More About Boy Read online

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  Do you think Roald Dahl might have based the character of Danny’s dad in Danny the Champion of the World on his own father?

  ‘My father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had. Here is a picture of him.’

  ‘You might think, if you didn’t know him well, that he was a stern and serious man. He wasn’t. He was actually a wildly funny person. What made him appear so serious was the fact that he never smiled with his mouth. He did it all with his eyes.’

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  More About Mama

  She was undoubtedly the absolute primary influence on my own life. She had a crystal-clear intellect and a deep interest in almost everything under the sun, from horticulture to cooking to wine to literature to paintings to furniture to birds and dogs and other animals – in other words, in all the lovely things in the world. Her hair, when she let it down, as she did every morning so that she could brush it assiduously, reached three-quarters of the way down her back, and it was always carefully plaited and coiled in a bun on the top of her head.

  My mother was widely read. She read the great Norwegian writers in their own language, Ibsen, Hamsun, Undsett and the rest of them, and in English she read the writers of her time, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Kipling etc. When we were young, she told us stories about Norwegian trolls and all the other mythical Norwegian creatures that lived in the dark pine forests, for she was a great teller of tales. Her memory was prodigious and nothing that ever happened to her in her life was forgotten. Embarrassing moments, funny moments, desperate moments were all recounted in every detail and we would listen enthralled.

  Kindergarten, 1922–3 (age 6–7)

  In 1920, when I was still only three, my mother’s eldest child, my own sister Astri, died from appendicitis. She was seven years old when she died, which was also the age of my own eldest daughter, Olivia, when she died from measles forty-two years later.

  Astri was far and away my father’s favourite. He adored her beyond measure and her sudden death left him literally speechless for days afterwards. He was so overwhelmed with grief that when he himself went down with pneumonia a month or so afterwards, he did not much care whether he lived or died.

  If they had had penicillin in those days, neither appendicitis nor pneumonia would have been so much of a threat, but with no penicillin or any other magical antibiotic cures, pneumonia in particular was a very dangerous illness indeed. The pneumonia patient, on about the fourth or fifth day, would invariably reach what was known as ‘the crisis’. The temperature soared and the pulse became rapid. The patient had to fight to survive. My father refused to fight. He was thinking, I am quite sure, of his beloved daughter, and he was wanting to join her in heaven. So he died. He was fifty-seven years old.

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  Roald Dahl dedicated three books to his beloved daughter Olivia. They were James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr Fox and The BFG.

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  My mother had now lost a daughter and a husband all in the space of a few weeks. Heaven knows what it must have felt like to be hit with a double catastrophe like this. Here she was, a young Norwegian in a foreign land, suddenly having to face all alone the very gravest problems and responsibilities. She had five children to look after, three of her own and two by her husband’s first wife, and to make matters worse, she herself was expecting another baby in two months’ time. A less courageous woman would almost certainly have sold the house and packed her bags and headed straight back to Norway with the children. Over there in her own country she had her mother and father willing and waiting to help her, as well as her two unmarried sisters. But she refused to take the easy way out. Her husband had always stated most emphatically that he wished all his children to be educated in English schools. They were the best in the world, he used to say. Better by far than the Norwegian ones. Better even than the Welsh ones, despite the fact that he lived in Wales and had his business there. He maintained that there was some kind of magic about English schooling and that the education it provided had caused the inhabitants of a small island to become a great nation and a great Empire and to produce the world’s greatest literature. ‘No child of mine,’ he kept saying, ‘is going to school anywhere else but in England.’ My mother was determined to carry out the wishes of her dead husband.

  Photograph © John Williams

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  THE DAHL FAMILY MONUMENT In Radyr churchyard, near their home. It reads:

  ‘In Loving Memory of Harald Dahl who died at Tymynydd April 11th 1920 aged 56 years. And of his daughter Astri who died February 13th 1920 aged 7 years.’

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  To accomplish this, she would have to move house from Wales to England, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. She must stay here in Wales for a while longer, where she knew people who could help and advise her, especially her husband’s great friend and partner, Mr Aadnesen. But even if she wasn’t leaving Wales quite yet, it was essential that she move to a smaller and more manageable house. She had enough children to look after without having to bother about a farm as well. So as soon as her fifth child (another daughter) was born, she sold the big house and moved to a smaller one a few miles away in Llandaff. It was called Cumberland Lodge and it was nothing more than a pleasant medium-sized suburban villa. So it was in Llandaff two years later, when I was six years old, that I went to my first school.

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  The family moved into Cumberland Lodge at some time in late 1921 or early 1922. The house was at 134 Cardiff Road, not far from their old home in Fairwater Road. It is now part of Howell’s School, next door.

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  The school was a kindergarten run by two sisters, Mrs Corfield and Miss Tucker, and it was called Elmtree House. It is astonishing how little one remembers about one’s life before the age of seven or eight. I can tell you all sorts of things that happened to me from eight onwards, but only very few before that. I went for a whole year to Elmtree House but I cannot even remember what my classroom looked like. Nor can I picture the faces of Mrs Corfield or Miss Tucker, although I am sure they were sweet and smiling. I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me at this distance of the school itself.

  On the other hand, I can remember very clearly the journeys I made to and from the school because they were so tremendously exciting. Great excitement is probably the only thing that really interests a six-year-old boy and it sticks in his mind. In my case, the excitement centred around my new tricycle. I rode to school on it every day with my eldest sister riding on hers. No grown-ups came with us, and I can remember oh so vividly how the two of us used to go racing at enormous tricycle speeds down the middle of the road and then, most glorious of all, when we came to a corner, we would lean to one side and take it on two wheels. All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whooping their way to school in the centre of the highway.

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  Roald Dahl and his sister Alfhild were among the first pupils at Elmtree House. The school started in 1922 – with just five pupils!

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  So much, then, for my memories of kindergarten sixty-two years ago. It’s not much, but it’s all there is left.

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  A Grand Time

  One of my most enduring memories of early childhood was my friendship with Joss Spivvis.

  It all started in the early nineteen-twenties, not long after my father and my eldest sister had both died within a few weeks of one another. The remainder of our large family, consisting of my mother and six children, had moved to a house in Llandaff, near Cardiff, which was called Cumberland Lodge.

  The gardener that my mother engaged to look after everything outdoors was a short, broad-shouldered, middle-aged Welshman with a pale brown moustache