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For though Dahl was proud to be British and though he craved recognition and acceptance from English society, for most of his life he preferred to live outside its boundaries, making his own rules and his own judgements, not unlike his ancestor, Pastor Hesselberg.
As a result, English people found him odd. His best friend at prep school admitted that he was drawn to Roald because he was “a foreigner”.
And he was. Though born in Britain, and a British citizen, in many ways Dahl retained the psychology of an emigre. Later in his life, people forgot that. They interpreted his behaviour through the false perspective of an assumed “Englishness”, to which he perhaps aspired, but which was never naturally his. They saw only a veneer and they misunderstood it. In truth, Roald was always an outsider, the child of Norwegian immigrants, whose native land would become for their son an imaginative refuge, a secret world he could always call his own.
As with many children of emigrants, Roald would take on the manners and identity of his adopted home with the zeal of a convert. His sister Alfhild complained that her brother did not “recognize more how strong the Scandinavian is in us as a family”.
Ironically, however, the one British ancestor he did publicly acknowledge was the Scots patriot William Wallace. Dahl was immensely proud of the family tree that showed his direct lineage to the rebel leader who, legend has it, also stood over six foot five inches tall. Wallace had defeated the invading English armies at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, but he was to meet a grisly end at their hands eight years later, when he was captured, taken to London, and executed. The brutal details of his death would not have eluded Dahl’s antennae, which were acutely sensitive to human cruelty. Wallace was stripped naked, tied to a horse and dragged to Smithfield, where he was hanged, cut down while still alive, then publicly castrated and disembowelled. His body was hacked into four parts and his head placed as a warning on a spike atop London Bridge, along with those of two of his brothers. The English then tried to exterminate the rest of the Wallace family and they largely succeeded in doing so. A few of them escaped, making a perilous journey by boat across the North Sea to Bergen in Norway, where they settled and began a Norwegian Wallace line that survives to this day. Dahl’s grandmother, Ellen Wallace, was a descendant of those plucky fourteenth-century refugees. She married Karl Laurits Hesselberg, the grandson of the resourceful pastor who had escaped the church fire in Grue.
His father’s side of the family were somewhat different.
If the Hesselbergs were grand, middle-class, philanthropic intellectuals, the Dahls were grounded in earth and agriculture. They were ambitious, canny, uneducated and rough — albeit with an eye for craftsmanship and beauty. Roald’s father, Harald Dahl, was born in Sarpsborg, a provincial town some 30 miles from Christiania, whose principal industries in the nineteenth century were timber and brewing. Roald described his paternal grandfather Olaus as a “prosperous merchant who owned a store in Sarps-borg and traded in just about everything from cheese to chicken-wire”.
But the records in the parish church in Sarpsborg describe him simply as a “butcher”,
while other legal documents refer to him as “pork butcher and sausage maker”. They came, as it were, from the other side of the tracks. Indeed, Roald once admitted to Liccy that his mother’s family, the Hesselbergs, thought themselves “a cut above” the provincial Dahls and rather looked down their noses at them.
Dahl is a common enough name in Norway. There are currently about 12,000 of them in a population of 4.75 million. But until the nineteenth century there were hardly any at all. Olaus Dahl indeed was not born a Dahl. He was christened Olaves Trulsen on May 19, 1834, the son of Truls Pedersen and Kristine Olsdottir. After his own given name, he took his father’s first name and added sen (in English “son of”) onto the end of it in the traditional Scandinavian manner. In this way surnames changed from generation to generation, as they still do in many Icelandic families. Spelling too was erratic — in records Olaus appears also as Olavus, Olaves and Olav. But at some point in his twenties he took the decision to “Europeanize” himself and acquire a fixed family name. Many others around him were doing the same, including his future wife Ellen Andersen, who changed her name to Langenen. Why Olaus chose Dahl, which means “Valley”, is uncertain, although it seems to have been a popular choice with others who came from the lowlands rather than the mountains.
Olaus’s story is typical of that of many Norwegians in the mid-nineteenth century. He was born into a small farming community, where his parents eked out a miserable existence. There, the short summers were filled with endless chores, while the winter brought only darkness and misery. The fogs swept in from the sea, swathing their primitive homestead and few acres of land in a damp, suffocating cloak of gloom. For much of the year, life was unbearably monotonous. If contemporary accounts are an accurate guide, in one corner of their two candlelit rooms, perched above the snorting animals, his mother would probably be spinning. In another his father was getting drunk. For generations, rural families had lived like this; subsisting, struggling simply to survive, grateful for the land they owned, yet tied to it like slaves. They were illiterate and uneducated. There was little or no scope for self-improvement. They aged prematurely and died young. Olaus would not have been alone in feeling the need to escape from a landscape that drained his energies and sapped his need for change. So, at some point in his late teens, he abandoned the countryside, and went to the expanding industrial town of Sarpsborg, some 20 miles away, where the railway would soon arrive. There he got a job as a trainee butcher and set up home with Ellen, from nearby Varteig. After a few years, he opened his own butcher’s shop.
Early twenty-first-century Sarpsborg is a grim place. Gray and ugly, it is dominated by a sullen 1960s concrete and steel shopping centre, which crouches next to the mournful remains of the nineteenth-century town. The outskirts are relentlessly, oppressively industrial. It is a far cry from the ancient splendours of Trondheim, the civilized serenity of Oslo, or the picturesque fjords and fishing villages of the western coast. On a dull Saturday afternoon in November, drunken and overweight supporters of Sparta, the ailing local football team, stagger from bar to bar. The occasional raucous cheer suggests an attempt at rowdiness. But one senses their hearts are not quite in it. Depression stalks the streets. In quiet corners, solitary older inhabitants drink furtively, seeking out the darkest corners of gloomy cafés in which to hide. Others huddle in groups, saying nothing. No trace remains of the butcher’s shop where Olaus plied his trade, or of the house in Droningensgade where he raised his family and where he lived with his servant Annette and his assistant Lars Nilssen. Like so many other older Sarpsborg buildings, they have long since been destroyed.
When Olaus died in 1923 at the age of eighty-nine, Roald was only six. It is not clear that he ever met him, although in Boy he confidently describes his paternal grandfather as “an amiable giant almost seven foot tall”.
Some of the other detail he gives about the man is entirely fictitious. For example, he claimed that Olaus was born in 1820, some fourteen years earlier than he actually was. Perhaps he confused him with his great-grandfather Hesselberg, the son of the pastor from Grue, who was indeed born that year. Perhaps not. Yet this lack of concern for detail blinded him to one unexpected anomaly of his own family history. Olaus and his wife Ellen had six children: three sons and three daughters over a period of thirteen years. Harald was born in 1863, Clara in 1865, Ragna in 1868, Oscar in 1870, Olga in 1873, and finally Truls in 1876.
Examining the local baptism and marriage records, however, reveals a surprising and perhaps significant detail: Roald’s father was illegitimate. Harald was born in December 1863, but his parents did not actually marry until the following summer. He was christened on June 26, 1864, when he was six months old, and just five days after his parents’ wedding. Whether Harald was aware that he was born a bastard is unclear, but in a small community like Sarpsborg, it was unlikely that fact would have been kept a secret from him for long, and the associated stigma may well have fuelled his desire to start a new life elsewhere.
Harald undoubtedly had a hard childhood. In Boy, Roald tells the gruesome story of how, aged fourteen, his father fell off the roof of the family home, where he was repairing loose tiles, and broke his arm. A drunken doctor then misdiagnosed a dislocated shoulder, summoning two men off the street to help him put the shoulder into place. As they forcibly manipulated young Harald’s arm, splinters of bone started to poke through the boy’s skin. Eventually the arm had to be amputated at the elbow. Dahl tells the tale with his usual lack of sentiment, explaining how his father made light of his disability — sharpening a prong of his fork so he could eat one-handed, and learning to do almost everything he wanted, except cutting the top off a hard-boiled egg, with a single hand. It’s a good tale. Suspiciously good. So it is not surprising to discover that Roald confessed to one of his American editors, Stephen Roxburgh at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, that he had invented much of it and that he had particularly enjoyed devising the detail of the sharpened fork.
Photographs confirm that his father’s arm was certainly amputated. But it’s also possible that Dahl’s version of the accident hid a more squalid domestic truth and that it was a drunken parent rather than a drunken doctor who was responsible for the amputation. We don’t know if Harald was a fabricator of the truth — his wife certainly was, and she was the one who passed the family legends down to Roald — but he was studious, thoughtful, and had a passion for beautiful things. He had little in common with his father: the obstinate and rough-hewn butcher, who squandered his money betting on local trotting races.
Harald and his brother Oscar must have elected to leave Norway some time in the 1880s. Writing a hundred years later, Roald describes the decision in characteristically simple terms:
My father was a year or so older than his brother Oscar, but they were exceptionally close and soon after they left school they went for a long walk together to plan their future. They decided that a small town like Sarpsborg in a small country like Norway was no place to make a fortune. So what they must do, they agreed, was to go away to one of the big countries, either to England or France, where opportunities to make good would be boundless.
Both went to Paris, but their motivations for leaving were almost certainly more complex than Roald made out. To begin with, the two brothers were nothing like the same age. There was a seven-year gap between them. So, even if Oscar had just left school when he departed for France, Harald would have been a young man in his twenties. The fact that Roald also maintained his grandfather “forbade” his two sons to leave and that the two men were forced to “run away”
suggests it took a while for the slow-burning Harald to pluck up the courage and defy him. Two more of Olaus and Ellen’s children also left Norway at this time: Clara went to South Africa and Olga to Denmark. Only Ragna and her youngest brother, Truls, stayed behind. Truls became his father’s apprentice and eventually took over the butcher’s shop, staying with him, one suspects, largely for business reasons.
The two older Dahl brothers left Norway on a boat. It’s quite possible they worked on ships for a considerable period of time before they ended up in Paris, for both of them later went into careers that involved quite detailed knowledge of shipping. What exactly they did when they got to the French capital remains unclear. Family legend has it that they went there to be both artists and entrepreneurs — an improbable combination of skills perhaps, but one that would define Roald, in whose mind there was always a natural link between making art and making money. It was the same with his elder sister Alfhild. Sitting in the garden of her house in the Chiltern Hills, a stone’s throw away from where her brother lived, her weathered features broke into a wrinkly grin as she recalled her father and uncle, seventy years earlier. “They left Norway to become artists, you see,” she told me. “They went to make their fortune. They just assumed they could do it.”
It was as if her brother were speaking. The crackly voice, the clipped, matter-of fact delivery, the wry chuckle.
The big picture, too, is similarly vivid and compelling, always uncluttered with qualifications or a surfeit of detail. For Alfhild, Harald and Oscar were typical Nordic bohemians, who came to Paris for its glamour, its freedom, and its artistic energy. Fictionalized versions of these Scandinavian visitors appear in literature of that period — Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, or Louise Strandberg in Victoria Benedictsson’s play The Enchantment. They left the stern world of the North for a “great, free glorious life”
among the boulevards and cafes, where geniuses mixed cheek-by-jowl with the indigent, where anarchists plotted social revolution, and where painting was in a ferment of change that had not been seen in one place since Renaissance Florence.
Fading sepia photographs give us a glimpse of the lost world they lived in: days at the races, fancy-dress parties, lunches on summer lawns in Compiegne and Neuilly. And then they painted. It was the golden age of Norwegian painting, and in Paris Harald would almost certainly have mixed with the leading Scandinavian painters of the day, including Edvard Munch and Frits Thaulow. Not that Harald was a modernist. He was a craftsman, who carved mirrors, picture frames and mantelpieces, and painted rural scenes. A few examples of his work survive — subtle, well-crafted landscapes in the Scandinavian naturalistic style. At Gipsy House, one of them, an impressionistic pastel in green, blue and brown, still hangs by Liccy Dahl’s bedside. It is reminiscent of the dismal rural setting from which Harald’s father had fled. A clump of straggly spruces tremble by the side of a placid lake, like a skeletal family tentatively approaching the chilly waters. No sunlight illuminates the scene, nor is there any sense of human habitation. In the foreground, reeds are tugged by a gust of wind. In the background, the bare mountains rise up into the haze toward the distant sky.
The visual arts were an important and little understood aspect of Roald Dahl’s life and formed a continuous counterpoise to his literary activities. All his life he bought and sold paintings, furniture and jewellery — sometimes to supplement his literary earnings. He even opened an antique shop. That connection between business and art, which came as naturally to him as breathing, would puzzle and irritate many of Dahl’s English literary contemporaries, who resented his skill at making money and disliked the pride he took in his own financial successes. It frequently caused misunderstandings. The British novelist Kingsley Amis was typical. In his memoirs, he described his only meeting with Dahl. It was at a party given by Tom Stoppard in the early 1970s. There, Roald apparently suggested to Amis that, if he was suffering from “financial problems”, he should consider writing a children’s book, and went on to describe how he might go about doing so. Amis, who had no interest in children’s fiction, felt he was being patronized by Dahl’s suggestion that his own writing was not bringing him enough money. Dahl, for his part, was in precisely the kind of English literary environment he loathed. He knew that Amis, like most of the guests, did not respect children’s writing as proper literature and this attitude made him feel vulnerable. Drunk and ill at ease, he probably felt that the only way to keep his head up with Amis was to talk money. The clash of attitudes was bitter and fundamental. Noting that Dahl departed by helicopter, Amis concluded: “I watched the television news that night, but there was no report of a famous children’s author being killed in a helicopter crash.”
The need for financial success was in Roald’s blood. His father and his uncle Oscar had both evolved into shrewd businessmen. When the two brothers eventually separated in Paris, Oscar travelled to La Rochelle, on the west coast of France, with his new wife, Therese Billotte, whom he had rescued from a fire in 1897 at the Bazar de la Charite. As with the fire in Grue, this had killed over one hundred people.
Billotte was from a family of painters. Her grandfather was the French writer and artist Eugene Fromentin, most famous for his naturalistic depictions of life in North Africa, while her uncle, Rene Billotte, was a commercial landscape painter, whose murals of exotic scenes still decorate Le Train Bleu, the elaborate gilded dining room of Paris’s main railway station to the South, the Gare de Lyon. In La Rochelle, Oscar started a company of fishing trawlers called Pecheurs d’Atlantique. His fleet began the practice of canning its catch on board ship, and became so successful that Roald could justifiably boast after the war that his uncle was “the wealthiest man in town”.
With the money he made, Oscar indulged himself. He purchased the Hôtel Pascaud, an elegant eighteenth-century town house, and filled it with exquisite objects. Roald would later fondly describe it as “a museum dedicated to beauty”.
Oscar was a complex character. He was an aesthete but, like his father Olaus, also something of a bully. Roald would always have a turbulent relationship with him. During the war Oscar remained in Occupied France, collaborating with the Nazis, while his son fought in the Resistance. One family legend has it that, after the war was over, he was publicly tarred and feathered by a group of bitter locals and that father and son never spoke again. However, what is certain is that this exotic French uncle, with his Viking appearance and fastidious taste, left an indelible impression on his young nephew — if only for his facial hair.
My late uncle Oscar… had a massive hairy moustache, and at meals he used to fish out of his pocket an elongated silver scoop with a small handle on it. This was called a moustache-strainer and he used to hold it over his moustache with his left hand as he spooned his soup into his mouth with his right. This did prevent the hair-ends from becoming saturated with lobster bisque … but I used to say to myself, “Why (doesn’t he just clip the hairs shorter? Or better still, just shave the (damn thing off altogether and be done with it?” But then Uncle Oscar was the sort of man who used to remove his false teeth at the end of dinner and rinse them in his finger-bowl?
Harald’s temperament, like his moustache, was less extrovert than his brother’s. And he remained in Paris a little longer. However, some time in the 1890s, when he decided that he was tired of the vie bohemienne, he headed not to La Rochelle but to South Wales, to the coal metropolis of Cardiff, where he had heard that enterprising Norwegians could make their fortune.
(#ulink_9ec5db95-45a1-5036-ac5c-032dc3df8e25)Most of the Vaernes farmlands have now been subsumed into Trondheim Airport, but the actual building Hans Theodor owned is still standing. He is buried nearby in the cemetery of Vaernes Church.
(#ulink_2c11d787-59d2-531e-bdb5-8acc219bb92f)Confusingly, the capital of Norway has undergone several changes of name. Ancient Norse Oslo was renamed Christiania in 1624 after King Christian IV of Norway rebuilt it following a disastrous fire. In 1878, Christiania was refashioned as Kristiania, and in 1925, the city became Oslo once again.
CHAPTER TWO (#u146a6ad4-446d-572e-a044-156c49de32a9)
Shutting Out the Sun
THE HISTORY OF TRADING between Norway and South Wales goes back well over a thousand years. Medieval chroniclers writing of the land of Morgannwg, now Glamorgan, in the period between the Roman settlement and the Norman Conquest celebrated the visits of Norwegian traders, comparing them favourably to the “black heathens”,
the Danes, whose intentions often seemed more inclined toward rape and pillage than commerce. Curiously, recent evidence suggests that Welsh men and women, captured in the valleys and sold into slavery, may have been the first major commodity exported from Wales to Norway;
however, by the mid-nineteenth century, trade in human souls had given way to a sophisticated, booming and lucrative business relationship based on timber, steel and above all, coal. Boats from Norway, already the third largest merchant fleet in the world, arrived in Cardiff with timber, mostly to use as pit props (which the Welsh miners called “Norways”), and left carrying coal and steel to all parts of the globe. In twenty years the city’s population doubled as it became the world’s major supplier of coal. By 1900, Cardiff was exporting 5 million tons of coal annually from more than 14 miles of seething dockside wharfage. Two thirds of these exports left in Norwegian-owned vessels. The city was consequently awash with commercial opportunities for an enterprising, intelligent young expatriate, tired of his sojourn in Paris and eager to make his fortune.
Cardiff, of course, already boasted a considerable number of resident Norwegian nationals. But the majority were transient sailors. In 1868, the Norwegian Mission to Seamen had constructed a little wooden church between the East and West Docks on land donated by the Marquis of Bute. It was a place of worship, but also a place where the ships’ crews, many of whom were as young as fourteen, could relax and read Norwegian books and newspapers, while the cargo on their boats was loaded and unloaded. A model ship hung from the ceiling, and the walls were decorated with Scandinavian landscapes and pictures of the royal families of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The tables were even decorated with miniature Norwegian flags.
Up to 75,000 seamen passed through the Mission’s doors each year, eager for reminders of home in this hostile industrial environment. The docks were noisy, filthy, and could be terrifying — particularly to anyone from a rural background. An experienced Norwegian sea captain described the city: “It’s not difficult to find Cardiff from the sea,” he told his young nephew, who was about to sail there for the first time; “you just look for a very black sky — that’s the coal dust. In the middle of the dust, there is a white building, the Norwegian Seamen’s Church. When we see that we know we are home.”
The tiny church, with its plucky spire, quickly became a symbol for the Norwegian community in Cardiff, although most who settled there integrated with the local Welsh community, and used it simply for births, marriages and deaths.
Today it stands restored, looking out at redeveloped Cardiff Bay, as if saluting the most famous of its congregation, who was christened there in the autumn of 1916, and whose name now graces the public area between the church and the grey slate, golden steel modernity of the new Wales Millennium Centre: Roald Dahl.* (#ulink_c8533c89-8f27-5f33-9211-4fcd22495c9a)
Exactly when Harald Dahl arrived in South Wales is not clear. He does not figure in the UK census of 1891; however, by 1897 a mustachioed and dapper Harald is posing for a portrait photographer in Newport, some 15 miles along the coast from Cardiff. His long, flat face, round forehead and confident, sardonic eyes bear little resemblance to the oafish features of his father, which scowl out of an earlier page in the same family photograph album.
It’s likely that this photograph of Harald, despatched to sisters and friends in Paris, was taken not long after he arrived in the Cardiff area and began learning his trade in shipping. In 1901 the census records that he was still single, working as a shipbroker’s manager and lodging near the docks in a small redbrick terrace at No. 3, Charles Place, Barry, in the house of a retired land steward called William Adam, his wife Mary and their two adult daughters. Yet, despite his relocation to South Wales, a significant part of Harald’s heart had remained in France. He had fallen in love with a glamorous doe-eyed Parisian beauty named Marie Beaurin-Gressier. Later in the summer of 1901, he returned to Paris and married her.
Her granddaughter Bryony describes Marie as coming from “a posh ancien régime family that had become rather impoverished and down on its luck”.
Certainly, the Beaurin-Gressiers were not bourgeois. Though they had houses in Paris and in the country, near Compiègne, they seemed more inclined to sport and leisure than to commerce. Rugby was a dominating interest. Two of Marie’s brothers, Guillaume and Charles, played for Paris Stade Français, the latter representing his country twice against England, while one of her sisters married the captain of the French team that won a gold medal at the 1900 Olympics. Another sister went to Algeria and married an Arab. Another brother ran a well-known Parisian fish restaurant. Yet another was an auctioneer. Marie was the most beautiful. Waiflike, elfin and delicate, she had a pale complexion, a mop of thick dark hair and sad, serious eyes. Fifteen years her senior, Harald must have had enormous charm, as well as good financial prospects, to succeed in stealing her away from her warm and adoring family. A snapshot of her on her wedding day, on a sunny veranda in the French countryside, beaming with delight and surrounded by admirers, suggests that she was very much in love. But it also suggests her innocence. She can surely have had little sense of what life in industrial Cardiff would offer her. Perhaps to counteract any potential feelings of homesickness, Marie brought some reminders of France with her to South Wales. Her trousseau boasted a diverse collection of jewellery, paintings and furniture, including a rosewood bedstead, various antique tables, chairs, secretaires, cabinets, an astronomical clock and an elaborate Louis XVI timepiece. Touchingly there was also a gilt mirror “carved by Mr Dahl and presented to Mrs Dahl”.
Shortly after the newlyweds returned to Cardiff, Harald went into business with another expatriate Norwegian, three years younger than he was: Ludvig Aadnesen. The two men had become acquainted with each other in Paris, but the Aadnesens, who came from Tvedestrand, near Krager0, the birthplace of Edvard Munch, were already part of Harald’s extended family. One of them had married Harald’s sister Clara, and emigrated to South Africa with her.† (#ulink_aca0a189-6ea6-5a29-a0c7-35e467506f3e) Ludvig, a lifelong bachelor, shared Harald’s fascination for painting and became his confidant and closest friend.
Financially, it was a good move. Over the next two decades the ship-broking firm of Aadnesen & Dahl, which supplied the ships that arrived in the docks with fuel and a host of other items, would expand from its small room in Bute Street to acquire offices in Newport, Swansea and Port Talbot, as well as large premises in Cardiff, which at one point also housed the Norwegian Consulate. Gradually the partnership began to trade in coal as well as simply supplying ships, and both men became rich. Dahl and Aadnesen were business partners, but they were also immensely close, and Ludvig occupied “an incredibly special place”
in Harald’s affections. In the family he was always referred to as “Parrain” (the French for “Godfather”), and when Harald died, he bequeathed to his “good old friend and partner” the only named object in his will: a painting by Frits Thaulow called Harbour Scene. The painting, now lost, must have symbolized many shared memories for the two men. It spoke, of course, of ships and the sea that had caused them both to move to Wales, but it also evoked their youth together in Norway.
Harald’s marriage to Marie began promisingly. He rented an Arts and Crafts seafront house near the docks in Barry, round the corner from where he had been lodging, with a first-floor balcony that offered a fine view of the bay. There, their first child, Ellen Marguerite, named after Harald’s mother, was born in 1903, and a son Louis, named perhaps after her elder brother, three years later in 1906. Those are the bare statistics. Yet while archival research can reconstruct the landmark events of a vanished life — its births, marriages and deaths — it cannot bring to life the personality that lived between these records without more personal, idiosyncratic evidence. Harald left diaries, letters, paintings, odd pieces of carving, and other artefacts that hint at his character. The contents of the expensive French leather wallet that was in his pocket when he died, for example, now carefully preserved at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, complete with postal orders and railway season ticket, testify both to his good taste and meticulous habits. Of Marie, however, nothing remains. Even the gilt mirror is no longer in the family.‡ (#ulink_ad84a855-c4b1-5c10-b7de-b7b7f29ddd92) It is consequently hard to hypothesize how she coped with her new life in Barry. But it’s more than likely she suffered. Far away from her family and from the world she loved, the grime and dust of Cardiff Docks must have seemed a poor replacement for the elegance of Paris or the delights of summer days in Compiègne. Living with a Norwegian husband, fifteen years older than she was and accustomed to solitude, also cannot have been easy.
On October 16, 1907, while heavily pregnant with their third child, Marie died. She was twenty-nine years old. Her death certificate indicates that she collapsed and died of a massive haemorrhage caused by placenta praevia — an obstetric complication, where the placenta lies low in the uterus and can shear off from it, causing sometimes fatal bleeding. Someone called Mary Henrich, probably a nurse or nanny as she was also living at the house, was present when Marie died and reported her death to the authorities. Marie’s granddaugther Bryony however remembers a rumour whispered in the family (perhaps stemming from Roald’s mother, Sofie Magdalene) that Marie had been depressed and died from a failed abortion.
While it is possible that an attempt to terminate the pregnancy artificially might produce similar symptoms to placenta praevia haemorrhage, the risks for the abortionist if the pregnancy was advanced would have been enormous. So, unless Marie had attempted somehow to do it herself, the official version seems a good deal more plausible.
Marie’s death left Harald devastated. He had almost completed building a splendid new whitewashed house for his family, far from the commotion and noise of the docks, in leafy Llandaff — a medieval town that the railway had made a suburb of Cardiff. Harald had designed many of the building’s details himself and proudly named his new home “Villa Marie” in honour of his young wife. Sadly, she never saw it finished. It survives today, though its name has changed,
but its steeply sloping gables and idiosyncratic Arts and Crafts appearance, with leaded windows and faux medieval buttresses, suggest how much Harald himself had contributed to the design and how much he must have looked forward to a settled and happy family life there. Instead, at forty-four, he found himself suddenly on his own — left to raise two tiny children, aged three and one, neither of whom would ever remember the dusky, wide-eyed waif whose beauty had so bewitched him.
Following Marie’s death, her mother Ganou came over from Paris to help look after Ellen and Louis. Harald drowned his sorrows in hard work, spending long hours in his office and obsessively tending Villa Marie’s substantial garden.
Four years passed. Then, one summer, Harald went away to visit his sister Olga, who was now living in Denmark.
Whether he was lonely and went consciously in search of a new bride, as Roald maintained in his memoir Boy, is uncertain, but it was in Denmark, not Norway, as Roald later claimed, that the Dahls and the Hesselbergs finally connected. Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, who was visiting friends, had strong, almost masculine features that were in sharp contrast to Marie’s delicate, almost doll-like appearance. Within a matter of weeks she and Harald were engaged.
It was a convenient match for both of them. She was twenty-six years old, sturdy, strong-willed and eager to break the tie with her parents. He was prosperous, established, and old enough to have been her father. Harald however had to overcome strong opposition from Sofie Magdalene’s parents. Karl Laurits and his wife Ellen were by now wealthy in their own right. He was treasurer of the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund and both were very controlling personalities. Their only son had recently died, and their three daughters were now the focus of their attention. Sofie Magdalene was considered the least attractive of them, and felt herself in some ways the “Cinderella” of the trio.
Nevertheless Karl Laurits was disconcerted that his eldest wanted to marry a man only ten years younger than he was. Worse still was the fact that she planned to leave Kristiania and live in Wales. But Sofie Magdalene was determined, and her parents were eventually forced to consent grudgingly to the wedding.
Her stubbornness in doing so may also have been farsighted. Ahead of her, she may have seen the fate that would befall Ellen and Astri, her two younger sisters. They failed to escape their father’s thrall and were destined to live out their entire lives in the parental home. Increasingly eccentric, they became a growing source of curiosity and amusement for their younger relations, who remembered them, either drunk or drugged, sitting on the veranda of their home in Josefinegate, like characters in an Ibsen play, methodically picking maggots out of raspberries with a pin.
Harald took his new wife to Paris on her honeymoon, kitting her out in the French fashions he adored, and buying her a cape made of black satin that she kept for the rest of her life. They visited his brother Oscar and his wife in La Rochelle, before returning to the Villa Marie. Sofie Magdalene immediately took charge in a manner that was both decisive and somewhat brutal. She turfed the beloved Ganou out of the house, and hired a Norwegian nanny, Birgit, to look after the children. This alienated Ellen and completely traumatized the five-year-old Louis, for whom Ganou had become a surrogate 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 new bride, however, was deliriously happy in the Villa Marie. Fifty years later she would still describe it as her “dream home” — the place where she had been happiest of all.
She was soon pregnant and a rejuvenated Harald excitedly insisted that she take a series of “glorious walks” through the surrounding countryside, because he believed these would imbue the unborn child in her womb with a sense of beauty and a love of nature. Within five years Sofie Magdalene had given birth to four children: Astri (1912), Alfhild (1914),§ (#ulink_c72a39e3-3652-5e88-9853-032385c30de8) Roald (1916)
and Else (1917). All four were indeed to manifest a strong artistic leaning and profound love of the countryside, qualities they shared with both their parents. Nevertheless, the idea that these “glorious walks” had somehow influenced their emotional development became deeply ingrained in their psychologies. Astri was Harald’s favourite. A snapshot of him roaring with delight as his one-year-old daughter takes a puff from his pipe is the only photograph to survive that shows him with anything but a sober, almost sombre, countenance. Roald was named after the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had successfully reached the South Pole in 1911, and whose nephew, Jens, worked briefly for Aadnesen & Dahl during the war.
He was his mother’s “pride and joy”, her only boy, and therefore treated with special care. His siblings affectionately dubbed him “the apple of the eye”.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
As 1920 dawned, Harald would have been forgiven for looking back on his life with some satisfaction. He had come a long way since he left his family in Sarpsborg for the delights of bohemian Paris. Business was booming. He had survived the sudden death of his first wife, to find unexpected happiness with Sofie Magdalene. Though he had started his family late — when he was forty — he was now in his mid-fifties and had six happy, healthy multilingual children around him.¶ (#ulink_9039e963-76e7-5411-b920-25bb245e73e5) Two were already at boarding school. His eldest daughter Ellen was at Roedean, a grand English fee-paying school for girls, set high atop a cliff in Sussex overlooking the English Channel, while Louis had just started at nearby Brighton College. If he did not see his younger children as much as he would have liked, he still occasionally found the time to relax and unwind with them — chasing a giggling Alfhild round the dining-room table, for example, while singing Grieg’s Troll Dance at the top of his voice.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 half sister Alfhild squealing with delight atop the handlebars,
Harald made minute and fussy adjustments to his will. Attended by two nurses, he cut out a small bequest to a distant cousin and instructed that all death duties arising from any of his other legacies were to be paid by the beneficiaries. Two days later, he was dead. He was buried in the medieval churchyard of St John the Baptist, Radyr, next to his daughter, Astri, on whose grave the earth was still fresh.
Above their joint resting place, not far from a 1,000-year-old yew tree, Sofie Magdalene erected an elaborate pink granite cross. It stands still in the little churchyard that was once surrounded by fields and farmland and is now besieged by an ugly 1970s housing estate. The monument thrusts prominently above the surrounding gravestones, its Celtic ornamentation and circled cross suggesting perhaps a public commitment the Dahl family had made to the Welsh soil in which they had put down their roots. If that was the case, Sofie Magdalene was hedging her bets as well. For she also ensured that both coffins were lined in lead so that they could be dug up and transported back to Norway if she chose to return there in the future.
The funeral was grand and formal. All the children dressed up. Alfhild wore a specially made check dress, with black bows. She remembered the huge house filled with flowers, the servants all dressed in black, and the heady perfume of the early spring narcissi, which lay strewn in piles upon the coffin. She also remembered the stoicism of her mother. For Sofie Magdalene never showed her pain. Others wept, but she did not. Much rested on her shoulders. She was thirty-five years old and had five children in her care — Ellen (sixteen), Louis (thirteen), Alfhild (five), Roald (three), and Else, barely one. A sixth was on the way. She was already looking forward. She intended to concentrate her energies on the living rather than the dead.
(#ulink_8c548a8b-988c-5250-843a-63ac25bee2d8)The church was dismantled, removed from its original site at Bute West Dock in 1987, and rebuilt in the regenerated Cardiff Bay in 1992. Roald Dahl was the first president of the Norwegian Church Preservation Society that supervised the restoration. In the process the building lost its corrugated iron roof and acquired a grander tiled one. It now overlooks Roald Dahl Plass (Plass is Norwegian for “Plaza”), formerly the Oval Basin, which was renamed after the author in 2002.
(#ulink_6b3e37c2-28b7-509e-8e38-4c8867bb145f)The exact links between the Dahls and the Aadnesens are complex and hard to discern. Census records reveal that Harald’s sister Clara Dahl married an Aadnesen and went to live with him in South Africa, where she gave birth to a son, Harald Dahl Aadnesen, in Durban in 1895. Either Aadnesen died or the couple were divorced, for by 1900, Clara was back in Oslo, living with her father and her five-year-old son. By the time Olaus died in 1923, Clara had remarried a local machinist called Siegfried Cammermeyer. Oscar Dahl took a benevolent interest in his nephew, Harald, who spent much time with his own son, Erik. Oscar’s family photograph albums show the two boys playing with each other, skiing in thick snow, and there are several shots of Harald’s wedding in France. What happened after that is unclear. Either Harald died young or his connection with Ludvig Aadnesen became increasingly tenuous. When Ludvig died in Whitchurch, Glamorganshire, in 1956, at the ripe old age of ninety, he left the bulk of his estate to his nieces Helga and Elizabeth and a nephew called Torolf. There was no mention at all of the South African-born Harald.
(#ulink_6217d80b-8742-57f2-aee1-8ddab4b5e417)According to Bryony Dahl, most of Marie’s furniture eventually went to her daughter Ellen, who used it to furnish the house in Hampstead, where she lived with her husband Ashley Miles. When Ashley and Ellen died, within a few weeks of each other early in 1988, everything was left to Ashley’s secretary, Barbara Prideaux, who had by then become their carer. She too died shortly afterwards, leaving two Beaurin-Gressier portraits to Bryony. She subsequently sold these along with the two pieces of Marie’s furniture that had been left to her father, Louis: an “elaborate marquetry cabinet” and a “ridiculous marble and ormolu clock” — presumably the Louis XVI timepiece mentioned in the marriage settlement — Bryony Dahl, Conversation with the author, 01/17/08.
(#ulink_c4907666-9078-530a-ab84-aa4621c718e2)Alfhild was named after Sofie Magdalene’s late brother, Alf, who had died in his twenties. Astri Newman [daughter of Alfhild], Conversation with the author, 10/15/07.
(#ulink_f3d33acc-dd2b-51cc-9f7e-ef2b95fabcf9)Learning two languages at the same time may have been one of the reasons Roald was so slow to start speaking. According to family legend, his first words were a complete sentence, spoken in Norwegian: “Pappa, hvor for har du ikke t0fflene dine pd deg — Daddy, why aren’t you wearingyour slippers?”
CHAPTER THREE (#u146a6ad4-446d-572e-a044-156c49de32a9)
Boy
THE EDWARDIAN CHILDREN’S WRITER Edith Nesbit thought that the most important quality in a good children’s writer was an ability vividly to recall their own childhood. Being able to relate to children as an adult, she believed, was largely unimportant. Roald Dahl could do both. His seductive voice, the subversive twinkle in his eye, and his sense of the comic and curious gave him an ability to mesmerize almost every child who crossed his path — yet he could also remember and reimagine his own childhood with astonishing sharpness. The detail might sometimes be unreliable, but what never failed him was an ability instinctively to recreate and understand the child’s point of view. It was something of which he was very proud. He knew he could do it and that a great many others could not. Sitting in his high-backed faded green armchair by the fire at Gipsy House, a glass of whisky in one hand, he once talked to me about it with considerable pride. “It’s really quite easy,” he would say. “I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.” Or, as his alter ego, Willy Wonka, put it in an early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “In my factory I make things to please children. I don’t care about adults.”
Dahl seldom dwelt on the traumatic early years of his childhood, and he generally made light of any connection between his fiction and his own life, yet the parallels between the two are intriguing. His fictional childhood bereavements, for example, are never maudlin. His child heroes or heroines always follow the positive pattern that Roald and his own sisters established after their father’s death. Sophie in The BFG has lived in an orphanage almost as long as she can remember, but does not dwell on what might have been. “Oh you poor little scrumplet!” cries the Big Friendly Giant, when he discovers that Sophie has no father or mother. “Is you not missing them very badly?” “Not really,” replies Sophie, “because I never knew them.”
This pragmatism was characteristic of Dahl himself. Perhaps because he never really knew his father, he does not seem unduly to have felt his absence.
This attitude contributed to an unsentimental, frequently subversive view of families, which was reflected strongly in his children’s fiction. The child always stands at the centre of things. Survival is often his or her main motivation, and enemies are as likely to come from within the family as from outside it.
Sometimes, the enemy is parents themselves — particularly if they are dreary or unimaginative. Occasionally, a good one appears — the “sparky” father figure in Danny the Champion of the World is probably the best example — but more often they feature as a negative force that the child must learn to endure, evade or subvert. To achieve this, the young hero must usually find an unexpected friend, who appreciates that child’s special qualities and allows them to bloom. Charlie Bucket’s soulmate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is neither mother, father, sibling nor schoolmate, but his quirky Grandpa Joe, and ultimately the great chocolate maker Willy Wonka himself. The orphaned narrator of The Witches has a similar relationship with his eccentric Norwegian grandmother. James in James and the Giant Peach finds salvation in nonhuman friends, a group of outsize and wacky bugs, while Sophie in The BFG finds her affinity in the person of a lumbering, good-natured giant. Sophie and James are both orphans and so have no parents to reject. Matilda Wormwood, on the other hand, the child heroine of Dahl’s last major book, Matilda, has parents from hell — conniving, vulgar imbeciles who ignore their daughter and try to crush her love of reading. They are comic caricatures, but also capable of brutal insensitivity, being “so gormless and so wrapped up in their silly little lives” that Dahl doubts they would have noticed had their daughter “crawled into the house with a broken leg”.
Matilda’s exceptional connection with her teacher Miss Honey is the emotional core of the story, and in the end, she chooses to desert her dysfunctional family to live with her new adult friend — an option many children may have dreamed of in sulkier moments. In each case, the love Dahl celebrates is not the traditional one between parent and child, but a close friendship established by the child, on its own terms, and in an unfamiliar context.
In many instances his books are a kind of imaginative survival manual for children about how to deal with the adult world around them. They offer the vision of an existence freed from parental controls, a world full of imagination and pleasure, where everything is possible. Escapist perhaps, but not sentimental. For Dahl always remembered that children were programmed to be survivors. Several times in conversation he described them as “uncivilized creatures”, engaged in a battle with a world of adults who were constantly telling them what to do. Once, in a radio interview, he even argued that most children unconsciously view their parents as “the enemy” and that there was “a very fine line between loving your parents deeply and resenting them”.
It was a perception he developed early and one that remained with him until he died. It gave him the confidence to claim, at the end of his life, that he spoke for young people, that he was their advocate in a world that largely ignored them. Indeed, by then he often claimed that he preferred the company of children to that of adults.
Roald himself was blessed with an extraordinarily strong and influential Norwegian mother, who single-handedly raised him and did much to shape his attitudes. He described her as “undoubtedly the primary influence on my own life”, singling out her “crystal clear intellect” and her “deep interest in almost everything under the sun” as two of the qualities he admired most in her. He acknowledged her as the source for his own interest in horticulture, cooking, wine, paintings, furniture and animals. She was the “materfamilias”, his constant reference point and guide.
“She devoted herself entirely to the children and the home. She had no social life of her own,” recalled her daughter Alfhild, adding that her mother “was very like Roald … a bit secret, a bit private”.
Sofie Magdalene was undoubtedly a remarkable woman: brave, stubborn, eccentric and determined, a survivor who was able to face almost any difficulty or disaster with equanimity. “Practical and fearless,”
was how her youngest daughter described her. “Dauntless”
was the adjective Roald used in Boy, while pointing out that she was always the only member of the family not to get seasick on the two-day ferry crossing from Newcastle to Norway. He admired her toughness, her lack of sentiment, her buccaneering spirit and her laissez-faire attitude toward her offspring. His description of her, a non-swimmer, in a small motorboat, guiding seven children, all without lifebelts, through mountainous waves in the open Norwegian seas was typical. “That was when my mother enjoyed herself most,” he wrote, revelling in behaviour most parents would consider reckless in the extreme. “There were times, I promise you, when the waves were so high that as we slid down into a trough the whole world disappeared from sight. Then up and up the boat would climb, standing almost vertically on its tail, until we reached the crest of the next wave, and then it was like being on the top of a foaming mountain.” Dahl’s description may be exaggerated, childish, but the implied metaphor is telling of his admiration for her as a parent. “It requires great skill to handle a small boat in seas like these,” he concluded, “but my mother knew exactly how to do it and we were never afraid. We loved every minute of it.”
