Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  * Paradoxically, Charlotte also admitted that in usurping her own father’s role and lavishing his generosity and affection on the Crosland girls, Roald sometimes exerted a control over them that was, in retrospect, “cruel” to her own father—Charlotte Crosland, Conversation with the author, 03/12/10.

  † Bantam had recently been sold to the Newhouse magazine group.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  No Point in Struggling

  IN JANUARY 1990, ROALD took Liccy, Ophelia, and Liccy’s youngest daughter, Lorina, on holiday to Jamaica. They stayed on the north coast of the island, at the Jamaica Inn—the intimate colonial-style lodge that Charles Marsh had founded shortly after the Second World War. For Roald, the hotel and its environs were filled with nostalgic memories: in the 1940s, William Stephenson, Pam Huntly, Lord Beaverbrook, Noël Coward and Ian Fleming had all walked on the beach and quaffed sundowners on the veranda with him. Now all but one of them were ghosts. There too Charles Marsh had helped to patch up Roald’s failing marriage with Pat, before suddenly falling victim to the mosquito bite that gave him cerebral malaria.

  Roald, however, was not there to indulge in memories. Though seventy-three, and walking a bit like an arthritic giraffe, he was still living very much in the present, and revelling in the company of people he loved—a grizzled lion surrounded by three glamorous lionesses. Ophelia, who had recently moved to Boston, where she was about to start a degree at Wellesley College, recalled the holiday as “a giant punctuation mark”—the last time she could recollect her father “unburdened by the weight of illness.” With her sitting next to him on the beach, under one of the large thatch umbrellas, he whiled away his time reading, dreaming up lewd limericks—something he had always enjoyed—and studying the other guests, “like a life guard,” before selecting one around whom he would start to weave a fanciful story. He had felt run-down, but the Caribbean sunshine, the company, and the lack of pressure invigorated him.

  Twenty-six-year-old Lorina on the other hand was not feeling well at all. She had a persistent headache and felt as if something was continually buzzing in her ear; at one point she asked Ophelia to see if she could peer inside because she thought an insect might be trapped down there. A quiet, self-contained beauty, who had recently become a fashion editor at Harper’s, Lorina’s features and skin color revealed more of her family’s Indian blood than either of her sisters. Roald had nicknamed her “The Burmese Cat” because of her slenderness and inscrutability, and often took delight in trying to provoke responses out of her. He seldom succeeded. When the buzzing and the headaches did not go away, Roald called in a local doctor who diagnosed an ear infection and gave her some antibiotics. Back in London, another physician would misdiagnose her symptoms as labyrinthitis—a viral infection of the inner ear. In reality she was suffering from an undiagnosed and aggressive brain tumor. Oblivious of the impending disaster, Lorina continued to “get on” with her busy and exciting life, unaware just what a tiny amount of it remained to her. Shortly after she returned from Jamaica, she went to South Africa to supervise a shoot there for the magazine.

  Back in England, the February weather had been unseasonably warm and mild, with temperatures in the mid-60s F. and narcissi and daffodils blooming in the garden of Gipsy House several weeks earlier than usual. The forecast promised more warmth and mildness. One evening, at about eleven o’clock, the telephone rang. Roald and Liccy were in their bedroom. Ophelia was sitting at the end of the bed, massaging Liccy’s feet. She picked up the phone. An unfamiliar voice asked for Mr. Dahl. Ophelia passed the phone over to her father. “Everything stopped at that moment,” she recalled. “I stood at the end of their bed and watched my father’s face as he held the phone. He said nothing. His mouth opened and he raised his scared eyes to me. I knew then that Lorina was dead and that nothing for Liccy would ever be the same again.”1 She had died at the airport of a sudden aneurysm caused by the tumor on her brain.

  The disaster plunged Liccy and Roald into despair and turned spring back into deepest winter. Liccy was inconsolable, and Roald’s inability to ease his wife’s distress upset him deeply. Though powerless to help, he did his best to be positive. When Liccy said that she wanted to be buried next to her daughter, he bought the next six plots in the graveyard. Lucy remembered her father trying to keep the show on the road—even at the funeral. “Everything was very businesslike,” she told me. She had flown in from Florida and was surprised when afterwards Roald told her simply “to go back home and get on with my life.” She felt it was a sign of his need to cover up his own vulnerability, of his “inability to be able to withstand the pain,” and reflected that he was behaving in the same way he had thirty years earlier when Olivia had died. “I think he made an unconscious decision not to open his heart after [Olivia’s death]. I think he slammed his heart shut for any form of mourning and loss … and he never really opened it up again. … Olivia was the one thing he never spoke about—ever.”2 Lorina’s death seemed also to accelerate his own illness, for he soon began to decline physically in a way that took everyone around him by surprise. “It was tragic, awful,” Charlotte told me, remembering how suddenly he began to deteriorate. “He sort of blamed himself. It was the last straw. … He felt a curse had struck again.”3 Neisha was aware that her mother had to cut short her own grieving in order to look after him.

  Before Roald went to Jamaica, he had been suffering from blurred vision. He had been travelling to London twice a month to have half a pint of blood removed, on the premise that this might ease the pressure on the capillaries in his eyes. This experimental technique appeared to be working, though he found it left him unexpectedly weak. Nevertheless, despite this unwanted lassitude, he was still basking in the calm that Charles Marsh had urged him to find within himself and which he seemed to have discovered living with Liccy. Four years earlier, he had attempted to describe this feeling. “A kind of serenity settles upon you like a warm mist,” he wrote. “The real struggle is over. Every movement becomes slower. You have all the time in the world. There is no rush. The never-ending fight to achieve something excellent has ended.”4 This statement did not imply that he had given up writing, or that he had sacrificed his standards, only that, after Matilda, he no longer felt any great pressure to complete things until he felt they were truly ready. Now he was working on a number of smaller projects: a tale about two middle-aged people and a tortoise, set in a high-rise block of flats; a railway safety guide; a cookbook; a lyrical description of the cycle of the seasons; two adult fables and what would be his valedictory children’s story, The Minpins. The act of writing still excited him, much as it had when, as a young flight lieutenant in Washington, he burned the midnight oil writing his flying stories. Nearly fifty years later, he was a little bit more sanguine about the process. But only marginally so. “Nothing can prevent the old fires of excitement rekindling once I am well into a story or a book,” he noted. “The momentum still gathers and the drive towards the last pages becomes as relentless as ever.”5

  Though his bones ached “like mad,” he was never bored, and while the prospect of his own mortality moved ever more clearly into view, death itself held no terrors for him, not only because he had looked it in the eye many times before, but also because of his oddly Peter Pan–like psychology that could view almost everything as an awfully big adventure. “The curious thing is that although I am strictly speaking an old man, I find it impossible to think of myself as being in the least bit ancient,” he wrote. “My body may be rusting to pieces, but my mind is something absolutely separate and is as young as ever. I believe that mentally I am a sort of overgrown child, a giggler, a lover of childish jokes and knock-knocks, a chocolate-and-sweet-eater, a person with one half of him that has failed completely to grown up.”6 That “spark of naughtiness” that delighted his nephew Nicholas Logsdail, that “need to snigger” that his niece Alexandra Anderson remembered, that “love of horrid detail” that Quentin Blake recalled, combined with his apparently endless
fascination for the new and the unexpected to keep Roald completely engaged with the world. He might lose his temper from time to time, but his outlook on the universe around him remained essentially sunny. It was without fear, bitterness or ennui. And almost all his final books bear gentle witness to this lightness.

  Esio Trot is a charming tale about a middle-aged single man, Mr. Hoppy, who ingeniously wins the love of his neighbor, Mrs. Silver, with a spell that apparently makes her pet tortoise, Alfie, grow bigger. Quentin Blake described it succinctly as a “love story set in two rooms.” A fable without a single wicked or grotesque character, Blake felt the narrative was built largely around Roald’s feelings for Liccy,7 and that there was a great deal of his creator to be detected in Mr. Hoppy’s penchant for ingenious and imaginative problem solving. It was a surprising perception perhaps. Mr. Hoppy was shy, reticent and nervous—not at all like the persona Roald presented to the public. Yet Wendy Kress, while acknowledging that her boss was humorous, pugnacious and often tried to get a rise out of her, also characterized him as essentially “introspective, shy, and totally untactile.”8 The magic spell to make Mrs. Silver’s tortoise grow bigger—“Esio Trot, Esio Trot, Teg reggib reggib! Emoc no, esio trot, worg pu, ffup pu, toohs pu! Gnirps pu, wolb pu, llews pu! Egrog! Elzzug! Ffuts! Plug! Tup no taf, Esio Trot, Tup no taf! No, teg no, elbbog doof!”—was, of course, not magic at all, but an amusing word game that disguised the fact that Mr. Hoppy had bought a collection of tortoises of different sizes from the pet shop and devised a way of replacing one with another every few days without Mrs. Silver noticing. The novelist Susan Hill, reviewing the book for The Times on May 20, 1990, commented that this was “a Roald Dahl we have never before encountered, newly mellowed, telling a silly, endearing story in a straightforward way—no rudeness, no dark underside, nothing for parents and teachers to complain about.”

  Esio Trot was a trifle, and an unusual one, in that there was not a child anywhere to be seen in its 60 pages. The Minpins, on the other hand, was much more characteristic late Dahl in that its hero is a warmhearted and mischievous child, who longs for adventure and eventually finds it in “The Forest of Sin,” discovering a race of tiny people in the woods, learning to fly on the back of a swan, and ultimately destroying a terrifying monster deep within the heart of the forest. In tone and subject matter, the tale in many ways harked back to Roald’s own Scandinavian roots, but it also doffed a cap to his old friends, the gremlins. Like their malevolent wartime cousins, the Minpins too wore suction boots to get around above ground, but instead of hitching a ride on Hurricanes and Spitfires, they flew on the backs of birds. This idea of flying on birds had featured in the Norwegian fairy tales of Theodor Kittelsen that Roald had been read as a child, and had stayed with him ever since. Ophelia remembered her father telling her a tale he had invented when she was very young about a tiny pink pill that miniaturized the swallower to such an extent that he or she was able to fly on the back of a budgerigar.9 According to Tom Maschler, Roald first started talking to him about The Minpins in the early 1980s, but had then put it aside. He picked it up again in 1989 when he started to feel his strength ebbing.

  In hindsight, the book reads like a poetic farewell. Its scale is grander, its tone more lyrical and its range more monumental than anything he had written since Some Time Never. For someone who had made his name by shattering some of the conventions of children’s literature, it was also curiously old-fashioned and metaphysical—particularly when it came to evoking the ecstasy of flying. Moreover, for the first time since he had worked with Quentin Blake, Roald suggested that another illustrator, less quirky and more epic in style, should illustrate the book. The reason he chose Patrick Benson becomes transparently clear in the final pages, where Little Billy realizes that soon he will be too big to fly on Swan’s back, and so the great white bird takes the boy on one final flight: a mysterious and transcendental flight that is pregnant with symbolic significance. Adolescence looms for Little Billy. Soon the magic of childhood will be over for him and he will have to face the drab world of adulthood. For Roald, a different, more absolute journey lay ahead, but the terms of reference were curiously the same. Both were leaving familiar territory and venturing into new landscapes, both too would have to bid farewell to the ones they loved most. Awesome vistas of sky, water and rocks overwhelm the tiny boy and the bird on their elemental flight, and evoke the infinite and benign power of nature that had seemed to redeem all the flaws of humanity at the end of Some Time Never.

  Swan flew through the night for what seemed like hours and hours until they came to a gigantic opening in the earth’s surface, a sort of huge gaping hole in the ground, and Swan glided slowly round and round above this massive crater and then right down into it. Deeper and deeper they went into the dark hole. Suddenly there was a brightness like sunlight below them, and Little Billy could see a vast lake of water, gloriously blue, and on the surface of the lake thousands of swans were swimming slowly about. The pure white of the swans against the blue of the water was very beautiful.10

  Tom Maschler remembered that Roald was profoundly focused on the book in his last months. “He didn’t stop until he knew it was right.”11

  Mortality preoccupied him in more mundane ways, too. And he busied himself with sorting out his financial affairs. In November 1989, he complained grumpily to Jonathan Cape that his royalty payments were taking considerably more than six months to be processed, and were being paid to him without interest added. His own high street bank account was paying him 14 percent per annum interest, he pointed out, so the publishers were making many thousand of pounds out of these delays.12 He also upset Murray Pollinger by refusing to make any long-term future commitment to his agency, unless Murray was prepared either to bring in “a younger partner of whom I approve, or … make an arrangement with another agency that is large enough to provide … continuity for my heirs in the future.”13 He tried to get Pollinger to take on Amanda Conquy, who was working at Heinemann, and threatened at one point to sell all his copyrights, because he was worried that Pollinger could not guarantee that his agency would be run by “competent and caring” staff for the next thirty or forty years. Murray, unsurprisingly, took this criticism personally. But he probably had not yet realized that behind the pugnacious rhetoric lurked a new context: Roald was planning carefully for the world that would exist after he was gone.

  In November 1989, his accountant Alan Langridge had encouraged him to consult Martin Goodwin, a specialist tax lawyer, because he was concerned about how best to look after his copyrights after his death. Over lunch at Gipsy House in January 1990, Dahl probed him with questions about the best way to look after his literary legacy and Goodwin was aware that Liccy too was “a big part” of that discussion. “She seemed,” he told me, “very much involved with all the books and it was clear Roald trusted her completely.” He also became aware that Roald and Liccy were planning to write a book together—a compendium of favorite Dahl recipes, combined with a collection of biographical anecdotes about the family. It would be called Memories with Food at Gipsy House.

  Goodwin suggested that Dahl might be able to minimize future inheritance tax liabilities and ensure Liccy’s control over the exploitation of his works by forming a partnership with her to which he could transfer all his existing copyrights. “At high speed” Roald decided to go ahead with the plan, creating Dahl & Dahl, and arranging for Goodwin to make another trip to Gipsy House so that he could help explain the plan to the children. The visit was, as Goodwin remembered, “not a consultation exercise but an information exercise.” Roald himself was predictably direct: “I’m leaving everything to Liccy,” he told his children. “I trust her absolutely to do right by you and to do right by the copyrights, and you must too.”14 Lucy recalled her own and her siblings’ shock when they realized that—apart from certain substantial specific gifts and legacies—it seemed they were being cut out of their father’s will. At one point she asked whether there were any limits on Lic
cy’s control and she remembered clearly Goodwin’s reply: “Yes, she can take whatever percentage she likes.” Roald had simply muttered: “Good.” Lucy was “horrified,” as Goodwin went back to London and their father sloped off into his bedroom to have a rest.

  Lucy told me that the children had all been brought up to believe that they would be left plenty of money when their father died, so they were stunned. “Suddenly our inheritance had gone to zero,” she told me somewhat melodramatically, “and we knew he wasn’t going to last more than six months.” After some discussion, Tessa and Ophelia convinced Lucy to venture back into their father’s bedroom to tell him how they felt. “I walked in. … He was lying on his bed watching television, obviously exhausted. … And I said to him, ‘Dad, we’re not sure that we quite like this plan that you’ve just told us about. … We’re not sure we like the fact that everything’s being left to Liccy and nothing’s being left to us.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t trust Liccy, you can fuck off!’ ” Nowadays Lucy tells that story with a throaty chuckle not dissimilar to her father’s, acknowledging what a good job her stepmother has made of running the estate over the last twenty years and how fairly the income has been distributed. Nevertheless, at the time she felt that the decision “turned” the Dahl children once more against Liccy. “We didn’t like her very much, because she had just taken everything that was supposed to be ours.”15 In fact, Roald had not forgotten his children’s interests. Having failed to persuade Amanda Conquy to leave her job at Heinemann and join the Pollinger agency, he then asked her to be one of the executors of his will. Amanda was initially astonished at the request—which she accepted—but rapidly realized he had asked her largely as “an insurance card” to make sure his children felt represented in the decision-making.16