Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  As he became weaker, Roald’s interest in public honors began to wane. Everyone around him knew that he had craved a knighthood for many years, and that he had tried, unsuccessfully and sometimes clumsily, to lobby for one. His ill-judged public utterances in the early 1980s had probably put paid to any chance of that happening. But even without the God Cried affair and the final Salman Rushdie outburst, one senses it was unlikely that cautious government officials would have ever bestowed the honor on such a notorious maverick. In 1985, he was offered the lower rank of an OBE. He turned it down.17 Politically, he was a fan of Margaret Thatcher’s and once bought her flowers, but his conservatism was never doctrinaire and always unorthodox. So it was something of a surprise when in 1988 he was unexpectedly asked to serve on a government Literacy and Education Committee that had been commissioned to report on the state of reading in the nation’s schools. Perhaps he saw it as a way to redeem his reputation. If he did, it was an error of judgment, for he did not last long on the committee. His secretary, Wendy, remembered that he was “bored out of his mind” and eventually resigned. He was replaced, instead, by a right-wing expert on linguistics.

  His own physical decline first became apparent when, in April 1990, while visiting Tessa in hospital after she had had a minor operation, Roald suddenly found that he had not the strength to get out of his chair. Tests revealed that he was suffering from sideroblastic anemia, a condition that, while chronic, was not life-threatening. With steroids and regular blood transfusions it appeared he could keep the illness at bay for several more years. In the summer, there was a reconciliation with Pat, who returned to Gipsy House to celebrate Theo’s thirtieth birthday. For many years she had been embittered by Roald’s rejection. In her autobiography, she admitted that, in this period, she often could not get the thought of Liccy out of her mind: “Like a venom, it poisoned the times I should have been concentrating on other things.”18 But Roald had been generous to her since they divorced and there were other consolations. She had felt more involved in her children’s lives since her separation and since Lucy and Ophelia had returned to the United States. She also felt she had come closer to God, and that this had given her an unexpected capacity to forgive. Soon, Liccy and she would bury the hatchet and become friends once more.

  Within weeks Roald was back at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where tests began to suggest that his anemia was evolving into myelofibrosis—a rare form of leukemia. He was delighted when other tests revealed that, despite years of high alcohol consumption, his liver was still in pristine condition. Visiting him in the hospital, Ophelia found him more reflective than usual. He talked to her about his experiences in the war and also about the possibility of her writing his biography, but he also discussed a story he had started writing about a girl who wanted to talk to her dog. She began to find her father increasingly childlike, vulnerable and innocent. “He had lost his sureness,” she later wrote. “I began to feel a greater need to protect him.”19 Yet, even in extremis, his mischievous nature and love of breaking rules did not desert him—and it was particularly evident when it came to smoking in hospital. One day he singed his eyebrows trying to light his cigarette furtively on a communal gas ring. Another time he got stuck while craning out of the window to puff away on one of his Cartier “gaspers” without being detected. It took a gaggle of nurses to drag him back inside, while an irate patient in the neighboring room complained that clouds of cigarette fumes were billowing in through his window. On another occasion, because dogs were not allowed in the hospital, he tried to arrange for Chopper, his pet Jack Russell, to be hauled in a basket to his window several stories up, just so he could see him.

  The junior houseman, Tom Solomon—now himself a distinguished neurologist—was repeatedly struck by his patient’s irrepressible sense of humor in the face of an illness that he knew was incurable. And Roald’s consultant hematologist, Sir David Weatherall, recalled his “enormous charm” and the extraordinary impact he had on the staff who were treating him. Roald gave each of the nurses nicknames—one was “the Russian ballerina”—and when the hospital authorities experimented with nurses wearing ordinary clothes rather than uniform, Roald sent Liccy out to buy new outfits for all of them. “He thought the idea was ridiculous,” Liccy recalled. “Not only did it mean that the patient was unsure who was a nurse and who wasn’t, but he felt it was a terrible imposition on the nurses themselves.” Yet he despatched Liccy to Marks and Spencer to buy a selection of shirts and cardigans and invited all of them into his room to choose what they wanted. “It was like a market stall,” Liccy remembered with a fond chuckle.20

  Through it all, Roald was never gloomy or morose. “I’ve been a bit off colour these last few months,” he wrote to his young fans late that summer, “feeling sleepy when I shouldn’t have been and without that lovely old bubbly energy that drives one to write books and drink gin and chase after girls.” But, he added, his young readers should not consign him to the grave just yet. “I usually manage to climb out,” he told them. “I’ve done it many times before.”21

  He was in and out of hospital throughout September and October. In mid-November, Ophelia flew in from Boston for a long weekend and was shocked at her father’s decline. He could hardly walk to the car. His imminent mortality was transparently clear to her now, although his joie de vivre was sufficiently intact that he still took enormous pleasure one evening in teaching her exactly how to decant a bottle of vintage port. She flew back to Boston two days later, returning to her apartment only to find a message from Lucy asking her to come back immediately because he had taken a turn for the worse and been readmitted to the hospital. She closed the door of her flat and headed straight back to the airport. Tom Solomon recalled Roald’s sister Else sitting by his bedside and telling him that he had nothing to fear from death. But when Ophelia got to the hospital, her father seemed to have rallied. He told her that he had just had the worst day he could remember since he crashed his plane in 1940. “I think I almost bought it,” he told her. In a slow, “whispery” voice, he started to ponder which of his children would be able to get themselves out of the burning plane. “I am not frightened of falling off my perch,” he told her. “If Olivia can do it, so can I.”22 He was becoming weaker by the hour, incontinent, and now the pain was incessant. “The nights were long and sad,” Ophelia recalled. “Talking became an enormous effort.”23

  There was debate within the family as to what to do. Liccy wanted to keep him alive as long as possible. His children felt he was suffering too much. They wanted him to be given morphine, which might hasten the end but relieve his pain. At night, in his hospital room, Tessa heard her father talking in his sleep to his mother and to Olivia, “as if he were visiting them … And then he’d wake up and say to me ‘Teddy, what are we going to do?’ ” This went on for several nights, but each morning, just when Tessa was certain it was clear he needed this ultimate pain relief, Liccy’s arrival would cause him to “perk up as if there was nothing wrong and he wasn’t in pain at all.”24 To Ophelia, it seemed as if her father was fighting now “just for Liccy.”25 His breathing became ever more labored and he was fitted with an oxygen mask. By the night of November 22, a crisis seemed to be approaching. Though impossibly weak, Roald had finally managed to heal a rift between himself and Tessa. After nights of sleeping in his room at the hospital, Tessa had decided to go and stay with friends in Oxford. As she left the room, she spontaneously went over to kiss her father’s “mossy” forehead. She knew he hated physical contact, but as she did so, the man she hailed as “the love of her life,” who had always been so reticent in showing her affection, quietly whispered that he loved her “very much indeed.” Tessa was so overwhelmed that she pulled off her glasses and smashed them against the wall.26

  Later that night, Roald became very thirsty. Ophelia tried to get him to drink some water, but found he had not the strength to swallow. He went back to sleep. Carefully she peeled a tangerine and dribbled some of its sweet j
uice onto his parched lips. He woke again and looked at her. “You know, I’m not frightened,” he repeated. “It’s just that I will miss you all so much.” It was the last sentence he would utter. Not long afterwards, Liccy came in from her camp bed in the next room. Now she too could see that he was so near the end there was only one option left. At about three in the morning, Solomon recalled, the Dahl family, which had previously seemed to him somewhat dysfunctional, suddenly “pulled together.” As a nurse prepared to administer some morphine, Roald appeared to be completely unconscious. Ophelia and Liccy put on a tape of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto—one of his favorite pieces.

  But Roald had one more surprise left for them. As the needle pricked his skin, he opened his eyes and muttered: “Ow, fuck!” They were to be his final words. As he died, Liccy cradled him in one arm, while her other hand covered his eyes, “lightly as though coaxing him to sleep.” Tessa stood at the end of the bed, “her arms folded, like a sentry guarding him.”27 Lucy waited outside. She had already exchanged her final words with her father. He had exhorted her to look after her children.28

  An hour or so after he passed away, the press began to call the hospital. Some wanted to know if the rumor was true that he had died of AIDS. A reputation for notoriety haunted him even at the end. Later, driving back to Gipsy House through the Vale of Aylesbury where Roald had lived so much of his life, Liccy and Ophelia sat in the car in silence. There seemed to be nothing to say. Then, quite suddenly, two white doves swooped down out of the trees and flew along beside them—their wings almost touching the passenger window of the car. The birds travelled with them for almost a mile before disappearing back into the woods. Both Liccy and Ophelia felt as if they had witnessed a gesture from another world.

  Lucy thought her father had died at the right time. Death as a concept had never been taboo at Gipsy House, and she recalled a dinner years earlier where her father, Else and Alfhild had discussed sending off for a do-it-yourself euthanasia kit, because none of them wanted an existence that had lost its dignity. “I think he was tired and he was ready,” she told me. “If he’d been offered another ten reasonable years he would have taken them, but I think the illness had worn him out. I think he knew that he wasn’t going to lick it. At that time Tessa was wealthy, because she’d just divorced James. Ophelia was fine. I was married, with two children … Theo was fine. Everyone was fine and I think that’s what he needed to know. I felt like he’d cleared his desk. Everything was organized.”29

  Ophelia felt that he had passed away with “plenty of regrets,” but that his sense of humor was perhaps the most important thing in his life and he was beginning to lose even that. “I think he wanted to let go, to be free of pain, and he wanted to be allowed to stop struggling,” she told me. That attitude was a long way from the fierce will to live that had characterized his ancestor’s behavior in the church fire in Grue 170 years earlier, and that had animated so many episodes of Roald’s life—most notably perhaps his decision to pull himself from his burning aeroplane in 1940. Yet it was strangely reminiscent of the death of the fighter pilot in one of his earliest stories, Death of an Old, Old Man:

  He relaxed his body and all the muscles in his body because he had no further wish to struggle. How nice it is not to struggle, he thought. There is no point in struggling. I was a fool to have struggled for so much and so long; I was a fool to have prayed for the sun when there was a black cloud in the sky. … This is so much better; this is ever so much better because there is a wood somewhere that I wish to walk through and you cannot walk struggling through a wood. There is a girl somewhere that I wish to sleep with, and you cannot sleep struggling with a girl. You cannot do anything struggling; especially you cannot live struggling, and so now I am going to do all the things that I want to do, and there will be no more struggling.30

  A couple of days after Roald died, David Weatherall sent Liccy the following tribute: “In thirty years of clinical practice I cannot remember ever being so moved or privileged in caring for a patient. Roald was quite unique. I have never seen anyone have such an effect on the medical and nursing staff—the sense of loss at every level was quite extraordinary. You all must be very proud of him. I was so glad he retained his extraordinary intellect to the end, and that he died with the calm and dignity which was so important to him.”31 Tom Solomon too remembered that he had had “a good death.” It seemed entirely appropriate to everyone that he had died on Children’s Day. Many were stunned when they heard the news. It was hard to imagine such a big man, such a force of nature, had departed. Astri Newman had thought him almost “immortal,” as had Quentin Blake, who reflected that, though increasingly “battered,” it seemed Roald would “go on for ever.”

  Several weeks after her father died, Ophelia went back into the hut. Nothing had been moved. The floor was still covered in dust, cobwebs and cigarette ash. Her father’s Dixon Ticonderoga pencils were still “sharpened like thin rockets … pointing upwards ready to pick up the story exactly where he had left it off.”32 On his green baize board was a sheaf of the lined yellow paper on which he always wrote. There were rough notes sketched out for the beginning of a story—even a few illustrations. “The cleverest man in the world is called Mr. Billy Bubbler,” was how it began.

  He can invent just about anything you want. He has a marvellous workshop full of wheels and wires and buckets of glue and balls of string and huge pots full of thick foaming stuff that gives off smoke in many colours. There are old motorcar tyres, baskets of carrots and electric machines and sewing machines and fizzy-drink machines and bath tubs and cow’s teeth and rice puddings and old shoes and everything else Mr. Bubbler needs to make his wonderful inventions.33

  There were other ideas left incomplete as well. The story of Cathy and her dog Zip who go into the woods and meet a gypsy woman who teaches the young girl how to talk to her pet. A tale about a child who could predict the future in her dreams. The outline of several ghost stories and—perhaps most fascinating of all—a story where the characters in the book become aware that they are only alive when a child reads them, and so in order to prolong their existence, they try to seek that child out in real life before he or she has finished reading the book.34

  Though his body had run out of steam, it was clear Dahl’s inventive brain had been whirring away in his little hut, dreaming up stories until he was admitted to the hospital for the last time. Stephen Roxburgh, for one, was unsurprised to discover that there were incomplete tales left behind. He was convinced Roald “had more big books in him.” It was simply the physical energy to go through with them that was lacking. “I think until he stopped going out to that hut, he was writing,” Roxburgh reflected.35 Tom Maschler agreed. “Many writers write their masterpiece when they’re twenty-five or thirty and then it’s downhill all the way,” he noted, maintaining that Dahl could have written another twenty books if he’d lived another twenty years and that some of them might have been “even better than anything he had written previously.”36 To that extent, Roald left with a fund of untold stories that were lost to the world. Yet rarely has a writer lived such an extraordinary and eventful life. Without his writing his life would still have been a remarkable one. He had lived it with energy, passion and commitment, and remained true to one of his favorite fragments of verse, four lines written by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay:

  “My candle burns at both ends,

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

  It gives a lovely light.” 37

  The CEO of Penguin Books, Peter Mayer, quoted those lines at Roald’s funeral in the ancient church in Great Missenden, where a huge number of friends turned up to bid him farewell. In his eulogy, Mayer remembered him not only as a great writer and a supreme “family man” but also as “a benefactor and protector.” Aside from paying tribute to Dahl’s countless acts of philanthropy, Mayer also unexpectedly thanked him for having been so “caring” to him personally duri
ng the Salman Rushdie crisis. It was an unexpected revelation from a man whose decision to publish The Satanic Verses Dahl had openly criticized. Roald took fierce issue with him, Mayer explained, but at another level, he also wanted to help his friend. “He sought me out and wrote to me and sent me things to ponder,” he told the mourners. “He tried to figure out how I could go forward in what had become a publishing drama. … He disagreed with me … and still with brains and hands and heart wanted to protect me.”38 There was the paradox of Roald Dahl. He was like a firework: unpredictable, volatile and exciting. He could delight you, but he was dangerous, too. Get too close and you would likely be burned. However indignant and hotheaded he might appear, his intemperateness could rapidly be defused by humor or kindness. You never quite knew what he would do next.