Love from Boy Read online

  34. Roald Dahl, letter to his mother, June 1931—RDMSC RD 13/1/6/43.

  35. Alfhild Hansen, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 7 August 1992.

  36. Nancy Deuchar, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 4 December 2007.

  37. Roald Dahl, “Things I Wish I’d Known when I was Eighteen,” unpublished article for the Sunday Express Magazine—RDMSC RD 1/2/7/1.

  38. Roald Dahl, letter to his mother, 4 February 1934—RDMSC RD 13/1/9/24.

  CHAPTER 3. 1935–1939

  “Another iced lager”

  39. Else Logsdail, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 3 January 1998.

  40. Roald Dahl, letter to his mother, 14 July 1936—RDMSC RD 14/2/2/8.

  41. Dahl later relocated the story to wartime Greece and it was eventually published as “Yesterday was Beautiful.”

  42. Alexandra Anderson, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 14 November 2007.

  43. Letter from Emma to Sofie Magdalene Dahl, 4 October 1938—RDMSC RD 14/3/4/1.

  44. Roald Dahl, Going Solo, London, Jonathan Cape, 1986, p.32.

  45. Roald Dahl, speech to boys at Repton School, 21 November 1975—RDMSC RD 6/1/1/25.

  46. Roald Dahl, Going Solo, p.87.

  CHAPTER 4. 1939–1940

  “Thoroughly good for the soul”

  47. Roald Dahl, The Minpins, London, Jonathan Cape, 1991, p.41.

  48. Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1961, p.95.

  49. Roald Dahl, Going Solo, p.96.

  CHAPTER 5. 1940–1942

  “Don’t worry”

  50. PRO Air 27, 669.

  51. Roald Dahl, Going Solo, p.105.

  52. Roald Dahl, letter to his mother, 20 November 1940—RDMSC RD 14/4/38.

  53. Roald Dahl, Going Solo, p.105.

  54. Ophelia Dahl, Memories of My Father (unpublished manuscript).

  55. Roald Dahl, letter to Barbara McDonald, 24 April 1953, now in the possession of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

  56. Roald Dahl, letter to Stephen Roxburgh, undated—Farrar, Straus and Giroux archive, New York.

  57. ‘Jonah’ Jones, C.O. of 84 Squadron, cited in T.H. Wisdom, Wings over Olympus, The Story of the Royal Air Force in Libya and Greece, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1942, p.169.

  58. Roald Dahl, “Katina” from Collected Stories, Everyman, pp.26–7.

  59. Roald Dahl, “Searching for Mr. Smith,” Browse and Darby Catalogue, 1983.

  CHAPTER 6. 1942–1943

  “Teeth like piano keys”

  60. Roald Dahl, The Gremlins, New York, Walt Disney/Random House, 1943.

  61. Jeremy Treglown, Roald Dahl, Harcourt, Brace, 1994, p.56.

  62. William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, Lyons Press, 1976, p.169.

  63. Isaiah Berlin, interview with Jeremy Treglown, in Jeremy Treglown, Roald Dahl, p.69.

  CHAPTER 7. 1943–1945

  “A good time was had by all”

  64. Bill Macdonald, The True Intrepid, Raincoast Books, p. 200.

  65. Roald Dahl, Visit to Hyde Park—RDMSC RD 15/5/94/5.

  66. Jonathan Cuneo, conversation with Donald Sturrock, 20 March 2007.

  EPILOGUE

  “I won’t write often”

  67. Ernest Cuneo Papers Box 107, CIA file—Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park. Cited in Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception—British Covert Operations in the US 1939–44, Brassey’s, 1998.

  68. Roald Dahl, Draft Author Biography for Reynall and Hitchcock, 4 July 1945—RDMSC RD 1/1/222.

  69. Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 3, No. 39, 13 September 1947—WLC Box 22.

  70. Patricia Neal, interview with Stephen Michael Shearer, June 2005. Cited in Shearer, Patricia Neal, An Unquiet Life, Louisville, University Press of Kentucky, 2006, p.261.

  71. Felicity and Roald Dahl, Memories with Food at Gipsy House, Viking, 1991, reprinted as The Roald Dahl Cookbook, Penguin, 1996, p.66.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Donald Sturrock is a British documentarian and the artistic director of the Roald Dahl Foundation, where he has created orchestral works and operas for children based on Dahl’s stories. He is the author of Storyteller, the authorized biography of Dahl. Sturrock lives in London.

  * Brean House School was another preparatory school in Weston-super-Mare.

  * The grave is that of Roald’s father Harald and elder sister Astri in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, Radyr. Constructed out of pink granite and decorated with an elaborate Celtic cross, it is by far the largest monument in the cemetery.

  * The Children’s Newspaper in 1919 with the aim of keeping young children abreast with the latest in world news and science. At its peak it sold half a million copies each week. Bubbles was a similar, but less practical, weekly journal for kids.

  * Adventurous friend of the Dahl family who hunted, traveled, and lived near Radyr.

  * This letter, composed by both Dahl and Douglas Highton in four languages, shows Highton attempting to write “Love from Roald” in Greek script and a less successful attempt by Roald to write “I am going out with Highton for dinner” in Norwegian. Sofie Magdalene must have been amused when Highton asked her in French whether she understood their game.

  * Probably East of the Sun and West of the Moon, an old Norse fairy tale.

  * Ashley Miles was a young pathologist, later a distinguished immunologist, who got engaged to Roald’s half-sister Ellen in 1929. They married the following year.

  * Captain Lancaster was the model for Captain Hardcastle in Boy.

  * These were the tailcoats Roald would have to wear at his next school, Repton.

  * The year was actually 1930.

  * Jenkyns was actually known as “Binks,” not “Biggs.” Dahl gets this right in future letters.

  * Dahl’s favorite brand of antiseptic toothpaste was characterized by its pink color and medicinal taste.

  * Dahl would later re-create the Grubber in his children’s story The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me (1985).

  * An American cereal, popular in the UK from 1903 until it ceased production in 2013. It was promoted using a popular cartoon figure called Sunny Jim.

  * A fire protection company, founded in Berlin in 1902. They quickly became the worldwide brand-leader in fire extinguishers, developing the foam extinguisher in 1926.

  * Norwegian cloudberries.

  * An old-fashioned remedy for constipation.

  * These were remedies for colds and calcium deficiency. Even as a boy, Roald was obsessed with proprietary medicines.

  * The new headmaster was John Christie, who would go on to beat Michael Arnold savagely before Arnold was expelled.

  * Roald had got a court summons for speeding or dangerous driving on his motorcycle.

  * King George V and his wife Queen Mary of Teck.

  * There were about twenty Tanganyikan shillings to the British pound.

  * Sofie Magdalene had just had all her teeth extracted.

  * Godown: in India and East Asia, a warehouse, especially one at a dockside.

  * Norwegian fishing village which the Dahl family often visited on holiday.

  * Gian Galeazzo Ciano was Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law. Lord Halifax was British Foreign Secretary from 1938–1940. In 1940, he would become British Ambassador to the USA in Washington. Roald would work for him there between 1942 and 1944.

  * Gunga Din was the long-suffering Indian water-bearer, “a better man than I am,” immortalized in a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Roald, like many of his had to memorize it at school.

  * The Navy, Army, and Air Force Institute was an organization created to run recreational establishments for servicemen. It was essentially a glorified bar.


  * John Logsdail, also in the RAF. He would marry Roald’s sister Else later that year.

  * In pod: contemporary slang for being pregnant.

  * Bunding or bund walls were flood defenses.

  * Roald’s grandparents, Bestemama and Bestepapa Karl Laurits and Ellen Hesselberg’s Oslo apartment was in Josefinegate.

  * “Mug” was the gossip columnist of the Nairobi Sunday Post.

  * Mrs. Harris was one of Sofie Magdalene’s dogs.

  * Primo Carnera was an Italian boxer and movie star. Ten years older than Roald, he shared Roald’s rangy build and stature.

  * Frank Waldrop was managing editor, and later editor-in-chief, of The Washington Times-Herald.

  * Hull (1871–1955) was an American politician. The longest serving Secretary of State, he held the post for eleven years under Roosevelt between 1933 and 1944.

  * Charles Marsh, Roald’s friend and mentor.

  * President Roosevelt died on April 12th 1945, less than a month before the war in Europe ended.

  * Roald’s nephew, Nicholas Logsdail.

  * Wylie McKissock (1906–94) was a pioneering British neurosurgeon. Theo became his patient when the Dahls returned to England.

  * Sheena Burt was at the time the family nanny. Angela Kirwan was helping her.

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