A few months later, Roald attended a family gathering at the Pollingers. “Laurence was there acting ostentatiously the part of the generous grandfather,” he told Watkins. “By that I mean he was dispensing pennies—only pennies—one at a time to his three other grandchildren. He said, ‘I give them pennies every time I see them.’ ‘How often do you see them?’ I asked. This question made him uncomfortable, and there was a good deal of nose-blowing to make his reply inaudible. So I asked the question again. The answer was, ‘Quite often, old man, about two or three times a year.’ His maximum financial liability therefore, to each child, was ninepence per annum.”49 When, five years later, Murray fell out with his father and resigned from the agency, leaving “without a penny,” Roald was “the most effusive”50 of a nucleus of about a dozen of his clients, including Laurie Lee and Penelope Lively, who backed him to set up on his own. Murray “has handled my affairs for a long time now with extreme efficiency and he is the only person who knows the intricacies of these many contracts,” he told Laurence Pollinger. “Were someone else to step into his shoes now, I should be the loser. I know you would not want that.”51 The same day he wrote to Mike Watkins to tell him that he proposed “to stand by [Murray] 100%.”52 He did.
Murray was forever grateful for this display of loyalty. “Is my face red,” he declared. “You make me a bit ashamed of my close relatives … that you should have been stirred up to write as you did … I am deeply grateful for your loyalty, expressed in such robust and irrefutable letters. This means an enormous amount to me at a time like this, and I am unable to find words meaningful enough to thank you.”53 The two families’ lives were further intertwined when Roald dedicated Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to his godson Edmund—apart from Charles Marsh, the only person outside the direct family ever to receive such a dedication. Then, in 1976, by a bizarre twist of fate, the shunt he had helped to design for Theo saved Edmund’s life—after his godson was admitted to hospital as the result of a minor car accident and a routine scan revealed severe neurological problems. It was hardly surprising that Murray felt his client was always “a tower of strength to our family when we were really up against it.”54
Dahl and Pollinger made a good team. Pollinger liked the fact that his client was “such a sharp businessman”55 and was always in the thick of things when it came to deals and negotiation, but while Gina sometimes got involved in editorial discussions, Murray stayed almost entirely out of them. “He never challenged Roald,” Roxburgh recalled. “He never offered an opinion. … His domain was the business part.”56 However, while Pollinger might celebrate Dahl’s negotiating skills, he was to learn that his client could get out of his depth when it came to other financial issues. Early in 1986, Dahl received a letter from the UK Inland Revenue asking for details about his Swiss companies, Icarus and Anric. His lawyer went to see the tax inspector, Mr. C. G. White at the Inland Revenue, and reported that White was going to instigate a “substantial enquiry” into Roald’s “overseas employment arrangements.” He added threateningly that these investigators were usually “reasonably determined and unreasonably aggressive.”57
Dahl had regretted Icarus almost as soon as he set it up. A year after its creation, he admitted to his lawyer that he was “thoroughly fed up with everything” and that—as he was “a moron when it comes to accounts and figures”—he wanted his UK income paid directly so that he could “pay my tax on it immediately.”58 But his foreign earnings were so inextricably wound up in the Swiss companies and he had spent so much money setting them up that unravelling those did not seem an option. The investigation changed all that. And it did not get off to a good start. Roald, in his own words, “made a cock” of filling in the initial forms, and as a result Mr. White became “rather ratty.”59 It was soon evident too that his accountant’s initial strategy of giving minimal information was proving counterproductive. So Roald took Liccy’s advice and hired a new lawyer and accountant: Bill Geffen and Alan Langridge.
Their plan was to reveal everything to the Revenue, ascribing any anomalies in the two Swiss companies to the fact that Dahl was unworldly in matters of finance. In this they were not being disingenuous. His final tax lawyer, Martin Goodwin, would later describe his client’s approach to figures, with a smile, as “somewhat unsophisticated,”60 although Geffen and Langridge may have been stretching the truth a little when they suggested that Roald actually had been intimidated by his Swiss banker, Mr. Schlaeppi.61 By September 1986, Roald was firmly behind the new plan. “We should help White in every way we can,” he told Geffen. “I personally believe he is well-disposed towards me now and I will bend over backwards to keep it that way. I do not want to string this affair out.”62 It was not surprising. The previous year Roald had had three major bowel operations and, in his own words, “only just survived.” He was still “in and out of hospital constantly and … under prolonged and massive doses of two different antibiotics.”63
He knew he was likely to suffer a hefty penalty. Late in September, he paid £400,000 on account to the Inland Revenue and another £100,000 three months later. However, the deliberations continued. Before Christmas he suggested to Wendy Kress, his secretary, that perhaps they might send Mr. White a Christmas present, to encourage him to move a bit more swiftly. Liccy had to explain to him why she did not think this was a good idea. When he eventually received a proposal from the Inland Revenue for the final settlement of the affair, he confessed to Alan Lang-ridge his complete lack of comprehension of the minutiae of the deal. “I personally understand almost nothing of Mr. White’s letter, but I feel he is trying to be helpful,” he told Langridge. “I have given orders for the dissolution of the Swiss companies Icarus and Anric … I have no further comment because I simply do not understand the rest of it.”64
In January 1987, the settlement was eventually agreed. In all, he owed £717,000. He paid the debt by closing his Swiss operations altogether and by renegotiating the sale of his U.S. paperback rights from Bantam to Penguin—a stratagem devised by Roger Straus, who had discovered a technicality in Dahl’s contract that allowed him to do this if Bantam came under new ownership.† Roald was grateful to his publisher for this and thanked his accountant for his “magic work” in dealing with the investigation.65 When, in September 1987, he finally received the “epoch-making” note from the Inland Revenue informing him that the whole business was irrevocably settled, he confessed that he was thinking of framing it.66 Mr. White wound up by thanking Dahl for his “patience and co-operation,” but characteristically it was Roald himself who had the last word. “Your last paragraph gave me more pleasure than my first bicycle on my ninth birthday,” he wrote in reply, adding: “Now that our business is concluded, I am able without prejudice to send you a small token of thanks for the sympathetic way you helped me out of my embarrassment.”67 Dahl sent him signed copies of some of his children’s books.
Throughout the 1980s, his books became ever more successful. The Witches, which was published in 1983, a year after The BFG, and dedicated to Liccy in the year he married her, was another massive hit with the public. Roald’s correspondence with Roxburgh over the book is intriguing for the robust but respectful way in which various discussions, both textual and political, were handled. “He was impatient … he wanted to move quickly … I was going over there three or four times a year,”68 Roxburgh told me, explaining, with a chuckle, that his own liberal outlook made him a trifle uneasy about a story that focused on a bunch of two-faced, vicious bald hags with clawlike fingers, who descend on the sleepy English seaside town of Bournemouth in an attempt to ensure that every single child in England is “rrrubbed out, sqvashed, sqvirted, sqvittered and frrrrittered.”69
Roald was convinced Roxburgh was overreacting. First he pointed out, justifiably, that the boy hero’s grandmother, who plays a crucial role in the story, was “the nicest person in the whole thing,” so it was unfair to accuse him of being misogynistic. Then, observing that he was “not as frightened of
offending women as you are,” he pointed out that “this sort of problem arises in all my children’s stories and I ignore it.” Nevertheless, he thanked Roxburgh for taking so much trouble, and reminded him in exaggerated terms that he had never had an editor like him before. Once again he found sanctuary in his understanding of his audience. “I must keep reminding you that this is a book for children and I don’t give a bugger what grown-ups think about it,” he concluded.70
The book was significant, too, not only for its rollicking narrative and its creepy humor but for a particularly daring plot, in which—halfway through the tale—the Grand High Witch turns the boy narrator into a mouse, and from then on the reader sees the world from a rodent perspective. Moreover, in the final pages, Dahl uses this device to handle issues of love and death with extraordinary sensitivity, adroitness and lack of sentimentality. For him, the mouse’s short lifespan was not something to be glossed over. The moment when the narrator realizes that his new mouse-life will be short, and that he and his eighty-six-year-old grandmother will probably die together, is not one of sadness but of childish tenderness and profound unspoken emotion. As the mouse and the grandmother snuggle up together, her lace dress tickling his nose, they discuss the extraordinary rate at which a mouse’s heart beats. The grandmother tells him how she can hear it humming when he is lying next to her on the pillow at night in bed.
The two of us remained silent in front of the fire for a long time after that, thinking about all these wonderful things. “My darling,” she said at last, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?” “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.” 71
Quentin Blake, who illustrated the book, was greatly impressed by the deft way Roald addressed this situation; but equally striking was the way the work once again unself-consciously celebrated the triumph of an unlikely loving friendship over any conventional family values. This was one of Dahl’s most powerfully “subversive” qualities—and one that was little appreciated or acknowledged in his lifetime. It was also something that mattered hugely to him. Liccy recalled that when the director Nicholas Roeg showed him the original version of his movie adaptation, Roald wept at this final scene of love between the grandmother and the mouse. That this version, which was so faithful to the ending of the book, was later abandoned for an alternative where the mouse turns back into a boy, appalled him. He felt that Warner Bros. had completely missed the point.
The Witches, as published, contained flashes of unexpected biographical detail about its author. The unnamed narrator, who loves playing with mice, whose parents were Norwegian and who travels to his homeland every summer for wonderful holidays with his large storytelling grandma, were brief glimpses of what had originally been a much lengthier portrait of Roald’s own childhood that appeared in the opening pages. Roxburgh was tenacious in his belief that this sequence of three chapters actually belonged elsewhere, and eventually he persuaded Roald to drop them. They were not put to waste. Roxburgh already had other plans for them. “Perhaps it might not be repulsive for you to consider a book on your early childhood/boyhood?” he suggested.72 The seed fell immediately on fertile ground and soon Roald, who had responded that he regarded “straight” autobiography as “the height of egotism,”73 was roughing out drafts of a new manuscript and sending all his childhood letters to his mother—which she had kept in bundles “neatly tied up in blue ribbons”—over to Roxburgh in New York for him to study.74 A year later, Boy—arranged with photographs, extracts from his letters, documents and illustrations—was ready for publication.
Boy, and its successor Going Solo, published two years later, in 1986, were, as Roxburgh anticipated, immensely popular with young readers. By now what Murray Pollinger described as “the Roald Dahl phenomenon” was in full spate.75 Both books were, as Quentin Blake described them, “hybrids of true autobiography, recollections and his own imagination,” because Roald “would always take a story in a direction that made it more interesting than in a way that made it more accurate.” But in editing the book, Roxburgh revealed some truths to Dahl about himself—the fact that his mother was so important to his development, for instance. This provoked Dahl to suggest to Roxburgh that he might want to write his official biography. Roxburgh was “surprised, honored, and flattered”76 to receive the offer, accepting it calmly, but acknowledging that if Roald had “second thoughts, for whatever reason,” he would happily withdraw.77
The idea was that the book would be completed after Dahl’s death, but Roxburgh began work on it immediately—copying much of Dahl’s correspondence and briefly interviewing Roald’s sisters when he was in Great Missenden. When he returned to New York, he even went to visit Claudia Marsh, then in her late eighties. Twenty-one year-old Ophelia revealed how close Stephen had become to the family when she wrote suggesting that he and his girlfriend ought to come over to Great Missenden to write it. “You could stay here for the rest of your lives,” she joked. “You could be Chief Logsman, snooker coach and write the book. Perhaps we could draw his life story out over, say, twelve volumes.…” She reminded him how he fitted in, “nice and mellow,” and that both her father and Liccy liked having him around. When her father referred to their occasional political differences, she jested that this was “probably a phase he was going through.”78 It was the high watermark of their friendship.
By the mid-1980s, all Roald’s children were adults. Ophelia was about to travel to Haiti and discover her life’s passion in Third World medicine. Tessa was married to an American financier, James Kelly, and was living not far away from Gipsy House. She had given birth to another daughter, Clover, in 1984 and a son, Luke, in 1986. Meanwhile, Lucy had married and was living in Captiva Island off the coast of Florida with her husband Michael. Her father had not approved of the match. Driving with her in the bridal car on their way to the ceremony, Roald, ever the subversive, offered to give her the cost of the reception—tens of thousands of pounds—if she changed her mind and abandoned the wedding. Theo was still living at home. Surprisingly, however, for a man who set such store by his family, all of Roald’s children were in some way critical of the way their father had raised them. Lucy wonders now whether he should have set more boundaries, agreeing with her stepsister Neisha that the Dahl children were too often allowed to run wild. As teenagers, at one time or another, all of them had experimented with drugs. To feed her habit, Lucy became an accomplished thief, raiding her father’s stash of gambling money, his wine cellar and even pawning the gold cigarette case his mother and sisters had given him before the war.79
In hindsight, Lucy felt that her father simply did not understand teenagers, and that this was perhaps why, despite the fact that he himself had experienced such a miserable time at Repton, he sent all his children away to boarding school. Although Ophelia enjoyed the experience, Tessa and Lucy did not. Lucy recalled that when she begged her father not to send her away, he simply replied that she needed to be “toughened up.” It was the way he had behaved when she competed in show-jumping contests. He would drive over to watch her take part, then leave her to walk home on her own, pretending he had never been there, and not realizing that she had spotted him in the crowd wearing his distinctive yellow hat. She felt he was “uncomfortable with open affection.” Just as Roald had done at St. Peter’s, Lucy feigned illness to try to escape her fate, inventing severe headaches that led to painful medical examinations. When the moment came to go back to school, she even tried sabotaging her father’s car so that he could not drive her there. Eventually, she set fire to one of the school buildings and was expelled. She was “never really disciplined” for this offense by her father, she recalled, but when he came to the school to collect her after the incident, she remembered that he found it impossible to talk to her about it. Instead, he sent her back to London to live with Tessa. “He didn’t know what to do with me, he had no idea. I don’t think he was very interested in
adolescents. He didn’t like them. I don’t think he could identify with them at all.”80
Dahl’s attitude to his teenage children revealed something too about his own attitude to adolescence—an emotional period he seldom explored in conversation and that he eschewed almost entirely in his writing. It seems that for him, as for many children’s writers, the advent of sexuality spelled the end of an enchanted world of innocence and fantasy—adulthood intruding rudely into the scented garden of youth. In an unpublished article written for the Sunday Express Magazine and titled “Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was Eighteen,” he claimed, probably truthfully, that teenage sex was something about which he knew very little.
I am very glad I did not have to go through the horrors of promiscuity that torture today’s children. In this benighted age, girls and boys treat the sexual act rather as rabbits do, or cattle. … Some of you may not believe this, but I promise you that a young man in the 1930s would have to court a girl for six months before he got anywhere near the mattress. He would have to ply her with flowers, give her meals he could ill-afford and behave generally with immense circumspection. If he tried anything too early, he got the boot. And even if he did happen to have a success at the end of this long and arduous hunt, he never shacked up with the girl afterwards. Today a girl will “move in” with a boy or vice versa with no more fuss than if one was moving in an old sofa. They go on holidays together without a blink and often never see each other again afterwards. I am so happy, therefore, that I was not swept into this particular dustbin when I was eighteen.
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