Roald Dahl (39 page)

Dahl was now more or less permanently in pain from his joints and his back, and it soon became clear that he was suffering from a form of leukemia. He took an optimistic, practical view of the situation, wanting to know exactly what was involved and saying that, as he had battled his way through so much, he would manage to do so again. Nothing kept him from his enjoyments. Whatever his doctors advised, he regarded Cartier cigarettes, gin, and sweets as indispensable. During one of his spells in hospital, he successfully bid at auction for a small Van Gogh drawing of a peasant woman, a study for
The Potato Pickers
, with which he was so pleased that when he went to the Isle of Wight to convalesce, he took it with him and hung it in his hotel room.
²¹

On occasion, he showed signs of having become a touch chastened. He spoke often about his difficulties with some of his grown-up daughters: only one of them had a nice boyfriend, he grumbled; the others, you didn't know who they were with. When he was young, you had to take a girl out to dinner for six months before you got a kiss.
²²
He also spoke of making efforts
to become a better person.
²³
He said he regretted that he couldn't fully believe in Christianity. He thought that the preeminent value was kindness and, headline-seeking to the last, told an interviewer from the
Guardian
that this was a good argument for ordaining women as priests: if they want to be ordained, he said, it would be unkind not to let them be.
²⁴
He mentioned dying: the sad thought that he wouldn't see his family anymore, but, against this, the fact that the world didn't seem to be becoming a better place, and “the human is not a very nice animal.” No, fear did not come into his feelings about death. When Olivia had died, almost thirty years ago, he had decided, “If she can do it, I can do it.”
²⁵

He continued to write and to involve himself in every detail of what happened to his books. They were selling stupendously well: in Britain alone, in paperback, over two million copies a year. There was a proliferation of tape recordings, dramatizations, cartoon strips, a
Roald Dahl Newsletter
. Films, too, of course. There was one of
Danny
, which he didn't mind much, although he thought Jeremy Irons a little too well manicured as the father. And Anjelica Huston, daughter of his old acquaintance John Huston, starred in
The Witches
, which he called a “stupid horror film” and urged everyone to boycott.
²⁶
It was, he thought, too “adult” in treatment (by which he may in part have meant too contemporary: the bald witches look like a convention of punks). He was also furious that it reverted to the original ending, which Stephen Roxburgh had persuaded him to change, where the hero is turned back from a mouse into a boy.

And there were still more books, with a new kindly tone:
Esio Trot
, a romance in which a lonely old man wins the heart of an old woman by a trick which convinces her that he can control the growth of her pet tortoise; and
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke
, about a back-to-front young clergyman who gets into trouble by saying “dog” for “God,” “pis” for “sip,” “krap” for “park.” (At Dahl's request, the rights to the book were auctioned in aid of the Dyslexia Institute.) In
The Minpins
, which, like
The Vicar of
Nibbleswicke
, would not be published until after Dahl's death, a boy escapes from his overprotective mother into a region threatened by a fire-breathing monster. The dwarfish inhabitants have learned to fly—they travel about on birds—and in his successful attempt to conquer their enemy, the boy makes his own first flight on the neck of a swan, which takes him through smoke and flames to victory, and safely home again.

The Minpins
worried some readers because of its apparent indebtedness to Carol Kendall's
The Minnipins
(1959). But apart from the title, and the midget world which both stories share with many others for children, Dahl's book is essentially his own, and recapitulates the myth of himself which he had written several times in different forms.
²⁷
In an earlier published version of the story, “The Swan,” two bullies take an air gun to a bird sanctuary, the favorite retreat of Peter, a solitary boy who loves wildlife. (For no reason necessary to the narrative, the reader is twice told that the sanctuary's owner is a Mr. Douglas Highton—the name of Dahl's closest friend at prep school.
²⁸
) Finding him there, the other boys torture Peter in various ways before finally tying his arms to the wings of a swan they have killed. Then they force him to climb a tree and launch himself from it. “Some people,” the narrative says,

when they have taken too much and have been driven beyond the point of endurance, simply crumble and give up. There are others, though they are not many, who will for some reason always be unconquerable. You meet them in time of war and also in time of peace. They have an indomitable spirit, and nothing … will cause them to give up.

Dahl himself, of course, half a century ago, had flown through flames against an enemy, and had returned to his mother.

Early in 1990, he and Felicity received a letter from Pat proposing a reconciliation. They eagerly agreed and invited her to come to a party for Theo's thirtieth birthday. It was the last time
she saw Roald alive. That summer, he and Felicity made an exhausting promotional trip to Australia and, on their return, went to dinner with their neighbor Elizabeth Stewart-Liberty. Dahl was full of complaints about Australian journalists who knew nothing about his books, but the old contemptuous energy was missing. Although his hostess served two of his favorite dishes, oysters and lobster, he had little appetite and left early.
²⁹
By autumn, he was in a hospital in Oxford, in unremitting pain.

Felicity was not unhopeful. She had seen him rally before and, according to Tessa, persuaded him against taking morphine, which would have weakened him further.
³⁰
Tessa disagreed with her. She says it was obvious that her father was going to die, and since painkilling drugs were anyway among his pleasures, he should have been allowed them. Both of his Hesselberg aunts had become morphine addicts in old age without coming to harm, she says, and Dahl himself “loved oblivion” and used to glamorize anesthetics when any of his children needed hospital treatment. “They'll put the needle in,” he would say in his seductive, cooing growl, “and you'll count 10, 9, 8 …” According to Tessa, he was now in such agony that some nights when she was alone with him, although he had always avoided physical contact with his children, he told her, “Squeeze me, hold on to me.” More than once he asked desperately, “What am I going to do?”

Dahl died on November 23, 1990. He is buried, not in Olivia's large plot with its alpine garden at Little Missenden, which had been intended for both him and Pat, but on the hillside opposite Gipsy House. Immediately above his grave is that of Felicity's daughter Lorina, who had died from a brain tumor eight months earlier, aged twenty-seven: for Dahl, a last crushing family tragedy.

His estate was valued at almost £3 million. The figure is no more than the annual income now generated by his work, under
the adroit management of Dahl & Dahl (in his will, simply described as “the Business”). Perhaps because he had been fearful of the effect of big inheritances on the already untidy lives of some of his children, he left everything, including the future royalties from his books, to Felicity for her lifetime. In the hospital, immediately after he died, she handed over some small memorabilia—Dahl's watch to Ophelia, his folding walking stick to Tessa. From now on, whatever they couldn't earn for themselves, they would have to seek from her.

By most accounts, Felicity Dahl uses her wealth both scrupulously and generously. She divides half the income from “the Business” among her four stepchildren. From the remaining half, she helps to fund a charity which she set up in her husband's name.
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The idea was not Dahl's but, appropriately enough, came to Felicity from an old letter to her husband about Charles Marsh's Public Welfare Foundation which she found in the writing hut after his death. The Roald Dahl Foundation makes grants for projects in areas with which he was himself concerned—hematology, neurology, and literacy—and concentrates each year on a particular problem. In 1992, the chosen field was epilepsy, and the foundation helped to build a library for an epileptics' center in Cheshire and provided a minibus for a school for epileptic children. The organization has also launched a series of musical events, commissioning composers to write settings of work by Dahl. The first of these—a concert performance of his comic-rhyme version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” with music by the young composer Paul Patterson—was given by the London Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall in November 1992, the second anniversary of his death. Other commissions have followed. The aim is to bring children into the world of serious modern music and to provide their teachers with backup material for use in the classroom. The foundation owns the copyrights to the works it commissions, which will provide another major source of revenue for future projects.

Some of Dahl's daughters have reservations, not that these
aren't valuable and appropriate ways for their father's money to be spent, but about the degree of control exercised by Felicity in what Tessa describes as “this stepmatriarchal society.” But in explaining their feelings, Lucy Dahl, for one, puts a brave face on what is clearly a difficult situation. This is what her father chose, she says, and “he didn't want anything to do with anyone who sat around and moaned.” Besides, as she points out, money is the least of their difficulties. Both Lucy and Tessa volunteer that a harder problem—not least, in their and Ophelia's relationships with other men—is for them to take Roald Dahl “off his pedestal.” Even Tessa, who is less inclined to reverence than most of the family, says simply, “He was a Great Man.”
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The funeral was traditional.
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Scores of family and old friends gathered in the parish church at Great Missenden, among them Patricia Neal, and had the wry pleasure of hearing the Great Man counted among the blessed who have not walked in the counsel of the ungodly nor sat in the seat of the scornful. Another of the readings was from Dahl's favorite poet, Dylan Thomas:

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The lines spoke for Dahl's children, and also reminded everyone, especially his sisters, of the father Roald himself had missed for seventy of his seventy-four years. But the most moving words, because the most personal and frank, were Peter Mayer's about his differences with his friend. Dahl's “unsubtle and perhaps idiosyncratic distinctions between the general and the particular, the objective and the subjective” had caused awkwardness between them, Mayer said. But “in the passing and crossing over,
just as my people say on our Day of Atonement, we are all children united with our parents.”
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I visited Dahl's grave when I began to write this book. On it were a few small, rather dilapidated toys—a plastic parrot, a teddy bear, a broken jack-in-the-box in the form of an egg. And instead of the chrysanthemums and gladioli on neighboring plots, his favorite vegetable: a large, handsome, tough-skinned, many-layered onion.

Image Gallery

Dahl's mother, Sofie Hesselberg, c. 1910, before her marriage to Harald Dahl. (Kaare Hesselberg)

The Norwegian Church in Cardiff, where Dahl and his sisters were baptised. (Ewart Parkinson)