Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock

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there in 1941, after the Nazis invaded Greece. Lesley Pares would get to know them both and come to be extremely close to Elizabeth David. But Dahl was concentrating on his recovery and literary soirees held little interest for him. He preferred listening to his gramophone, animated only by occasional forays into the routine colonial existence of golf clubs, cocktails, dinner parties, and games of bridge. His contribution to Egyptian artistic life was limited to exhibiting two of the Iraqi photographs that had survived the destruction of his kit at an exhibition in Cairo, organized by a friend of his mother’s from London, Dr Omar Khairat. One of them, an aerial photograph of the mighty 2,000-year-old Arch of Ctesiphon, won him a silver medal. He had taken it from the cockpit of his plane while flying from Hab-baniya. However, his head injuries remained slow to heal and a return to the air was beginning to seem increasingly unlikely. Blinding headaches could still force him to abandon the simplest of tasks and retire to his room, and he was dogged by a sense of lethargy and lightheadedness. So he waited, hoping that his health would improve and that he would be able, at last, to fly in action. For, despite the doctors’ pessimistic prognosis about his head injuries, his “one obsession was to get back to operational flying”.37

      “A monumental bash on the head” was how Dahl once described his accident in the Western Desert, claiming that it directly led to his becoming a writer.38 This was not just because his first published piece of writing was a semifictionalized account of the crash, but also because he suspected that the brain injuries which he received there had materially altered his personality and inclined him to creative writing. His daughter Ophelia recalled her father’s fascination with tales of people who had experienced dramatic psychological and physiological changes — such as losing or recovering sight — after suffering a blow to the head. He also told her that he was convinced something of this sort had happened to him, as it explained why a budding corporate businessman, without any particular artistic ambition, was transformed into someone with a burning need to write and tell stories.39 This hypothesis was doubtless attractive too because it pushed potentially more complex psychological issues about the sources of his desire to write into the background.

      Nowadays doctors might well have diagnosed Dahl as suffering from what is called postconcussive syndrome.40 The initial symptoms of this condition are normally forgetfulness, irritability, an inability to concentrate and severe headaches. Dahl suffered from all of these. In some patients the symptoms disappear, but leave behind longer-lasting behavioural changes, which are usually associated with mood swings and an increased lack of inhibition. In some cases, too, it can also result in a fundamental alteration of the perception of the self. With Dahl, these alterations were marginal, but they were nonetheless significant. His sense of embarrassment — already minimal — was further diminished, his sense of fantasy heightened, while his desire to shock became even more pronounced. He emerged from his crisis more confident, more determined to make a mark. His first brush with death doubtless also played a significant part in this change in his own perception of himself, making him more aware of his vulnerability, more reflective, yet also intensifying the sense of himself as a survivor, as a figure of destiny.

      This heightened sense of self was closely linked to the very act of flying. From its ecstatic beginnings, swooping over the Kenyan bush, the sense of being alone and free in an unfamiliar element stimulated Roald’s sense of the mystical. It reinforced his sense of isolation. The sky became an alternative world: a place of tranquillity and gentle beauty, a refuge either from the horrors of war or the cruelties of human behaviour that could be magical, transformative, even redemptive. Most of his early adult stories are profoundly connected to this spiritual dimension of flying, and it is also a feature of many of Dahl’s most well loved children’s books. In the first of these, James and the Giant Peach, the child protagonist, James, who has escaped from his cruel aunts to find shelter inside an enormous peach, stands at night on the surface of the giant fruit, accompanied by a group of equally outsize bugs. They are all flying high above the Atlantic Ocean because the peach has been borne aloft by a flock of seagulls. Contemplating the heavens above him, James is filled with an overpowering sense of mystery and wonder. “Clouds like mountains towered over their heads on all sides, mysterious, menacing, overwhelming …,” Dahl writes. “The peach was a soft, stealthy traveller, making no noise at all as it floated along. And several times during that long silent night ride high up over the middle of the ocean in moonlight, James and his friends saw things that no-one had seen before.”41 It is a sense of epiphany similar to that which affects Charlie Bucket, the hero of Dahl’s next children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when, flying high over the factory inside a great glass elevator, Willy Wonka hands over his world to the young boy.

      The glory of flight also suffuses Dahl’s last book, The Minpins, in which a small boy, Little Billy, flies on the back of a swan into a dark and magical nocturnal landscape, filled with extraordinary natural wonders. Here, fifty years after he himself last flew on his own, Dahl powerfully evokes that sense of separation between the solitary flyer and the rest of humanity that he had felt when launching his schoolboy fire-balloons, and which, through flying a fighter plane, had been fixed at the centre of his psychology. Boy and bird, moving as one, witness things that neither will ever be able to understand or explain. And what they see is theirs alone. “They flew in a magical world of silence, swooping and gliding over the dark world below, where all the earthly people were fast asleep in their beds.”42 This mystical connection between boy and bird was familiar territory for Dahl, who had explored it fifteen years earlier in one of his cruellest and most powerful tales, “The Swan”. Here, another small boy is hunted and bullied by a ruthless pair of child tormentors. They torture him and deliberately kill the nesting swan he has been watching with their rifle. Cutting the wings off the dead bird, they strap them to the terrified boy and force him to climb high up a nearby tree. Then they dare him to fly. When he refuses, they shoot him in the thigh in an attempt to make him jump. Wounded and bleeding, the boy spreads his wings and dives off the branch. However, he does not fall to the ground. Instead, he soars into safety toward “a light … of such brilliance and beauty he was unable to look away from it”.43 Dahl viscerally understood that situation: the dazzling bright aviator’s light, the fine thread that separates life from death. He had experienced that, too.

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