Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  But the garden was not enough to keep Roald’s demons at bay. Whereas Pat was able to cry and talk to others about her lost child, Roald kept himself to himself and seemed incapable of acknowledging his wife’s suffering. He rapidly put all Olivia’s toys and books into a polished oak chest, which he kept in his bedroom. He made Tessa feel that she could never make up for Olivia’s loss. He was silent. Pat found him increasingly distant. “He did not talk about his feelings … did not want to talk about Olivia … he wouldn’t let anything come out, nothing.”8 His daily consumption of alcohol increased and he upped the regular dose of barbiturates for his back pain. Sonia Austrian recalled that during her stay there, she “just could not reach him. … There was no way to talk to him, to do anything, he was totally withdrawn.” His normally garrulous, argumentative personality disappeared completely. He spent hours in his hut, at the cemetery, or alone with his mother. The loss destroyed his lust for life. It also damaged his relationship with Tessa and Theo, who understandably felt they had lost their father. “It took him a long while to get out of that,” Austrian remembered. “I think he always missed [Olivia], I don’t think he ever really got over her death.”9

  Roald struggled to find any kind of consolation. One moment he was the brutal atheist, tearing into Pat’s fragile belief in an afterlife and angrily dismissing it as no more than “trashy sentiment,” the next found him more uncertain. Less than a month after Olivia died, he wrote to his ex-headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher, the supposed tormentor of his friend Michael Arnold, to ask if he could offer them any spiritual guidance. Pat, whose “mystical self” already believed that she would see her daughter again in heaven,10 was probably the principal architect of the visit; but Roald went along with her, asking his old French teacher, Henry Davidson (“Peehard”), now secretary of the Old Reptonian Society, to contact Fisher on their behalf.11 It was a surprising turnaround for such a skeptic, but as Pat recalled, Roald was prepared to give a man who until the previous year had been Archbishop of Canterbury the chance to convince him. On December 18, 1962, he and Pat drove down to Trent Rectory, deep in the Dorset countryside, where Fisher had retired. There the former leader of the Church of England discussed the “hard path”12 he believed the Dahls would need to tread if they were to overcome their loss. Afterwards, they wrote to Fisher thanking him for his help and enclosing copies of Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You as a gift.

  Superficially, the contact appeared to have been very cordial. But Dahl was always touchy about religion and would later claim that the conversation with Fisher finally convinced him Christianity was a sham. Characteristically, the deciding issue appears to have been what “the Boss” said about the Dahls’ family dog, Rowley. Nine years later, Dahl explained his reasoning to his two youngest children, Ophelia and Lucy, by then six and five respectively, on Christmas Day, 1970. They had been to the church at Little Missenden and were carrying some bunches of richly variegated holly to decorate Olivia’s grave. Ophelia asked her father why God had allowed her elder sister to die. Roald admitted that he did not know and then told her about his meeting with Fisher and how certain “the Boss” had been that although Olivia was now in Paradise, her beloved Rowley would never join her there. “His whole face closed up,” he recalled. “I wanted to ask him how he could be so absolutely sure that other creatures did not get the same special treatment as us, but the look of disapproval that had settled around his mouth stopped me. I sat there wondering if this great and famous churchman really knew what he was talking about and whether he knew anything at all about God or heaven, and if he didn’t, then who in the world did? And from that moment on, my darlings, I’m afraid I began to wonder whether there really was a God or not.”13

  Dahl’s Christian faith had always been tenuous, but his mystical streak could be surprisingly powerful. More than anything, he feared that some sort of bitter destiny hung over his family. Two years before, in Manhattan, he had blamed a peacock and a white-faced boy for Theo’s accident. They had seemed like omens of disaster. He had moved to Buckinghamshire, where he thought himself safe from these sinister forces. Now once again he felt threatened. The similarity between his father’s fate and his own weighed heavy on his mind. At one point he seriously considered having a male witch come and exorcise malignant spirits from the house. “I was in a kind of daze,” he told the Life journalist Barry Farrell later. “Morbid thoughts kept after me. It occurred to me that there must be some kind of tie-up and that kind of thought can run you down, you know, worrying about fate and the meaning of things.”14 Alfhild was also disturbed by her brother’s gloomy condition. One day she went to see him and found him contemplating a painting of his lost daughter. He stared at it quietly for a long time, before turning to her and whispering four words: “the face of doom.”15 The picture remained in his hut until the day he died.

  Depression—the secret enemy that had stalked Dahl much of his life, and that he had usually fought off with his unique brand of positive energy—now had him in its grip. He tended to view it as “a great self-indulgence,”16 arguing that the only way to cope with grief was “to bury [it] and not wear it on your sleeve and then roll those sleeves up and get down to putting things right.”17 But this time there was nothing he could do. He began to suffer from heart problems. He took to his bed. A sense of the pointlessness of life overwhelmed him. As a sixteen-year-old schoolboy he had struggled to keep that negativity at bay. Responding to the news that a family friend had recently given birth, he had told his mother: “I suppose you have got to give the baby a present; well, give it a millstone with instructions as to how it should be hung around the neck while in the bath.”18 In that teenage nihilism there lurked at least the shadow of a smile. But there was little laughter at Gipsy House in the first months of 1963. It was the coldest winter for years, with temperatures so low that the ink in his hut froze in the bottle. Sporadic bursts of activity punctuated the melancholy gloom. Roald bullied his doctor into getting gamma globulin for Olivia and Tessa’s great school friends, Sarah and Amanda Conquy, who also had measles. He tried to puzzle out why Olivia’s measles had evolved into deadly encephalitis, hoping he could discover what had made her vulnerable and thereby prevent other children from suffering her fate. But it was beyond him. He retreated into himself, refusing to talk about his pain even to Pat, who was frustrated by what she later described as his “Nordic strain of deep restraint.”19 She wrote to her friends Jean Valentino and Chloe Carter that she felt Roald “truly wanted to die.”20 Sarah and Amanda’s mother, Frankie Conquy, recalled that he could not even bring himself to mention Olivia’s name, though he framed her paintings and poems and hung them all about the house. Years later, in her autobiographical novel Working for Love, Tessa recreated the situation: “My father could not function and my mother, realizing the need for solidarity, rallied herself. For about a year she held our family together.”21 Pat, who longed to talk about her daughter, stoically endured her husband’s silence. She told the columnist Louella Parsons that she felt as if the family were living through the Book of Job.22

  Tessa found her father’s behavior confusing and inexplicable. However hard she tried to help him, however much she tried to console him, he rejected her. Working for Love may ultimately be fiction, but it is so closely based on reality that Tessa thought it accurately reflected much of what she was feeling at the time. In the book, she described her father as “beyond help. He could not speak for grief. I remember seeing his beautiful blue eyes fill with tears. I saw him weep in his bedroom, and then when he noticed me, he asked me to leave.” In another scene, the narrator Molly (Tessa) describes her father driving to school and asking her to sing a song that her dead sister used to sing. The father ends up shouting: “Why can’t you be more like her? Why can’t you sing like her? The woods, the walks, the spark, you haven’t got it, have you? Why can’t you be her?”23 Pat despaired of his behavior, wondering if things would ever improve. “It gets worse rather than better,” she told friends. “I
want him to get a job that will force him to see people and work with others.”24

  Then, as winter turned into spring, hope appeared in the form of an organization called International Help for Children (IHC), which assisted illegitimate boys and girls in southern Italy who had been abandoned by their families. Marjorie Clipstone, a neighbor, had brought the pioneering work of Father Mario Borrelli to Roald and Pat’s attention. Borrelli, who helped found the charity, had spent many months living as a vagrant among the vagabond children of Naples and had subsequently founded a hostel for these scugnizzi, or street urchins. His autobiography had just been published25 and a documentary about him recently screened on British television. The children’s helplessness stirred Dahl. It not only stimulated his natural instinct for generosity and his identification with the underdog, it also motivated him to do something positive. Following the advice to put the self aside that Charles Marsh had given him years earlier, he and Pat put all of Olivia’s trust fund into IHC and Roald himself became an active chairman of the Great Missenden branch, which eventually boasted over three hundred members. For the first time in his life he became a committed public campaigner, writing outspoken reports that bristled with eloquent indignation at the human cruelty and injustice he perceived around him.

  Alberobello is a small town high up in the mountains above the heel of Italy. … The inhabitants of Alberobello are poor and backward. They are also shockingly bigoted. In those parts, for example, a child with a deformity is regarded as a disgrace to the family and is liable to be kept locked in the cellar for life. Any woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock is immediately treated as an outcast, and neither church nor family will give her assistance. And recently, in Alberobello, in this town with a lovely name, there was a case of a twelve and a half year-old girl who had been brutally raped. Her family kicked her out on the spot. She ran for help to the convent, hysterical. The nuns shut the door in her face. Nobody would touch her. She was lost. So you can see that there is a problem here.26

  While Roald immersed himself in charitable work, Pat found some solace in acting. She and the entire family went to Los Angeles for two weeks, while she filmed an episode of a popular medical television series called Ben Casey. When they returned to England, Theo’s seizures returned. It seemed his shunt was malfunctioning again. Later in the summer, he lost consciousness and had to be rushed to hospital. Roald assumed that now—at last—his son would get the replacement valve which he had helped design. Kenneth Till, however, proposed removing the device altogether. He had attempted unsuccessfully to do this eighteen months earlier. Now he wanted to try again. It was a gamble. If Theo, who was barely three, could last thirty days without the drain, Till believed he would be in the clear. Roald and Pat agreed to let him go ahead. So, on September 8, for the ninth time in Theo’s short life, the surgeons operated to remove the shunt. This time, there would be good news. Theo survived the thirty days without a relapse. His hydrocephalus did not return. He would never need the new valve his father had helped pioneer. For once in the Dahl family’s recent history a medical crisis had produced a happy outcome. And there was yet another piece of good news too. “Hot news from the Frog Laboratories in Oxford,”27 Dahl scribbled to Mike Watkins in October. Pat was pregnant again.

  Eventually Dahl’s spirits improved sufficiently for him to return to the alternative reality he had started to create almost three years earlier. Just before Olivia’s death, he had retitled his latest story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and greatly fleshed out its central character, Willy Wonka—the superhuman genius with an ability to create the most outlandish and exciting sweets the world had ever seen. This extravagant magician—whose name Dahl had refashioned from a boomerang called the Skilly Wonka his half brother Louis once made for him—possessed a personality that was much like his creator’s. He was capricious, entertaining and brilliant. He was an adult, but one with the sensibilities of a child. He was devoid of sentimentality. He was funny. He was private. He was elusive. And he had a dark side. Bad children would get mashed, stretched, transformed into a giant blueberries or boiled into fudge if they stepped out of line in his inventing rooms. On the surface he could seem aloof, but underneath he had a kind heart. It was perhaps the most memorable character Dahl would ever create—a man who lived by his own rules, within his own realm, apparently safe from the world outside his factory walls. When Roald finally closed the door to the hut, pulled the curtains tight, sat down in his chair, wrapped a sleeping bag around his legs and switched on his anglepoise lamp, he too found himself in a world which he controlled completely and where no unpleasant surprises could disturb him. It also was reassuring that this imaginary universe was focused on one of his most favorite things: chocolate.

  Ever since he was a child, Roald had been fascinated by sweets—and particularly by chocolate. Beyond boyhood ecstasies among the liquorice bootlaces and multicolored gobstoppers that lined the walls of Mrs. Pratchett’s sweetshop in Llandaff, he had honed a palate for chocolate tasting at Repton, where his housemaster had arranged with the marketing department of Cadbury’s at Bourneville that each year every boy in The Priory would receive a cardboard box containing twelve bars of new Cadbury’s chocolate. The box came with a checklist on which its recipient was invited to write comments and award marks. To make it suitably scientific, they always included one “control” bar—a coffee cream. Roald had relished his role as a schoolboy connoisseur—he claimed in Boy that he had once commented that one chocolate creation was “too subtle for the common palate,”28 and he fantasized about the extraordinary place where these new recipes were devised. This passion continued into adulthood. One of the talismanic objects he kept beside him in his writing hut was a big silver ball made out of wrappers taken from the chocolate bars he ate for lunch each day when he was working at his office in Shell in London in the 1930s. Somewhere between a golf ball and tennis ball in size, it was so unexpectedly heavy that, when he brought it out and showed it to visitors, few could guess what it was. Most reckoned it was some sort of cannonball.

  Roald’s own taste in chocolate was itself eclectic. Sometimes it was highbrow. During the war, he arranged for regular boxes of milk and bittersweet chocolate to be sent across the Atlantic to his mother and each of his siblings from a high-end New York chocolatier called Rosemarie de Paris. This little bit of luxury helped relieve the miseries of rationing. But his real enthusiasm was for commercial mass-market chocolates. Most meals at Gipsy House, however grand, concluded with a selection of these familiar brands, produced from a small red plastic box. In an essay in The Roald Dahl Cookbook, written in the last year of his life and first published posthumously as Memories with Food at Gipsy House, he waxed lyrically about the seven miraculous years between 1930 and 1937 when the greatest of these chocolates—Mars, KitKat, Aero, Maltesers, Rolo, Smarties and many others—were all invented. He thought that British children should be taught these dates at school, instead of the reigns of the Kings and Queens of England, and—with a smile—he compared them to other golden ages which, in the arts, had produced Beethoven and Mozart in music, the French Impressionists in art, and Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy in literature.

  The exuberant pleasure in the magic of invention is one of the great qualities of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In that respect, the book mirrors Dahl’s own real-life crisis in the aftermath of Theo’s accident; but in other ways its rip-roaring energy and swagger seem to stand at a distance from the pain of Olivia’s death and the many continuing anxieties surrounding Theo, to whom the tale is dedicated. Those two disasters partially explain why the story went through six different rewrites, but they do not entirely explain its long gestation, which was also due to an obsessive need to clarify the storyline. Much of the narrative remained constant throughout. The essential nature of the two main characters, for example: the capricious Willy Wonka and the impoverished, spirited and kindly child, Charlie Bucket, never changed. In all versions of the story, Charlie wins one of the
“golden tickets” that have been hidden under the wrappers of his most popular chocolate bar, thereby entitling him to a trip around Wonka’s extraordinary factory. His fellow winners—there were originally ten—likewise were always grotesque parodies of childish vices such as greed, selfishness, conceitedness, television addiction, or being spoiled. But there the similarities end.

  At the beginning, there were no Oompa-Loompa factory workers and no Grandpa Joe to look after Charlie. Nor were any of the child grotesques present in their final form. Characters who were eventually eliminated from the adventure or substantially altered included Elvira Entwistle (the prototype of Veruca Salt), Miranda Grope (who fell into the chocolate river), Tommy Troutbeck (who disobeyed Wonka and ended up in the Pounding and Cutting Room), Bertie Upside (who overheats after eating too many warming candies), Marvin Prune, Violet Strabismus and Herpes Trout. The plot, too, was quite different. It was a detective story in which Charlie strayed from Wonka’s gaze long enough to be accidentally coated in quick-drying chocolate. Mistaken for one of Wonka’s giant “chocolate boys,” he is delivered as an Easter present to Wonka’s son, Freddie. Trapped inside his chocolate shell, and left overnight in Wonka’s home, Charlie witnesses a burglary. The following morning, when he has been liberated from his cocoa prison, he helps identify the thieves and is rewarded by Wonka with a huge sweetshop of his own, which “occupies a whole block in the centre of the city and is nine stories high.”29 Most strikingly perhaps, in the early drafts, Dahl described Charlie as a “small NEGRO boy,” who boldly confronts Wonka with the issue that innumerable parents and educators would ponder in future years. What actually happened to the children who were juiced, stretched, minced, flushed down a rubbish chute or cooked in a fudge-boiler? Shocked that Charlie should think anyone might actually have been hurt in his domain, Wonka’s reply is true to form in its innocent naïveté: “I run a chocolate factory, you know,” he tells the boy indignantly, “not a butcher’s shop.”30