Donald Sturrock - Love from Boy: Roald Dahl’s Letters to His Mother

R oald Dahl is widely acknowledged as one of the very greatest childrens writers. Yet he was a strangely reluctant traveler on the road to that destiny. It was only when he was in his forties that he attempted to write a book for children. And, for many years before that, he appeared to have no aspirations to become a writer at all. He ascribed this sudden change of gear to a monumental bash on the head he had sustained as a wartime fighter pilot in 1940. Crashing his plane in the Libyan desert, he believed, had not only given him something to write about, but the resultant head injuries had also changed his personality, liberating his desire to write. The observation was perhaps disingenuous. For, while Roald did indeed show little interest in writing as a way of earning his living until 1942, he had, since childhood, been practicing his craft in another context: writing letters to his mother, Sofie Magdalene.

These letters are remarkable. More than 600 in total, they span a forty-year period, beginning in 1925 when, as a nine-year-old, Roald was sent away to boarding school and ending in 1965, two years before his mothers death. Sofie Magdalene carefully kept each one, and most of their envelopes, holding on to them despite wartime bombings and many subsequent house moves. In his memoir of childhood, Boy, Roald movingly described how he discovered them:

My mother... kept every one of these letters, binding them carefully in neat bundles with green tape, but this was her own secret. She never told me she was doing it. In 1967, when she knew she was dying, I was in hospital, in Oxford, having a serious operation on my spine and I was unable to write to her, so she had a telephone specially installed beside my bed in order that she might have one last conversation with me. She didnt tell me she was dying nor did anyone else for that matter because I was in a fairly serious condition myself at the time. She simply asked me how I was and hoped I would get better soon and sent me her love. I had no idea she would die the next day, but she knew all right and she wanted to reach out and speak to me for one last time. When I recovered and went home, I was given this vast collection of my letters...

Roald was given the cache of letters he had written to his mother after her death in 1967. They cover a period of forty years between 1925 and 1965.

The larger part of themand the most intriguingwere written before 1946, when Roalds first collection of short stories was published and he returned home from the USA to live with Sofie Magdalene in rural Buckinghamshire. They are of considerable biographical interest as they provide a comprehensive and fascinating account of Roalds school days in the 1920s and 1930s, of his time in Tanganyika just before the outbreak of war, of his training as a fighter pilot in Iraq and Egypt, and of how he saw action in Greece and Palestine. They chronicle his time as a diplomat in Washington too, and his foray into intelligence work in New York, as well as recording in fresh detail how his career as a writer began.