CHILDREN LAUGH
As one of the great storytellers of the 20th century,
Roald Dahl has held generations of children around the world in his thrall.
He was a highly imaginative man,
and I have a feeling he sometimes found it very difficult to part truth from imagination.
The fantastic ideas in his books are matched by the extraordinary events of his life.
ALL SQUEAL
And he never stopped telling stories.
I can remember going very wide-eyed and thinking, "Really? Are you telling the truth?" I never knew.
It had to be... What was the word he was always using? It had to be sparky.
"He sat there watching her and smiled.
"He thought, 'I'm going to eat this child.
"'Compared with her old grandmamma, she's going to taste like caviar. '
"Then Little Red Riding Hood said, 'But Grandma, what a lovely great big furry coat you have on. '
"'That's wrong!' cried Wolf, 'Have you forgot to tell me what big teeth I've got?
"'Ah, well, no matter what you say, I'm going to eat you anyway. '
"The small girl smiles.
"One eyelid flickers.
"She whips a pistol from her knickers.
"She aims at the creature's head, and bang, bang, bang,
"she shoots him dead."
ALL CHEER
You can't control children who are excited...
A week or so ago, Roald Dahl's family gathered at Gypsy House, his home in Great Missenden,
to celebrate the opening of the Dahl museum.
.. mad cow disease... After talking at length to them for this film,
and digging deep into his personal archive,
it's clear that they too remain under his inimitable spell.
Daddy claimed - but it might have been his wonderful storytelling -
that the next day, he'd been past the field and had seen the farmer
counting the sheep, scratching his head.
When you're old enough to write a book for children,
by then you've become pompous and grown-up, and you've lost all your jokiness.
Unless you are a kind of... undeveloped...
adult...
and you still have an enormous amount of childishness in you,
I don't think you can do it.
Roald Dahl never lost that jokiness.
It's part of a reason why it was hard to tell where his storytelling ended and reality began.
James And The Giant Peach, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory,
The Witches, Matilda,
all his children's stories belong to a folk tale morality
with a black and white sense of good and evil but they also have a subversive streak.
He saw himself as on the side of the small child surrounded by giants,
"the enemy", he called them, even though he himself was the biggest,
and when he chose to be, the friendliest of the lot.
The limbs, I remember these long, long limbs.
A sort of reedy,
creaky,
elegant grasshopper.
And that was the thing about being hugged by him,
you would be sort of enveloped in these long limbs.
He was quite formidable and I remember there were two boys who were eight or nine or something,
and they asked, "What do you do if someone doesn't like your work?"
That sort of thing. Roald said, "We hit them."
HE CHUCKLES
It was exactly the right answer. It was the answer they wanted, really.
His grandchildren called him "Mouldy", it was their version of his Norwegian name, Roald.
When he gave his grandson Luke a party for his fourth birthday,
Mouldy knew instantly what it was like to be that age.
The cake was going to made out of a caravan,
and the baguette was shaped like the Enormous Crocodile.
SOPHIE: And it had eggs for eyes.
Artichoke pieces on it so it had the scales of a crocodile.
One thing after another would come out of the kitchen.
I was just remembering the story he told about his fourth birthday.
He got so excited about the prospect of it.
"'We'll put fancy dress on the invitations', my mother said.
"'They'll love it. '
"I'd be Little Boy Blue because it was my favourite nursery rhyme.
"My excitement and nervousness caused such a ferment within my bladder, the floodgates opened,
"and out shot a stream of pee-pee like a jet from a pressure hose.
"In no time at all, the entire front of my beautiful powder blue velvet trousers was covered with an enormous black wet stain.
"I began to howl and I was whisked out of the room by my mother,
"who changed me into ordinary grey flannel shorts, and a white shirt.
"'Never mind,' she said. 'If they ask you who you're meant to be,
"'say you're dressed as yourself, because that's what you'll be for the rest of your life. '"
His keepsakes of those early days, and most of his life,
were treasured in his tiny writing hut in his Buckinghamshire garden.
SOPHIE: It was not somewhere you just dropped in.
It was quite an honour to be sent to tell Mouldy that it's supper time.
You'd knock on the door, "Come in!"
In you'd go.
He would frighten children.
He used to say, "There are wolves in my hut,
"and sometimes you can hear them.
"They may be asleep at the moment, but...
"when they wake up, you can hear them.
"But you must be very careful."
These children were scared to death.
They were convinced there were wolves inside.
When he did ask them in, they really didn't want to go into the hut.
In this unlikely place of mystery and magic,
he hoarded ideas and revisited his youth.
At home, his mother and three sisters always called him "boy".
His father died when he was three
and his mother Sophia became the centre of his life.
The letter he wrote home after arriving at his boarding school at the age of seven
was the first of 917 to his mother over the next 40 years.
He told her everything,
but from an early age, he always took charge.
"Please could you send me some conkers as quick as you can,
"but don't send too many. Send them in a tin and wrap it up in paper."
"Where are thou? Mother Christmas?
"I only wish I knew why Father should get all the praise,
"and no-one mentions you.
"I bet you buy the presents and wrap them large and small,
"while all the time, that rotten swine pretends he's done it all."
"So hail to Mother Christmas who shoulders all the work,
"and down with Father Christmas, that unmitigated jerk!"
I got him to speak to some children's librarians at a conference once,
and the theme was something like...
political correctness in children's writing today,
he said, "I'll do it, I don't need to know what the theme is."
And he turned up and just told us the story about what his sex education had been.
On the last day, we all knew we would get a terrific lecture
from the headmaster, where all secrets would be told.
All mysteries unfurled.
And in we went, eight of us,
and stood around his desk.
There were touches in it of storyteller's art.
He said his headmaster's hair was slicked back with brilliantine,
so smooth that it was like the top of a creme brulee.
You think, "That's a neat phrase."
He said, "All of you boys have attached to your body,
"an organ..." AUDIENCE LAUGHS
"If you look carefully next time you're having your bath, you'll see it.
"Thanks to the high standards of etiquette in this school,
"you don't know about those things, but I expect you can guess."
We stood there waiting to know what was going to come next.
He said, "This organ of yours is the exact equivalent of an electric torch.
"And the end of the organ, as you can see from its shape, is the bulb of the torch."
I got him, I was with him there, you know.
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
He said, "Now, listen carefully to this.
He said, "If you so much as touch that torch organ,
"with one finger or even with the tip of one finger,
"the torch will switch on and the bulb will light up.
"And what happens to any torch that switches on?"
He said, "The battery runs down."
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
"And I may say that little boys like you have very small batteries."
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
When his American publisher recognised the quality of Dahl's boyhood memories,
he persuaded him to write a book about his childhood entitled simply Boy.
It soon became clear that he carried on telling stories whether or not he was writing fiction.
He talks about his father who'd lost an arm.
And he talks his father having sharpened one edge of a fork,
so he could use it as a knife. I thought that's marvellous!
What a good idea. I said "Did your father really..." "No, he didn't." He made it up.
I thought, "If that's what you're making up, keep making it up." It doesn't get better.
For him, it was all about storytelling.
And he took anything he had access to and turned it into the best story possible.
He said at the beginning of Boy, "This isn't autobiography,
"but everything in this is true."
Well, that would be a typical...
That would be a typical, er... Dahl approach to it.
What does that mean? I don't know what it means but, um...
If I wanted to put some high fallutin' spin to it, I would say because...
there's more truth in story than there is in details, facts.
Dahl's search for adventure led him to train as an RAF fighter pilot
at the outbreak of war.
He served in north Africa, Palestine and Greece,
and shot down six German aircraft.
He always carried his Zeiss camera with him. He was a talented photographer.
This here is one of my favourite photographs,
a photograph of men lining up to board trains,
going off to war in Mombassa, in 1939, from a ship.
At the time, he was thinking about enlisting and so this would've had a special significance for him.
I also love this mysterious group of figures up here.
This group of British cads, who were probably his group who he's probably ventured off from to take the photo.
This is another one of my favourite pictures which is...
he's taken once he's actually enlisted and he's in training and he's gone to Baghdad in 1940.
There's a great description he sent to his mother,
saying he loved the dusty air, and he wasn't sure the photo would come out,
but there were these amazing shafts of light coming down.
It's a mysterious picture with the boy standing there looking at you.
It's sort of similar to his writings.
Dahl was invalided out of the Air Force after a horrific crash.
It gave him chronic back pain for the rest of his life but it also launched him as a writer.
His first short story described how he's been shot down by enemy gunfire in the desert.
He first submitted it to the veteran adventure writer CS Forester.
And I got a letter back, saying I didn't touch it,
the Saturday Evening Post bought it at once for $1,000,
the agent takes 10%, here's my cheque for 900 bucks.
I thought, "My God, it can't be as easy as all that!"
The fee was actually $300,
but the agent called it a remarkable piece.
"Did Lieutenant Dahl write it without any assistance whatever?
"If so, he should write more, he's a natural writer of superior quality."
It was a vivid story but the facts were more prosaic.
He actually crashed when making a forced landing because he was running out of fuel.
He was never shot down, he wasn't flying a Hurricane, he wasn't even on a combat mission.
He was alone flying in a rather mystical space.
Flying, I think, influenced him a great deal,
and helped him as a fantasist
or fuelled his love of fantasy.
He served the rest of the war as a diplomat in Washington,
but 60 years on, the war hero's glamour still glows.
I will meet ladies of a certain age
who'll say, "Was your grandfather Roald Dahl?" I'll say, "Yes."
And they'll say "Oh, he took me out for lunch once to the 21 Club."
And, you know, the bosom will start heaving and, you know,
the eyes will go moist and you realise he was a phenomenal lady-killer.
Ah, he was so handsome.
I met him at Lillian Hillman's, big party, she had.
And I said to Lillian, "Who is that man?" And shouted "Roald Dahl," at the top of her voice.
The actress Patricia Neal met him on the rebound from her affair with Gary Cooper.
I sat next to him at supper, you know.
He only talked to Leonard Bernstein across the table.
He had not one word to say to me
and I did not like him.
He was a rude man! Ha ha ha! He really could be in those days.
And then he called me up for a date about one or two days later,
and I said, "So, sorry, can't go."
And then, um... then he called me again.
I couldn't think of an excuse so I said yes, and we started.
I'm very happy that we did.
I wanted to get married.
I wanted children and he was about the best I saw.
They went on their honeymoon through France and...
apparently it was ghastly because Mum slept the whole way,
and Dad desperately wanted to look at the vineyards and all the things he loved and he suddenly thought,
"What have I done? I've married this woman who doesn't like what I do."
Although the marriage was to last 30 years and produce five children,
it was a struggle from the start.
Even in the early days, Dahl was talking of divorce.
They got back to England and she was introduced to his family,
and this house had been bought in her absence by his mother,
in Buckinghamshire, she'd come from Hollywood.
The strain in their relationship was compounded by three family disasters,
which deeply affected Dahl.
They give fresh meaning to the dark twists in his writing.
The first tragedy came in 1960, in a New York street
when their baby son Theo was just four months old.
A taxi jumped a light
and crashed into Theo's carriage and carried the carriage across Madison Avenue into the back of a bus,
and bounced off the back of the bus on to the wall of a school.
And Tessa had to watch this whole thing happening.
I was pushing the pram with my nanny,
and I, um...
witnessed it, obviously, and it was horrific,
and I didn't realise till many, many, many years later, the profound effect it had on me.
Oh, it was just terrible.
The doctor came in,
and he said, "He is dying."
Theo did pull through but the brain injuries caused hydrocephalus.
Every time the baby came out of hospital, he had to go back.
We were with Pat and Roald on New Year's Eve.
We literally watched Theo's head get bigger,
as it swelled up with cerebral fluid.
He had to have operations,
to take the fluid out of his brain,
because it couldn't get out.
Dahl didn't rely on the doctors alone to limit the brain damage to his son.
He devoted all his energy to developing a new device to drain fluid from the brain.
He only had to say, "Well, what I need is...
"a chemical engineer who can make it,
"a doctor who says what he hasn't got and what he wants.
"I'll put up the money and we'll make it." To see Roald driven in that way was absolutely awesome.
By the time the valve was developed, Theo's condition had improved,
but it was used in hundreds of other cases around the world.
Being the only boy of the family was a privilege. I grew up with my father,
and, er... it was very special, it was very special.
When the next disaster struck two years later,
Dahl had no chance to use his medical knowledge or to leap into practical action.
This time, at home in Great Missenden,
the victim was their eldest child, Olivia, who was seven.
Poor Olivia was upstairs in the bedroom with measles,
and I remember Pat leaning out of the window and saying, "Hello, everybody, isn't it the most wonderful day?
"And poor Olivia," the usual things you'd expect.
The following day, we heard that Olivia had died.
Dahl left an account of Olivia's last hours
which has only recently come to light.
"The day before she died in the morning, I taught her chess.
"She learnt all the moves quickly,
"and we played a game. I fooled around a bit, and as a result, she beat me.
"The morning of the day she died, I said, 'Do you want to play chess?'
"'No thank you,' she said, 'I'm too tired, I feel tired.
"'I have a headache here. '"
Olivia was in our bed,
and she obviously eyes that way, foaming at the mouth.
Measles had developed into encephalitis.
The Dahls left their daughter in hospital overnight
unprepared for the speed at which the crisis was overtaking them.
The phone rang and the doctor said to me,
"Mrs Dahl, Olivia's dead."
And I didn't say a word, and he said, "Did you hear me?"
"I said Olivia's dead."
I said, "Thank you," and hung up.
It was just horrendous.
Roald had gone back to the hospital.
"Two doctors advanced on me from waiting room,
"'How is she?' 'I'm afraid it's too late. '
"I went into her room. Sheet was over her.
"Doctor said to nurse, 'Go out, leave him alone. '
"I kissed her, she was warm. I went out.
"'She's warm,' I said to doctor in hall. 'Why is she warm?'
"'Of course,' he said. I left."
And then Roald came home...
soon after that.
And we embraced one another, we just wept, you know?
And then Roald went to bed,
and I was up all night, and I looked at the...
looked at the great moon...
and then the sun was arising and I saw the sun rise and...
Olivia's dead, you know, there's nothing you can do.
She'd be 49 now, I think, if she were living.
Well, I guess she was meant to die.
"First of all, you began to care terribly about everything that existed far below you on the world.
"About people, trees, rivers, cows,
"houses, cherries, mountains,
"grains of soil and grasshoppers,
"and all the great mass of tiny living things, and all the wide scattering of odd inanimate objects,
"upon the surface of the Earth.
"Yet at the same time,
"at the very same time, there was within you a small rebellious voice,
"whispering strange rebellious things, telling you that nothing anywhere on Earth was worth a jot,
"that nothing anywhere was worth a moment's thought, or love or sorrow."
In his torment, Dahl decided to seek spiritual comfort from his old headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher,
who'd just retired from the highest office in the Church of England.
We went to see the Archbishop of Canterbury,
and Roald had all kinds of things to ask him.
And Roald said, "Well, I suppose she'll be all right,
"because she's got her dog with her."
Um... and the archbishop said,
"Oh no, dogs aren't allowed in heaven."
He didn't believe in heaven for dogs or cats,
or birds or animals or anything.
He just believed in human beings. That upset Roald so much.
He thought, how can anybody say that,
to a father who's just lost his child and is clinging on to any kind of...
string to give him hope.
FELICITY DAHL: He really could not believe that he had not been able
to save his child's life.
He was shattered by it.
I've never seen anybody so bad as he was.
It was hard for him to talk, to do much of anything.
He just barely got through every day. He was just so grief-stricken.
He would suddenly stop the car and shout at me, "Why can't you sing like she could?
"Why can't you sing about the trees and the fields like she could?"
And I'd try and I couldn't.
I don't think he could help making me feel
that I should have died.
I don't think that's cruel, I think that's just a terribly broken heart.
The Dahls struggled to return to normality.
Roald sought solace in his writing, Pat continued her screen career,
and won an Oscar in 1964 playing opposite Paul Newman.
You're a good housekeeper. You're a good cook. You're a good laundress.
What else you good at?
I've taken care of myself.
Shouldn't have to, woman looks like you do,
That's what my ex-husband used to tell me. What did you do to make him take off?
Wear your curlers to bed?
Ed's a gambler.
He's probably up at Vegas Arena right now dealing at night, losing it all back up in the daytime.
He sounds no better than a heel.
Ain't you all?
Don't go shooting all the dogs cos one of them's got fleas.
I was married to Ed for six years,
all he's good for is to scratch my back where I can't reach it.
You still got an itch?
A few months later came the third disaster in California.
Pat was three months pregnant and bathing Tessa when she got shooting pains in her head.
It was a massive stroke, another brain emergency.
Dahl recognised the symptoms and called a top brain surgeon at home.
He said, "I don't think she'll stand an operation."
I said, "What happens if you don't operate?" He used a funny phrase, "Then she will succumb for certain."
I said, "Then you've bloody well got to operate, haven't you?"
I was operated on that night.
And I was not expected to live.
She had an eight-hour operation and then she was unconscious for 20 days.
About halfway through, I said to Charlie Carter, the surgeon, "She's going to live now, isn't she?"
He said "Yes, she is, but I'm not sure I've done you a favour,
"because the odds are, it's a vegetable."
She'd gone from being a very stunning, beautiful, glamorous...
magnetic woman to...
to this decrepit monster.
No hair, she tried to put lipstick on because she knew I was coming, it was down her face.
She couldn't move her right side and she was trying to say "love" to me.
But she was going "urgh", like that.
I was thoroughly paralysed. It was just awful.
And they asked me if I wanted to feed her.
And I said yes,
but there was nothing I wanted to do less than feed her.
I wanted to get out of there, get away from her and never see her again. She was terrifying.
Because she wasn't your mother? She was a monster.
She was an idiot, you know.
But the surgeon gave me one great tip, he said, "Get cracking.
"Every week that's lost in rehabilitation is lost forever."
Back in England, Pat gave birth to their fifth child, Lucy.
But Roald never let up.
He organised a punishing programme of therapy.
Valerie Eaton-Griffiths spent six hours a day with Pat, five days a week.
At first it seemed hopeless.
She had the saddest eyes I've ever seen.
To capture her attention was incredibly difficult.
She was just miles away, staring into the distance.
And she hadn't got many words then,
and she got "red hairdryer" for a dry martini, I think,
and she got "oblagon" for cigarette.
That's what we all think the two things stood for, her great needs of the time! But not many words.
Roald, challenging man that he is, walked in and said,
"I booked you two to go over and talk to the New York Association of Brain Injured Children."
He said, um...
"They want you to give a speech in New York City."
I didn't wanna do it. I said, "Mngh!"
Reading was desperately difficult for her, couldn't get to even try reading until I'd got some...
Is it Louella Parsons? A gossip columnist from Hollywood. ..got some of her stuff over.
Then she really wanted to know what it said, and I wouldn't let her know until she'd worked at it.
Dahl knew the lure of the showbiz world would force the pace of her recovery.
And I walked on, and everybody stood up. It was the greatest thing in the world!
PATRICIA NEAL ON RECORDING: 'I am so happy and grateful for being alive,
'alive, alive-oh!'
APPLAUSE
INAUDIBLE
"She leaned forward until her face was directly over the basin,
"and looked straight down into William's eye."
"'Hello, dear', she whispered. 'It's me, Mary. '
"The eye stared back at her with a peculiar fixed intensity.
"The optic nerve connecting the underside of it to the brain looked like a short length of spaghetti.
"'Are you feeling all right, William? ' she said.
"It was a queer sensation, peering into her husband's eye when there was no face to go with it.
"'You know what,' she told herself,
"looking behind the eye now and staring hard down at the great grey pulpy walnut,
"that lay so placidly under the water.
"'I'm not at all sure that I don't prefer him as he is at present. Quiet, isn't he, ' she said.
Dahl pressed on with further challenges for Pat.
Some of her friends felt his relentless determination was almost brutal.
I would say, "I want to kill myself," and he would say,
"Well, we'll have to get a gun..."
Or something like that!
She used to call him "the bully",
with a great smile.
I think it was good that he did that, I really do.
Even though I was angry with him and it was awful.
It's very difficult to know whether it was right or wrong.
He WAS hard, but it turned out very well.
Pat's illness meant Roald had much more contact with their children.
He became virtually a single parent.
He got their meals, he took them for walks, he answered all their questions,
and he did the school run every day.
TESSA DAHL: He'd teach our times-tables in the car, we'd sing them every day.
He was there - not emotionally - but he was there.
You never doubted his...
his closeness or love at all. Or at least, I didn't.
I remember him coming home from a walk with Ophelia in the woods,
and he said to my mum, "Pat, she's just like Olivia.
"She lifted up the stones and she saw the ants and she them all having their little villages,
"this is just like Olivia."
I can remember leaning on him, or touching him in some sort of way,
or sitting on his lap, but he wasn't a hugger or a kisser.
Roald did a superb job.
Got the family all going to the dentist, took over everything.
He's quite a good cook. I mean you know, he could...
But when you ARE a bit better...
when she'd finished the films, stopped working with me,
suddenly there was nothing for her to do at all. Not easy.
Tessa would say, "Daddy, bleuleudadum, Daddy, bleuleudadum."
And I would say, "Talk to me! Talk to me!"
And Roald would say, "Talk to Mummy."
And she couldn't talk to me, it was an awful thing to go through.
He was obliged to become the main breadwinner.
For years, he'd written adult stories.
Now the bedtime stories he'd been improvising for the children
about a giant peach or a chocolate factory offered a new line of business.
He became a children's author because every night, he would come up and tell us a story.
And then he would go to his hut the next day and write it.
To stay the night at the Dahls' house was far better
than staying anywhere else because he would wake you up in the night
and take you down the lane in your pyjamas in the dark,
to wait for the last train to come over the bridge.
And we would stand in the tunnel under the bridge and wait for this train to come up,
and he would tell spooky stories.
"In the silvery moonlight,
"the village street she knew so well seemed completely different.
"The houses looked bent and crooked like houses in a fairy tale.
"Everything was pale and ghostly and milky white.
"Sophie allowed her eye to travel farther down the street.
"Suddenly she froze. There was something coming up the street on the opposite side.
"It was something black. Something tall and black.
"Something very tall and very black,
"and very thin."
We were just so excited to know what was going to be the next story.
We couldn't wait till the next day, the next night, you know.
"'Augustus, ' cried Mr Wonka, hopping up and down. 'You must come away, you're dirtying my chocolate. '"
The children, being very sparky,
and sparked by two very sparky parents,
would egg him on and say, "Tell us more about that character. Did he do this?"
"The pressure was terrific. Something had to give. Something did give. That something was Augustus."
He'd say, "If you write a children's book,
"you grab the little blighter by the throat on page one and don't let go."
"Two jokes a page," he'd say. "Don't stop for sunsets."
"Charlie picked it up and tore off the wrapper. And suddenly, from underneath the wrapper,
"there came a brilliant flash of gold.
"Charlie's heart stood still. 'It's a golden ticket! ' screamed the shopkeeper,
"leaping about a foot in the air. 'You've got a golden ticket! You've found the last golden ticket!'
"'Hey, would you believe it? Come look at this, everybody! The kid's found Wonka's last golden ticket.
"'There it is. It's right here in his hands. '"
He liked chocolate and I liked chocolate. It was "a boy book", as they call it.
It were just... my book. It was meant to be my book and nobody else's book.
God, that's so deep! Look at that!
Dahl became an expert on chocolate in his schooldays.
In the 1930s, Cadbury's would test out their new chocolate bars on him and his pals
and get them to mark them out of ten. It was a habit he never lost.
He referred to me as Mrs Cadbury because six out of the ten of our choices were Cadbury's,
which he was amazed at
cos, in his eyes, how could we have anything but a Mars Bar at number 1?
That's probably the greatest invention. 1932.
I sent him a Twirl, at the time my daughter's favourite.
He said it wasn't a patch on a Flake and didn't know why they'd bothered.
The very first one that was ever invented was the Dairy Milk Flake,
in 1921. I've never been to a chocolate factory, but obviously they had a slit...
"Why don't we push the stuff through a thin slit and let it roll on top of it?" Wonderful!
You could ask him any question about chocolate and he would give you an answer right back.
Kit-Kats, 1935, all that sort of thing. Maltesers? Yeah, 1936.
I mean, it IS like the Italian Renaissance is to painting, the '30s is to chocolate.
Chocolate bars rounded off every meal at Gypsy House.
The feast laid on by Fantastic Mr Fox for his family and friends
became part of the Dahl daily ritual.
Very noisy! I always ended up hearing things I probably shouldn't have heard,
probably wildly inappropriate, but...
.. he would sit at the head of the trestle table,
you know, with that enormous chair!
And it's all very symbolic, this man amongst these adoring women
often joshing for position...
I suppose like a big Viking table, you know!
Thor with his band of women.
He liked to take his band of women to the gaming tables in London. It appealed to his daredevil streak.
Remember, he'd been completely solo in a hut all day...on his own
in his own little world.
And he wanted to get out and see the lights.
He played blackjack because... it requires complete concentration.
I think this was the only time he could blank out everything.
It was oblivion for him, it was heaven.
He belonged to the Curzon House Club. But his fearlessness would often get him into trouble.
He stood up and he said,
"Ladies and gentlemen, I beg for your silence!" And, you know,
he was six foot six. When he begs for your silence, you shut up.
And he stood up and he said,
"I BEG you not to be willing
"to put up with eating this SHIT! It is just revolting! I mean, after all the money we give these people,
"they think that they can just feed us this absolute crap?!"
He started being heckled. "Go home if you don't like it!" Things like that.
"Piss off!" "Shut up!" And so Dad sat down then,
REALLY pleased with himself. "I've done it now."
He was a troublemaker!
He LOVED to cause a bit of trouble.
"A message to children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own,
"do please remember something important.
"A stodgy parent is no fun at all.
"What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky."
But it wasn't just the parents. Children had to be sparky too.
Dahl was like the BFG blowing dreams in through their bedroom windows.
He wanted them to dream of adventure.
There was this old Morris 1000 they had bought.
Tessa was driving it around the orchard - and she was about 17 or 18 when I was 10 or 11 -
and I LONGED to be behind the wheel of this car. So he taught me to drive
one day in the orchard.
He wasn't a GREAT teacher, but if you picked up on things quickly, he was pretty good.
And I was bitten by some great driving bug. I just couldn't get it out of my system.
I could go around and around this five-acre field for four hours in a row.
The trouble was that I couldn't stay in the orchard,
and I started taking the car out when he'd take a sleep in the afternoon...
.. not just to the village but to local towns.
I'd go and visit friends, go for cups of tea. I was 11 or 12 years old,
driving around Great Missenden.
The only reason I got caught
was because I couldn't start the car once.
I took the car to the village, went in the sweetshop, bought sweets, came back out and couldn't start the car.
So I had to call him, and he was irritated that I'd woken him from a nap. And he seemed irritated that...
not so much that I'd taken the car out, but rather that, "If you take the car out,
"you HAVE to be able to start it if it doesn't start. You have to fiddle around and..."
It was as though he was thinking, "I didn't tell you what to muck around with if the car wouldn't start."
The one place where he could escape the turmoil of daily life at Gypsy House was his writing hut,
his sanctuary.
Every morning, he'd sit in his mother's old chair
with six freshly-sharpened and surprisingly hard American pencils,
ready to marshal his ideas into stories.
Finally you get settled, you get into a sort of nest.
You get really comfortable. And then you're away.
He jotted down random ideas and phrases which appealed to him and which he'd come back to later.
"Let's go into the garden and eat worms."
"Nurse, I believe you put the bedpan in the icebox." That comes from some of his stays in hospital.
"A pale grey face like a bowl of porridge."
"A face like an old sea-boot."
"A nose like a bathroom tap."
He also made lists of words that he'd invented,
and played with the vocabulary for The Big Friendly Giant.
"The BFG looked at Sophie and smiled.
"'Yesterday, ' he said, 'We was not believing in giants, was we?
"'Today, we's not believing in snozzcambers.
"'Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our two little winkles,
"'we think it is not existing.
"'What about, for instance, the great squizzly scotchhopper? '
"'I beg your pardon? ' Sophie asked. 'And the humplecrimp?' 'What's that?'
"'And the raprascal?' 'The what?' 'And the crumpscoddle. '
"'Are they animals?' 'They is COMMON animals,' said the BFG contemptuously.
"'I is not a very know-all giant myself, but it seems to me you is an absolutely know-NOTHING human bean.
"'Your brain is full of rotten-wool. ' 'You mean COTTON-wool,' Sophie said.
"'What I mean and what I say
"'is two different things,' the BFG announced rather grandly."
We gave him a waistcoat.
And you can see the waistcoat here. But we didn't quite know what to do about the footwear.
We left that problem. Then finally he sent me...
this... very strange sort of parcel
and, when I opened it, I discovered it was one of his sandals,
a Norwegian sandal.
That's what the BFG wears.
They are Roald's sandals.
And it made it clear to me, in a sense, how close he was to him, as well.
He told me that he thought
the thing children thought was the funniest thing that could happen
was when an adult farted,
that children think that is amazingly funny.
Dahl could explore this subject to his heart's content with the BFG.
His champagne is frobscottle.
And in frobscottle, the bubbles don't go up to make you burp,
they got down. And we all know what's going to happen.
Even though Dahl had coined a word for it, whizzpopping,
his American publisher thought the scene was too near the bone.
He told him the idea was "rather isolated".
Of course, he just took it to a whole new level, said he agreed with me
that it was isolated and it was much too good, so he was gonna put in a new scene. "So I've gone even further
"and had the BFG doing a whizzpopper for the Queen. Slightly vulgar, perhaps, but you and I know
"that the children will love it." It was perfectly clear to me that...
let it go, this is brilliant, children WILL love this scene.
And they did.
Shortly after the book came out, Roxburgh was on a train in England
when he chanced on a small girl being read the story out loud.
She was perched on the edge of her seat.
And her eyes were getting larger and larger as it became apparent
that Sophie was trying to convince the BFG not to whizzpop for the Queen,
but the Queen thought that it was a musical instrument he was going to play.
The climax builds quite dramatically. This little girl was sitting there... She was vibrating.
She anticipated what was coming, but she couldn't quite conceive of this.
And sure enough, at the whizzpopping moment,
this little girl came off her seat. She just...
I don't know whether she propelled herself or she just launched,
but she just popped up off her seat! He'd got it dead right.
He sent me a cutting from a newspaper which shows an extraordinary photograph
of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor...
jumping.
"Surely the first recorded instance of royalty whizzpopping."
Just the kind of thing he would've absolutely loved.
The characters who perhaps more than any other bear the brunt of all Dahl's personal loathings
are the Twits.
His fixation on personal hygiene was given full reign in the character of Mr Twit.
Dahl, you see, had a lifetime obsession about... beards.
There's a description which children love
of the sort of debris in the beard, you know, the decaying gorgonzola
and the cornflakes and the sardine bones and that sort of thing, because he never washes it.
He says, "He had a beard like a lavatory brush."
And so I had to be sure that the bristles were sticking out each side,
and round the bottom, if you see what I mean
"There were always hundreds of bits of old breakfasts and lunches and suppers
"sticking to the hairs around his face.
"They weren't big bits, mind you,
"because he used to wipe those off with the back of his hand, or on his sleeve while he was eating.
"But if you looked closely - not that you'd ever want to -
"you would see tiny little specks of dried-up scrambled egg stuck to the hairs
"and spinach and tomato ketchup and fish fingers
"and minced chicken livers and all the other disgusting things Mr Twit liked to eat."
Oh, God! He never, ever stopped teasing me about the beard.
He felt it as... Since you asked the question, you must know his feelings about it... as hiding something.
He was relentless on the subject of what was wrong with my face because I felt I had to have this hair on it.
And it wasn't just beards. At his daughter Tessa's wedding,
he had some guests squirming with embarrassment.
Instead of giving the traditional father-speech, he turned the whole thing on its head -
was James, Tessa's husband, a good egg or not?
The thing to do if you want to judge a man
immediately and with absolute accuracy
is to look in an earhole...
LAUGHTER
He knows that, deep down,
we're all terribly worried about the kind of nasty bits of our bodies
If... If you see tufts of hair... LAUGHTER
.. sprouting like grass out of his earholes -
a rich pubescence, as we earhole experts call it -
you know for certain that the fellow's a bounder.
'He did it wherever he could. '
He just liked to shock.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERS
Introducing Patricia Neal...
I love this hour. Children in bed, alone with my husband...
Coffee tastes especially good now...
Years of shared of shared tragedy had kept the Dahls together, but they'd taken their toll.
These commercials brought Roald into contact with Felicity Crossland,
the attractive younger woman arranging Pat's wardrobe.
I use Maxim because I think it's excellent but, more important, my husband thinks so, too.
He came bursting in the front door with Tessa - they'd been out to buy a new car -
and... I just turned round and saw
this incredibly attractive, handsome, tall man.
He just had a twinkle in his eye and a marvellously sort of warm feeling about him.
And I just looked at him, and I thought, "Gosh, you are fantastic. You are fantastic."
Was it love at first sight? Yes, it was. It was, definitely...
I think, for both of us, yup.
They began a secret affair.
The teenage Tessa was the first to discover what was going on,
and was asked to keep the secret.
I so desperately wanted to be part of his life...
and I so needed to be...
someone that HE needed...
um...
th...that I said yes.
Um...
And I left...
with this extraordinary mixed state of euphoria
that at last it was going to be Daddy, me and Liccy.
And this terrible feeling of guilt
that my mother, who I loved and...
You know, it had been a hard, long, strong battle to get Mummy well again.
.. I had to keep the story, real-life story, from my mother.
My ex-husband, he had... a lot of affairs.
She wasn't the only one.
And he was serious about her.
And I-I didn't want to break up our marriage. I did not want to break it up, I didn't want it to break up.
It was difficult because we never ever felt we would be able to marry.
And we were feeling guilty,
um, you know, primarily because of Pat
and not hurting her,
and upsetting the children.
It was a dark, troubled time at Gypsy House.
Finally, 16 years after her stroke, Pat was told to leave -
kicked out, as she saw it, of her own home.
When we broke up, I was the angriest person you will ever see in your life.
No-one wanted anything to do with me.
I was the most... I was un...
I was impossible to be around.
I could not believe that he had done this to me.
But he did, baby.
He said, "I'm tired and I just need
"somebody who's gonna make me a cup of tea." And I knew what he meant.
I was disappointed in my father for his inability to do it in a more...
I guess, a more honest way.
I think that he felt very, very uneasy in the role of the bad guy.
"A leg of lamb.
"All right, then, they would have lamb for supper.
"She carried it upstairs,
"holding the thin bone end of it with both her hands,
"and, as she went through the living room,
"she saw him standing over by the window with his back to her,
and she stopped.
"'For God's sake,' he said, hearing her, but not turning around.
"'Don't make supper for me, I'm going out. '
"At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him
"and, without any pause, she swung the big, frozen leg of lamb high in the air
"and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head.
"She might just have well have hit him with a steel club.
"She stepped back apace, waiting,
"and the funny thing was...
"that he remained standing there for at least four or five seconds, gently swaying.
"Then he crashed to the carpet."
Wish I'd been so clever as to do that. The leg of lamb.
Can't go back now!
But no, I... I loved Roald,
and I... you know, was a little... angry, shall we say?
But I'm not angry now. I'm thoroughly over it.
After the deceit and betrayal, Dahl felt a sense of release when he married Liccy.
For his final seven years, the books came thick and fast.
There was a tenderness and closeness in the stories,
whether between Matilda and Miss Honey, or the boy and his grandmother in the Witches,
or the middle-aged couple in Esio Trot.
From the age of seven up, he'd been responsible for everybody,
and I think at last, you know, he could pass some of that responsibility to me.
His life changed very much after he married Liccy - for the better for him. Much, much better for him.
She was wonderful for him. She made him happy beyond belief.
Those last few years of his life, he was so, so happy.
He became a lighter man.
I think some of his best books were written in that Liccy phase, when he didn't have to feel guilty
about being with the person he'd fallen in love with.
"Mr Hoppy flung open his front door and flew down the stairs two at a time
"with the love-songs of a thousand Cupids ringing in his ears.
"'This is it, ' he whispered to himself under his breath.
"He caught sight of Mrs Silver standing at the open door,
"waiting to welcome him, with a huge smile on her face.
"She flung her arms around him and cried, 'You really are the most wonderful man I've ever met!
"'Come in at once and let me make you a cup of tea.
"'That's the very least you deserve. '"
In 1990, Dahl was in and out of hospital with leukaemia,
but he was, in his words, "the undeveloped adult" to the last.
As his mother had said he should, he carried on as himself for the rest of his life.
And the day he arrived, I got an urgent call that there was a problem,
and when I got there, the problem turned out to be
that Roald Dahl had insisted on smoking one of his large cigars.
So this enormous man was hanging out of the window on the top floor of the hospital
with a porter on each foot. They couldn't get him back.
He was still smoking. And with the prevailing wind, it was all pouring in to the next room.
With about six people, we managed to drag him back in. He promised not to do it again,
and did the same thing the next day. But that was Roald Dahl.
The sister had confiscated his matches and lighter
cos she had caught him with his head out of the window trying to have a cigarette.
So he realised the only place he could light his cigarette was on the gas ring in the nurses' kitchen.
So he managed to get down there and he put his head down to light the cigarette
and, of course, the flames burned his eyebrows and his eyelashes.
And again he was caught, of course.
And just when the staff and all of us were getting fed up with him, almost,
this enormous charm would appear, and you were finished!
And I went in, and he went, "Oh, Teddy," he said, "I nearly died today."
He said, "It was really hard to stay alive, so what I did was I imagined I was in a fighter plane,"
"then I put each one of my children in that plane,"
"and I had you being shot down.
"and it was which ones of you would have survived, and held it together, and stayed alive,
"and which ones of you couldn't have done."
I kissed him and I said, "I love you, Dad."
And I walked to the door.
And just as I got to the door,
he said...
"I love you too, Teddy, so very much indeed."
And I left the room. And I was wearing my glasses and I just threw them against the wall.
And Liccy came out and she said, "What's the matter?"
And I said, "He's going to die." And she said, "Don't be ridiculous."
I said, "He's going to die, I know he's gonna die." And she said, "Why?" And I said, "He said he loves me."
"We have tears in our eyes As we wave our goodbyes,
"We so loved being with you, we three.
"So do please now and then Come and see us again, The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.
"All you do is to look At a page in this book
"Because that's where we always will be
"No book ever ends When it's full of your friends. The Giraffe and the Pelly and me."
Well, once when we were abroad, Roald went missing,
and I was sent to try and find him,
and I dashed all around and finally saw him walking along.
And behind him were a whole mass of children. It just literally looked like the Pied Piper.
How he'd gathered them, I'd no idea. There they just were, this great tall, slightly stooping man,
and all these children behind! It was lovely.
"'A whizzpopper,' cried the BFG, beaming at her,
"'Us giants is making whizzpoppers all the time.
"'Whizzpopping is a sign of happiness. It is music in our ears.
"'You surely is not telling me
"'that a little whizzpopping is forbidden among human beans?'
"'No,!' Sophie cried, 'Don't! You're not to, I beg you!'
"'Music is good for the digestion,' the Queen said.
"'When I'm in Scotland, they play the bagpipes
"'outside the window while I'm eating. Do play something!'
"'I has her Magister's permission!' cried the BFG,
and, all at once, he let fly with a whizzpopper
"that sounded as though a bomb had exploded.
"The Queen jumped. 'Whoopee!' shouted the BFG.
"'That is better than bagglepipes, is it not, Magister?'
"It took the Queen a few seconds to get over the shock.
"'I prefer the bagpipes,' she said.