Roald Dahl (21 page)

When, later, Dahl bought a billiard table and had a regular game at Gipsy House, Wally was usually one of the players. Some visitors were unimpressed by what they saw as Dahl's attempt at “the Hemingway buddy thing,” but he really liked to spend time with workingmen, going to the dog races or playing darts. And where, as with Claud's cattle, he saw a chance to help, he was sometimes able, through the Marshes' Public Welfare Foundation, to provide it. Gratitude, then, as well as sympathy, surrounded the couple when they brought Theo home, and they quickly settled into a protective local routine. Tessa was enrolled for the following term at Gateway School, a private nursery in the village; Olivia at Godstowe, a traditional preparatory school for girls a short drive away in High Wycombe. Their father's share as a chauffeur in one of the Godstowe car pools was duly organized. Meanwhile, summer was coming. To cheer up Olivia and Tessa, who—particularly the latter—showed signs of having been traumatized by their brother's accident, the ever-energetic Dahl took them and other members of the family on various expeditions. A favorite was flying model gliders on a hillside near Amersham. He met another enthusiast there, a hydraulic engineer named Stanley Wade, whose hobby was to make miniature engines for toy airplanes.

Practical people like Wade were among those with whom Dahl
always got on best locally. Dahl hated the English obsession with class (although, with his usual contradictoriness, he also partly shared it: he was infatuated with titles and complained to friends that Asta's husband, Alex Anderson, with whom he didn't get on, was a mere vet
¹⁴
). Among the financially better-off of his neighbors, he preferred sophisticated business people like the Stewart-Libertys to the gentry who shot and hunted. Some of the latter reciprocated his distrust. In “up-county” Buckinghamshire circles, according to one former neighbor, there were people who wouldn't have him in the house—perhaps because the more hidebound they were, the more he went out of his way to offend them. In the early 1960s, it would have been hard to find a society less adventurous within similar reach of London. As the neighbor says, “Roald used to like to shock, and go to a smart dinner party and say something simply frightful.”

That spring and summer, making himself agreeable stood lower than usual on Dahl's list of priorities. His main concern was still with the valve in Theo's head. Dahl now knew that three main problems were involved.
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Two were related to the surgical operation itself. As the tube containing the valve was inserted into the cerebral ventricle, small particles of organic matter were liable to get into it. Even if it remained clear, there was danger that the end of the tube would rest too close to the choroid plexus, the structure of blood vessels which generates the cerebrospinal fluid. When this happened, pieces of the choroid plexus might, over time, break off into the tube. Either way, when solid matter entered the valve, it became blocked and infection developed.

The existing valve was a simple affair, a short length of silicone rubber tubing with a tiny rubber dome at each end, slit to let out the fluid. Solid matter couldn't easily escape through the opening, and if it did, another problem was exacerbated. This was that the dome was unreliable in its main job—preventing blood from returning into the valve, where it coagulated.

The Dahls had been referred by Theo's surgeon in New York
to a specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. He was a senior man, unacquainted with new treatment for hydrocephalus and unimpressed by its success rate. He passed Theo on to a junior colleague, a neurosurgical consultant then in his early forties named Kenneth Till.

All of Till's patients were children, most of them suffering from potentially fatal conditions. He was accustomed to meeting distraught parents. He would explain to them what he proposed. Here was the problem, this was what he would like to do about it, these were the possible outcomes. Did he have their permission? Often the answer would be no more than a desperate shrug.

Dahl was different—to Till, refreshingly, fascinatingly, and helpfully different. He had had plenty of firsthand experience of hospitals. He read up on everything for himself and was, in Till's estimation, “very knowledgeable.” There was also a psychological detachment. “He had the coolness—I think this perhaps
is
the word—the coolness to want to know the pros and cons, the whys and wherefores. He didn't have to hold himself in.”
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Whenever Dahl didn't understand what Till proposed, he would make him draw it for him. He studied the problem incessantly and came up with two ideas. One was simple but frightening: that since the draining system seemed to be harmful to Theo, perhaps they should try just taking it out and see what happened. The other was to devise a better valve. Then he remembered his aircraft-modeling acquaintance Stanley Wade and put the problem to him.

Within a month, Wade had designed a prototype. It consisted of a cylinder about seven millimeters in diameter and four centimeters long. Inside were two stainless-steel shutters, each consisting of a disk held within a cage, which allowed both fluid and small solid particles to pass around it in one direction but which closed tight if any pressure was exerted in the other. Wade also offered a solution to the problem of inserting the tube itself into the brain. He constructed a thin implement of hollow steel, with
a flexible extractor to remove any plug of organic material before the permanent tube was introduced through it.

Dahl, Wade, and Kenneth Till met regularly at Little Whitefield to discuss progress—and also to fly Wade's airplanes. Till remembers an occasion when one disappeared into a nearby field and Olivia brightly parroted her father: “It's in the bloody cabbages.”

Most medical breakthroughs are expensive: there are development costs, inventors hope to make their fortunes, everyone involved has to be paid. In this case, the men agreed that if the valve was successful, it should be priced at no more than would cover the manufacturing and administrative outlay. Experiments were carried out for free by engineering firms with which Wade had connections. The fact that no serious money was involved also saved time. Little more than a year after the family's return to England, a patent application had been lodged for the Wade-Dahl-Till Valve. In June 1962, Dahl wrote to Alfred Knopf, telling him that the first valve had been inserted into a child's head at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. So far, there had been no setbacks. He added buoyantly, “You should
see
the apple blossom in our orchard this morning.”
¹⁷

Within eighteen months, the valve was on the market at less than a third of the price of its earlier rival. It came to be exported all over the world, and Kenneth Till reckons that before it was superseded, it was used to treat 2,000 to 3,000 children. Some people still have it in their heads today.

As it happened, there was no need to use it on Theo, who unexpectedly but steadily began to get better. His recovery seemed to bless the whole family's life. At their new schools, the girls quickly made friends who were delighted to be asked home by them. The house with the gypsy caravan in the garden and the colored birds flying all around had fast earned a reputation as a children's paradise. Olivia and Tessa's tall, restless father was
a little intimidating, but was redeemed by the knowledge that he kept the glove compartment of his old Humber stuffed with packets of sweets, which he sometimes dished out as rewards for the best story anyone told on a journey. And Pat was beautiful and tolerant. Women who are now mothers themselves, friends at the time of Olivia and Tessa, describe sticking their crayon drawings over the not-yet-famous paintings on the walls and, around Christmas, helping themselves to slices from the big caramel-colored Norwegian cheese which stood in the kitchen all day.
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Pat's best-remembered phrase, in her husky Southern voice, was “Whatever you want, darling.”

By the autumn of 1962, Olivia was seven and a half, an imaginative, slightly fey girl who made up rhyming poems in the car and charmed visitors by telling them that she had an invisible imp on each shoulder, one good, one bad.
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Tessa was an imperious, articulate five-and-a-half—plump-faced and already with something of the look of her mother. Theo was just over two. Early in October, their parents went to a dinner party given in London by Alfred Knopf, who was en route to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The other guests were the popular novelist Storm Jameson and her husband and the publisher Frederick Warburg. Dahl had just delivered a revised draft of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. He had submitted the first version not long before Theo's accident, almost two years ago, but had inevitably been slow in revising it. Now he was in boisterous spirits and told Knopf that the family were all well.
²⁰

A few days afterward, the parents of children at Godstowe School received a note warning them of an outbreak of measles. In those days, few children in Britain were inoculated against the disease: catching it was regarded as a normal rite of passage, like losing your first teeth. Gamma globulin was hard to obtain, except for pregnant women. Pat tried the husband of Roald's older half sister Ellen, Sir Ashley Miles, who was a celebrated physician, the author of a standard textbook on immunology. For once, string pulling failed. Indeed, Miles's eminence was itself a
barrier to any help he might otherwise have given. He had been Director of the Department of Biological Standards and was well on his way to a senior position in the Royal Society. It wouldn't have been right for him to bend the rules—and besides, he said, it would be good for the girls to get their measles over with.
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The vulnerable Theo was another matter, and the serum was made available for him.

Soon Olivia became ill. She had always succumbed heavily to minor ailments, but when she slept for twenty-four hours at a stretch, Pat called the doctor. Roald tried to amuse the child by making little animals with colored pipe cleaners, but she “couldn't do them at all.”
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That evening, drowsiness became coma. The doctor returned, went white, and called an ambulance. Olivia died in the hospital the same night.

As Dahl's early story “Katina” shows, he had felt a protective tenderness for little girls long before he was a father, let alone a bereaved one. To anyone, the tragedy would have been shattering, and in his case it followed two years of intense anxiety and effort over Theo. It also echoed his sister Astri's death, at exactly the same age. Two months later, on one of the few occasions when he was ever guilty of understatement, he told Alfred Knopf, “Pat and I are finding it rather hard going still.”
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Neal herself puts it more strongly. She says that her husband all but went out of his mind.
²⁴

For a writer, one option not readily available at such a time is to take refuge in work. Sitting on his own in the shed, with a blank pad of lined yellow paper in front of him and a pile of neatly sharpened pencils, Dahl had no escape from whatever pushed itself into his mind. He gave himself to private mourning on a Victorian scale. Olivia was buried in the nearby hamlet of Little Missenden, in a large plot—the idea was that it would eventually accommodate her parents, too. Dahl went again and again to the grave, and with the help of a horticulturist friend, Valerie Finnis, built an alpine garden on it, taking an obsessive pride in the number of different species it contained—about 120,
he said, including some found for him by a collector in Munich which were exceptionally scarce and had never been grown before in England. He had also imported a tiny cineraria from Afghanistan.
²⁵
He thought about afterlife and, because he believed in always going to the top man for advice, made an appointment for himself and Pat to discuss the matter with his old headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury. Dahl didn't think that Olivia could be happy where there were no dogs, and Fisher angered him by saying that the Christian heaven was confined to humans. Whether or not this doctrinal severity stirred Dahl's later, mistaken attack on Fisher in
Boy
, Pat thought that their daughter's death was the end, for Roald, of any residual possibility of Christian belief.
²⁶

He had always found it almost impossible to talk to anyone about his feelings, and seemed now to cut himself off from friends, relatives, even from his children, in a way that made Tessa, at least, feel that she could never mean as much to him as Olivia had meant. To a theater director friend, Gerald Savory, who spent a lot of time with the couple immediately after Olivia's death, it was as if a shutter had come down.
²⁷
Some months later, Dahl asked Annabella to come and stay, and took her to the grave. But he didn't weep and said nothing of what he was going through.
²⁸
He was drinking more than usual and increased his dose of the barbiturates which, whether for back pain or just to calm himself, he regularly took.

When Tessa was fractious, so she says, her father sometimes handed out pills to her, too. Because of her later drug addiction, it is a serious claim. Her mother denies it, saying that she and Roald would never have given the children “grown-up pills,” but her youngest daughter, Lucy, confirms Tessa's story, while pointing out that there was and is nothing unusual about it. Lucy adds that her parents would also quite often give the children wine or whiskey if they were feeling unwell, “and it did make you feel better.”
²⁹
If this is right, some of Tessa's and Lucy's later difficulties may have had part of their origins in the tragedies
which hit the family at this time (in Lucy's case, before she was even born), and in their father's escape routes from them.