Secret Lives: Roald Dahl

(September 13, 1916 – November 23, 1990)

The chocolate test 

IS ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ among your all-time favourite reads? Have you sailed through ‘The BFG,’ ‘Matilda’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach’ time and again? Is it news to you that the man who penned these popular works was born in south Wales to a shipbroker named Harald Dahl and Sophie Magdalene Hesselberg, both of Norwegian origin?

Let’s check out the life of best-selling author Roald Dahl. Did you guess that after a short stint with the Shell oil company, he was a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force during World War II, later posted to Washington as part of the British intelligence (yes, the guys who dig out all the hidden truths). So, he wrote only in his spare time!

Roald was lucky to have an unusual father like Harald, who supplied ships with all they could possibly need at port, and loved climbing Alpine slopes, despite an arm amputated at the elbow. But Roald (the fifth of six children by two wives) lost his father when he was just three. Sophie was determined to fulfil Harald’s dream of an English education for their children, so she took them to Norway only for vacations. 

At six, an excited Roald rode his tricycle to his first kindergarten at Llandraff, alongside his older sister on her bicycle. A year later, he joined the Llandraff Cathedral School, in the shadow of the Welsh town cathedral. At eight, can you guess what Roald’s greatest wish was? To go whizzing down a hill on a cycle, with his hands off the handlebars!

As a schoolboy, the Llandraff sweetshop was the centre of his life. But he and his mates were terrified of its owner, Mrs. Pratchett. She hated customers who bought nothing. So, they hatched the Mouse Plot. What’s that? One day, clutching their clammy pennies, they trooped in. As they bought a Sherbet Sucker and a Licorice Bootlace, Roald popped a dead mouse into the great glass jar of Gobstoppers.

To their horror, Mrs. Pratchett turned up at their school one morning. She pointed out the five culprits ~ and the headmaster caned them for their petty crime. Upset, Sophie vowed to shift Roald to an English boarding school, St. Peter’s at Somerset.

But before that, the whole family took off for Norway. In Oslo, they met Sophie’s parents, Bestemama and Bestepapa, who treated them to a huge poached fish and mounds of caramel ice-cream. Then, off they went by boat, up the Norwegian fjords (remember those from geography class?), to the island of Tjome. They even learnt to laugh as giant waves tossed their little motor-boat atop their crests, for all the Dahls were super swimmers!

St. Peter’s seemed a typical boarding school, complete with stuffed tuck boxes, terrible food, a strict matron and letters home every week. At nine, here’s the first one Roald ever wrote:

“Dear Mama… I’m having a lovely time here. We play foot ball (sic) every day here. The beds have no springs. Will you send my stamp album and quite a lot of swaps? The masters are very nice. I’ve got all my clothes now, and a belt, and a tie, and a school jersey. Love, Boy”. That’s what Sophie called Roald, her only son.

How did he cope with homesickness? By turning his face towards the Bristol Channel and his missing family while in his dormitory bed. By keenly observing the weird ways of the ‘ancient’ matron, probably 28. By pretending to have appendicitis, so his mother had to rush him back to Wales. 

By 12, Roald was sent away to the Repton public school, near Derby. That’s where Cadbury’s used to send cardboard boxes of their new chocolate bars for pre-teen boys to grade on enclosed sheets. The firm knew these were the world’s greatest chocolate-tasters. No wonder one of them went on to write ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ That doesn’t surprise you a jot, does it?

Secret Lives: J.K. Rowling

 

She cast the Harry Potter spell

 

ARE YOU totally bewitched by Harry Potter? Do you wish you could attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Or even better, do you wish you could step into best-selling author J.K. Rowling’s shoes? 

 But hang on a moment. What do you know of Joanne Kathleen Rowling? How did she grow up to be a wizard with words, who draws you into reading thick books without pictures, away from TV and video games?

Does Rowling think like you, or share in your fantasies? She said in an interview to Time magazine after the publication of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ in 1997, “I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to eleven years old. I can remember being a kid and being very powerless and having this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable. I think I have very vivid memories of how it felt to be Harry’s age.”

Born on July 31, 1966, in the tiny English hamlet of Chipping Sodbury, dreamy Joanne loved to play games of pretence, either in her room or in the grassy backyard. Her parents Peter and Anne, both bookworms, read aloud to her from a very young age. “My most vivid memory of childhood is my father sitting and reading ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (by Kenneth Grahame) to me,” she confessed to the Daily Telegraph in London. “I had the measles at the time, but I don’t really remember that. I just remember the book.”

Once her younger sister Di arrived two years later, Joanne invented a constant supply of fantastic stories for her. One was about how Di fell through a rabbit hole, and was fed strawberries by its furry-tailed inhabitants. But Di was upset because, with each re-telling, the story changed. So, Joanne picked up a pencil and paper to write her first rabbit story. She’s been writing ever since.

The young writer continued to devour books at a phenomenal pace. Her favourites included ‘The Little White Horse’ by Elizabeth Gouge, ‘Manxmouse’ by Paul Gallico, and the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. 

When the Rowling family shifted to the small town of Winterbourne, Joanne’s closest buddies were Ian and Vikki Potter, who loved to try her madcap ideas, often dressing up as witches or wizards. “Their surname was Potter,” Joanne later recalled. “I always liked the name.” You do too, don’t you?

When Joanne was nine, discovering the James Bond novels and Jane Austen, the family relocated to Tutshill, by the river Wye. She got into trouble at the local primary school. She fared badly in a fractions test on her first day, so the teacher seated her among the duller students. How did Joanne cope? She studied extra hard until she ensured a seat among the bright stars.

By the time she moved on to Wyedean Comprehensive School, Joanne felt ill at ease with the world. “I was quiet, freckly, short-sighted and rubbish at sports,” she recalled. 

But when she emerged from her shell, she made friends easily enough. In an essay, Joanne confessed, “I used to tell my equally quiet and studious friends long serial stories during lunchtime. They usually involved us all doing heroic and daring deeds we certainly would not have done in real life.”

Joanne was soon obsessed by author Jessica Mitford, a human rights and feminist activist who ran away and joined the Spanish Civil War at 19. “I remember reading the book ‘Hons and Rebels’ at age fourteen, and it changed my life,” wrote the Potter author.

She ended high school as the head girl, through she dreaded addressing the whole school.  She played her audience a record on one occasion, to cut down on speaking time. “The record was scratched. It began skipping and played the same line over and over again. Finally, the deputy headmistress came out on stage and kicked it,” Joanne recalled on a website.

Would you have guessed that the creator of Harry Potter had a childhood like this? Not for a zillion Chocolate Frogs or Every-Flavour Beans, I bet.