Roald returned from the USA early in 1946, aged twenty-nine. He moved in with his mother and his youngest sister, Asta, at Grange Farm, a remote homestead near Great Missenden. It was later owned by the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Then, when Asta married and Sofie Magdalene’s arthritis deteriorated, mother and son together moved to Wistaria Cottage, a large house on the High Street of nearby Old Amersham.

There, Roald bred racing greyhounds, poached pheasants in the local woods, and listened obsessively to classical music. In 1947 a press release described his main hobby as “listening for hours to his favourite symphonies, played on an elaborate built-in recording machine.”⁶⁹ The following year he completed his first novel Some Time Never, a fantastical Swiftian satire depicting the destruction of the human race following a nuclear holocaust. Its main human protagonist was a thinly disguised portrait of the book’s author: a demobbed pilot turned music critic. The other main characters were gremlins. It was not well reviewed. Roald’s second novel, Fifty Thousand Frogskins, completed in 1951, was a dystopian vision of post-war rural Britain, set against a backdrop of illegal greyhound racing and populated with a cast of small-time crooks and chancers. When his publishers refused to publish the book, Roald lost his nerve. He took to his heels, flying to New York, where his friend Charles Marsh secured him a job working for his charity, the Public Welfare Foundation.

So, after a five-year absence, Roald found himself once again regularly writing to his mother. But the tone of his letters had changed. His correspondence was calmer and more matter-of-fact. In New York, he reinvented himself as a writer of grand guignol short stories with strange twisted plots. The breathless energy that had once animated his letters home now found its natural outlet in his fiction. Alfred Hitchcock started to dramatize them for television and soon the American press had dubbed Roald, the Master of the Macabre. In his letters home he enthusiastically reported back to his mother how well his books were now selling and how he had begun to make proper money from them, while also gossiping about mutual friends, enquiring about the health of his greyhounds, offering advice on the purchase of stocks and shares, and lamenting the extortionate cost of dog food.

He remained reticent about anything too personal. He barely mentioned his engagement to the Hungarian divorcee, Suzanne Horvath, or the subsequent break-up of that relationship. Nor did he say much about the romance with his future wife, the actress Patricia Neal, which began when he went to see rehearsals of a revival of his friend Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. His announcement of their marriage, for example, was characteristically bluff.

May 23rd 1953

from 9 E 62nd St

Dear Mama

Thanks for the letter. I’ll get the stockings for you and the mineral water gadgets, although I may give them to someone else to take as we are going to Italy and France first.

Here’s a couple of pictures of Pat I had in my drawer. I’ll get hold of some better ones soon and let you have. We think it might be a good idea if we got married before we leave, so we’ll probably do that. She insists on a church, so if I can find one small enough and far enough away from the reporters etc., it’ll be okay with me. Except for Charles and Claudia [Marsh] (who are very keen on this thing) I don’t expect we’ll have more than four or five people. Pat’s mother and sister may come up from Tennessee, but it’s a long way. Don’t know any date, but as we’re flying to Rome on 3 July it’ll probably be a day or so before.

Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal on honeymoon in Rome, 1953. “I hope she will like the Dahl family, which is a bit out of the ordinary,” Sofie Magdalene wrote to Claudia Marsh. “I am sure Roald wants a family,” she added, “as he is unusually fond of and good with children, but that is their business and not mine.”

. . . Charles has insisted on donating a huge yellow sapphire ring, about 20 carats, which is very decent of him.

Give my love to Tante Astrid and Ellen if they are there.

Love

Roald

Pat, Olivia, Roald, and Tessa on holiday in Norway, 1958. There he started to work on his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach.

Roald and Pat got married in New York in the summer of 1953. They honeymooned in Europe, eventually arriving in England where they stayed with Sofie Magdalene in Wistaria Cottage for several weeks, before returning to America in the autumn. The following year, Roald decided to come back to England and bought a cottage near his mother, which he later renamed Gipsy House. Sofie Magdalene helped fund its purchase. It would become her son’s home for the rest of his life.

Roald’s first child Olivia was born in 1955 and that year he embarked on a peripatetic existence between Buckinghamshire and the USA. Normally the family spent spring and summer in Great Missenden, returning to New York in the autumn, as Pat was often working there. Their second daughter Tessa was born in 1957 and a son Theo in 1960. Becoming a parent acted as a catalyst on Roald’s desire to write for young people and in 1959 his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach, was published in the USA.

While in America, Roald was always in regular correspondence with his mother, who, in his absence, continued to supervise the maintenance of the Gipsy House garden, as well as any domestic repairs and renovations that were needed. Even after a severe fall, which resulted in her being confined to a wheelchair and moving in with her daughter Else’s family, Sofie Magdalene was always on hand to advise and offer guidance.

In December 1960 disaster struck. The pram carrying Roald’s four-month-old son was hit by a New York cab and crushed against the side of a bus. Theo suffered terrible head injuries and almost died. For three years Roald and Pat were in a constant state of anxiety, because the tube that drained excess fluid from their son’s cranial cavity kept blocking. When that happened his head would swell dramatically, leading to blindness, fitting, and potential brain damage. These blockages happened seven times over the first nine months after the accident and each of these alarming episodes resulted in major surgery under a general anesthetic.

Roald decided he would devise a more efficient valve that did not block so often, and so he approached his son’s neurosurgeon, Kenneth Till, and a model airplane engineer called Stanley Wade to help him. The resulting Dahl-Wade-Till valve transformed that aspect of pediatric head injuries. It was used on more than 3,000 children around the world, before it was eventually superseded. Sofie Magdalene too played her part in the early stages of its development.

February 16th 1961

New York

Dear Mama

Theo’s tube blocked up again and we took him to the hospital at eight o’clock this morning. His sight was failing, but hadn’t quite gone.

They’re just finished operating, and the valve at the end of the tube in his heart was faulty and had allowed blood to get in—therefore to block it. They have now put in a new tube, but this time into the pleura, the lung, not the heart.

Pat and I going out again soon. Very distressing, the whole thing.

Love

Roald

Sofie Magdalene in the conservatory of her annex at Roald’s sister, Else’s house near Great Missenden, 1961. In the foreground is Roald’s son Theo, who was still recovering from the injuries he had received the previous year when a rogue New York taxi crushed him against the side of a bus.

February 18th

New York

Dear Mama

Saw Theo at lunchtime today, and Pat, who finished work at 4 PM, has just phoned saying that she is up there now at the hospital. (It’s 5:30 PM.) He’s made a good recovery from this very uncomfortable operation, and the tube appears to be draining well. His sight is coming back slowly, and he can see a person at about 8 feet. He is beginning to take milk and to keep it down, and is moderately cheerful. In fact, altogether as good as can be expected.

I don’t think much of the tubes that they use here for this work, particularly the valve at the lower end, which is meant to open up between 40 mm and 80 mm water column pressure. This valve is literally nothing but a slit in the plastic tube. The thing is made by a small lab in Pasadena, California, and is called the Pudenz-Heyer shunt valve. Do they have anything better in England, something less likely to block and clog? If Ellen gets a chance, could she please ask Wylie?* I don’t understand how that Kyle chap has gone along with so little trouble. Everyone here has blockages all the time. What valve do the English put into a) the heart, and most important, (b) the pleura? Does Wylie have a lot of blockages?

I broke my ankle two weeks ago in the snow and forgot to tell you. I went to a place I know and got an X-ray for five dollars, and the doctor friend read it for me. They wanted to take me to hospital and put the bloody thing in plaster, but I refused. It’s mending now, but it hurt like hell for twelve days, walking on it.

Please thank Asta for her letter, arrived today. Everyone else here is well.

Love

Roald

Theo’s accident confirmed Roald in his view that New York was no place to raise a family and from then on Great Missenden became his permanent year-round base. He had constructed a writing hut in the orchard at the bottom of his garden as a sanctuary from his children and was just beginning to settle into a new story there, when, in 1962, he was stricken by the greatest misfortune of his life. His eldest daughter Olivia died unexpectedly of complications from measles. She was seven years old. Sofie Magdalene had of course gone through the same experience herself forty years earlier, yet there was little she could do to help him. From her annex in Else’s house, ten minutes’ drive away, she gave him what solace she could. But only time could ever begin to heal that wound.

1964 was a happier year. It saw the birth of another daughter, Ophelia, the publication of Roald’s second children’s story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Pat winning a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Hud. But the following February the family faced the third of its terrible reversals. Three months pregnant with their fifth child, Pat suffered a major stroke in Los Angeles, while shooting John Ford’s last movie, Seven Women. She was in a coma for three weeks. On February 20th the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that there was “little hope” for her. Two days later Variety ran the headline, “Film Actress Patricia Neal Dies at 39.”

Roald, Theo, and a young friend laying flowers on the intricate alpine garden Roald constructed around his seven-year-old daughter Olivia’s grave. On the headstone was carved the inscription “She stands before me as a living child.”

But Pat was a fighter. She did not die. On March 10th, almost three weeks after the hemorrhage that nearly killed her, she began to regain consciousness. Her doctors had warned Roald that if Pat came out of the coma she was likely to be “a vegetable” for the rest of her life, but Roald was determined that he would do whatever he could to restore her health. His pioneering intensive therapy yielded amazing results and within three years Pat was back at work and had even been nominated for another Oscar. Her baby, Lucy, had been delivered safely in the summer of 1965.

Throughout the early stages of her recovery, Roald wrote regularly to Sofie Magdalene, informing his eighty-year-old mother of Pat’s progress with characteristic bluntness and lack of sentimentality. The childish need to sugarcoat adversity and protect her from bad news had given way to the understanding that she was someone on whom he could always rely for clear-headed advice and assistance. Mother and son were made of the same material and shared the same practical outlook on life. This was the final crisis they would face together.

Saturday

13515 Romany Drive

Pacific Palisades

California

Dear Mama

It happened like this: Pat came home from the studio at around 5:30. She felt good. At six she had one martini. At six-thirty she went upstairs to bath Tessa. Five minutes later, Sheena called me up. I found her sitting on the bed. She said, ‘I have a terrible pain between the eyes, and I’ve been having hallucinations. I think I am ill.’ I at once found the home phone number of a neuro-surgeon I’ve been working with on our valve (a top neurosurgeon in Los Angeles), and I called him. I said, ‘Come at once.’ As I was speaking to him, Pat lost consciousness and was sick. Charles Carton (the neurosurgeon) said he would send an ambulance at once and he himself would go to the Emergency entrance of the U.C.L.A. Hospital. The ambulance came in 10 minutes. I rode in it with Pat. We got her to the hospital altogether within 25 minutes of her feeling the pain. Charles Carton was waiting. By then Pat had come round and could talk, but her memory had gone. Dr Carton examined her. He said he found no real evidence of cerebral haemorrhage. ‘Perhaps she has had a seizure,’ he said. The fact was that we had got her there so quickly that the real signs (stiff neck etc.) hadn’t had time to develop. I went in to see her. While I was there, she had another haemorrhage and passed out. I called in Dr. Carton. He did a spinal tap on the spot. It showed the spinal fluid scarlet with blood. He rushed her up to X-ray. They injected contrast medium into her neck arteries and took photos. While they were taking them, she had her third and largest haemorrhage. The X-raying took 2 ½ hours. When I was called in to inspect the pictures, it was about 10.30pm. They showed a massive haemorrhage in an artery over the left frontal lobe. Dr Carton said to me, ‘If we operate she will probably not survive. Her respiratory system will pack up.’ I said, ‘What will happen if you don’t operate?’ He said, ‘Then she will die for certain.’ So I said, ‘You must operate at once.’ He agreed. It took an hour to prepare her for the op., and they actually started at midnight. At seven in the morning it was finished, including a tracheotomy, and they brought her up into the ‘Intensive Care Unit’. She had stood it well. Lungs still functioning etc.

This morning, ten days later, she is, as you know, still unconscious. But there are signs of her beginning to come closer to the surface. She opens an eye occasionally (though probably doesn’t register anything she sees), and she squeezes one’s hand, though here again, it is doubtful if this is anything more than an involuntary action.

This morning’s spinal tap showed the fluid becoming far clearer and less bloody. And now all we can do is wait and see.

She has very little use of her right side, right arm and leg, but there is some response in it to stimulation. The left side is okay. The face is unaffected and looks normal. But the hemisphere where the bleeding took place is the speech control, and that may well be damaged. That, of course, is looking far ahead. The first thing is to get her back to consciousness.

Sheena, Angela, and masses of friends have all been wonderful.* There is no trouble about running the house. I am mostly at the hospital. I get there first at 6.30 a.m., see the doctors, come back for breakfast, then return. I make my last visit at 10 p.m., and stay till 11.

Tessa is very good, but obviously disturbed. We are keeping her busy. She goes out all the time to play with friends’ children when she is not at school. She goes to school mornings only, and comes home for lunch. Theo also goes to nursery school mornings.

That’s about all except that Pat couldn’t be in a better hospital. She’s getting fantastic attention, and every possible medical aid.

I won’t write often. Cables and telephone are better.

I don’t know what to say about the work on our house. My inclination is to let them go on with it, and if that is what they are doing, and if they are prepared to do it, I would let them go ahead.

Love to all

Roald

Roald’s very last letter to his mother dates from this period. It was written just before he returned home from Pacific Palisades with Pat and the children. A British magazine had offered to redecorate Gipsy House while the family were away. Sofie Magdalene was keeping an eye on the progress of the works and wrote to him warning him that she did not think he would like what the decorators were doing. They were stripping out old floorboards and antique tiles, installing bookcases with fake books, and painting the walls brown. Roald assured her that everything would be okay. But it wasn’t. When he returned home, he found that—just as his mother had warned him—he had to undo almost everything that had been changed. He later complained to the magazine that the walls had been painted “the colour of elephant’s turds.”⁷⁰

Despite age and infirmity, Sofie Magdalene could still teach her headstrong son a thing or two. He knew that. And so did she. Roald paid a moving tribute to her in the cookbook he wrote with his second wife, Liccy, just before he died in 1990:

She was the matriarch, the mater familias, and her children radiated around her like planets round a sun. In some families children rebel and go as far away as possible from the parents, especially after they are married, because mothers-in-law are not always popular in the household. But with Mama’s children and their marriage partners there was a genuine desire to keep this remarkable old parent within reach.⁷¹

When Sofie Magdalene herself had died twenty-three years earlier, in 1967, Roald had been in hospital and too ill to attend her funeral. His sisters scattered her ashes near the grave in Radyr where her husband Harald and her daughter Astri were buried. Roald did not mourn her. Indeed it was twenty years before he visited the gravesite. Her redoubtable spirit surely continued within him. Yet the absence of any of her letters in Roald’s archive is perplexing. For a man who kept so much correspondence, it is doubly surprising that not one letter survived and it leaves one wondering, who was this mysterious, missing correspondent?

Of course, his side of the correspondence reveals much about her. She was private. She could be obstinate. She shared his fascination with invention, his scurrilous sense of humor and delight in a dirty joke. She gave wise advice and unstinting love. She celebrated self-control and lack of sentimentality. She was calm and level-headed in a crisis. Through war and separation, right up to her own end, she was a loyal, tireless, phlegmatic, and unshockable correspondent.

In all this, mother and son were very much alike. In their later correspondence there is often a confessional tone, a sense that Roald is talking to himself. His letters are honest, unvarnished, almost like entries in a diary. The famous Dahl imagination, the sense of wonder and fantasy, the madcap humor, the naughtiness—the elements, in short, that characterize his children’s fiction—are almost entirely absent. By contrast, the earlier letters—which make up the bulk of this collection—are quite different. They are brimful of these qualities.

In this they reflect the fact that Sofie Magdalene was Roald’s first reader. More than anyone else, it was she who encouraged him to tell stories and nourished his desire to fabricate, exaggerate, and entertain. Reading these letters, one often has the impression of a writer flexing his storytelling muscles, a sense that a literary apprentice is rehearsing, practicing, honing his craft. To use an analogy that Roald himself might have appreciated, we are watching a trainee pilot preparing to fly solo. In this, Sofie Magdalene was an essential and invaluable foil. Without her unique sensibility to guide him, Roald might have returned to work for Shell after the war and eventually retired as a senior executive to play golf, drink whisky, and crack jokes. Such timeless tales as The BFG, Matilda, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Witches might never have seen the light of day.

Thankfully that did not happen. And Sofie Magdalene, who would probably have preferred her son to work in an oil company, instead became unwitting midwife to his development as a writer. Without her correspondence and without the vicissitudes of war, Roald might never have embraced that literary destiny his 1938 horoscope had predicted. And, for that, we all have reason to be grateful.