Roald returned to an English winter so bitter that he had to cut a path almost 100 feet long through the orchard to reach his writing hut.71 There he began revising the manuscript of a new children’s book, Charlie’s Chocolate Boy. But he found himself starved of advice. Mike Watkins had responded with some insensitivity to the first draft, telling him curtly that the story was excellent, “but not quite up to the level of James,”72 and offering no advice, no suggestions, and little enthusiastic encouragement. Nor was Laurence Pollinger an editor. He was a dealmaker and a negotiator—as Sheila St. Lawrence put it, he was “all business.”73 Dahl did not even bother to send him a draft. In desperation, he begged Mike Watkins to find out where Sheila was living in Ireland and send the draft of the new children’s book to her.
To make matters worse, Pat, whose opinion he also sought out and trusted, was away, shooting a new movie in Texas. Earlier in the year, she had received a script entitled Hud Bannon, from the director Martin Ritt, who asked if she would consider playing the role of Alma Brown. It was not a huge part, only twenty-five minutes of screen time, but Pat liked the character—“a tall woman, shapely, comfortable and pretty … with an indulgent knowledge of the world.”74 The fact that her co-star would be Paul Newman and that Ritt would allow her the opportunity to go home to see her children for a few days when the shooting locations changed from Hollywood to Texas, also led her to accept the offer with alacrity. All through the shoot she sensed a special chemistry between her and Newman, who would later describe working with her as “a delight.”75§ She flew home at the end of July, and a few days later the family departed for their annual summer holiday in Norway.
The family itself was damaged, but strong. Looking after Theo, whose walking skills were improving fast and whose mind seemed surprisingly undamaged by his trauma, had brought Pat and Roald closer together, and she told a journalist that she no longer constantly challenged him or wished to “have nice fights and make it up in bed.” Instead, she acknowledged that constant disagreements simply wore away at the trust her husband needed, observing that after an argument, Roald “simply didn’t like me—for days and days.”76 Theo had become a “centering force,”77 assisting the family to settle down more permanently in England. For herself, Pat still missed New York and life on East 81st Street—“that dirty old building with its nutty inhabitants.”78 But despite Tessa deliberately wetting the bed a few times,79 and initially refusing to go to school, she and Olivia soon adjusted to life in Great Missenden. Roald bought Olivia a glass cabinet for her most precious possessions and she spent hours playing with her miniatures on a little rug that lay in front of it. Sometimes he indulged his own childish side with them, chasing fire engines through the countryside in search of adventure, launching tiny fire-balloons into the summer skies, inventing stories about the witches’ tree at the top of the garden, and making Olivia and Tessa’s names appear magically on the lawn one morning by sprinkling weedkiller on the grass at midnight. He told his children it was the work of the fairies.
Gradually, even Pat was beginning to come to terms with English rural life. She began describing Little Whitefield as her “permanent home,” boasting that the following year, 1963, she had no plans to go to the United States at all. “You see the serenity of this sleepy, leafy place is irresistible to me,” she told a reporter from Housewife magazine, “and work is not.”80 Her relationship with Roald seemed to have settled into one of a profound companionship that had been tempered and strengthened by cruel adversity. Pat defined herself to the same journalist as a good wife—one who was her husband’s “best and truest friend.” Surrounded by three children and Roald, on whose face wrinkles were starting to appear, and whose hair was now thinning rapidly, she would later describe the two years after Theo’s accident as one of the most beautiful periods of her life. Sue Denson agreed. To her, the Dahls seemed as strong and resilient a family unit as you could imagine.
Each of the children had a different character. Seven-year-old Olivia, the eldest, was fascinated by many of her father’s hobbies. She loved painting and making things. To Tessa, she was glorious: “beautiful and willowy, translucent and glowing.”81 Roald delighted in her curiosity, her kindness, and her love of plants and animals. She would spend hours on her own in the bird house, just watching what was going on. Although he had described her as “an irregular little bastard”82 when she was a baby, and had smacked her when she misbehaved, now that she was a little girl, he found being with her an “enchantment.”83 Sheila St. Lawrence was similarly captivated. “We have all fallen in love with Olivia,” she wrote to Roald shortly after his daughter’s birth. “She is magnificent. I am a bit jealous of her wonderful prettiness and delicacy.”84 She illuminated summers at Gipsy House. “Breakfast on the lawn, Olivia running around naked,” Roald wrote Sheila in 1956, “all the huge fruit trees in the orchard now a sea of pink and white blossom and the first delicious young tender spinach picked from the garden.”85 Olivia learned to identify all the roses, reciting their Latin names for her father and listing the qualities that made each of them distinctive.86 Roald revelled in the time he spent alone with her.
Michael Arnold’s son Nicholas recalled too that she seemed to have “something of the angel about her,”87 while her aunt Alfhild fondly remembered her teaching Theo to walk by placing books carefully on the ground and gently persuading him to put his feet one after the other on each book.88 Tessa, on the contrary was “a little tiger”89—a “cat,”90 who was feisty and determined. She was a humorist, too, with a quick sense of wit and an enormous grin.91 Pat thought she had been molded in the womb, not by glorious walks in the summer meadows but by “the catwalks and hot studio sets of A Face in the Crowd.”92 And Theo? He was a mystery. No one was quite certain how the injuries he had sustained as a baby would affect him when he grew up. Roald was simply pleased that he was alive.
Throughout 1962, life seemed to be settling into the kind of familiar pattern Roald had long desired. Pat was away for eleven weeks shooting Hud, but he was blissfully content to stay at home, writing, gardening, and taking the children to and from school when required. He continued revising Charlie’s Chocolate Boy and even started a new children’s book. Then, one day in November 1962, Olivia returned home from school with a note from the headmistress at Godstowe, notifying all parents that there was an outbreak of measles. Pat and Roald were concerned largely for Theo, because he was still so vulnerable to infection. There was no generic measles vaccination available then—the first was licensed in the United States in 1963. However, Dahl knew that gamma globulin could be used to boost children’s immunity against the disease and that, although uncommon in England, in America it was a fairly routine prophylactic. Pat once again called her brother-in-law Ashley Miles to see if he could help. Miles agreed to send some. But he only provided enough for Theo. “Let the girls get measles,” he told her, “it will be good for them.”93 Three days later, Olivia was covered in spots.
Roald and Pat separated her from her siblings and let the disease take its course. After a couple of days of mild fever, all seemed to be progressing normally. When she awoke on the third day, her temperature had come down and she was sufficiently alert for Roald to teach her how to play chess. She beat him immediately. After eating a good lunch, she went to sleep again at 5 p.m. and did not wake until late the following morning. Only now she did not want to play games, complaining instead that she had a headache. Roald did his best to distract her. He tried to persuade her to make a monkey out of colored pipe cleaners. But she was not interested. He noticed also that her fingers, usually so dextrous, were fumbling and imprecise. All she seemed to want to do was sleep. Roald and Pat called their GP, Mervyn Brigstock, who came over in the afternoon. He examined Olivia carefully and, although he agreed that she was strangely lethargic, he found nothing wrong. He left half an hour later. Roald returned to his hut. It was about four o’clock.
Soon afterwards, Roald’s sister Else dropped round to see how he
r goddaughter was faring. She looked in on Olivia, who seemed sound asleep. Sue Denson, the nanny, went down to make Tessa and Theo their tea. At 5 p.m., just as dusk had fallen, Pat went back into Olivia’s bedroom and discovered her daughter having convulsions. She stared at her mother with “dead-looking eyes,”94 then suddenly became quite still, “her mouth gaping limply, oozing spit.”95 Pat ran to the switch that connected the hut to the main house and hit it desperately. Four quick flashes brought Roald running. Immediately, he called Dr. Brigstock. While they waited for him to arrive, Pat and Roald cooled Olivia’s forehead with cold flannels. But she did not respond. Soon she was unconscious. As soon as Brigstock saw her, he summoned an ambulance. Olivia’s breathing was now shallow and irregular and she needed oxygen. Roald wrapped his limp daughter in an eiderdown and carried her out to the ambulance, which rushed her away to nearby Stoke Mandeville Hospital. There they hoped she could be resuscitated. Pat stayed behind with the other children. Brigstock went with Olivia in the ambulance. Roald followed behind in his car.96
* I have reconstructed this version of the crash from various notes and accounts given by Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl within two years of the accident. These include a lengthy interview Neal gave to Lloyd Shearer in the Long Island Sunday Press.
† Harvey Orkin was Pat’s agent—a man she would describe as a “totally appealing, warm and joyful human being.” Roald did not initially take to him, describing him in a letter to Charles Marsh as “a loud-mouthed Jewish gent of the worst type.” However, when Orkin turned up during the hospital crisis and drove the Dahls from Lenox Hill to Presbyterian Hospital, Roald’s perception of him changed radically. “He was the sort of friend who would drive through a storm to help,” Pat recalled her husband declaring afterwards. “There was no long line of cars at the curbstone, just Harvey’s.” (Dahl’s own description of events that evening suggests that Orkin drove Dr. Watson’s car.)—Neal, As I Am, pp. 121–122, 218; Roald Dahl, Undated letter to Charles Marsh, c. 1954—CMP.
‡ This proposed project, devised by the successful English writing team of Ned Sherrin and Caryl Brahms, was in development for many months before Dahl abandoned it, feeling that neither Sherrin nor Brahms had brought sufficient energy and new ideas to the adaptation.
§ After her stroke, Patricia came to believe that Hud had been shot the following year, after Olivia’s death. She told this to the Life magazine journalist Barry Farrell and later repeated it in her autobiography As I Am, where she recounted a fictitious story about being in a swimming pool with Paul Newman and telling him of Olivia’s death. His response, she claimed, was insensitive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Breaking Point
Awful drive. Lorries kept holding us up on narrow roads. Got to hospital. Ambulance went to wrong entrance. Backed out. Arrived. Young doctor in charge. Mervyn and he gave her 3 mg sodium amatol* I sat in hall. Smoked. Felt frozen. A small single bar electric fire on wall. An old man in next room. Woman doctor went to phone. She was trying urgently to locate another doctor. He arrived. I went in. Olivia lying quietly. Still unconscious. She has an even chance, doctor said. They had tapped her spine. Not meningitis. It’s encephalitis. Mervyn left in my car. I stayed. Pat arrived with Else and John. John went out to get some whiskey. Pat went in to see Olivia. Kissed her. Spoke to her. Still unconscious. I went in. I said, “Olivia … Olivia.” She raised her head slightly off pillow. Sister said don’t. I went out. We drank whiskey. I told doctor to consult experts. Call anyone. He called a man in Oxford. I listened. Instructions were given. Not much could be done. I first said I would stay on. Then I said I’d go back with Pat and Else and John. Went. Arrived home. Called Philip [Rainsford] Evans.† He called hospital. Called me back. “Shall I come?” “Yes please.” I said I’d tell hospital he was coming. I called. Doc thought I was Evans. He said
I’m afraid she’s worse. I got in the car. Got to hospital. Walked in. Two doctors advanced on me from waiting room. How is she? I’m afraid it’s too late. I went into her room. Sheet was over her. Doctor said to nurse go out. Leave him alone. I kissed her. She was warm. I went out. “She is warm.” I said to doctors in hall, “why is she so warm?” “Of course,” he said. I left.1
No one knows exactly when Dahl wrote this distressingly cool and clinical account of how his daughter died. The meticulous description of her final day, of which this is the conclusion, was written in note form, in a green school exercise book, on whose cover, in capitals, was written one word: OLIVIA. He kept it at the back of a particularly obscure drawer in his hut and told no one about it. His family only discovered it after his own death, twenty-eight years later. Its focus on detail suggests that, like the notes he made after Theo’s accident, these series of snapshots were written soon after the event, when the disaster was all still bitterly fresh in his mind. Perhaps it was just the reflex response of the habitual writer. Possibly it was a kind of improvised therapy, an attempt to deal with the fact that his daughter’s death had robbed him of the sense of forward momentum he had always previously been able to generate in a time of crisis. It may simply have been an agonizing aide-mémoire that helped ensure that the emotional wound of losing his daughter would never entirely heal. The ugly details of her sudden death, which the soothing analgesic of memory might with time have blurred and fuzzed, would now lurk there forever in a secret corner of his most private space. One glance alone would be sufficient to re-evoke the immediate intensity of those emotions of loss.
For Olivia’s death was quite different to Theo’s accident. Theo had required his father’s active care and attention. Roald was able to channel all his reserves of positive energy into the practical issues of designing the valve that might give his son a normal life again. With Olivia there was nothing he could do to affect the outcome. She was gone and he could not bring her back. Her death left him “limp with despair.” And fast behind the sense of loss was a feeling of guilt that somehow he had let his “favourite child” down. “I wish we’d had a chance to fight for her,”2 he told Mike Watkins a few days after her death. The uncertain sense that somehow he had failed as the family protector, and had not done enough to shield his daughter from the cruelty of the world, would haunt him for years.
Pat was waiting for him when he returned home. She already knew the worst. The doctors at the hospital had called her to break the news. Roald hugged her desperately, his “heavy sobs” spilling onto her shoulder. Then she sensed that he needed to be alone. She knew already he was “destroyed.”3 The pediatrician Dr. Evans, who had arrived at the hospital after Olivia died, came early the next morning to Gipsy House and told them that she had been the victim of measles encephalitis, a rare inflammation of the brain which can arise from measles, and which affects one in a thousand cases. He confirmed that large doses of gamma globulin could well have prevented her from getting the disease. Thus, Pat remembered, began the “landslide of anger and frustration”4 that almost buried the family.
The children were resilient. Theo was too young to understand what was happening, while five-year-old Tessa simply responded to the news by asking her mother if all of Olivia’s miniatures were now hers. This upset Pat, but it was exactly what Tessa’s aunt Alfhild had done when her elder sister died four decades earlier. Only later would the effects of her elder sister’s death on her own psychology become clear to Tessa—to such an extent that even now she finds her mind has “blanked” many memories of Olivia.5 Pat found surprising consolation from Mormor. Her Norwegian mysticism and “crystal vision” offered a sense that death was not the absolute end. Moreover, Pat knew that her seventy-seven-year-old mother-in-law had suffered in 1920 exactly as she was suffering now. The parallels between the deaths of Astri and Olivia were indeed uncanny. Each had been the eldest child, each the apple of their father’s eye, each seven years old when a medical emergency abruptly ended their young lives.
The funeral took place in the nearby village of Little Missenden inside a tiny church, almost a thousand y
ears old, some of whose stones dated back to ancient Saxon England. It was a simple service, “peaceful and short,”6 as Alfhild described it, with family and a handful of friends in attendance. Snow fell as they buried Olivia, inspiring Else to compose a poem comparing that pristine winter canopy to a white blanket that enfolded her grave with love. But it offered Roald little consolation. Sonia Austrian came to visit the family after Christmas and found him absorbed in creating a living monument to his daughter. He had bought two plots in the graveyard and on her grave he and Pat had inscribed a quotation from W. B. Yeats—“She stands before me as a living child.” Around it, Roald planted an intricate alpine garden, with rocks chosen from different quarries, and more than two hundred different plants—including tiny Japanese evergreens, a cineraria from Afghanistan and countless varieties of snowdrop. With the help of Valerie Finnis, an expert in alpine plants, who worked at the nearby Waterperry Horticultural School for Women, he was fashioning an exquisite miniature world—understated, but powerful in its somber organic melancholy—and one that would always require his constant care and attention. As she watched her father’s “enormous hands holding a small fork, delicately weeding, forbidding the plants to die,” it seemed to Tessa as if her father was being “consumed” by the garden, as if he was “frightened to let go of the last living part of her.”7
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