Forty birds and the mating season is in full swing. They copulate incessantly. Every nine or ten minutes. I can’t watch them any more. It gives me a terrible inferiority complex.”59

  Roald now found that he wrote best when he was undisturbed in his hut. It was built out of a single layer of bricks, insulated with polystyrene and divided into two rooms, neither more than six feet wide. In the front room he stored his files, letters and manuscripts in two ancient wooden cabinets, on top of which were perched two tiny model aeroplanes with oak propellers and long slender wings covered in varnished silk. In the opposite corner lay a rubber exercise mat, and several sets of barbells.60 The backroom was his writing space. There, for four hours a day, he could separate himself from the main house and cut himself off from the world of nannies, nurses, schools and shopping. Seated in a soft leather chair—which he replaced with a chair of his mother’s after her death—with his legs up and covered in a warm blanket, he created a world where his imagination could run free. It was not dissimilar to the cockpit of a plane. With the curtains drawn, and only the occasional sound of Claud’s cattle chomping the grasses outside to disturb him, his green baize writing board and lined yellow U.S. legal pads in front of him, his sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga in hand, and a tableful of little treasures at his side, he could escape into an alternative existence and become a “truant boy” once more.

  He missed his professional relationship with Sheila St. Lawrence, but had too much on his mind to try to resurrect it. Sheila had by now moved to Ireland and given up her career as an agent. Despite the fact that she and Roald had been close for thirteen years, that they had families of similar ages, that Sheila had stayed with him through the night at Lenox Hill Hospital on the evening of Theo’s accident, and despite her considerable editorial impact on his next book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they corresponded less and less frequently, and not at all after 1962. Perhaps if Roald’s own life had not been so full of other more pressing disasters, the rift might have been healed. Instead, it almost set a pattern for the future. A close relationship suddenly sundered by a fierce and self-righteous row would become an all-too-familiar trajectory in his life. Sometimes the victim would be professional. Publishers like Bob Bernstein, Bob Gottlieb and Stephen Roxburgh would all be embraced warmly, showered with compliments, then rejected in a flurry of angry and resentful correspondence. With friends and family, the disagreement would usually happen over dinner—typically after several whiskeys and glasses of wine, when Roald would become garrulous and hurtful. His friendship with his Repton school friend, Michael Arnold, ended this way, and his relationship with his nephew Nicholas was soured by a meal where Roald “insulted” and “humiliated” Nicholas’s young wife. Logsdail believed that, in this instance, alcohol was largely the cause.61 Dahl’s daughter Tessa agreed. “Daddy was a mean drunk,”62 she told me, recalling many other fierce domestic rows.

  With Sheila St. Lawrence, the disagreement was somewhat different—firstly because he made some attempt to patch it up and also because Roald was almost certainly hurt himself by its disintegration. After she moved to Ireland, he would occasionally ask Mike Watkins why she did not write to him. There was never a clear answer. For twenty years, Sheila recalled, there was “no communication, nothing, absolutely nothing” between them. Then, just a few years before his death, he invited her to Dublin for a book signing. To her great regret, she was in the United States when he was in Ireland, and consequently could not make it. They never reconnected.

  Ironically, too, despite the energies of the Pick-Pollinger nexus, establishing himself in the United Kingdom proved to be a much slower process than anyone had anticipated. Kiss Kiss was eventually published in the autumn of 1960, but although it received generally good reviews, its success was muted by comparison to its popularity in America. John Betjeman wrote to Dahl congratulating him on the collection.63 From then on, he would always be a fan—affectionately addressing Dahl in superlatives such as “the world’s best short story writer”64 and “best of story writers.”65 Other critics were more measured. H. E. Bates, writing in The Sunday Times on October 9, 1960, summed up the general perception when he described Dahl briefly as “a humorist, whose prime speciality is the macabre. Many of his subjects are quite revolting, some are merely diabolically ingenious, others just plain nasty; but nearly all are very funny.” Disappointed by the UK sales, Michael Joseph’s fervor for James and the Giant Peach began to cool, whereas Alfred Knopf in New York remained “crazy” about it, enthusing that it was the kind of children’s book he had always wanted to publish,66 and telling Dahl himself that it was a “little classic.”67 Roald was now finding that Charles Pick did not return his calls. Soon the firm would renege on its agreement to publish the book and Pick himself would leave to join Heinemann. When Roald found out, he was furious. “It smacks a bit of ‘Fuck you, Jack, I’m all right,’ ” he complained to Mike Watkins. “What
about the writers they wooed so assiduously with a ‘Come to me, I’ll look after you …’?”68 Watkins could offer no reply.

  Throughout 1961, Roald focused on preparing a new musical version of some of his adult stories,‡ and the illustrations and design for James and the Giant Peach. After some indecision, he had eventually agreed that an American, Nancy Ekholm Burkert, should get the job, rather than the distinguished Danish fantasy painter Lars Bo. He had characteristically clear views about the look of the drawings and, perhaps surprisingly, his tastes were neither macabre nor fantastical. His model for James, for example, was Winnie-the-Pooh. Shepard’s Christopher Robin “is and always will be the perfect small boy,” he told his editor at Knopf. “We should get closer to that. … A face with character is not so important as a face with charm. One must fall in love with him.”69 In November 1961, he flew back to New York for the publication of James and the Giant Peach, returning home three weeks later with some glowing reviews. The New York Herald Tribune (Nov. 12, 1961) described the book as “a richly imaginative fantasy, extremely well-told and convincingly illustrated, concluding simply: ‘We love it.’ ” The New York Times was equally positive, terming it a “lively fantasy … a magic brew concocted from absurdly nauseating ingredients … with never a dull moment.” The reviewer was confident that the book would be “received with rapturous attention.”70 In fact, sales were slow and decidedly unspectacular—at least to Dahl’s eyes—but the children’s department at Knopf assured him that even their most successful books always started slowly.