WHEN I met Roald Dahl seven years before his death, he assured me what made him want to be a writer was "a monumental bang on the head". This was his response when, down in his snug nest, Gipsy House in Buckinghamshire, I delved for literary sources.
Lanky, with a ruffled thatch, he looked like a not too amiable giant of slightly scarecrow pedigree. His voice was so barking schoolmasterish that, when he got worked up, you feared it might reach the shrill note of chalk skidding across a blackboard. But a moment later the tone would be low and almost contrite. It was a personality that incorporated characteristics of both his Big Friendly Giant and Peachy James's dreadful Aunt Spiker.
Dahl's way of introducing variety into talking to the press - an exercise he did not enjoy - was to resort to his more cherished pastime of making things up. He was off: 24 year old Pilot Dahl, flying over Libya in a Gloster Gladiator, hit the ground at 200 mph, bashing his head on the reflector sight and flattening his nose. Up until then, Pilot Dahl had produced only dogged schoolboy letters home but, in the best tradition of boys' adventure overnight miracles, his first letter home from the hospital was brilliant. He was a writer.
A squashed one, but a writer.
When he died in 1990, aged 74, Roald Dahl was one of the world's most widely published children's writers. He left an estate worth £3 million and handsome royalties that would later reach such a figure annually. Now the spotlight on Dahl is brighter than ever. Disney's James And The Giant Peach, directed by Henry Selick and already grossing £25 million in the United States, is released here this weekend.
Born in Wales of Norwegian parents, Dahl had an early career of almost preposterous glamour, which rapidly somersaulted into high tragedy, illness and periods of protracted family drama. After the plane crash (it really happened), and while working as an air attache (a spy, actually) in the British Embassy in Washington, he met Patricia Neal, the Oscar winning star of Hud who was then getting over a scandalous love affair with the married Gary Cooper. Dahl himself had been having an affair with another Hollywood star. Annabella, while her husband, Tyrone Power, was away playing in a more serious theatre" in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese.
In 1942, Dahl had written a 15 page boys' story called The Gremlins (introducing the word into common usage), which was such a runaway success in the United States that he became a frequent visitor to Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR at the White House. This was a spiffing position for spying, since his target was The Great American Ally. He was a dashing and, by all accounts, arrogant figure in Washington high society, with ambitions to be a serious writer.
The curious thing about his career is that he does not seem to have been capable of producing the work for which he became world famous until he had personally produced the required audience: children.
AS a children's writer, Dahl made a trademark of the subversion of the adult world by children. But his children's tales also carry a of misogyny and, if you don't count his tenderness for young children (but you do count his dismissal of adolescent, more than a suggestion of misanthropy.
Dahl gloried in describing detestable women. Aunt Sponge in James And The Giant Peach is not only enormously fat with piggy eyes and a sunken mouth; her flabby face "looked exactly as though it had been boiled". Aunt Spiker had "long, wet, narrow lips, and whenever she got angry or excited, little flecks of spit would come shooting out of her mouth". Dahl's rolling Giant Peach unceremoniously "irons out" these two creatures. But more tellingly, Dahl has already allowed James's blameless parents to be "gobbled up by an angry rhinoceros".
When, nearly 30 years later, he produced The Witches, alerting children to the prevalence of witches who are "always women . . . while a ghoul is always male . . . not half as dangerous as a Real Witch", there came a passing outcry from feminists. But it won the Whitbread Prize and became the New York Times's book of the year. And children - be mused, powerless prisoners of the adult world - love Dahl's books, with their promise of cackling triumph over tedious and tyrannical adults.
The simplest explanation for Dahl's misanthropy is that, like most creative people, he continued all his life to keep in touch with the child within him, but his was a mutinous, nose thumbing nipper. The obverse of his character reflected the tenderness and concern that schoolboys, however villainous with their peers, can exhibit towards defenceless children.
In Los Angeles, where she now lives, his youngest daughter, Lucy, recalled for me the elaborate world of make believe her father wove around their bedtime.
"He told us how dreams were mixed under a tree, and then every night, rain or shine, he would go out and, with a bamboo pipe, blow dreams in through the window. For years we believed the Giant lived under one of the trees, but we did not dare ask which one in case we were thought stupid."
It cannot be said that the series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl was to suffer made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action.
The first tragedy was when the Dahls' four month old son, Theo, was hit by a cab while being wheeled in his pram across Madison Avenue in New York. He suffered severe brain damage. The treatment in New York allowed Theo only a precarious hold on life, dependent on the use of an unreliable valve implant. Throughout this period, Dahl demonstrated his massive energy and organisational abilities, having the child moved to various hospitals in New York, and eventually to England, where, he enrolled a specialist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, Kenneth Till, and recruited a hydraulic engineer, Stanley Wade. Between them, they invented a valve that freed the child from the continual and terrifying relapses he was suffering.
This was the Wade Dahl Till valve, which is today credited with having saved the lives of hundreds of children.
Shortly after this came the calamitous death of his beloved eldest child, Olivia, in an outbreak of measles at her school. Dahl had wanted to have her inoculated, but in those days in Britain the serum was reserved largely for pregnant women. Dahl's usual approach to a crisis was to go to the top, so he approached Sir Ashley Miles, an eminent immunologist. But Sir Ashley refused to make an exception in his case, and Olivia subsequently contracted a rare form of the disease and died, aged eight.
The next major crisis brought out all Dahl's bossy, tyrannical skills, in which benevolent bullying often seemed to shade into downright callousness. It involved him press ganging the villagers of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire into being carers for his wife.
IN February 1965, on the set of John Ford's Seven Women, Patricia Neal suffered three strokes in rapid succession, and while surgery saved her life, it seemed impossible she would ever be able to speak again. She was pregnant with Lucy at the time.
The peculiarity of this condition, of which Dahl was acutely aware, is that the patient has a period of perhaps a year to re learn basic skills; after that, there is no hope of regaining the use of damaged faculties. Dahl brought Neal back to his home at Great Missenden and subjected her to a remorseless re education process that began at 10 a.m. and lasted all day, every day, for months. Dahl himself was less the therapist than the gaffer "a cross between a dog trainer and a traffic cop," Neal wrote in her autobiography, As I Am. But Neal made good progress.
By now, Dahl was at the height of his fame: his children's books James And The Giant Peach and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory were runaway successes. His collections of short stories were doing well, and he was employed by Hollywood to write scripts - notably the Bond film You Only Live Twice.
But he was given to impetuous political outbursts, one of which brought serious accusations of anti Semitism after he wrote a piece condemning the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. While he admitted later the piece was written "fast and emotionally", he said that, at the time, he was "angry that you cannot protest against such a thing without being. accused of anti Semitism". Then, in 1989, he attacked Salman Rushdie, describing the author, newly under the Ayatollah's fatwah, as a "dangerous opportunist". By the mid 1970s something like total disintegration hit family life at Great Missenden. Patricia Neal, then sufficiently recovered to make coffee commercials for TV, met Felicity Crosland, recently widowed, who was working for the David Ogilvy advertising agency. They became friends and Patricia brought the 35 year old woman to stay at Great Missenden. It was a disastrous move. She became a close family friend and, unknown to most of them for years, Dahl's mistress. When Patricia found out, she left her home and went back to America.
Thirty years of marriage, and more than 15 of solicitous, if overbearing, care were wiped out. By this time, both Lucy and their second daughter, Tessa, had become helplessly involved with drugs.
So what has become of this fractured family? Unhappy families, as Tolstoy tells us, are unhappy in their own way. But they often eventually work out solutions, also in their own way. Astonishingly, rancour and recriminations are not legacies Dahl has left, although he appears to have done his best to ignite them. In a final act of baffling insensitivity, he left all of his considerable fortune to Felicity, whom he had married in 1983, and nothing to his children. But, as if in defiance of Dahl's imaginative ravings, the stepmother turned out this time not to be wicked.
Felicity settled what was, by all accounts, a generous proportion of his royalties on his children and used part of her inheritance to fund the Roald Dahl Foundation, which makes grants to medical and literacy projects.
The person who might be expected to bear the most resentment, of course, is Patricia Neal - betrayed, in conventional terms, by both husband and best friend. In a telephone conversation, I remind her that, six years previously, she had found it too painful to return to England for her daughter Lucy's marriage. "I was, shall we say, indignant for a long, long time. But I am no longer indignant. I decided to just forget the whole thing."
Some years ago, she suggested a reconciliation to Roald and Felicity. "We got on beautifully in the last year of his life, and Felicity and I get along gorgeously now." She recalled how Dahl helped her through her illness. "He had me working from when I woke up in the morning until I went to bed at night. He really did do a wondrous job ... He was a very good man."
Dahl might have done many strange things. He wanted to pelt the adult world "with scrambled dregs and stinkburgs' eggs and just a pinch of grime". If he was often, in that world, a whirling dervish of irascibility and huffing caprice, he was his family insist, a great father to his children, and probably as good a companion as they could expect when it came to their turn to blunder into adulthood.