Roald Dahl Read online

  30. Interview with Sir David Sells. Meeting Sells much later, the archbishop asked him whether they had overlapped at the school. Only by a term, Sells told him. “You’re lucky,” Fisher said. “I was pretty crisp.”

  31. Telephone interview with Sir Stuart Hampshire.

  32. Review of J. T. Christie: A Great Teacher (a selection of his own writings, with introductory memoirs by Donald Lindsay, Roger Young, and Hugh Lloyd-Jones), London Review of Books, October 3, 1985.

  33. Interview with Sir David Sells.

  34. Letter from J.T.J. Dobie.

  35. Letter from B.L.L. Reuss.

  36. Interview with John Bradburn.

  37. The Dahl Diary, 1992.

  38. “Galloping Foxley” was bought by Town and Country in 1953 and first collected in Someone Like You the same year.

  39. For example, pp. 96–96 of “Galloping Foxley” (SLY, Penguin edn., 1970) become pp. 155–155 of Boy (Penguin edn., 1984).

  40. David Atkins in The Author, Spring 1992, p. 24. Atkins tells various other stories about his friendship with Dahl, but his memory isn’t faultless. He thinks Dahl had a Norwegian accent, and that they both arrived at Repton “on the same day in September 1930,” along with Welch and Geoffrey Lumsden. Dahl had in fact joined the school in January, Welch the previous September, and Lumsden in May 1928.

  41. Letter from Jim Furse.

  42. Interview with Dennis Pearl.

  43. Bernard Thomas, ed., Repton, 1557 to 1957, 1957, pp. 104–104; Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography, 1987, pp. 95–95.

  44. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder was so impressed by the power of Carthage that he famously ended every speech by saying that the rival city must be destroyed: “Delenda est Carthago.”

  45. Debates recorded in The Reptonian, 1931–1931, p. 31; 1933–1933, pp. 11, 13.

  46. The Dahl Diary, 1992.

  47. Interview with Ian Rankin.

  48. Letter from B.L.L. Reuss.

  49. The Dahl Diary, 1992.

  CHAPTER 3

  Main sources

  FSG

  Interviews and correspondence with Tessa Dahl, Dennis Pearl, Antony Pegg, and with survivors of 80 Squadron named in the notes or in the Further Acknowledgments.

  Boy; Dahl Diary, 1992; Going Solo; Memories with Food; Over to You; “A Piece of Cake,” “Shot Down over Libya”

  Dennis Clarke, Public Schools Explorers in Newfoundland, [1935]

  The Shell Magazine, 1936–1936

  Shell pamphlets: “The Shell Company of East Africa Limited” and “East Africa Tanganyika: History of Shell–B.P.”

  Christopher Shores, Strike True: The Story of No. 80 Squadron Royal Air Force, 1986

  John Terraine, The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939–1939, 1985

  NOTES

  1. FSG.

  2. Interview with Dennis Pearl.

  3. The organization continues today as the British Schools Exploring Society.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Dennis Clarke, Public Schools Explorers in Newfoundland [1935].

  6. Boy, p. 155.

  7. Interview with Antony Pegg.

  8. The Shell Magazine, 1936–1936.

  9. Interview with Dennis Pearl; Roald Dahl, “A Book That Changed Me,” Independent on Sunday, July 15, 1990.

  10. Memories with Food, p. 20.

  11. The Dahl Diary, 1992.

  12. Shell pamphlets: “The Shell Company of East Africa Limited” and “East Africa Tanganyika: History of Shell—B.P.”

  13. Going Solo, pp. 20f; Memories with Food, p. 34.

  14. FSG.

  15. Going Solo, p. 8.

  16. ABC radio interview with Terry Lane, 1990.

  17. See Chapter 11, n. 15.

  18. CM, April 30, 1950.

  19. SLY, Penguin edn., pp. 117–117.

  20. Collier’s, June 3, 1950.

  21. FSG.

  22. Interview with Dennis Pearl.

  23. FSG.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Letter from Roy Ballantyne.

  28. For detailed information in this section, I have relied principally on 80 Squadron’s Operations Record Book in the Public Record Office (PRO Air 27, 669) and the relevant volumes in the typescript official RAF Narrative held in the library of the RAF Museum at Hendon.

  29. Going Solo, pp. 97–97.

  30. See Chapter 4, n. 8.

  31. PRO Air 27, 669.

  32. RD to Sofie Dahl, November 20, 1940, FSG.

  33. Going Solo, p. 132. Dahl attributes the criticism to his friend David Coke, also a relative newcomer to the squadron. Jones was wounded in action soon after his arrival in Greece in November 1940, when his Gladiator was shot to pieces. As usual, what Dahl says has to be treated with at least a double amount of caution. He glamorizes Coke as heir to the Earl of Leicester, “although anyone acting less like a future Earl I have never met”: unsurprisingly, since the future earl was in fact his older brother.

  34. Letter from Air Marshal Sir Edward Gordon Jones.

  35. Going Solo, pp. 121, 117.

  36. Telephone interview with G. E. Wilson.

  37. Dahl doesn’t mention Coke’s brother in Going Solo, although he was impressed by the aristocratic connection: see n. 32.

  38. The squadron history (Shores, p. 22) attributes no claims to Dahl before April 20. In his own version (Going Solo, pp. 122–122), he was credited with one Junker 88 on his first day, April 15, and another on April 16.

  39. Going Solo, p. 146.

  40. Dahl’s Flight Sergeant “Rivelon,” for example, whose death he records on April 17, is Rivalant, who two days later was officially credited with having shot down a dive bomber.

  41. RAF Narrative, vol. cit., p. 70.

  42. 80 Squadron Operations Record Book summary for April 1941; Shores, p. 22; RAF Narrative, vol. cit., p. 70.

  43. See the later comment of his squadron leader, p. 49.

  44. Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1944.

  45. Going Solo, pp. 174f.

  46. Ibid., p. 184.

  47. The Dahl Diary, 1992.

  48. Going Solo, pp. 194–194. Dahl seems not to have heard, either, of the Balfour Declaration, by which in 1917 Lloyd George’s Foreign Secretary promised the Jews a national home in Palestine.

  49. 80 Squadron Operations Record Book, PRO Air 27, 669, June 9, 1941.

  50. Ibid., June 16, 1941.

  51. FSG.

  52. Letter from Sir Edward Gordon Jones.

  53. Letter from Creekmore Fath.

  54. Interview with Robin Hogg.

  55. Over to You, Penguin edn., 1973, p. 23.

  CHAPTER 4

  Main sources

  AK; CM; WD

  Interviews with Annabella, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Tessa Dahl, Creekmore Fath, Martha Gellhorn, Antoinette Haskell, Alice Keene, Stephen Koch, Helen Lillie, Claudia Marsh, David Ogilvy, Claudia Warner

  Going Solo; “Lucky Break”; “Searching for Mr. Smith,” 1979, reprinted in Matthew Smith, catalogue of the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition of 1983, pp. 54–54.

  David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War: The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City, 1988

  Anthony Cave Brown, The Secret Servant: The Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Churchill’s Spymaster, 1988

  H. Montgomery Hyde, The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson, 1962

  Richard Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During World War II, 1982

  For Dahl’s own version of his career in British Security Coordination I have used his accounts to Chris Powling in Roald Dahl (1983), to Terry Lane for ABC, and on the CBC TV program about Sir William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid, 1974. Dahl also talked about this to Professor Stephen Koch in connection with his forthcoming book on literary spies.

  NOTES

  1. Matthew Smith, catalogue of the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition of 1983, p. 42.
/>   2. See Dahl’s article “Searching for Mr. Smith,” 1979, reprinted in the catalogue of the Matthew Smith exhibition (see n. 1), pp. 54–54.

  3. Ibid., p. 50.

  4. Eg. to Justin Wintle in The Pied Pipers.

  5. ABC interview with Terry Lane.

  6. See n. 13.

  7. Interview with Sir Isaiah Berlin.

  8. Berlin adds, “Captain Hornblower was a kind, generous, sweet, second-rate imitator and admirer of Somerset Maugham (who in turn was an imitator of Maupassant).”

  9. Going Solo, p. 97.

  10. The revised text appeared as “A Piece of Cake” in OTY, first published in 1946 and again in WSHS, in 1977, where it is subtitled “My first story—1942.”

  11. Interview with Martha Gellhorn.

  12. Interview with Creekmore Fath.

  13. David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War: The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City, 1988, Chapter VI, “Parties for a Purpose.”

  14. Ibid., p. 152.

  15. Ibid., p. 160.

  16. Interview with Tessa Dahl.

  17. As I Am, p. 157.

  18. The Noël Coward Diaries, May 22, 1951, p. 69.

  19. Isaiah Berlin, for example, recalls Dahl’s dramatic response to being offered a house for rent after its occupier, a woman official of OSS, had been shot dead by her lover. “He went along and sat in the twilight to see if ghosts would occur—which as a creative writer he would find disturbing to cope with. The ghosts duly appeared, and he did not take the house.” Berlin was also house hunting at the time and, when Dahl told him about the place and the reason for his decision, unsuperstitiously rented it. He lived there with a friend for two or three years, undisturbed by ghosts.

  20. Switch Bitch, 1974, p. 38.

  21. WD archives.

  22. See Richard Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During World War II, 1982.

  23. WD, July 13, 1942.

  24. WD, May 19, 1943.

  25. Ibid., October 14, 1942.

  26. Ibid., November 30, 1942.

  27. Ibid., February 1, 1943.

  28. Ibid., November 8, 1942.

  29. Minutes of story meeting, WD, August 20, 1943.

  30. WD, October 8, 1942.

  31. WD, May 22, 1943.

  32. Kenneth G. Wynn, Men of the Battle of Britain, 1989, pp. 40–40.

  33. WD, September 20, 1942.

  34. Ibid., September 18, 1942.

  35. Ibid., October 7, 1942.

  36. In his autobiographical piece “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer,” he says, “I also had a go at a story for children. It was called ‘The Gremlins,’ and this I believe was the first time the word had been used” (WSHS p. 216). In an interview with him on Australian radio in 1989, Terry Lane tried to suggest that the gremlins had already been widely current in RAF lore, but Dahl insisted that it was he who had put them there.

  37. The Gremlins, 1943, p. 1.

  38. They appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in March and September 1945.

  39. Interview with Creekmore Fath.

  40. Hyde, p. 190.

  41. Powling, p. 44.

  42. See n. 20.

  43. Correspondence with Helen Lillie, according to whom Stephenson gave a military rank and a uniform to anyone working with agents.

  44. Letter from Ministry of Defence RAF Personnel Management Centre: “After a thorough search of the above officer’s records, I can find no indication that he served either in the substantive or acting rank of Wing Commander.”

  45. Correspondence with Helen Lillie.

  46. Powling, p. 43; CBC-TV, A Man Called Intrepid; Terry Lane interview.

  47. Cave Brown, p. 483.

  48. The pamphlet’s title was Our Job in the Pacific. One of the authors was the controversial Sinologist Owen Lattimore. See Cave Brown, pp. 482–482.

  49. See Washington Despatches 1941–1941, March 4, 1942 and passim. Indian independence was another of Clare Boothe Luce’s hobby horses. Noël Coward wrote in his diary on February 20, 1943, that he had just seen her and “she became rather shrill over the Indian question” (The Noël Coward Diaries).

  50. Ibid., February 21, 1943.

  51. See Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, Beaverbrook, 1992, p. 447.

  52. CM, March 31, 1943.

  53. Ibid., April 5, 1943.

  54. Letter from Helen Lillie. She adds, “I think it was in character that he should predominantly write for children, where his superiority was assured.”

  55. Interview with Annabella.

  56. Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1949.

  57. “My Lady Love, My Dove,” SLY, pp. 57–57.

  58. Ibid., p. 61.

  59. Interview with David Ogilvy.

  60. Ibid.

  61. AK, July 30, 1943.

  62. Ibid., August 10, 1943.

  63. Ibid., August 23, 1943.

  CHAPTER 5

  Main sources

  AK; BBC; CM

  Interviews with Tessa Dahl, Martha Gellhorn, Antoinette Haskell, Claudia Marsh, Dennis Pearl, Claudia Warner

  ASML (Preface); OTY; Sometime Never

  Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1895, 1987

  NOTES

  1. To her grandchildren and others in the family, she became “Mormor”—the Norwegian word for grandmother (literally, “mother’s mother”).

  2. CM, February 28, 1946.

  3. Ibid., March 9, 1948.

  4. Ibid., September 5, 1946.

  5. Preface to ASML.

  6. Interview with Stephen Roxburgh.

  7. RD interview with Brian Sibley, “Meridian,” BBC World Service, November 1988.

  8. “The Ratcatcher,” “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” “Mr. Hoddy,” and “Rummins” respectively. Some of these, along with the dog-race story “Mr. Feasey,” appeared in the “Claud’s Dog” section of Someone Like You (first published in the U.S. in 1953). They were all collected, with “Parson’s Pleasure” and “The Champion of the World,” as Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life (1989).

  9. Preface to ASML, p. vii.

  10. CM, December 19 and 22, 1946.

  11. OTY, pp. 152–152.

  12. See Chapter 4, n. 39.

  13. The Noël Coward Diaries, January 29, 1946, p. 50.

  14. TLS, January 18, 1947.

  15. The Saturday Review of Literature, March 9, 1946.

  16. BBC, August 23, 1948.

  17. CM, July 22 and October 12, 1947.

  18. Ibid., July 19, 1946.

  19. Ibid., September 28, 1946.

  20. Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1895, 1987.

  21. See Marlene J. Mayo, “Literary Representation in Occupied Japan: Incidents of Civil Censorship,” in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer, 1991, p. 150.

  22. Sometime Never, p. 53.

  23. Ibid., p. 100.

  24. Ibid., p. 112.

  25. Ibid., p. 236.

  26. As published, Sometime Never reads as if no one at Scribner’s more than glanced at it before sending it to the printer. On one page, the idea that the pilots look as if they have been poured into their chairs is repeated three times (p. 33). On another, Dahl doodles: “All day the flying men were up there in the sky, always moving; moving, moving, moving, so that movement became a function of their lives.… Movement swirled around them.… Movement followed them,” etc. (p. 40).

  27. Sometime Never, p. 143.

  28. CM (copy of letter to Stuart Rose), November 1946.

  29. BBC, July 7, 1948.

  30. Ibid., August 23 and September 9, 1948.

  31. Ibid., September 14, 1948.

  32. Ibid., November 28, 1948.

  33. Ibid., January 10, 1949.

  34. Ibid., March 8 and 17, August 1, and September 13, 1949.

  35. Ibid., September 5, 1951.

  36. CM, May 5, 1949.

  37
. On October 29, 1949, he wrote to Marsh that he had suffered two months of imaginative constipation.

  38. CM, May 5, 1949.

  39. The Saturday Evening Post, September 20, 1947. The story was collected in WSHS, pp. 52–52.

  40. CM, July 22, 1947.

  41. CM, October 11, 1945.

  42. Ibid., July 22, 1946.

  43. Ibid., July 26, 1946.

  44. Ibid., August 1, 1947. The reply to Sydney Rothman is dated July 30. The Settlement remains active, and several survivors of the 1940s are involved. Since none of them has any recollection of Dahl’s letter, it seems safe to assume that he neither sent it nor intended to. I am grateful to the Settlement’s former director Nick Collins for his help.

  45. CM, September 14, 1946.

  46. Interview with Claudia Warner.

  47. BBC, September 5, 1951.

  48. CM, May 28 and June 11, 1946.

  49. Ibid., April 2 and July 19, 1946.

  50. Ibid., May 22, 1950.

  51. MS, [n.d.] and interview with Alice Keene.

  52. CM, October 23, 1950.

  53. Ibid., October 14, 1950.

  54. Ibid., September 10, [1953]. (Year supplied by Patricia Neal.)

  55. Ibid., May 11, 1947; April 6 and October 29, 1948; June 4, 1949.

  56. Interview with Alice Keene.

  57. CM, August 17, 1950.

  58. Ibid., September 3, 1950. The scheme had been first discussed four years earlier.

  59. Ibid., April 6, 1948.

  60. Ibid., September 10, 1951.

  61. Interview with Martha Gellhorn.

  62. CM, September 10, 1951.

  CHAPTER 6

  Main sources

  AK; BBC; CM

  Interviews with Betsy Drake, Colin Fox, Brendan Gill, Edmund and Marian Goodman, Antoinette Haskell, Alice Keene, Patricia Neal, David Ogilvy

  As I Am

  Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983)

  NOTES

  1. Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life, 1983, p. 211.

  2. Interview with Brendan Gill.

  3. Quoted by Diane Johnson, p. 229.

  4. As I Am, pp. 110–110.

  5. Ibid., p. 131.

  6. Ibid., p. 133.

  7. Ibid., p. 139.

  8. CM, February 10, 1952.

  9. Interview with Patricia Neal.

  10. See Chapter 5, n. 17.

  11. Memories with Food, p. 225.

  12. BBC, September 13, 1951.

  13. SLY, p. 10.

  14. Interview with Brough Girling.