Roald Dahl Page 22

  Cameron had no difficulty in answering these points, and there the argument stopped.23 But Dahl’s publishers got at least part of the message: that to those concerned with bringing up children in a racially mixed society, the Oompa-Loompas were no longer acceptable as originally written. The following year, to accompany its new sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared, in which the Oompa-Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long “golden-brown” hair and “rosy-white” skin. From now on, Dahl was often to find his books read—not least by his publishers—with a critical thoroughness he wasn’t used to and didn’t always care for.

  12

  Wham!

  Dahl used to boast, in the 1970s, that he paid the housekeeping bills out of his winnings at blackjack.1 It was an exaggeration, but a friend whom he took gambling at the Curzon House Club half a dozen times, Ian Rankin, says that he never saw him come away a loser.2

  He kept his gambling money separate, in a bedroom drawer (which, according to Tessa, some of his children were later to find a useful source of supply). When he went to the Mayfair casino, he would take £200 or so from the drawer. He never spent more than he had either brought with him or won that night.

  Dahl offered to teach Rankin his blackjack method. The minutest calculations were involved: about when precisely to double, when to split, how much to alter your bets in relation to the previous ones you had been putting up. Rankin—an old-fashioned, laid-back Etonian with sandy hair and a broken nose—couldn’t be bothered to memorize the technique sufficiently well to make it work, and says that even if he had, by the time the table had given him a large whiskey, he would have forgotten. But Dahl drank little while he was playing and gave the game his intensest concentration. He was always looking for the moment when he could add his own twist to the method: one which, he liked to claim, changed the odds a little more, so that they were fractionally in his favor. The approach was psychological as well as technical. While playing, he watched for a hint that the banker was nervous, perhaps because there had been a run of play against him or because, in a changeover, he had newly joined the game. Then Dahl would pile in and win.

  His public persona was not, of course, that of a gambling man. And he hadn’t yet acquired his later fame as an irritable, ornery sounder-off on political issues. The world knew him as a genial, rather scruffy children’s author—a tall scarecrow whose face, under the increasingly bald, high dome, looked both distinguished and in need of repair.

  This appearance fitted another role, as one of the people behind what had become the Volunteer Stroke Scheme. The methods which Valerie Eaton Griffith developed by trial and error with Patricia Neal (“she teaching me,” Griffith insists) had been taken up next with the writer Alan Moorehead, who, after suffering a stroke, rented a house in Great Missenden so as to benefit from the same techniques.3 In his case, there was much less improvement, but the possibilities of the approach were clear, and Griffith won the support of a scientist in Great Missenden, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Robert Robinson, in planning a national scheme, which eventually found sponsorship from the Chest, Heart and Stroke Association. Moorehead and Dahl encouraged Valerie Eaton Griffith to write a book about her efforts, A Stroke in the Family, and helped her to get it published by Penguin in 1970. Gradually the volunteer organization spread, and today it coordinates 120 local schemes through ten regional managers and publishes its own books, pamphlets, and a quarterly magazine.4

  Another view of Dahl which he encouraged was as the libertarian father idealized in Danny, the Champion of the World. The book, first published in 1975, mythologizes a father-son relationship of the kind which, in both roles, Dahl had seen shattered. It is also an ode to a newly prevalent condition, that of the single parent, as well as to an old one, the rural outlaw. When Danny—the book’s narrator—was a baby, his father “washed me and fed me and changed my nappies and did all the millions of other things a mother normally does for her child.”5 Yet this male mother is a traditionally macho, omniscient patriarch, a skilled car mechanic and maker of kites, wildlife expert, storyteller, and defender, who takes Danny’s side against a bullying teacher. He also has a secret. At night he creeps out of their gypsy caravan and goes poaching in the nearby woods.

  In essence, it is an expanded version of the ideal of devoted, piratical fatherhood in Fantastic Mr. Fox, and we are clearly meant to read the book as another allegory of Dahl’s own ménage. It is dedicated to “the whole family: Pat, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, Lucy.” The gypsy caravan (on whose roof apples thud with an everyday evocativeness reminiscent of Dahl’s earliest stories) is based on the one still parked in the garden of Gipsy House. The gas station comes from Dahl’s first job; Danny’s teachers are versions of those at St. Peter’s, Weston-super-Mare.

  Even the nocturnal poaching had been one of his real hobbies. But when the book was written, in the early 1970s, the sport had developed an additional symbolic meaning for him, signaled by a warning which Danny gives to his readers: “You will learn as you get older, just as I learned that autumn, that no father is perfect. Grown-ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets … that would probably make you gasp if you knew about them.”6 Such quirks, we are to understand, must be forgiven in both parents and children. They are part of not being “stodgy.” For as the book’s last page insists, “What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY.”

  There was no shortage of sparkiness at Gipsy House, although it often now took the form of rows between Roald and Pat, or Roald and anyone else, after he had had a few drinks in the evening. There were also signs that as a recipe for bringing up children, even the most vivid incandescence has its limitations.

  After Theo’s accident and Olivia’s death, Tessa had been upset to a degree which led Pat to suggest they find her some counseling. Anna Freud’s name was suggested, but Dahl furiously vetoed the idea.7 By 1972, a turbulent, slim, six-foot-tall fifteen-year-old with her mother’s long legs and wide cheekbones, Tessa was offered a role with Pat in a Hollywood film, Happy Mother’s Day, Love George.8 The idea came from Pat, who now thinks it was a bad mistake. Roald was furious, but didn’t see how he could stop her. Tessa feels that he didn’t try all that hard. Certainly, when she afterward walked out of boarding school and returned home the worse for a few Bloody Marys on the train, he gave her the impression that he found it all amusing and, in a way, was proud of her for it.

  It was the strongest indication yet that some of his children would be as independent-minded and as troublesome as Dahl himself. But the lives of his daughters, particularly Tessa and Lucy, were to be characterized by an emotional storminess for which he felt partly responsible, which he couldn’t calm, and which still continues after his death. As usual, he came up with what he hoped would prove a practical solution, setting up an antique shop in Great Missenden called The Witchball, for Tessa to run. If it seems like an idea more in tune with his own interests than Tessa’s, that was partly because he was otherwise preoccupied.

  According to Annabella, Dahl had had various flirtations since his marriage to Pat, and—although there is a discreet haze over the details—these had included at least one long affair, with a millionairess in New York.9 (She had a famous collection of pictures, and once, when she was away, Dahl took Annabella to the house to see them. “We were like two naughty schoolboys sometimes,” the actress says.) Pat herself says that since her stroke there had been the gangster’s daughter, an Irish novelist, and a woman in Switzerland—all part of what Tessa describes as “an endless slew of rich old bags who suddenly wanted to do nice things for me.”10 According to Annabella, “Roald didn’t make passes at women; the women ran to him.” To illustrate his response, she makes a gesture like someone pushing crumbs off a table.

  By the early 1970s, someone altogether new overwhelmed Dahl’s thoughts. The key to Danny’s words about parental secrets and nocturnal disappearances was Felicity Crosland: in her
mid-thirties, strong, elegant, Gallic-featured—in some ways a younger version of Annabella herself. She was recently divorced from her husband, Charles, a quiet gentleman-farmer with whom she had had three daughters, who now lived mostly with their father.

  When she first met Dahl, she was employed by David Ogilvy’s advertising agency, for which Patricia Neal was making the Maxim coffee commercials. According to Pat’s account in As I Am, Mrs. Crosland was given the job of helping Mrs. Dahl choose the dresses she wore in commercials in which she poured Mr. Dahl his coffee. (“My husband is a writer,” Pat had to say. “He’s terribly fussy when it comes to the coffee he drinks.”11) Pat was in need of friends, not least because Valerie Eaton Griffith, who was now busy with the ever-expanding Volunteer Stroke Scheme, had begun weaning her off their daily lessons. Griffith blames herself for this now, thinking she may have overestimated how independent Neal really was and how well she would withstand having nothing to do at home. Certainly it seemed to Griffith that under the near-intolerable pressures on Pat, she “began to behave badly. She was intolerant, she would yell at people, she would crave attention so that she’d overdo almost everything in an actressy way, and make it very difficult for people to live and be peaceful in that house. It was extremely hard for all of them, and very hard on Roald, who had stood square behind her, and possibly that was the germ …”12

  Pat liked the attentive Felicity and asked her to Gipsy House. A journalist who later interviewed the younger woman described Pat’s predicament: “Imagine the scene. You meet someone at work, get on with her rather well and invite her home to meet your husband. She and he take one look at each other and wham!—you’re out of the picture.”13

  Already smitten, “Liccy” (pronounced Lissy) returned the invitation. Over dinner with the couple at her Battersea flat, she mentioned that she was going to Paris the next day. With his trick of always giving a woman an errand to run, Roald asked her if she could pick up an umbrella he had left with a friend there. The friend greeted her with the words “I hear you are the most marvelous woman in the world.” Soon afterward, Felicity and Roald met à deux. Dahl, in his late fifties, seemed to her “a shy Norwegian giant with all the Nordic hangups,” but “very romantic.” He discovered that Felicity had been born in Palace Road, Llandaff, very near his own birthplace. Her father was a Portuguese surgeon named Alfonso d’Abreu, who, Dahl liked to boast, took part in the development of the pacemaker.14 Her mother was born Throckmorton, from a Catholic family which can trace its lineage back to the Middle Ages. One of her ancestors was a maid-of-honor to Queen Elizabeth I, married Sir Walter Ralegh, and—when he fell into disfavor under James I—spent a dozen years imprisoned in the Tower of London with him and their children.15 Llandaff, medicine, royalty, adventure, literature: it was a multiple coup de foudre.

  They met frequently, both in London and at Gipsy House. Liccy sometimes brought along a man to Great Missenden for cover. Dahl’s gambling companion, Ian Rankin, was one (it was through her that he and Dahl met). These arrangements produced their own complications, some of them farcical. One night, taking a walk in the garden after everyone had gone to bed, Rankin set off the burglar alarm by mistake and was arrested by two local policemen. The whole household was woken up, but Dahl’s anger seemed out of all proportion and Rankin wasn’t invited again.16

  Inevitably, people began to find out: among them, Tessa. She was now in her mid-to-late teens, often anorexic, heavily involved in drugs, and embarking on her own succession of affairs, in which some of her partners can be seen as surrogates of her father: the fifty-year-old Peter Sellers among them. By the time she was nineteen, she was pregnant. All this may have colored the account she now gives of those days.

  One night at Gipsy House, Tessa says, her father offered her a new kind of sleeping pill to try. It didn’t work, and as she lay awake, she heard him talking to Felicity on the telephone, in a way that made it clear that they were lovers. Tessa had already suspected this from something her Aunt Else had said, but when she had challenged Felicity, she had denied it. Now Tessa told Else what she had heard. Else said that it was best if everyone turned a blind eye. This wasn’t Tessa’s style, and she confronted her father. He at first denied everything, then rounded on her: “You’ve always been trouble, you’ve always been a nosy little bitch. I want you to get out of this fucking house now.” Whether or not these were his actual words, they are what Tessa remembers hearing. Later he apologized, and the next day came around to The Witchball and said that Liccy wanted to talk to her.

  According to Tessa’s understandably emotional account, it was an odd meeting. She was wretchedly confused, not least because Felicity was always very kind to her in her troubles—if anything, more helpful than her own mother. She also saw Else’s point, that the energetic but ailing Roald needed emotional support of a kind which Pat did not provide. Above all, Tessa was fascinated by her dawning sense of the power which her knowledge gave her. As she remembers it, Felicity offered to give Roald up if his daughter asked her to. But, again according to Tessa’s account, Felicity warned the girl that this would devastate him—and that the marriage would be finished if Pat was told. So Tessa kept the secret.

  In doing so, she unavoidably became an accomplice. As she remembers things, the pair gradually came to use her as a go-between and a confidante. Roald in particular, in an attempt at self-exoneration, told her intimate details of his foundering relationship with her mother, and then bribed her—with money and, after her baby, Sophie, was born, with a house in Wandsworth—to keep quiet. Tessa had always longed to be closer to her father. This wasn’t how she had imagined it, but it was something.

  The other children knew nothing of the affair and lived relatively unperturbed in their own worlds of school, friends, and horses. Pat herself was often away and so far suspected little of what was going on. To casual visitors, Gipsy House still seemed a noisy, affectionate, untidy domestic paradise. Everyone describes what successive magazine photographers and film cameramen also recorded: the Constructivist paintings and Picasso lithographs, the log piles of bottles in the wine cellar, the garden with its gypsy caravan, and the unswept writing hut. One newcomer after another learned what kind of pencil Dahl wrote with (a yellow Dixon Ticonderoga, with an eraser at one end), inspected his armchair with its writing board covered in billiard velvet, was offered a chocolate bar from a well-worn tin box, and heard his disquisition on the history of the Malteser.

  So long as Dahl didn’t take a dislike to them, almost anyone felt welcome. He had built an indoor pool for Pat, but its main users were children from the village. Friends would turn up at Gipsy House to play snooker on the recently acquired three-quarter-sized table, or just to have a few drinks. Dahl was a man’s man, say the men who liked him, and Gipsy House was a place where you didn’t feel you shouldn’t swear.17 Not all women were made to feel so comfortable, particularly if they were friends of Pat’s. The journalist Gitta Sereny, for example, found Dahl “very cold, very absent,” at this time.18

  His publishers were among the most frequent visitors. Robert and Helen Bernstein and their family came on several occasions, admired a Henry Moore print, were given it, and were taken to the Curzon House Club.19 And there were the many friends who lived nearby: a scientist, doctors, businessmen, but few writers (Elizabeth David was a special case), and certainly no literary critics.20 If he liked people, Dahl’s charm was such that even to those who had only met him a few times, he could seem uniquely close. While few claim that they understood him, many of his friends and acquaintances thought they were the only ones who knew him at all. So when, as inevitably happened in a life which was both very busy and in fact not at all short of lasting relationships, some of these people found themselves shut out, they could be hurt. Creekmore Fath was not particularly surprised that although he often visited England after the end of the war, his attempts to make contact with his old Washington buddy always failed. But David Ogilvy, like Ian Rankin, was startled to find himself
suddenly dropped. Ogilvy had sometimes been critical of Dahl’s treatment of Pat, and believes, too, that Dahl may have been envious of his importance in H. Montgomery Hyde’s book about wartime British intelligence in America21—a book in which Dahl himself does not figure. But when, around this time, he invited the Dahls to stay at his French château, he was astonished to receive a letter from Roald announcing that they were no longer friends. The rupture, he says, was both “total and inexplicable.”

  A similar but even more hurtful rift occurred with Colin Fox.22 Fox was one of those who thought themselves special to Dahl. He particularly remembers a day when they were putting up fencing posts together at Gipsy House. As they worked, Dahl told him he mustn’t think he could survive forever as a model and player of bit parts. “You’ll have to do something concrete or your friends will have to look after you.” Fox heard the second part of the sentence more clearly than the first. A vulnerable man, he was overwhelmed that Dahl should think of looking after him. From that moment, “always he was in the back of my mind, that here was this great pillar—Gentleman’s Agreement.” Years afterward, near-derelict and in despair, he came to England from New York in the hope of drawing on what he saw as this promise. With pitiful symbolism, Fox says he wanted Dahl to write some words for him, for a play in which he had been given a non-speaking role. He telephoned from a phone booth in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, but Dahl said it wasn’t convenient and would not see him.

  It is easy to see how Dahl could have been misinterpreted in such a situation. And a lot was going on, not least within the family. Although Pat and Roald fought a good deal, they also had some deceptively happy times together. In January 1974 they went to the Virgin Islands, where Roald played in a golf tournament. Pat now remembers the holiday with irony: “He was in fine form. Outrageously witty, too. He charmed everyone at the event. Including me. We got along so well that I started to think of Tobago as our second honeymoon.”23 That spring, she successfully underwent cosmetic surgery on her stroke-slackened face, and Felicity brought “an armload of presents” to the hospital. In the summer, instead of going to Norway, Roald, Pat, and the children joined Liccy and her daughters on holiday in Minorca, together with another friend, named Phoebe Berens. “One afternoon, girl-talking with Phoebe,” Pat “bragged about how happy Roald and I were now, and what a great sex life we had. I remember Phoebe looked at me and then rolled her eyes up to the ceiling.”