Roald Dahl (40 page)
Authors: Jeremy Treglown
At Elm Tree House School, Llandaff. Dahl's sisters Asta and Elsa are on the far left, Alfhild in the middle of the same row. (Elm Tree House)
Dahl at Repton, aged seventeen, from the Priory House photograph album. (Repton School)
The Priory House football team, Repton, winter 1932. Dahl, who played outside left, is in the middle of the back row. (John F. Barclay)
One of Matthew Smith's portraits of Dahl, painted in 1941. (Alice Keene)
Matthew Smith in London, early 1940s. (Alice Keene)
Charles Marsh, shortly before the Second World War. (Antoinette Haskell)
Alfred Knopf. (Fabian Bachrach)
Notes
A
BBREVIATIONS
Sources frequently referred to in the notes are abbreviated as follows:
AK | Archives of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin |
BBC | BBC Written Archives, Reading |
CM | Correspondence of Charles Marsh, in the possession of his widow |
FSG | Archives of Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
MS | Letters to Matthew Smith, in the possession of Alice Keene |
NY | The New Yorker |
PRO | Public Record Office files |
WD | Walt Disney Archives, used by permission of © The Walt Disney Company |
A
BBREVIATED TITLES
As I Am | Patricia Neal, |
ASML | Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: |
CCF | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory |
Danny | Danny, the Champion of the World |
JGP | James and the Giant Peach |
KK | Kiss Kiss |
“Lucky Break” | “Lucky Break: How I became a writer,” in |
Memories with Food | Felicity and Roald Dahl, |
OTY | Over to You, 1946; Penguin edition, 1973 |
Pat and Roald | Barry Farrell, |
“A Piece of Cake” | “A Piece of Cake: My first storyâ1942,” in |
Powling | Chris Powling, |
“Shot Down over Libya” | “Shot Down over Libya ⦠factual report on Libyan air fighting,” |
SLY | Someone Like You |
WSHS | The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar |
P
REFACE
1.
See pp. 260f.
2.
Information from Amanda Conquy.
C
HAPTER
1
Main sources
CM
Interviews with Creekmore Fath, Antoinette Haskell, Claudia Marsh, David Ogilvy
N
OTES
1
. All quotations/information in this section are from the correspondence of Charles Marsh (hereafter, CM).
2
. See H. G. Nicholas, ed.,
Washington Despatches 1941â1941. Weekly Reports from the British Embassy
, pp. 345f.
3
. Ibid.
4
. Robert A. Caro,
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
, Vol. 1,
The Path to Power
, 1982, pp. xiii, 477, and passim.
5
. See Chapter 2, n. 4.
6
. Sir Isaiah Berlin says that Marsh “was obviously very vain, spoke in staccato, disjointed sentences, gave the impression of being powerful, not to say sinister.⦠[He was] not exactly abnormal, but [I thought] that there was a screw faintly loose somewhereâand I felt rather frightened of him, as if in the presence of someone slightly unbalanced.”
7
. CM, June 27, 1943.
8
. Ibid., 1943, n.d.
9
. Interview with Colin Fox.
10
. Interview with Claudia Warner.
11
.
The Gremlins
, 1943, see pp. 88f.
12
. British sales figures given are for children's paperbacks published by Puffin.
According to Puffin's publishing director, Elizabeth Attenborough, 11,326,700 copies were sold in 1980â1980. The figure for 1989 was 2,383,518; for 1990, 2,318,718.
Whitaker's Almanac
records that the U.K. birth rate rose in 1980â1980 from about 700,000 to just under 800,000 per annum: a total for the decade of about 7.5 million.
13
. Eleanor Roosevelt,
This I Remember
, 1949.
14
. Bing Taylor in
The Good Book Guide
, Spring 1980, p. 4.
15
. See Chapters 11â11.
16
.
The Noël Coward Diaries
, ed. Graham Payne and Sheridan Morley, February 14, 1954, 1982, p. 231.
17
. Compare, for example,
Danny, the Champion of the World
with its earlier adult version, “The Champion of the World”;
George's Marvellous Medicine
with
My Uncle Oswald; Esio Trot
with “Mr. Botibol”; and
The Twits
with Dahl's adult tales of domestic cruelty, particularly “William and Mary” or “The Way Up to Heaven.”
C
HAPTER
2
Main sources
FSG
Interviews and correspondence with Tessa Dahl, Kaare Hesselberg, Douglas Highton, J.F.M. Walker, and with old Reptonians listed in individual notes and in the Further Acknowledgments
Boy; Memories with Food; The Dahl Diary, 1992
Repton
, 1557â1557, edited by Bernard Thomas (1957). Contemporary volumes of the Repton school magazine,
The Reptonian
N
OTES
1
. Information about the Hesselberg family: letters from Kaare Hesselberg;
Memories with Food
.
2
. Patricia Neal says that, later, Sofie “was not at all beautiful.”
3
. Edgar L. Chappell,
History of the Port of Cardiff
, 1939, p. 121.
4
.
Boy
, 1984, p. 17. Ty Mynydd was a big house, but the turrets Dahl describes are surely those of Castell Coch.
5
. In a letter to the Marshes, many years later, Sofie said that she was worried that Roald might take after his father, who “was difficult if the babies made a noise to disturb his work and I think Roald is just as bad. I feel sorry for Pat.” CM, January 16, 1956.
6
.
Boy
, FSG edn., p. 20.
7
. Cutting from an unidentified Cardiff paper, sent by Kaare Hesselberg. In conversation, Roald Dahl later rounded the figure up to a quarter of a million (
Pat and Roald
, p. 74).
8
. Tessa Dahl,
Working for Love
, 1988, pp. 30, 51.
9
. BBC “Bookmark,” 1985.
10
.
Memories with Food
, pp. 65â65.