Roald Dahl

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy nine, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

Our castaway this week is a writer of short stories, of children's books, and of screenplays, Rual Dahl.

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Could you adjust yourself to isolation on an island? Very easily, yes. I look for it more and more in my life to day. I hate to say it, but I would love it.

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How much does music mean to you?

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It means

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A great deal, but not in a not in the professional way. In the old days, before I was married, I never used to start writing in the morning.

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for putting on some very great music, like a Beethoven quartet.

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Yeah.

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and sit and listen to it in in the hopes that some of this greatness would rub off on me.

Roald Dahl1:13

Uh

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And that I would

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Write better. As a matter of fact, it it helped quite a lot because it is impossible after listening to great music to write absolute rubbish. Do you ever play it as background while you're

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Revising or whatever. Oh, goodness me, no, no. A little hut, curtains drawn so that I don't see the uh squirrels up in the apple trees in the orchard, the light on, right away from the house, no vacuum cleaners, nothing.

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Did you have any plan in choosing your eight record?

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No, no, no plan. I just went to my record shelves and uh

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Picked out. One one becomes, I think at my age, I could say at our age, couldn't I? Very well aware of the ones one loves most, having played them a lot. What's the first one you've got there on that little pile?

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It's uh Puccini's Larberam.

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With Caruso.

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Singing Jejalida Manina.

Speaker 42:34

Nani Modiara

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Enrico Caruso, an aria from Laboer.

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Loil, you're from a Norwegian family.

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Pure Norwegian, both mother and father, yes. But educated in England. Yes, born and educated in England. I speak Norwegian.

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and have visited it nearly every year of my life, but I'm really very English.

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English Public School

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Were you bright at school?

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Not particularly, no. No, I was better at games than at uh than at work. Certainly no sign of uh

Roald Dahl3:35

Do you have a

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Uh

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Any ability to uh

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Write or do anything else. No, I was I was nothing at school. I I wasn't even a house prefect. You do quote in one of your books.

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Your English report.

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indolent and illiterate.

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Yes. Yes. I think the illiterate was a little bit unfair because I used to read avidly all through. Indolent, yes. What did you read? What were you fondest of reading? Everything I could get hold of from Dickens and Thackeray and oh, there was an American fellow who, when I read him, I couldn't turn the light off at night, a short story writer called Ambrose Bierce. Oh, yes, indeed. Who had a wonderful title to his collection, which was Can Such Things Be? Yes. At age 11, I couldn't turn the light off. A formidable writer. Yes.

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Now you went off at the age of sixteen on a travelling adventure. It was seventeen, yes. We we went on something that was then called the Public Schools Exploring Expedition to Newfoundland, led by an intrepid and frightfully tough

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uh Surgeon Commander was on Scott's expedition to the South Pole.

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It it was enormous fly. It nearly killed us, you know, marching across uh Newfoundland and back uh with a hundred and ten pounds on our backs. Wow'Cause in those days it was unexplored. Aeroplanes weren't flying around. What did you want to be as a boy, as a schoolboy?

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I hadn't the foggiest idea what I wanted to be. All I knew was that uh when my mother said uh my father died when I was three, so uh my mother brought us all up.

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She said, Do you want to go to Oxford or Cambridge? and in those days, you must remember it was quite easy to get into them.

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If you could pay.

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And uh I said, No, I don't. She said, What do you want to do? I said, I want to get a job that'll take me to distant lands. And what was the first job that took you to distant lands? That was the only job. I went up for an interview uh with the shell company for the Eastern staff.

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And my housemaster, I remember my housemaster saying, I don't know what you're wasting your time with this for. There'll be uh people like the head boys of Eton and uh Harrow and God knows what there.

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But uh this imposing board of directors interviewing sixty boys for five places

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They all brightened up when

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I said I'd won heavyweight boxing at school.

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And that got me one of the places. And where did it take you?

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Took me to what was then Tanganyika, Dar es Salaam. Marvellous, he wrote, romantic, exciting.

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Uh

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Three weeks to get there on a ship. And they thought your heavyweight boxing might be useful. God knows what they thought. And you could cope. Right.

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Let's have your second record. What's that to be?

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The second one is

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The Beethoven, the violin concerto, a part of the slow movement. Why do you choose it?

Presenter6:32

Oh, it's just uh I mean, I would choose masses of Beethoven if I could, because he's one of the great men, Himmenbach, and uh I just didn't know which to choose, whether I chose a piano concerto or a quartet or or this, but uh this is a fine record and uh played by a fine violinist. Who is your soloist? Yehudi Manouin.

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Part of the second movement of the Beethoven violin concerto, Yehudi Menuen with the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klempere. So you were in East Africa?

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You were only eighteen. What was your job? Was it an office job? Well, it was a bit of everything. It it was rather marvellous, uh, a chap that age. You you learned Swahili, you drove around and visited the Seisel plantations and the diamond mines and the things like that to see that the chaps had the right kind of lubricating oil for their machinery. You didn't know an awful lot about it. You'd have a six-month course.

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And uh it was it was so adventurous. At that age, pretty terrific. Were you settled? Did you think this was going to be your career? Yes, I did. I did, indeed.

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How long did you carry on with the job?

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Well, I was there about two years when the war broke out. Yes. And.

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Obviously, yeah.

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one joined up so I got in a car and and uh drove a long way through these uh again exciting rutted

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roads uh and uh fording rivers, uh up to Nairobi and joined the RAF, flying training. Did you train in Nairobi? Yes, I did. Initial training, and then we finished up in Iraq.

Speaker 48:56

Five

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in a in a ghastly place called Habania, where the temperature was uh one hundred and twenty in the shade and you had to start flying at six in the morning and you finished at nine and uh that was it. It was so hot.

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Uh you served in the Middle East. You were rather badly shot up. Yes, I I uh finished up uh in a sort of pile of flames on the ground. But I I recovered from that and went on flying a bit. Yes, you went to Greece.

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And you ended the war. You were sort of invalidated out of active flying. You you ended up in the United States as assistant air attache, which sounds rather a glamorous post. Well, I I started up in that post. I didn't last very long because um

Presenter9:43

I'm attackless.

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sort of fellow and uh that's the one thing a diplomat mustn't be, you know. I got I got shunted out of that, but I came back rather quickly working for the quiet Canadian, uh Sir William Stevenson in uh intelligence, yes, which was much more fun.

Roald Dahl9:57

Intelligence

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And it was while you were in that, in Washington, I believe, that you began to write.

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Mm-hmm. I did.

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I'd never thought about it before, but as soon as I arrived in Washington and one must remember that America was hardly in the war then, and we were trying to do as much propaganda as we could to get help from America

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And I was sitting in my room in the embassy and a door opened and a little round face poked in with thick glasses and said, may I come in?

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And I really did think that this little man was gonna ask for a job of some sort, not that I could have given it to him.

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And he said, My name is CS Forrester.

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And I said, oh, go on, you know. And he said, no, honestly. And being an avid reader, one of my gods was walking into the room. And he said, look, will you come out to lunch with me and tell me your most exciting adventure in the war? And I'll write it. And it'll be in the Saturday Evening Post and it'll be good for Britain. Yes. And I said, yes, I jolly well will.

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And uh so we sat down and we having our lunch. We were eating duck.

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And he was trying to make notes and shovel this stuff into his mouth, and it was a mess, and I was trying to talk. I said, Look, if I scribble this down this evening and send it to you,

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Uh you can put it in proper shape.

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Would that help? He said, Would that be marvellous? Would you do that?

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As of course I will.

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And so I did.

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And uh

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It a little story seemed to emerge from it, and I sent it to him.

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And a week later

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I got a lovely letter from him and and a cheque for a thousand dollars saying he hadn't touched it and he'd sold it to the Saturday New Post for me, and they wanted more. A thousand dollars for a

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An evening's work not bad.

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Well, I I I I said I can't be as easy as all actually. But it it it somehow uh worked. It was. Right. Well, obviously this was a terribly important evening in your life. Let's break off at this point for your third record.

Presenter11:57

Oh, Dylan Thomas, reading Fern Hill. The greatest to my mind.

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The greatest voice has ever been in broadcasting and the greatest poet of our time.

Roald Dahl12:08

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, the night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes. And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns, and once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves trail with daisies and bars.

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Dylan Thomas reading his own poem, Fern Hill.

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Right, you wrote a number of RAF stories for the Saturday Evening Post.

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And very useful they must have been for the British war effort. Then you put those together in a book.

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Mm-hmm. Yes.

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You're credited with inventing the word gremlin.

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Yes. Tell us about that. Well, it may be true, and it probably is.

Roald Dahl13:00

Tell us about that.

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But uh I don't like to take uh too much credit for that. I wrote a little story about creatures early in the war, just after the Forrester thing. Yes. And it was called The Gremlins, and uh somebody showed it to Walt Disney, and he fell in love with it and was going to make a film.

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And uh

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In fact, I went out to Hollywood and at his expense with RAF permission and

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Stayed, this uh silly young man in RF uniform staying in a suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel with a car provided by Walt and seeing him every day.

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Um nothing much came of thee.

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The film They Spent

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I don't know how many million dollars on it and scrapped it. And that was the end of it. But these were the original.

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gremlins, the ones that uh used to get in the machinery and

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Climb out on the wings and do all that damage. Yes, and and and and uh Disney drew the first pictures of them and their wives. They bred very fast. They began turning up in broadcasting almost immediately.

Roald Dahl14:00

And it was.

Presenter14:06

Now, what happened to you when the war ended? I mean, you had started writing, writing very successfully.

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Yes, I I was managing to sell uh more or less what I wrote then to big American magazines and and and it seemed that as a single man I could make a living. And so I said to the shell company,

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I think I'll have a go and resign from you. And you better have all the gratuities you've paid me in the war back. They were extremely nice.

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They said, we think you'll need them. You better keep them if you're going to go into that racket. And good luck. And from now on, you were a professional writer. Yes.

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Record number four.

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I once said to a professional musician in Washington called Mark Bitstein, what is the greatest musical work that's ever been composed?

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And he said Bach's mass and B minor.

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And I went home and I played it and I played it and I must say I think he's right.

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Part of the Angus Dei from the Bach B minor Mass, a performance conducted by Herbert von Karian.

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Now your short story is not very many in number, really, through the years. Very ingeniously constructed.

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sometimes rather gruesome, often very funny. Now, because of the rather gruesome angle, they seem to pair rather strangely with

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children's books which have been your other major output.

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Well, I don't think they're gruesome at all.

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I only write, really, what I think is funny. One is an entertainer. They're not all funny.

Roald Dahl16:38

Do you think

Presenter16:38

Do you think they are? Well, I've probably got a a warm sense of humor, but but I think it's terribly funny if somebody gets uh uh killed by being hit on the head with a frozen leg of lamb or something like that. You see? You can't really call that tragic, can you?

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Well, it's a matter of opinion. The old story about a man sleeping on a banana skin. It's jolly painful, but we all roar with laughter, though. Yes, it depends which side you're on, really. Yes, it does.

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How many books of short stories have you collected now?

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I think five. Yes. Five, yes. And how many children's books?

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Seven or eight. Which have had enormous sales. Uh in particular Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is probably almost successful, isn't it? Probably, yes. Yes. And it's been made into a film? It was made into a rather crummy film, yes. I wasn't pleased with it at all. Did you have anything to do with it? Well, I originally wrote the screenplay, but I made the mistake of letting Hollywood have a free hand, and I shall never do that again.

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Right, another record.

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The next one is uh another Beethoven. I didn't know which symphony to choose, but I I've taken the ninth. Here's a part of the third movement of the ninth, the choral.

Roald Dahl18:50

Yeah.

Presenter18:50

Part of the third movement of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

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Now for many years television has been after the backlog of your short stories, but you've said no, and now you've said yes, and indeed they have been cropping up on the box. What made you change your mind?

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With all due respect, except for a few.

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superb shows like upstairs, downstairs, the quality of television is not very high and I thought, well,

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I'm not exactly starving, and so let's hang on to them.

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And and also I I had uh just enough sense to realize that a large package of them is better than trickling them out in one or two.

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And so I waited.

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And uh

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Finally I thought I found the right.

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People to do them.

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And uh

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Agreed.

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Have you scripted any of them yourself? No, I don't want to do that. I want to keep away. Now, since your Disney days, you have done a few scripts for for the big screen, one of the James Bond films, for example. That was fun. That's the only one I've had any real fun doing. Which one was it? It was You Only Live Twice. You were inventing some extraordinary devices and and whatever. Yes, that was the fun of it. And and it was Connery, Sean Connery's last one. Yeah. He did. And we went to Japan and you you you live in such luxury when you do a bottle and you go in helicopters everywhere.

Speaker 420:03

Yeah.

Roald Dahl20:04

Yeah.

Roald Dahl20:08

Do you

Speaker 420:08

Go in helicopter.

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Tops of mountains and uh everything. It's enormous fun.

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You did chitty chitty bang bang? Yeah, that wasn't much fun. Was it? No, no. I I better not talk. You know, you see, I'll start calling uh

Presenter20:22

people are horrible. But but I I'm not in love with cinema directors, let's just put it that way. Right. Except for the James Bond one, which was nice.

Speaker 420:31

Right.

Presenter20:35

Now, while you were living in America, you had the good fortune to become married to that excellent actress, Patricia Neal. Have you written any screenplays for her? One. But uh there again, uh I think I'd rather not talk about it too much because uh it was one of those. Yes, it was one of those. I don't think it was a bad screenplay, but uh things happen to film. That's why it's so much nicer, you know, if you're a

Roald Dahl20:53

Okay.

Presenter20:56

an ordinary writer to to stick to writing books and stories and and

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Nobody can screw around with them, can they?

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Now we know that your wife had a serious illness. She had

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More than one very serious stroke.

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out of which you did marvellous work in in getting her to recover. As a result of this, you built up more or less a a foundation, a a group.

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Of the sequence centers. I didn't build it up. It was simply my.

Roald Dahl21:22

Well, I couldn't.

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Original small idea of how to treat a stroke patient and give her a very intensive

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Therapy. Immediately. As soon as possible after the stroke. The first few months are vital. But I called in uh amateurs to help because the English local hospital, they're all overworked and understaffed and and we were offered half an hour's speech therapy a week.

Presenter21:51

So I said, Well, that's no no ruddy good. She's gonna need six hours a day. And you gave her six hours a day. Yeah, we called in the chums and they they popped in and out.

Roald Dahl21:56

Yeah, we cool

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regularly, just like uh school.

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And it was very, very fierce and intense.

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The final teacher we had, who lives in our village,

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who is an extraordinary woman called Valerie Griffiths, uh has taken this whole scheme up.

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and allied herself with the Chestnut Heart.

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Society, which is now I think called the Chest Heart and Stroke Society.

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And there are thirty branches, I think, in England, Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, each one with a hundred amateur volunteers. They're ready to rush in to a stroke patient who's been discharged from hospital. It's working well. It's very efficacious, I mean, if you start immediately. The great thing, you see, a stroke patient doesn't want is to be left alone.

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Uh in the kitchen.

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staring at the ceiling and uh what can the poor husband or wife or whoever the other partner is do?

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Uh unless they've got help. That's marvellous work.

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Let's have another record. We've got to number six now. Number six is the lovely Foray Requiem.

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And if we could have the sanctus.

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The sanctus from the Forae Requiem, the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the new Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Wilcox.

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You have recently, at last, completed a novel. Yes.

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Are you a a disciplined writer? Do do you work set hours? Yes, I'm I I am a disciplined writer. I don't think any writer writes particularly long hours, because he can't. You become in inefficient. I work from ten to twelve.

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And from four to six. Yes. And then it's time for a drink.

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Time for a drink after twelve, and it's time for a drink after six. So I I hotfooted down from my little hut in the orchard.

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And uh

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Have a drink. Do you work fast? How long does a short story take? Anything up to six months. I'm a very slow worker. Yes. Very slow. How long did the novel take, My Uncle Oswald?

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Well added

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That was a short story, is he about every five or six years.

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I decide to write another story about my wicked uncle.

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This mythical man, and I started a story about him, and and uh I didn't set out to write a novel at all, it it just didn't stop.

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What are your other occupations? You live in the country. Um, what do you collect? What do you

Presenter25:18

Do when you're not sitting in your little hut writing? I'm a pretty restless sort of chap. Don't like lying on the beach doing nothing. So so I have a a pretty deep interest in uh

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Wine in eighteenth century English furniture.

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in pictures of all kinds, but mainly of this century.

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Plants and gardening, which has uh in the last twenty years has has blossomed out into uh cultivating and breeding uh a certain kind of orchid known as phalaenopsis. You're also a gambler.

Presenter25:54

Yes, I've been gambler all my li I'll gamble actually on anything. Horses, dogs. I I once uh uh bred racing greyhounds just after the war. I had uh twenty or thirty of them. Successfully?

Presenter26:07

Not particularly, no. No, he was a gambler. But that was the gamble. He doesn't care whether he's successful or not, as long as he can gamble. Oh, it was enormous fun.

Roald Dahl26:10

But that was the gamble.

Presenter26:16

reading them and running them in little flapping tracks in the country. But you see all this gambling, whatever it's on, has allowed me to write three or four or five, I suppose five stories.

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To go with gambling. Not not from your gambling profits, but because they've given you the ideas. Yes. Yes. It intrigues me. Right.

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Next record.

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Uh Bach again.

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They

Presenter26:43

Very well known sweet number three in D major. This movement, uh which you're going to hear, the air from this, is wonderfully well known, but you you must never call it, well you haven't, but so many people do refer to great music, which we hear a lot of as being hackneyed.

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It's not. It's simply the greater the music, the more often you hear it.

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Bach's orchestral suite number three in D major, once again the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Carrion, and this is the air, the air on the G string.

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No

Presenter28:13

You're a countryman. Does that mean you'd be an efficient castaway? Could you look after yourself? First essential, could you build a hut, like your hut at the bottom of the garden where you where you write? I think I jolly well could, yes, as long as my health was good.

Roald Dahl28:20

Like

Roald Dahl28:24

As long as my health

Presenter28:26

I would be able to do it, yes. Yes. I'd love it. And food. You could you live off the land?

Roald Dahl28:27

Yeah.

Presenter28:32

Uh if it was livable off I think I could, yes. I'm a gardener. Would you try to escape? No, no, no, I'd love it. I'd absolutely adore it. I wouldn't escape.

Presenter28:42

I'd stay there and hope that no smoke or funnel hove into the distance, you know?

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Last record. The last record.

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has got to be a Mozart. I haven't had one yet. Another of the the greats. I I didn't know which to choose, so I I've taken one of the lovelies, uh a sonata in A.

Presenter30:02

Alfred Brendel playing the second movement, the minuetto from Mozart's Sonata in A, Kirkel, three three one. If you could take just one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

Presenter30:15

Oh, it would have to be the uh B minor mass of Bach.

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And you're allowed to take to your island one luxury, any one thing of no practical use. What would you choose?

Presenter30:27

It causes great problems for a a Sybarite like me. The two things that I wouldn't want to do without is is uh smoking and drinking.

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I toyed with the idea of a still.

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'Cause then I could I could distill my liquor. There'd be coconuts or something like that. Yes, that could be I could do that. Or a packet of tobacco seeds.

Roald Dahl30:41

Yes, that could be overnight.

Presenter30:46

So I could grow the tobacco.

Presenter30:48

Or even a bunch of cuttings from a great vineyard like Romani-Conti in Burgundy and try to plant them and then in time you would have the grapes forever. Yes, that would take a few years, wouldn't it? Yes, I'd be without drink until then. I'd like to have the still and the cuttings and the tobacco seeds, but I can't have them all. Oh, pack them all up in a box, yes.

Roald Dahl30:58

But that would be a good thing.

Roald Dahl31:02

I'd like to

Roald Dahl31:08

Oh, pack'em all.

Presenter31:10

They're all yours. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and

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We don't like big encyclopedias.

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Well, I think it would

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If you're going to be there a great number of years, it would have to be poetry.

Presenter31:23

And the best wide-ranging anthology that I know of is the New Oxford Book of English Verse, compiled by Dame Helen Gardner. Wright. The New Oxford Book of English Verse. And thank you, Ruel Dahl, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Presenter31:41

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 331:49

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.