Dear Mama,
Pat is really doing very well. At present she is helped out of bed into a wheelchair for all meals, and also whenever she wants to go to the pot. She understands possibly 50% of everything that is said to her, it may be more. Speech is poor, but she is just beginning to have therapy on that, and it is coming back slowly. She watches one’s lips and then copies very well. You tell her to say “Tessa.” She tries, fails, then tries again and succeeds. If she has a request to make she usually gets as far as “I want to …” or “Can I have …” But this will probably come back almost totally in time. She still has no use in her right arm. Her right leg is beginning to move. In herself, she is very fit and cheerful. She smiles a great deal. She has met and completely recognised Tessa & Theo … I think that in about four days we will get her home here to the house, with a full time living-in nurse. That will make things much easier for everyone, and much pleasanter for her. … They are going to put a steel brace on her right leg to help her to walk. … The children are all fine, and everyone is very braced by Pat’s condition.
Love to all
Roald 4
Miraculously, barely a week after she began to regain consciousness, and a month after she had suffered the stroke, Pat was discharged from the hospital to convalesce in Pacific Palisades. She left wearing an eye-patch as well as a leg brace. A scarf hid the scars on her shaven head. Assisting her into the car, Roald told the press proudly that his wife was now “fully conscious and her thought processes are perfect. … She is a tremendous fighter.”5 But when she got home, this bravado was more difficult to maintain. Bouquets of flowers and bowls of fruit from well-wishers arrived at the house daily. Frank Sinatra sent over his chauffeur to deliver a portable gramophone and a stack of records. Pat showed little interest. Roald forced her into daily physiotherapy and speech therapy, and hired Annie, a “fine enormous negress”6 as a live-in nurse to look after her. But as Pat struggled to put her thoughts into words, to teach herself the names of primary colors, to work out how to use her right arm and feed herself, she became overwhelmed by the awareness of exactly what she had lost. The fact that she was pregnant also made relearning how to walk particularly exhausting. One of the other nurses, Jean Alexander, remembered that to get her to exercise was “like pulling teeth.”7 Roald later described his wife’s condition in terms that starkly contrasted with the facade he had put on for the reporters outside the hospital. In reality, Pat had “no initiative.” “If left alone, she would sit and stare into space and in half an hour a great black cloud of depression would envelop her mind. Unless I was prepared to have a bad-tempered desperately unhappy nitwit in the house, some very drastic action would have to be taken.”8
Encouraged by Charles Carton, Dahl therefore embarked on an innovative regime of almost constant mental and physical stimulation. His methods were Spartan—almost reminiscent of the kind of discipline he himself had experienced at school. There was to be no self-pity, no indulgence toward the illness, just a determination to beat all the disabilities. His approach, Pat recalled, “was to get me to do it myself.” Hard work would be the key. Though the speech therapist had said that an hour or so a day was all she could initially manage, and that doing more might even be harmful, Roald forced her to do four or five times more than that. He felt that “idleness was far more dangerous than fatigue,” Pat later wrote. “And anything was better than vegetating.”9 Frustrated, tired and uncertain of the outcome of her treatment, Pat was frequently deliberately uncooperative, although she could still perform when the occasion demanded. Within a week of being discharged from the hospital, the director Mel Brooks and his wife Anne Bancroft, who had taken over Pat’s role in Seven Women, invited the Dahls over to their house for dinner. Brooks expected Pat to arrive in a wheelchair, but was astounded to find her walking around the house unaided.10 Pat herself remembered the occasion as “a fine evening,” although she “couldn’t follow a word of the conversation.”11
Carton’s wife Claire agreed that Roald’s attitude was “extraordinarily instrumental”12 in the speed of her recovery. To others, Roald’s strict approach seemed unnecessarily controlling and strangely lacking in human warmth. Pat’s mother Eura, for example, recovering from viral sinusitis in Florida, was desperate to see her daughter, but her doctors had forbidden her to travel. Roald barely communicated with her. Mrs. Neal wrote to Dahl’s sister Else, complaining that she felt she had been consciously kept away from her crippled daughter. With characteristic tact, Else tried to explain what she felt her brother needed to achieve his ends. Her letter is a fascinating articulation of that detached, buttoned-up quality in Roald that was at its most striking when he was most vulnerable, and that would often baffle outsiders when they encountered it. In this time of crisis, when the family’s survival was at stake, Else said, it was not sympathetic relatives but skilled outsiders that her brother needed. He could not allow himself to be exposed to extreme feelings, which might deflect him from his task and interfere with what he believed was necessary for Pat’s recovery. “Any strong emotional element” was likely to be “damaging,” she concluded. Encouraging Mrs. Neal to be patient, Else assured her that since the illness, Roald and Pat’s understanding of each other had been “to the exclusion of everyone else,” consoling her with the thought that “they have been through so much together that it has strengthened their love and trust of each other.”13 This may have been true. But the absence of tangible affection in that understanding was distressing to almost all who witnessed it.
Roald behaved like a general running a military campaign, demanding absolute adherence to his rules from everyone in the household. Pat’s friend Gloria Stern, who came to visit one afternoon, found him reminiscent both of a stage manager and a traffic cop. She admired his “fierce, unrelenting approach,” but was disturbed because it also reminded her of “the way one trains a dog.”14 Marjorie Clipstone, their friend from Great Missenden, who was travelling in America, also came to visit. She planned to spend two days in Pacific Palisades. She stayed a month. In a letter to Alfhild, she too painted a disturbed picture of life in Romany Drive, with the seven-year-old Tessa particularly unhappy. Clipstone noticed that Roald spent a lot of time “boosting” his daughter, and she reflected that he “must need a lot of boosting too, even if his stoical independence won’t let him ask for it or even accept it easily.” Roald’s stoicism did relax sufficiently for him to admit to her that he was in “terrible trouble”15 with his mother-in-law, who had finally come to stay and whose approach to Pat’s condition was clashing completely with his. One evening, Eura cooked her daughter a special steak for dinner. Roald was appalled. He took it off the plate, cut it into pieces and passed it around the table, so that everyone could have some of it. “She should share with everybody,” Pat remembered him saying. “She should not be treated special.”16 Eura was made to feel so unwelcome that she decided to return home early.
Mrs. Neal might have consoled herself that she was by no means the only one whose offers of help were spurned. The recently widowed Claudia Marsh also suggested she fly out and assist Roald. She too was refused, although Claudia understood why. She sensed, like Else, that all Roald wanted was for “everyone to leave him alone” so he could “concentrate on what was completely absorbing him.”17 He was almost entirely focused on Pat’s treatment. Helping him were a household of six staff: Sheena Burt; Angela Kirwan; the speech therapist; the physiotherapist; Annie the nurse; and a cleaning woman. Sheena Burt wrote to Sofie Magdalene describing Dahl admiringly as “the only man among all these women … such a strong man that one feels one can carry on with his inspiration and guidance.”18 But Sheena was blissfully unaware of the financial implications of Roald’s attitude. Though the Ritts had continued to let them use their house rent-free and though Pat’s medical insurance paid half of the surgeon’s fees and 80 percent of the hospital bills, running the household in Los Angeles was costing Roald more than $800 a week (perhaps as much as $4,500 by today’s v
alues). The family was living off its savings, and the prognosis for Pat’s recovery was still highly uncertain. For the “Estimated period of disability,” Carton had written on his discharge notes: “Cannot be determined at this time.”19 So, as soon as Pat was declared fit to travel, Roald returned to England. At Gipsy House, he would be able to construct a support system that would be significantly cheaper than the one in California. “I shall be glad to be back,” he told his mother.20
The family arrived back in Great Missenden on May 17, after breaking the journey for two days in Washington to stay with Claudia Marsh. Cary Grant had driven them to the airport in Los Angeles and Dahl had announced to the waiting reporters that his wife would walk onto the plane unaided. She did. She also handled a fifteen-minute press conference with some aplomb, although her speech problems were manifest for all to see. To the London press, she even cautiously hazarded the view that one day she might return to the stage. In his own version of what happened, Roald merged the two events for maximum effect, claiming that Pat was “unable to answer any of their questions except in monosyllables” while emphasizing his own role in her recovery. “When I told them that one day she would act again, the room went silent,” he wrote later. “The reporters stared. I might just as well have announced that the woman was going to sprout wings and fly to the moon.” In the same context he also declared that his wife’s treatment was being conducted without any direct medical supervision. “I called in no doctors,” he announced. “It was a matter that had to be sorted out by the family alone.”21 His was a dauntless, intrepid response to a crisis. Yet part of this survival mechanism involved turning events into a coherent narrative with no gray areas: a story with a challenge, a hero and a positive outcome that would defy the prognoses of other pundits. It was almost one of his “dreams of glory.”
A nasty surprise awaited the Dahls when they got home to Gipsy House. The interior was almost unrecognizable. The decorators had stripped out the wooden doors and antique floor tiles, installed bookshelves with fake books in the drawing room, and replaced much of their antique furniture with more fashionable bamboo alternatives. The final flourish was to paint the drawing room dark brown and lay a matching carpet that Roald described as “the colour of elephant turds.”22 A few weeks earlier, the ever watchful Sofie Magdalene had warned her son that all was not well, and criticized Linda Blandford, the journalist in charge of the project. Despite her disabilities, she even offered to sort out the situation. Roald’s reply had been characteristically positive: “I don’t worry about the chocolate walls and ceiling. Pat did agree to all those colours before she left. And I don’t really agree with you about Linda Blandford. I think she has been splendid. You see, she is a professional, doing a job for her magazine, and part of the deal was that she and her decorator, after ascertaining Pat’s wishes, should be allowed to go ahead from there on their own. … She has been marvellous about getting us all sorts of appliances as cheaply as possible through the magazine. … If we don’t like the result, then that is really our fault, not hers. We certainly will not denounce it as soon as we see it. We’ll give it a good try. All radical changes are hard to adjust to.”23 As soon as he returned, however, he realized that his mother was right. Immediately, he set to work, ripping out bookcases, repainting the walls, replacing the new doors and removing the new flooring.
While all this was going on, he was devising a strategy for Pat’s rehabilitation based, as he saw it, on “common sense” and the avoidance of “inertia, boredom, frustration and depression” in the patient.24 It involved an increase in the levels of stimulation she had been receiving in Los Angeles. He sent her for physiotherapy at a nearby RAF Military Hospital, where Pat felt as though she were in a boot camp.25 Then each day, between nine and twelve in the morning and two and five in the afternoon, he arranged for friends and neighbors to visit her. These amateur therapists—Dahl described them as “intelligent, ordinary people, a lot of them retired or housewives whose husbands were working”26—read children’s books to her and played elementary word games. Some encouraged her to draw pictures, or laid out objects on a tray and got her to try to memorize them. Others stretched her mind with simple crosswords, jigsaw puzzles or arithmetic. Many were initially shocked at her physical appearance. “It was very upsetting,” Pam Lowndes told me, recalling Pat’s eyepatch and leg brace. “I mean, from a vibrant, lovely-looking woman, she now looked terrible.” Pam also remembered Roald’s stern command not to “stand any nonsense” from his wife, encouraging her to push Pat as far as she could. But when Roald was not around, Pam recalled, the therapists were not quite so firm with their patient.27 Dahl probably sensed this, writing later in an introduction to a set of notes for treating recovering stroke victims that “recreation and fun” should also be “an important part of the programme.”28
In September, Jean Alexander and Gloria Carugati, two of the nurses who had worked with Pat in Los Angeles, came to the United Kingdom to work at the Atkinson Morley Neurological Hospital in Wimbledon, on the outskirts of London. Anne Bancroft paid for their flights over, and on their days off they too joined the roster of helpers at Gipsy House. The atmosphere there was often strained. Humiliated by being pushed into situations that she felt were beyond her, Pat complained vociferously. She would frequently tell her niece Anna Corrie to fuck off when she tried to help her and sometimes her responses were entirely unintelligible. A cigarette came out as an “oblogon,” a spoonful of sugar as a “soap driver.” A martini was a “sooty swatch.” “Inject me again,” she would say if she had forgotten something.29 Tessa described the situation in Working for Love: “She would shout and scream. Make up words that we didn’t understand and then laugh hysterically. Every day swarms of visitors would come and sit with her. On my father’s instructions they would make her study, like a kindergarten child, reading, writing and arithmetic. Matthew [Theo] was more advanced at school than she was.”30
Pat’s frustration was compounded by the fact that friends like the actor Kenneth Haigh, Mormor’s companion Mrs. Newland, the Kirwans, and Frankie Conquy, the mother of Tessa’s best friend Amanda, now seemed more like tutors than comrades. Although these sessions often concluded in tears, Roald insisted they continue. He was convinced that any activity, however stressful, was better than nothing. A few of Pat’s friends occasionally wondered if Roald’s hectoring manner might be wearing her down, but most of her teachers agreed with Pam Lowndes that he had shown “great vision” in his attitude and were astonished by her progress. “He was not horrid,” Lowndes recalled, recalling how easily Pat slumped into despondency and self-pity. “He was abrupt. But then, if Roald shouted, she pulled herself up.”31
Before long, one of these amateur therapists began to bring a more formal structure to Pat’s rehabilitation. Valerie Eaton Griffith was in her early forties. A former manager of an Elizabeth Arden salon in London, she had recently been ill herself and given up work to live nearby with her elderly father. She had time on her hands. Arriving at Gipsy House for the first time, all Roald had told her was that his wife had “to be stimulated a lot.”32 Immediately, Eaton Griffith sensed that Pat needed a coherent strategy for her psychological problems to mesh with Roald’s stimulation therapy. Gradually she began devising one, boosting her patient’s self-esteem and compiling systematic data about what activities seemed to yield the best results. Roald was delighted. Although he had instigated this rigorous regime, he had also taken a very detached attitude toward the therapy itself. He simply let the helpers get on with their sessions, reserving his own energies, as he put it, for “running the house or earning a living and above all, keeping cheerful.”33 Now he handed Pat’s rehabilitation over almost entirely to Eaton Griffith, who worked with her two or three times a week for six hours a day. “Slowly and cunningly,” as Pat would later describe it, Val nudged her patient forward.34
In his introduction to A Stroke in the Family—the pioneering self-help book based on her experience with Pat which Val Eat
on Griffith would later write—Roald explained that he had not involved himself directly in his wife’s rehabilitation because of the damage that this role change might cause to their marriage. Later, he joked that he simply “stood by and whacked her over the head and saw she was ready to start work at nine each morning,” praising her tenacity and humor, but speculating also that his own incentive for her recovery was perhaps more powerful even than her own. “I was often criticised at the time for pushing the patient too hard,” he told the Speech Rehabilitation Institute in 1971, “but when you’re talking about real life as opposed to vegetable life, you’re in a crisis and you don’t stop to enquire whether the patient is comfortable or not. … Nothing was smooth or easy. In fact at one time I took her to a psychiatrist to make sure she didn’t intend to carry out her threats of suicide.”35
Yet, despite all his efforts, it was gradually becoming clear to Roald that the aneurysm had metamorphosed his wife into a quite different person to the one who had returned home from shooting on February 17. The match had never been ideal. It had started shakily, and without Charles Marsh’s support would probably have broken down within six months, but it had been galvanized by the arrival of their children and further strengthened by the twin disasters of Olivia’s death and Theo’s accident. These shared catastrophes had brought Roald and Pat closer together. Now Pat had become the third of these calamities. With her eyepatch and her steel calliper, Tessa felt that her mother had been transformed from a glamorous extrovert into a “terrible burden” that the family had to endure with “silent suffering.”36
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