first terrifying descent as a boy down the mineshaft of a Rhondda Valley pit, caged in the industrial Welsh dark, dropping at speed to the seams where the roof was held up by pit props known as ‘Norways’. What the young Dahl got from Joss was a sense of terror, excitement, cultural and linguistic difference – and the spellbinding power of a narrative rooted in everyday, as well as fantastical, things. Tellingly, the description of the descent into the mine that Dahl gives in his essay had already appeared in Dahl’s work, in almost exactly the same form, in the description of the descent of the great glass elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). One must look hard for the presence of Wales in his work, but it is there. Dahl himself tells us in Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) that after being caned by the headmaster in the Cathedral School for the famous ‘Great Mouse Plot’ in Mrs Pratchett’s sweetshop (now a blue-plaqued Chinese takeaway) and being sent away by his outraged mother to a prep school in Weston-super-Mare, he used to align himself towards home each night, ensuring he faced his family across the Bristol channel in Wales. The description at the 20
beginning of James and the Giant Peach (1961) of the young boy, incarcerated in the house of his horrible aunts, recalls that act of Welsh homing: James looks back yearningly towards his dead parents’ house, over a rich pastoral landscape that recalls the Dahls’ estate at Radyr. In The BFG (1982) we have the narrative of an outsider – a giant at home neither in his own giant world nor in human society, in which he inhabits margins and shadows. He speaks a creative, hybrid language that he calls ‘terrible wigglish’ – which immediately brings to mind the Wenglish with which Dahl would undoubtedly have had some contact as a child. The BFG goes on to tell how this outsider learns to speak ‘proper’, and how he is accepted into the English cultural establishment by the Queen of England, no less. What we glimpse here is Dahl’s reflection on his own cultural move away from Wales and his complex Welshness – from perceived ‘margins’ to English ‘centres’ of culture (centres to which he never quite got access, as we have seen). What Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected sets out to demonstrate is that – to quote Dahl’s famous statement about secrets – Wales is to be found in his work ‘hidden in the most unlikely places’. Images: © RDNL, courtesy of The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre
Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected, edited by Damian Walford Davies, is available from University of Wales Press: www.uwp.co.uk