Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock

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mother. For weeks after she left he would stand at the garden gate looking desperately down Fairwater Road and screaming for her to come back. No longer was French to be spoken at home. From now on, only Norwegian and English were permitted. The sensitive Louis found it hard to cope with these changes and suffered psychologically. Once he appeared on the Dahls’ front doorstep with a classmate who announced to an uncomprehending Sofie Magdalene that the unhappy boy had had “an accident in bags” during a lesson and needed to come home to wash his bottom. Though Louis would in time grow to be fond of his stepmother, these initial experiences caused a fault line between Sofie Magdalene and her stepchildren that would lead to tension later on.

      The First World War brought the need for registration cards for Harald and Sofie Magdalene, and resentment among some locals that Norway remained neutral throughout the conflict. Harald and Sofie seem to have been immune from this — perhaps because Harald was working so hard to keep the merchant fleet going. His wartime secretary, J. Harry Williams, recalled Harald as a model employer, conscientious, diligent and responsible. He was “my first ideal”, he told Roald. “Nobody has ever come higher in my experience.”19 Alfhild too remembered her father working long hours, coming home tired late in the evenings, and her mother trying to cheer him up with her Norwegian cooking. The war did no harm to his business and, as it prospered, Harald sold Villa Marie in 1917 and bought Ty Mynydd, a large Victorian farmhouse at Radyr, further out of Cardiff, a few stops down the Taff Vale railway. It had 150 acres of land, its own electricity generator, a laundry and a collection of farm outbuildings that included a working piggery. Roald later recalled with nostalgia its grand lawns and terraces, its numerous servants, and the surrounding fields filled with shire horses, hay wagons, pigs, chickens and milking cows. The purchase of the farm even merited an article in the local press, which described Mr Dahl as a man “with many years association with the shipping trade of South Wales” and “prominent in Docks circles”. “His firm is a very large business,” the article concluded, “especially with Norwegian shipowners, whose vessels have continued to trade with the district all through the war.”20

      Harald bought paintings and antique furniture for the new house, and carved wooden picture frames. He collected alpine plants, going out in all weathers to stock the new garden with what he had collected. At one point he also bought his young wife a secondhand De Dion Bouton car, and tried to persuade her to take up driving. It was a mistake. On her way to visit a friend who had just had a baby, she put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and crashed the car into a cartload of eggs. When she finally got to her friend’s house, she found that the baby had died. She never drove again.21 At home, Harald was not the easiest of husbands. He could be withdrawn and undemonstrative, sometimes almost cold, as he absorbed himself in his many private interests. Years later, Sofie Magdalene would tell her granddaughter, Lou Pearl, that at times she even felt frightened of him.22

      Now Sofie was pregnant again. Everything seemed idyllic. But these halcyon days were not to last. At the beginning of February, Astri, Sofie’s eldest daughter, awoke in the middle of the night with a fierce stomachache. Her younger sister, Alfhild, who shared a room with her, went to fetch her mother, complaining that Astri’s cries of pain were keeping her awake. A doctor was summoned and Astri was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. The doctor operated at home, on the scrubbed nursery table, but by then it was too late. The appendix had burst and Astri had peritonitis. She never came round from the anaesthetic. About a week later, she died from the infection. She was seven years old.

      Harald never recovered from the blow. “Astri was far and away my father’s favourite,” Roald wrote in Boy. “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 afterward, he did not much care whether he lived or died.”24 Writing those words, Roald knew only too well what his own father was feeling, for with vicious symmetry, some forty years later, he too was to lose his own eldest daughter — also aged seven. The son’s understanding of his father’s psychology was acute, but he also recalled his father’s anguish from a child’s perspective. He remembered the laurel bushes, which his father had been pruning when he first became ill and which, for the rest of his life, would always be associated with death. And he remembered his father’s refusal to do battle with the disease. The eyes of the adult and child blended together as he described Harald’s death, more than sixty years after it happened. “My father refused to fight,” he wrote. “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.”25

      Wracked with pneumonia, Harald articulated his regrets in his journal, torturing himself for having worked too hard and not having sufficiently enjoyed his dead daughter’s brief life. “How little we understand about putting a price on the world’s many good things? How seldom does the door to our hearts stand wide open? We put the blame on the fact that we have too much to do, that we must have peace and quiet to think and work, and so we shut out the sun. Only when it is too late do we see what we have missed.”26 Ironically, even as he noted these observations, he was unable to change his habits. As the coughing worsened and the fever soared, and as his eldest son Louis cycled around the garden with his five-year-old

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