Roald Dahl Great Welsh Writers

Roald Dahl is one of the greatest children's writers of all time.

His books are loved by tens of millions of young readers

the world over.

"Then she started swinging her round and round her head,

"faster and faster, and Amanda was screaming blue murder,

"and the Trunchbull was yelling,

"'I'll give you pigtails, you little rat.'"

They've been made into West End musicals

and Hollywood films.

Oh, my.

Less well-known is where Roald Dahl came from.

He was Welsh,

born and raised in Cardiff in the 1910s and '20s,

What happened during those early years in Wales helped to shape

both his life and his books.

"I'm watching you,

"so keep your thieving fingers off them chocolates.

"Either you forks out or you gets out."

This is an untold Roald Dahl story

of the triumphs and tragedies of his own Welsh childhood.

Look around, and it's easy enough to find Roald Dahl's name in Cardiff

today. He has public spaces named after him, shows and exhibitions,

and plaques in his honour.

But uncovering the story of Roald Dahl's Welsh childhood

means digging a little deeper.

Our tale begins a century ago in Llandaff,

on the genteel fringes of Cardiff.

Here, in the upstairs room of a fine house, a baby boy was born.

BABY CRIES

He was named Roald, unusual for a Welsh child.

But his parents, Sofie Magdalene and Harald Dahl, were both Norwegian,

and rapidly growing rich in the thriving Welsh capital.

Industrial Cardiff was a sort of Klondyke.

There was a boom going on.

Cardiff, the greatest coal-exporting port in the world -

there was money to be made here.

Harald Dahl set himself up a supply business,

providing everything that a ship pulling into Cardiff needed.

So he provided that ship with the coal for its fuel,

with its supplies, with its food for its next voyage,

with its replacement ropes, with its pulleys,

with its bits and pieces.

That's the business, a one-stop shop.

It was a very progressive idea.

Harald Dahl's offices were in Cardiff's bustling docks.

From his window, he could see the Norwegian Church,

the social and religious hub of the city's

prospering Norwegian community.

It was here, in October 1916, that Roald Dahl was christened.

Before too long, Harald's growing wealth,

along with his growing family,

were calling for a house somewhat larger than the one in Llandaff,

and so they moved to rural Radyr, six miles north of Cardiff,

and a home worthy of a fairy tale.

"I remember it as a mighty house, with turrets on its roof,

"and with majestic lawns and terraces around it.

"There were many acres of farm and woodland,

"and a number of cottages for the staff.

"Very soon, the meadows were full of milking cows,

"and the sties were full of pigs,

"and the chicken run was full of chickens.

"There were several massive shire horses

"for pulling the ploughs and the hay wagons.

"And there was a ploughman and a cowman and a couple of gardeners

"and all manner of servants in the house itself."

I think Ty-Mynydd was extraordinarily important,

I think it was the kind of paradise... I mean,

it was where he had his first memories,

he grew up in this, for him,

this utterly idyllic world of fields and pastures and animals

and the freedom to roam, and a sense, I think, that, you know,

the world was a very beautiful place.

He and his sisters were able to walk through the fields.

They all talked with enormous fondness and nostalgia

about this place, and it meant a great deal to them.

What life should be

is kind of embodied in that building.

Only echoes remain today of Ty-Mynydd,

the lodge, the curve of its drive,

and some of its woodland.

But the spell the place cast on Roald Dahl never faded.

He always chose to live in the countryside.

And books like Danny, The Champion Of The World

and Matilda are set in blissful, rural worlds.

There's often this sense that,

within the children's texts,

that they want to return to some

idyllic part of the countryside,

an idyllic time in the past.

In Matilda, Matilda wants to escape,

and when she escapes, she escapes to something much more simple.

She escapes to Miss Honey,

and she does it going to Miss Honey's cottage,

which is in the countryside.

And it goes back... They talk about poetry as they go.

It's done like a fairy tale.

"Matilda saw a narrow dirt-path

"leading to a tiny red-brick cottage.

"The cottage was so small it looked more like a doll's house

"than a human dwelling.

"On either side of the path there was a wilderness

"of nettles and blackberry thorns and long brown grass.

"An enormous oak tree stood overshadowing the cottage,

"its massive spreading branches seemed to be

"enfolding and embracing the tiny building,

"and perhaps hiding it as well from the rest of the world.

"Miss Honey, with one hand on the gate, which hadn't yet opened,

"turned to Matilda and said,

"'A poet called Dylan Thomas once wrote some lines

"'that I think of every time I walk up this path.'

"Matilda waited, and Miss Honey, in a rather wonderful, slow voice,

"began reciting the poem."

At Ty-Mynydd, the young Roald Dahl

was living in a real-life rural paradise.

But that childhood world was about to be shattered.

Deep one winter, Roald's elder sister, Astri,

died of a burst appendix.

Just seven weeks later, his father, Harald, died, too -

some said of a broken heart.

He was laid to rest in the local churchyard,

the Celtic pattern on his headstone

reflecting the roots he had put down in Wales.

With her husband dead, Roald's mother, Sofie Magdalene,

decided it was time for more practical living arrangements.

The Dahls were moving house.

Their new home was back in Llandaff,

an attractive urban villa called Cumberland Lodge.

This would be the scene of adventures worthy of Roald Dahl's own books,

and the realm of Sofie Magdalene.

She was the biggest influence on his life.

She was intrepid,

and I think that's what he really admired about her -

that she... Fear didn't come.

You know, she'd take them out on a boat

without lifeboats in big, stormy weather.

She was a strong...

Oh, I wish I'd met her! Wonderful woman.

They were being raised, most of the time, as, you know,

by a single mother.

Very formidable, strong single mother

who was quite a personality in her own right.

They really didn't conform to the normal middle-class values of

the time, you know, where people were polite and behaved themselves.

Roald's school friends, several of whom I spoke to

when they were alive, you know,

told me that going to stay at the Dahls'

was basically like going to a madhouse where, you know,

where anything went.

Roald Dahl's children's books are famous

for their irreverent, mischievous spirit.

And at Cumberland Lodge in the 1920s,

the young Roald was up to plenty of hijinks of his own.

I think, without doubt, Roald was a mischief-maker.

I think he was an inventive, unusual mischief-maker.

I mean, he talks about constructing this elaborate chariot

out of Meccano that would douse passers-by with water

cos it ran down on a wire, which he could then release and drench people

who were walking their dogs at the end of the garden.

GIRL SCREAMS

DOG BARKS

And the same way, you know, his sisters would say

that he would sometimes, you know,

would send them up a tree, padded up with cushions,

and fire air gun at them, just to see how far the pellets

went into the cushions.

None of the sisters seemed to have been remotely frightened

by doing this - they just took it for granted that

that's the kind of thing young kids did.

But a big change was on the way for the young Roald Dahl.

At the age of seven,

his mother enrolled him at the nearby Cathedral School in Llandaff.

It was to be his first taste of a regimented world,

far removed from the free spirits of home.

The Cathedral School, when Roald Dahl was a pupil,

was a preparatory or prep school.

It never held more than about 50 or 60 boys

and most of them were boarders.

There was a big classroom

they called big school,

with all the honours boards

on the wall, described...

always described as a dusty classroom for some reason and there

were other classrooms round the back and a gym,

which was very popular, and some fives courts.

And this, erm...

this is a hat that belonged to one of Roald Dahl's contemporaries

in the school,

so this is what Road Dahl would have worn.

When they went to and from school,

they would have passed the war memorial and they were expected to

raise their hats or their caps when they passed

it woe betide any boy who didn't.

So this is what he would have had to raise in respect to the war dead.

Roald Dahl wrote about his Llandaff school days

in his colourful childhood memoir, Boy.

His most vivid memory was of a remarkable adventure

that wouldn't be out of place in his own children's books.

He even gave it a name - The Great Mouse Plot.

DOOR OPENS

BELL RINGS

We're standing here outside the centrepiece of The Great Mouse Plot.

This is not, in fact, the Great Wall Chinese takeaway,

but in Roald's day,

this was Mrs Pratchett's sweetshop and these are the windows

against which the young Roald would press his nose,

looking at the boiled wonders and gobstoppers in jars beyond.

DOOR OPENS

BELL RINGS

"The sweetshop in Llandaff in the year 1923

"was the very centre of our lives.

"To us, it was what a bar is to a drunk, or a church is to a bishop.

"Without it, there would have been little to live for,

"but it had one terrible drawback, this sweetshop -

"the woman who owned it was a horror!

"We hated her and we had good reason for doing so.

"Her name was Mrs Pratchett.

"She was a small, skinny, old hag

"with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour

"as a green gooseberry.

"She never smiled,

"she never welcomed us when we went in,

"and the only times she spoke were when she said things like,

"'I'm watching you,

"'so keep your thieving fingers off them chocolates!'

"or, 'I don't want you in here just to look around.

"'Either you forks out or you gets out.'"

The young Roald and his pals dream of getting their own back

on the loathsome Mrs Pratchett.

Then, one day, they find a dead mouse and Roald hatches a plan.

They will give the old woman the fright of her life

by putting the mouse in a jar of her sweets.

"Thwaites handed me the mouse.

"'I'm putting it in the gobstoppers,' I said.

"'The gobstoppers are never behind the counter.'

"Thus, everything was arranged.

"We were strutting as we entered the shop.

"We were the victors now and Mrs Pratchett was the victim.

"She stood behind the counter and her small malignant pig eyes

"watched us suspiciously as we came forward.

"'One Sherbert Sucker, please,' Thwaites said,

"holding out his penny.

"When I saw Mrs Pratchett turn her head away for a couple of seconds,

"I lifted the heavy glass lid off the gobstopper jar

"and dropped the mouse in.

"My heart was thumping like mad and my hands had gone all sweaty.

"As soon as we were outside, we broke into a run.

"I felt like a hero!

"I WAS a hero!"

The boys' triumph is short-lived, though.

The following day, Mrs Pratchett is at the Cathedral School.

She points out the miscreants to the headmaster

and they are ordered to his dreaded study.

And it ends with him, erm...

It's this rather lurid description of him being caned by the...

all the boys responsible for The Great Mouse Plot being caned by the

headmaster with the evil Mrs Pratchett looking on

like a sort of witch from the wings and urging the headmaster

to beat the boys harder and harder.

CACKLING

It's very, very typically Roald Dahl, that scene.

Roald Dahl seems never to have forgotten the punishment

meted out to him.

In books like Matilda, school is at best a dubious place -

at worst, downright cruel.

I mean, when you're talking about the nastiness

and the cruelty of adults to children,

I'm immediately reminded of Miss Trunchbull -

huge, domineering and little tiny Matilda

being in the power of someone cruel, nasty, stupid.

And I think he taps into that brilliantly.

It's not only that he remembers what it's like to be a child,

but that he is, again, stalwart in the defence of children,

and what he's saying to children is, "You CAN stand up to them.

"You CAN defeat these evil people.

"Just because they're bigger than you,

"they are not smarter, they are not wiser.

"Use your brains, hold yourself together.

"They will be defeated."

In childhood, Roald Dahl had his own real-life champion

in the shape of his mother.

When Sofie Magdalene discovered that her son had been beaten at school,

she stormed to the house of the headmaster

and gave him a piece of her mind.

She was an extraordinary woman, ahead of her time -

bold, well-read and with a wicked sense of humour.

And although Roald's father was now dead,

he also found at home an unlikely male role model.

"The gardener that my mother engaged to look after everything outdoors

"was a short, broad-shouldered, middle-aged Welshman

"with a pale brown moustache, whose name was Jones.

"But, to us children, he very soon became known as Joss Spivvis.

"I adored him. I worshipped him.

"I used to follow him around and watch him at his work

"and listen to him talk.

"Endless stories about his young days, Joss would tell me,

"as he dug the kitchen garden or weeded the flowerbed.

"And if it was raining, we would be in the potting shed

"or in the greenhouse, or in the harness room.

"He had the Welshman's love of speech and song

"and when he described something to me,

"his flowery sentences would hold me enthralled.

"One of my most endearing memories of early childhood

"was my friendship with Joss Spivvis."

Roald's father Harald had been a keen gardener.

Now Joss the gardener was becoming a father figure to the boy.

He even took Roald to watch Cardiff City play football,

the club flying high in the First Division.

CROWD CHEERS

But there was another, starker side of Welsh life

that Joss revealed to the well-to-do Llandaff boy...

..because the Dahls' gardener was a former Rhondda miner.

"'Five o'clock in the morning, six days a week,

"'we reported for work at the pithead,' Joss said,

"'and I was always shivering, shivering, shivering.

"'You don't half shiver at five in the morning

"'when you're young and skinny.

"'Then into the cage we all went

"'and when they let go the winding gear,

"'we all dropped like a stone

"'into the black, black hole for miles and miles and it fell so fast,

"'your feet left the floor and your stomach came up into your throat,

"'and every time I went down,

"'I thought the cable had broken and we were going to go right on

"'falling until we came to the very centre of the Earth,

"'where everything was white-hot, boiling lava.'"

Many years later,

Roald Dahl seemed to recall Joss Spivvis' words when he came to write

one of his best-loved children's books.

In Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, and in its sequel,

Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator,

those wonderful descriptions of terror,

of the elevator

in both those novels.

Look carefully enough,

and you realise that his description

of the sudden drop of the elevator in

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is almost exactly the description

you get of Joss Spivvis' first day in the mine.

So at the heart of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory,

you have the experience,

the recalled experience of a Rhondda miner as a young child,

the terror of that boy dropping into the shaft of a Rhondda mine.

That, I think, is non-negotiable.

The descriptions tally almost exactly.

Back in 1925,

the young Roald Dahl's time with Joss Spivvis was drawing to a close.

In line with her late husband's wishes,

Sofie Magdalene had decided to send her son

to an English boarding school.

And so, in September, the nine-year-old Roald

boarded a paddle steamer bound for a strange new world

across the Bristol Channel.

His destination was St Peter's School in Weston-super-Mare -

a place he later described as "a private lunatic asylum".

The real trauma was being taken away from that loving family environment,

you know, with this very rock-like strong mother

and being hurled into a world that was entirely male,

where there were all these arbitrary rules and regulations and orders and

things to do and things not to do -

you know, his own household, I think,

was very free and easy by comparison and I think he found that

truly traumatic and hard to adjust to and, you know,

when he writes about how unhappy he was there,

I'm absolutely certain that's true.

In the freezing dormitory of St Peter's,

the young Roald would align himself in bed so that he could sleep facing

Wales, the distant land he could see far away across the water

of the Bristol Channel.

When Roald Dahl came to write his first children's book,

James And The Giant Peach, he seemed to recall the sadness of these days.

"Poor James, carrying nothing but a small suitcase containing a pair of

"pyjamas and a toothbrush, was sent away to live with his two aunts.

"Their names were Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker,

"and I'm sorry to say that they were horrible people.

"They lived in a queer, ramshackle house

"on the top of a high hill in the South of England.

"James could look down and see for miles and miles.

"On a very clear day, if he looked in the right direction,

"he could see a tiny, grey dot, far away on the horizon,

"which was the house that he used to live in

"with his beloved mother and father.

"And just beyond that, he could see the ocean itself -

"a long, thin streak of blackish blue,

"like a line of ink beneath the rim of the sky."

Throughout these troubled times, Roald's home remained in Wales.

He wrote to his mother there every week,

asking after Jones the gardener, the dogs and,

rather less often, his sisters.

Always, he signed himself simply "Boy".

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, you know,

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...

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 even, you know,

writing home from St Peter's.

In 1927, when Roald was ten, his mother and family left Wales,

bound for Kent.

With Harald Dahl dead and Roald destined to finish his education

at public school, there was logic in a move to England.

As a young man, Roald Dahl enjoyed a globetrotting life of adventure -

as an oilman in Africa, a World War II fighter pilot,

an intelligence officer and a Hollywood screenwriter.

When the time came to settle down, it was in rural Buckinghamshire.

Here, he wrote some of the greatest children's books of the 20th century,

ground-breaking works that helped to redefine the genre.

As the years went by, Roald Dahl cultivated an image -

that of a maverick English country gentleman.

Yet he always enjoyed returning to Wales, often for seaside holidays.

On one of these trips,

he made a pilgrimage to the former home of his literary hero.

That man was also Welsh and a near contemporary - Dylan Thomas.

He did, of course, adore Dylan's literature,

and he'd heard about the hut that he wrote in

and he was thinking at that time, you know,

he was dealing with a family, a wife that was very ill, erm,

a son that was very ill, a daughter that he'd lost,

and he had to escape into the garden, you know,

to get a bit of peace in order to write,

and he heard about Dylan's hut, and he went down to see it, and it's...

The hut at Gypsy House in Great Missenden

is a complete replica.

You know, he more or less measured it and, you know,

where the door was and where the windows... It's a copy.

Perhaps he felt...

..Dylan could influence him a little, once he was inside.

I don't know. And also, the connection with Wales,

you know, that roots are very important.

And...he felt that.

He felt, you know, he was born

and had a lot of his life, his young life, in Wales.

Roald Dahl died in 1990, aged 74.

At his funeral, his daughter read a Dylan Thomas poem.

He was, and still is, one of the world's great storytellers.

It's now 100 years since Roald Dahl was born in Wales,

so what do the young Welsh readers of today think of him?

You open it up, and then it's like you're in

a completely different world.

I think Roald Dahl's funny, humorous and a bit...

bit naughty.

Sometimes, when I'm sad, then I read them to make me laugh.

When I read Matilda, I feel happy.

I really like the way he makes up all the words and things like that.

They're really funny.

It's really kind of inspirational.

I think Roald Dahl is wonderful.

One of Roald Dahl's best-loved books is The BFG.

At its end, the Big Friendly Giant meets the Queen,

who orders that an enormous house be built specially for him

in Windsor Great Park.

There is, in the real world,

an enormous house in Windsor Great Park owned by the Queen.

Its name, as Roald Dahl surely knew, is Cumberland Lodge...

..his own childhood home in Wales.

I think, for Roald, Wales always stood for the countryside,

somewhere that was happy, somewhere that was safe,

somewhere that was secure,

where he had some of the most happy, happy memories of his childhood.

You know, Jesuit says, "If you can have a child till seven,"

or whatever, "you've got them." I think Wales functioned in that way

right throughout his life.

This was a place where everything would be OK

and I sort of think that that's what Wales meant for him.

GLITTER BALL CHIRPS A "YOOHOO"

# Oh, it don't mean a thing

# If it ain't got that swing

# Doo-wa, doo-wa, doo-wa, doo-wa, doo-wa! #

Strictly: Mission Fabulous continues