Love from Boy Read online

  This is Texas ranch country round here, and there are a lot of cowboys in the hospital who have piles from sitting all their lives on a horse. I thought it was only radiators, but it seems as though it’s horses as well . . .

  Haven’t had any letters from you since I’ve been here, but I expect my secretary is being slow about forwarding them from Washington. By the way, my boss was knighted in the New Year’s honours—Sir William Stephenson. He works in New York.

  The war news sounds marvellous. Hope it ends soon.

  Lots of love to all

  Roald

  March 26th 1945

  Scott and White Clinic Temple

  Texas

  Dear Mama

  At last they’ve found the trouble and I think I’m cured once and for all. I’ve been down here in bed now about 18 days, and have had quite a time. The business with the weights on the legs didn’t help much, so as a last resort they took the Lipiodol out of my spine—and that did the trick.

  It was quite a job doing it. It had to be done in the X-ray room under the fluoroscope, so they can watch what they were doing. The first time they tried under local anaesthetic they failed to get the needle in—they had to use very thick ones, because the oil is thick. Three doctors tried for 1½ hours but without success, and I personally did not enjoy it at all. Then the day before yesterday they took me up again, and gave me Pentathol—an intravenous anaesthetic, and kept me under two hours while they did the job.

  Anyway they got it all out, and then I had a fairly rough night of it. My breathing when I came back to my room was apparently six to the minute. But I was given lots of glucose intravenously and also penicillin shots all through the night. The next morning—yesterday, I more or less came to and tested my legs and back and found everything cured—so in a day or two I’ll be getting up and probably will be back in Washington quite fit and well in about 10 days. It was the first time that they had removed the Lipiodol in this hospital. They said that it’s very rare for people to get such a reaction from having it in the spine as I had.

  Anyway now I feel fine, and I’ve had a very pleasant time reading while I’ve been here. Reading Dickens, Shakespeare, the Brontes and a lot of that old stuff which I’d never read before . . .

  The war news keeps sounding marvellous, but the war keeps going on. I suppose at some time or other it will just have to stop because there won’t be any more of Germany to invade.

  It takes a bit of time for me to get your letters down here, so I haven’t had one recently. I’ll probably send you a telegram tomorrow because this will probably take a bit of time to reach you.

  I’m sending my book up to New York tomorrow, it is all ready, and The Gremlins is now 90 pages—a small book in itself.

  Lots of love to all

  Roald

  April 18th 1945

  Georgetown University Hospital

  Washington

  Dear Mama

  Today I leave this place, so you can see it has been very quick. I came in in the early hours of Saturday morning and today is Wednesday.

  Well, how it happened. I had dinner Friday night with Drew Pearson and his wife (he’s a famous newspaper writer) and we had for supper a piece of one of his own cows, which was called Cordell Hull.* I had two helpings also a dessert, a sort of strawberry tart so that when I got a tummy ache once afterwards I just thought that I had made a pig of myself, especially as the pain was high up in the solar plexus. Well, I played one game of backgammon with Mrs. Pearson then the tummy ache was pretty uncomfortable so I went home. I went to bed and was sick and lost Cordell Hull down the lavatory, then I was sick again and again and many times more all through the night and when bismuth didn’t make it any better I thought oh hell this is some tummy ache and I said this may be an appendix so I will be careful and not take any Epsom salts, but it doesn’t seem like an appendix because the pain is high up in the solar plexus.

  Well at 4 AM I hadn’t slept and it was worse, really quite bad, so I got up and dressed and got into my car and drove round the corner to this huge hospital—it is just around the corner—and I staggered into the main entrance and there was a nun. (A nun has just sharpened my pencil for me.) There was a nun with a large white hat like a marquee tent and I said I have a tummy ache such a terrible tummy ache and she called the nurse and I went to the emergency room and a young intern doctor came along very sleepy and took a blood count and said, ‘Good God,’ because it was very high, 18,000 or 20,000 or something like that, and the pulse was 120. So they wheeled me up to a ward on a stretcher, to a four bed ward where there was one other man, and I went to bed with ice on my stomach. Soon a surgeon came along and said, ‘I’m going to operate,’ and I said, ‘the quicker the better’, so they operated. In the afternoon I felt all right and they told me that they just got it in time and it was a very inflamed thing, which was going to burst . . .

  Today is Wednesday, and I’m going out. I’m going to Charles’s Washington house where there are servants and things and I can take it easy for a bit.* But it is all very quick, quick partly because I don’t want to stay here. There are two other old men in the room, one a hernia, and the other an abscess and they fart all day and have enemas and talk bull shit and then they fart some more quite openly and unashamedly just as though it was like saying good morning. It’s a very good hospital, but I do prefer the Scott and White. There’s no comparison. No comparison at all.

  Sad news about Roosevelt, but good news about the war.*

  Lots of love to all

  Roald

  May 21st 1945

  Palm Springs

  Dear Mama

  I just sent you a telegram saying I’m back in Washington after fine holiday, which is all quite true. I stayed on for a few days with Howard and Slim Hawks in Palm Springs and got fine and brown and fit and then got the US army air corps to fly me into Los Angeles. There I went and stayed in a fine house owned by Mike Romanoff, the bogus Russian prince who has the largest and smartest restaurant in Hollywood. It was all very comfortable with Mike’s house rigged up just as he thought a Russian prince’s house should be rigged up, and every kind of drink behind the bar and every kind of food in the fridge and every kind of everything everywhere else. Also his famous bulldog called Confucius who is listed in the Los Angeles telephone directory, with whom Mike holds long and serious conversations in his bedroom every morning.

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Mike, emerging from his bedroom the first day, ‘of the terribly rude things that Confucius has just said to me.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘He said I was a shitty old Russian prince.’ And Mike went back to his room mumbling to himself. But it was fine staying there.

  Well, that’s sad news about Bestemama, but somehow I almost guessed it. I was certain that she was not alive. Anyway I expect that it made it a lot easier for the Tantes to live through the occupation . . .

  I’ll try to get lipsticks stockings etc. for Asta and the others.

  Lots of love to all

  Roald

  July 7th 1945

  Box 55 Terminal A, Toronto

  Dear Mama

  Seeing Niagara Falls made me want to pee. This job will take 2–3 months after which hope to make trip home.

  Love to all

  Roald

  August 1st 1945

  Box 55 Terminal A, Toronto

  Dear Mama

  Have a letter from you and two from Asta. One is very long and interesting, the other telling me that there is a vacancy as Assistant Air Attaché in Oslo for someone with a Permanent Commission. Well, I couldn’t face that, being in uniform all my life, so I won’t apply—not that I could get away right now anyway. This job is more important.

  No news here as usual. Lovely weather. I’m browner than I’ve ever been before, really nut brown, and the back slowly
but surely getting better . . .

  Lots of love to all—and Nicholas*

  Roald

  December 20th 1945

  BSC Room 3553

  630 5th Avenue

  NY

  Dear Mama

  Christmas is coming and the weather is getting cold. Indeed, it is as cold as buggery in New York right now, many degrees below freezing and yesterday we had 8 inches of snow. But I still managed to drive around in my fine car.

  Now the news is that I’m coming home again—this time for good. My work finishes here at the end of the year, then I’m going off for two or three weeks in January to try and rewrite the Gremlins and get that finished. I’ll be sailing home I should say about the end of January.

  Now as this is positively the last chance you have of my bringing stuff over, you had all better make out an enormous list of everything that you want. One can buy almost anything and I’ll be able to bring it with me in trunks or packing cases, although there may be some duty. And for any large items you can pay me at home. Better make it a full list, including clothes with complete details as to size (does John or Leslie for example want a jacket or flannel trousers, does anyone want shoes). You want things like mixmasters. Does anyone want saucepans etc. etc.?

  So let’s have a full list, with nothing left out . . . I’ve got plenty of money to buy the stuff.

  Otherwise no news, I think.

  Lots of love to all

  Roald

  EPILOGUE

  —

  “I won’t write often”

  1946–1965

  Roald returned from the USA early in 1946, aged twenty-nine. He moved in with his mother and his youngest sister, Asta, at Grange Farm, a remote homestead near Great Missenden. It was later owned by the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Then, when Asta married and Sofie Magdalene’s arthritis deteriorated, mother and son together moved to Wistaria Cottage, a large house on the High Street of nearby Old Amersham.

  There, Roald bred racing greyhounds, poached pheasants in the local woods, and listened obsessively to classical music. In 1947 a press release described his main hobby as “listening for hours to his favourite symphonies, played on an elaborate built-in recording machine.”69 The following year he completed his first novel Some Time Never, a fantastical Swiftian satire depicting the destruction of the human race following a nuclear holocaust. Its main human protagonist was a thinly disguised portrait of the book’s author: a demobbed pilot turned music critic. The other main characters were gremlins. It was not well reviewed. Roald’s second novel, Fifty Thousand Frogskins, completed in 1951, was a dystopian vision of post-war rural Britain, set against a backdrop of illegal greyhound racing and populated with a cast of small-time crooks and chancers. When his publishers refused to publish the book, Roald lost his nerve. He took to his heels, flying to New York, where his friend Charles Marsh secured him a job working for his charity, the Public Welfare Foundation.

  So, after a five-year absence, Roald found himself once again regularly writing to his mother. But the tone of his letters had changed. His correspondence was calmer and more matter-of-fact. In New York, he reinvented himself as a writer of grand guignol short stories with strange twisted plots. The breathless energy that had once animated his letters home now found its natural outlet in his fiction. Alfred Hitchcock started to dramatize them for television and soon the American press had dubbed Roald, the Master of the Macabre. In his letters home he enthusiastically reported back to his mother how well his books were now selling and how he had begun to make proper money from them, while also gossiping about mutual friends, enquiring about the health of his greyhounds, offering advice on the purchase of stocks and shares, and lamenting the extortionate cost of dog food.

  He remained reticent about anything too personal. He barely mentioned his engagement to the Hungarian divorcee, Suzanne Horvath, or the subsequent break-up of that relationship. Nor did he say much about the romance with his future wife, the actress Patricia Neal, which began when he went to see rehearsals of a revival of his friend Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. His announcement of their marriage, for example, was characteristically bluff.

  May 23rd 1953

  from 9 E 62nd St

  Dear Mama

  Thanks for the letter. I’ll get the stockings for you and the mineral water gadgets, although I may give them to someone else to take as we are going to Italy and France first.

  Here’s a couple of pictures of Pat I had in my drawer. I’ll get hold of some better ones soon and let you have. We think it might be a good idea if we got married before we leave, so we’ll probably do that. She insists on a church, so if I can find one small enough and far enough away from the reporters etc., it’ll be okay with me. Except for Charles and Claudia [Marsh] (who are very keen on this thing) I don’t expect we’ll have more than four or five people. Pat’s mother and sister may come up from Tennessee, but it’s a long way. Don’t know any date, but as we’re flying to Rome on 3 July it’ll probably be a day or so before.

  Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal on honeymoon in Rome, 1953. “I hope she will like the Dahl family, which is a bit out of the ordinary,” Sofie Magdalene wrote to Claudia Marsh. “I am sure Roald wants a family,” she added, “as he is unusually fond of and good with children, but that is their business and not mine.”

  . . . Charles has insisted on donating a huge yellow sapphire ring, about 20 carats, which is very decent of him.

  Give my love to Tante Astrid and Ellen if they are there.

  Love

  Roald

  Pat, Olivia, Roald, and Tessa on holiday in Norway, 1958. There he started to work on his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach.

  Roald and Pat got married in New York in the summer of 1953. They honeymooned in Europe, eventually arriving in England where they stayed with Sofie Magdalene in Wistaria Cottage for several weeks, before returning to America in the autumn. The following year, Roald decided to come back to England and bought a cottage near his mother, which he later renamed Gipsy House. Sofie Magdalene helped fund its purchase. It would become her son’s home for the rest of his life.

  Roald’s first child Olivia was born in 1955 and that year he embarked on a peripatetic existence between Buckinghamshire and the USA. Normally the family spent spring and summer in Great Missenden, returning to New York in the autumn, as Pat was often working there. Their second daughter Tessa was born in 1957 and a son Theo in 1960. Becoming a parent acted as a catalyst on Roald’s desire to write for young people and in 1959 his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach, was published in the USA.

  While in America, Roald was always in regular correspondence with his mother, who, in his absence, continued to supervise the maintenance of the Gipsy House garden, as well as any domestic repairs and renovations that were needed. Even after a severe fall, which resulted in her being confined to a wheelchair and moving in with her daughter Else’s family, Sofie Magdalene was always on hand to advise and offer guidance.

  In December 1960 disaster struck. The pram carrying Roald’s four-month-old son was hit by a New York cab and crushed against the side of a bus. Theo suffered terrible head injuries and almost died. For three years Roald and Pat were in a constant state of anxiety, because the tube that drained excess fluid from their son’s cranial cavity kept blocking. When that happened his head would swell dramatically, leading to blindness, fitting, and potential brain damage. These blockages happened seven times over the first nine months after the accident and each of these alarming episodes resulted in major surgery under a general anesthetic.

  Roald decided he would devise a more efficient valve that did not block so often, and so he approached his son’s neurosurgeon, Kenneth Till, and a model airplane engineer called Stanley Wade to help him. The resulting Dahl-Wade-Till valve transformed that aspect of pediatric head injuries. It was used on
more than 3,000 children around the world, before it was eventually superseded. Sofie Magdalene too played her part in the early stages of its development.

  February 16th 1961

  New York

  Dear Mama

  Theo’s tube blocked up again and we took him to the hospital at eight o’clock this morning. His sight was failing, but hadn’t quite gone.

  They’re just finished operating, and the valve at the end of the tube in his heart was faulty and had allowed blood to get in—therefore to block it. They have now put in a new tube, but this time into the pleura, the lung, not the heart.

  Pat and I going out again soon. Very distressing, the whole thing.

  Love

  Roald

  Sofie Magdalene in the conservatory of her annex at Roald’s sister, Else’s house near Great Missenden, 1961. In the foreground is Roald’s son Theo, who was still recovering from the injuries he had received the previous year when a rogue New York taxi crushed him against the side of a bus.

  February 18th

  New York

  Dear Mama

  Saw Theo at lunchtime today, and Pat, who finished work at 4 PM, has just phoned saying that she is up there now at the hospital. (It’s 5:30 PM.) He’s made a good recovery from this very uncomfortable operation, and the tube appears to be draining well. His sight is coming back slowly, and he can see a person at about 8 feet. He is beginning to take milk and to keep it down, and is moderately cheerful. In fact, altogether as good as can be expected.

  I don’t think much of the tubes that they use here for this work, particularly the valve at the lower end, which is meant to open up between 40 mm and 80 mm water column pressure. This valve is literally nothing but a slit in the plastic tube. The thing is made by a small lab in Pasadena, California, and is called the Pudenz-Heyer shunt valve. Do they have anything better in England, something less likely to block and clog? If Ellen gets a chance, could she please ask Wylie?* I don’t understand how that Kyle chap has gone along with so little trouble. Everyone here has blockages all the time. What valve do the English put into a) the heart, and most important, (b) the pleura? Does Wylie have a lot of blockages?