LITMIR.BIZ

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approached fifty, and her family responsibilities began to diminish, she was becoming increasingly arthritic, immobile and concerned with the welfare of her many animals. She had quarrelled with Oscar, her brother-in-law, over his administration of Harald’s estate, accusing him of abusing his position as a trustee and humiliating her by making her submit receipts for every purchase she made. He in turn had threatened to sue her. But her children and stepchildren, led by the vociferous sixteen-year-old Roald, had rallied round. “I should jolly well sue him, get ten thousand and not care what anyone said!”²⁰ he told her. “Get Ellen and Louis to entice him to Bexley; take him up to Dartford … and push him into that most useful and old-established institution — the Dartford Mental Home, where he could spend his time writing lavatory roll after lavatory roll of concentrated libel — for writing libel seems to be his pet hobby nowadays.”²¹ As her family grew up, Sofie Magdalene’s zest for travelling to Norway also began to wane. She preferred to take her Cairn terriers down to Tenby or to Cornwall instead, provoking her mother to accuse her of caring more for her puppies than her own parents.²² Gradually she retreated into her own space and let her children get on with their own lives. She would be there if they needed her. Otherwise, she kept herself to herself.

      In Bexley, Roald had set up his own “very smart” ²³ darkroom with shuttered windows and zinc-lined sink. He spent much of his spare time there developing photographs and entering them for competitions. He also began to dabble in writing spoofs and sketches, including a short comic piece called Double Exposure which has survived as perhaps his first adult literary work. It is set in America some time in the future when the government has decreed that all couples must produce a child within five years of marriage. The plot tells of the aptly named Mrs Barren, who has failed to get pregnant and therefore faces a visit from a government official whose job it is to impregnate her — or, as Dahl puts it, to “go through the usual routine prescribed under the code” to ensure “continued propagation of the race”. The humour is built on a premise of mistaken identity. On her fifth wedding anniversary, Mrs Barren is visited not by the government stud, but by Mr Litmus F. Lenser, a photographer of children who is trying to sell his services to her. A series of lewd double entendres ensues, as Mr Lenser talks about his “baby work” and Mrs Barren becomes increasingly alarmed by the number and variety of sexual acts she imagines she will have to perform with him. “I have reduced it to a science,” says Lenser typically. “I recommend at least two in the bath tub, one or two on the couch, and a couple on the floor. You want your children natural, don’t you?”²⁴

      Dahl found other outlets too for this madcap inventiveness. In Norway, in 1935, he had taken a photo of his bare-chested half brother Louis, playing a harmonica, and looking “not unlike a native of Honolulu. Brown granite looks white next to his skin”.²⁵ In September 1937, however, this same photograph appeared in a very different context: The Shell Magazine. In a section entitled “Whips and Scorpions”, the man in the photograph was identified as a Mr Dippy Dud, and Shell employees from the unlikely town of Whelkington-on-Sea were invited to rugby-tackle him to the ground when they saw him on the promenade. If they floored him while carrying a copy of The Shell Magazine, the article declared, a prize would be theirs. “Mr Dud,” the anonymous writer continued, “is a keen musician, but do not be misled if he is not playing a mouth organ when you see him. He is an equally adept performer on the harmonica, also on the harmonium, euphonium, pandemonium, saxophone, vibraphone, dictaphone, glockenspiel and catarrh … Don’t be afraid to tackle anyone you think may be Mr Dud. People who are mistaken for him enter heartily into the fun of the thing, especially town councillors, archdeacons and retired colonels.” Dahl was surely the author of this piece, whose subversive tone and extravagant comic vocabulary anticipate the language of one of his most famous fictional characters: Willy Wonka.

      It is hard to imagine these four years of relaxed normality — travelling up to London six mornings a week on the 8.15 train from Bexley, with trilby hat and furled umbrella, alongside a “swarm of other equally sombre-suited businessmen”²⁶ They simply do not fit in with the rest of Dahl’s extraordinarily eventful existence. Perhaps in hindsight not even Roald himself could believe it. In Boy, he telescopes these four years into two and suggests that he was in East Africa for much longer than the single year he spent there. Yet Dahl’s time in the leafy suburbs was important in forming him as a writer for it was at this time that he became a voracious reader. “The best reading times I ever had were in the 1930s,” he declared less than a year before he died, in a speech at the Sunday Express Book Awards, where he listed the novels by Waugh, Greene, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald that had thrilled him in his twenties. “We never had it so good,” ²⁷ he continued, celebrating these novels for being entertaining, well-plotted, elegant and yet serious. One story of Damon Runyon’s particularly excited him — for its terseness, its present-tense narrative and the fact that its style “broke all the rules”.²⁸ Those years in Bexley also confirmed his ideal of family life. The carefree, easygoing atmosphere of Oakwood — a huge Edwardian house on three floors with rambling gardens, studios, well-stocked wine cellar, conservatory, grotto and servants — set a kind of standard for Dahl as to what a family house should be. It was relaxed. And there were few, if any, rules. It would become a model for the kind of lifestyle Dahl tried to create for himself and his own young family in rural Buckinghamshire twenty years later.

      When not in his darkroom, Dahl could often be found playing golf. He had started playing as an eleven-year-old on the beach at Weston-super-Mare,²⁹ and joined Dartford Golf Club as a Junior Member in 1927, where he went almost every day of the holidays with Alfhild.³⁰ By 1936, when he was runner-up in the Shell Championship,³¹ he had become almost a scratch player.³² If not on the golf course, he was likely to be at the races, gambling either on horses or greyhounds. Dennis Pearl remembered Roald being introduced to the world of racing greyhounds by Dick Wolsey, a wealthy bookmaker who played at Dartford Golf Club. Wolsey was from the wrong side of the tracks. He had left school aged twelve, sometimes carried £1,000 in cash in his back pocket, and kept a Rolls-Royce that he only drove at night, “in case the tax man saw him”.³³He was perhaps the first of many self-made entrepreneurs to whom Dahl found himself instinctively drawn.

      Wolsey took his young friend to the newly opened Catford Stadium, nine miles away, to see his own dogs racing, and Roald was instantly hooked. From then onwards he would spend most Saturday evenings there, often wagering his week’s earnings on the races. Pearl remembered his friend’s fascination with the other gamblers too and how intrigued Dahl was by “the way in which they gambled, and the effect that gambling had on them”.³⁴ It was the beginning of a love affair with betting that would last to the end of his life. Indeed, he once told his daughter Ophelia that winning on the horses or at blackjack gave him more pleasure than receiving a royalty check from his writing.³⁵

      Shell did not offer much in the way of paid holidays, but whenever he could, Roald got away. Twice he went to Norway with Michael Arnold and Dennis Pearl. There, he swam, fished, went boating, chased girls, and reconnected with his cousin Finn, the son of his uncle Truls. Once he sketched out notes for a tale about an absurd encounter with a local mechanic, which some years later, relocated to wartime Greece, would become the basis of his poignant story “Yesterday Was Beautiful”. He also indulged a sense of fun that could at times be distinctly oafish. Once on a climbing trip to Snowdonia, with Dennis Pearl and Jimmy Horrocks,

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