From Willy Wonka to Matilda: The Story of One of the Greatest Storytellers For Children of the 20th Century—Roald Dahl

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for The Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Roald Dahl was a British author of popular children’s books, which have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He’s been called one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century. Hollywood has made five of his children’s books into movies: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (twice), Matilda, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: My name is Steve Gardam, and I’m a Roald Dahl fan, and I’ve been a Roald Dahl fan for a long time. I’m now my calties, but I’m also the director of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, which is an independent charity, a wonderful little museum that you can visit in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire in the UK, which is just outside of London. Although it feels like a world away, because it’s beautiful countryside, and Great Missenden is the village where Roald Dahl moved to in 1954, and it’s where he lived and

00:01:20
Speaker 3: worked and produced most of the stories that people will know and love.

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Speaker 2: The Roald Dahl Museum holds Roald Dahl’s personal at-working archive, so we have an amazing insight into the mind of a great creative force. What we try and do at the museum is try and explore how his lived experience fueled his creativity. He’s one of the most celebrated Your resouthors of all time. He produced officially 20 titles for children, and these stories have been adapted into musicals, films, TV shows, and more. Besides, his most iconic works really started with James and the Giant Peach, his first proper book for children in 1961, and he moved on to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Enormous Crocodile, Amazing Purple Patch, in the 1980s, with The BFG, George’s Marvellous Medicine, The Witches, and perhaps most famously, Matilda, which I believe sold some 17 million-plus copies around the world. Roald Dahl was entirely Norwegian by parentage, but he grew up in Wales, born in September 1916, and in large homes with many children, because his father had two children from his first marriage, and then four children with Dahl’s mother, Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, of which Roald was the only boy, hence the title of his first volume of autobiography, Boy: Tales from Childhood. He was also known as the apple of his mother’s eye, and this probably was reinforced by, tragically, the loss of one of his sisters when he was only four, and his father, Harald, died a few months later. The family led and says of a broken heart.

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Speaker 4: The secret of my mother was minding her own business and always being there. If she’s wanted, then you’ll gravitate towards her. She is there like a great big rock.

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Speaker 2: And this probably characterizes some of Dahl’s lifelong search for father figures, some of his most famous characters, particularly Willy Wonka. There’s always a trace, if you understand his life story, to some of his most famous creations.

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Speaker 3: When he was a

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Speaker 2: young boy, he didn’t like school, but he did love sweets or candy.

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Speaker 3: Here’s an excerpt from Roald Dahl’s autobiography.

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Speaker 5: When I was seven, my mother decided I should go to a proper boys’ school. It was called Llandaff Cathedral School, and it stood right under the shadow of the cathedral.

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Speaker 6: The sweet shop at Llandaff was the very centre of our lives.

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Speaker 5: To us, it was what a bar is to a drunk, or a church to a bishop. Without it, there would have been

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Speaker 6: little live for. But it had one terrible drawback: this sweet shop. The woman who owned it—it was a horror.

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Speaker 5: She never welcomed us when we went in, and the only time she spoke was when she said things like:

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Speaker 6: “I’m watching you, so keep your thieving fingers off them chocolates!”

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Speaker 2: So, one day, they decided to get back at her. Dahl described this as his moment of brilliance and glory.

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Speaker 5: My four friends and I had come across a loose floorboard at the back of the classroom one day.

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Speaker 6: We lifted up and found a dead mouse. It was an exciting discovery. “Old,” all right, Tick, I said, “Why don’t

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Speaker 5: we slip it into one of Mrs. Pratchett’s jars of sweets? Then when she puts her dirty hand in to grab a handful, she’ll grab a stinky dead mouse.”

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Speaker 4: Instead, when you’re old enough to do, and experienced enough to be a competent writer, by then you’ve become pompous, an adult, grown up, and you’ve lost all your jokiness. And so, unless you are a kind of undeveloped adult, and you still have an enormous amount of childishness in you, and you giggle at funny stories and jokes and things, I don’t think you can do it.

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Speaker 5: The five of us left school and headed for the sweet shop. We were tremendously jazzed up. We felt like a gang of desperados setting out to rob a train. We were the victors now, and Mrs. Pratchett was the victim. She stood behind the counter, and her small, malignant pig eyes

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Speaker 6: watched us suspiciously.

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Speaker 5: When I saw Mrs. Pratchett turn her head away for a couple of seconds, I lifted the heavy glass lid of the gobstoppers jar

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Speaker 6: and dropped the mouse in.

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Speaker 3: Here’s Roald Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock.

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Speaker 7: Well, I think Roald thought they got away with it, but in fact, of course, he hadn’t.

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Speaker 4: We all went back to our classrooms, and then a message came in asking for the five of us to report immediately to the headmaster’s study. Off we went, trembling. When we got there, the headmaster was standing up in the middle of the room with a long, thin cane in his hands. He ticked us off, told us that we were going to be punished, and told us also to line up against the side of the study. I was last in the line. He told Thwaites, I think he was first, to bend over, and he gave him four colossal cracks, and he went hopping out of the room, clutching his buttocks and whimpering. Then the next one got the same treatment, and then the next, and the next.

00:07:19
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Steve Gardam, the Roald Dahl Museum director. When we come back, more of Roald Dahl’s story here on Our American Stories. Here in Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories and America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Roald Dahl. Let’s pick up with Dahl himself, completing the story of his punishment for the prank he played on that mean candy store.

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Speaker 4: On her, on the second or third—well, I’m not sure what it was. We suddenly got the shock of our lives, because from the far corner of the room came Mrs. Pratchett’s voice saying, “That’s it! Lay into him, Headmaster! Give it to him and all that!” And we looked around, and there was this farther old hag sitting in an armchair watching, and when I came up, I remember her yelling, “That’s the nastiest of the lot! You lay into him, Headmaster, and let him off!” And I limped out, clutching my buttocks and whimpering, and off we went.

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Speaker 2: He went on to another famous Welsh private school called Repton, which had an extreme system of what was known as fagging, where younger boys were essentially servants or even slaves to the older boys. An abuse and misuse of power that this created was rife. Nevertheless, memories from these times still stayed with him. Even the trick played on Mrs. Pratchett in his childhood days in Llandaff, Wales, became the inspiration for a similar prank played on Miss Trunchbull in Matilda.

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Speaker 6: “It’s like a war!” Matilda said. “You’re darn right! It’s like a war!” Lavender cried. “And the casualties are terrific!”

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Speaker 5: “We are the crusaders, the gallant army, fighting for our lives with hardly any weapons at all.”

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Speaker 8: “And the Trunchbull, it’s the Prince of Darkness, the Foul Serpent, the Fiery Dragon, with all the weapons at her command.”

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Speaker 4: I’ve never liked authority. I’ve never got on very well in institutions. But it’s wrong, of course, to be like that, because you couldn’t run schools and institutions like that. If everyone was like that, there shouldn’t be too many rebels around. There shouldn’t be what you are on. Well, yes, but you’ll get much mellower as you get older, you know. I’m still a rebel in some respects, yes, very much so. I don’t like conformists. People who conform.

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Speaker 2: Matilda is one of the four books by Dahl ranked among the School Library Journal’s Top 100 All-Time Children’s Books.

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Speaker 3: This is more than any other writer on the list.

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Speaker 2: Matilda has been made it for a movie twice, first in 1996, directed by and starring Danny DeVito and Mara Wilson as Matilda, and in the UK and around the world. The stage musical has been a success in London’s West End since 2010, and it became a movie in 2022. One of the things that Dahl’s school days gave to him was a near lifelong habit of letter writing, particularly to his mother and to his sisters. So he was sent away to boarding school in England, away from Wales, following the incident of the sweet shop, and that started a habit of writing a letter once a week. He was terribly homesick. He was a young boy; he was probably only nine, and he said he used to sleep facing across the Bristol Channel to Wales because he was so homesick. Here’s Roald reading from James and the Giant Peach, first published in 1961.

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Speaker 4: Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had a happy life. He lived peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house beside the sea. There were always plenty of other children for him to play with, and there was a sandy beach for him to run about on and the ocean to paddle in. It was the perfect life for a small boy. Then one day James’s mother and father went to London to do some shop, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up in full daylight, mind you, and on the crowded street, by an enormous, angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo. Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience for two such gentle parents. But, in the long run, it was far nastier for James than it was for them. Their troubles were all over in a jiffy. They were dead and gone in 35 seconds flat. Poor James, on the other hand, was still very much alive, and all at once he found himself alone and frightened in a vast, unfriendly world.

00:12:43
Speaker 3: Here’s Roald Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock.

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Speaker 7: Well, I think Roald thought they got away with it, but in fact, of course, he hadn’t.

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Speaker 7: I think you can sense, even in those very early schoolboy letters, the storyteller kind of beginning to enjoy his craft. He often tells her stories that have been told to him at school, and then he starts to invent, and he starts to use language in a funny way. And I mean, some of them are really pretty remarkable for a young child. So, although I think he had no idea that that’s what he was doing, I think in some ways he was cutting his teeth as a storyteller.

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Speaker 4: Were you bright at school? Not particularly. No. No, I was better at games than at work. There’s certainly no sign of, in the ability to write or do anything else. No, I was nothing at school. I wasn’t even a house prefect. I used to read avidly. In my last school at Repton, all the laboratories were outside in the outhouse, where there was no heating at all. And in the winter, of course, it was freezing in there, and the prefects, they used to send us out before they went to the laboratory themselves. They would send us out to warm the seat for them. So you took your trousers down and sat on the seat until the prefect was ready to come out there. And that’s when I, of course, I took a Dickens out, and I’d read most of most of Dickens, warming the seats of the laboratories for the prefects.

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Speaker 2: After school, Dahl, having been advised that he probably wouldn’t get into Oxbridge with his academic record, he took a job with Shell Oil. His avowed intention was to be posted somewhere exotic.

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Speaker 4: If you think at the time, which was 1933 or ’34, there were virtually no airplanes flying you anywhere. There weren’t any, no commercial airline. It’s impossible for young people today to understand the excitement of getting on a boat and traveling solidly for three or four weeks and finishing up in Africa among the coconut parts.

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Speaker 2: Eventually, he was sent to East Africa: Tanganyika, as it was known at the time (Tanzania today). This becomes part of the stories he tells. Roald’s celebrated illustrator, Quentin Blake, who Roald once described as the finest illustrator of children’s books anywhere in the world today.

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Speaker 9: The first book I did was The Enormous Crocodile. It says he had hundreds of teeth, and of course, what it is especially for: eating children.

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Speaker 5: Soon, he thought, “One of them is going to sit on my head, and I’ll give a jerk and a snap, and after that…”

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Speaker 8: “It will be, yum, yum, yum!”

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Speaker 5: At that moment, there was a flash of brown. It was Muggle-Wump the monkey.

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Speaker 10: “Run!”

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Speaker 6: Muggle-Wump shouted to the children,

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Speaker 5: “All of you, run, run, run!”

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Speaker 6: “There’s not a see-saw! It’s the Enormous Crocodile, and he wants to eat you up!”

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Speaker 4: I’m quite prepared to have them killed in the most grizzly, pastful way, like little boys pulled out of the windows and eaten by giants and bone crunched up and everything, or a child falling into a chocolate-making machine and coming out as fudge. That’s fine, as long as there is a whopping great laugh. At the same time, he…

00:16:13
Speaker 2: He was in Tanganyika, Tanzania, at the time that the Second World War broke out, and he decided to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. So he drove into Kenya from Tanzania, and then was signed up as a pilot officer in training, and he graduated third in his particular class, only behind two men who previously had civilian flying experience, so he was something of a talent in this area. However, on his first qualified flight from Egypt into the Libyan desert to try and meet up with 80 Squadron, something went very, very wrong. The location of the air base that he was aiming for was not where it was supposed to be.

00:16:54
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Steve Gardam, the Roald Dahl Museum director in Buckinghamshire, England. You’ve also been hearing from Roald Dahl himself and from other authorities on the subject of Roald Dahl. And my goodness, what a life story! A tough life early on in regard to just not really connecting in school, but his reaction to that, in the end, his creativity may have indeed stemmed from that. He had to find his own life within that life. And I love what he said about never liking authority, that you don’t want too many rebels because you need that authority. Well, life can’t… well, life can’t be life. But he was a rebel, didn’t fit in, and in the end unleashed. His early life may indeed have unleashed his lifelong curiosity and creativity. When we come back, more of Roald Dahl’s story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Roald Dahl. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:16
Speaker 2: So he and another pilot who were flying in formation had to make a terrible choice, and the choice was to set down in raw desert.

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Speaker 3: The other pilot managed it.

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Speaker 2: Dahl hit a rock and smashed his skull into the control panel of his plane, driving his nose back into his face. He blacked out. The other pilot helped pulling from the wreckage, and they were found. Dahl’s injuries were severe. Here again is Roald Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock.

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Speaker 7: The crash clearly was incredibly important because it became the subject of his first piece of published work. But I think it also may well have changed his personality. He thought, and often said, that he felt something had changed in him as a result of this crash. They were the head injuries that made him into a writer.

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Speaker 4: It’s my cozy little theory that because I was a fairly square young chap, and that I started writing soon after that, that maybe the head helped.

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Speaker 2: He convalesced in Egypt, in Alexandria, and he recovered enough to be able to join up with 80 Squadron after a really long and uncomfortable flight for such a tall man. Dahl was nearly six foot seven, and he had to be crammed into the cockpit of a Hurricane fighter. When he arrived in Greece, he had to be lifted out of the plane by other men because his muscles were cramped up from being in the position for so long. This was then the start of Dahl’s true combat experience in the Second World War. It was brief, but it was as