I once watched a documentary that claimed polar bears survive because they are endlessly curious. It showed a polar bear coming up to a camera and sniffing it and poking it. I think writers are a bit like polar bears. They are forever sniffing out things, listening and remembering, so that they can turn them into stories, which they sell and that helps them make a living, which means that they survive too!
On the way to his top-secret job in North America, Roald met someone called Douglas Bisgood, a wounded pilot like him. Douglas had fought in the Battle of Britain and before that he had been a racing car driver. As the two men headed across the Atlantic, they joked and gossiped together.
During the war, RAF pilots became famous for inventing their own slang – special words and ways of saying things. For example, a plane was a ‘crate’ and a crash was a ‘prang’. Put that together and they might say, ‘Did you hear about Lofty? He pranged his crate …’ These pilots, who were living life on the edge, never knowing which flight might be their last, also seemed to have invented their own folklore. They made up stories about little mischievous imp-like creatures who lived in and around the planes, often making the aircraft go horribly wrong but sometimes protecting the pilots. They called them ‘gremlins’.
For someone on the verge of becoming a writer, this sort of thing is treasure! Roald’s mother had once filled his young head with stories of the trolls and giants of Norwegian folklore. Now, on the deck of the SS Batori, Roald and Douglas swapped folklore and made up new stories about gremlins. Sounds like good fun to me.
In Washington, Roald found himself far away from the dangerous world of the fighter pilot and far away from hungry, bombed-out, war-torn London. There were massive amounts of food and drink, and lots of parties. He had oodles of time to listen to his beloved music. All he had to do was give speeches about the great work that the RAF was doing and keep his ear to the ground. Roald had to play the part of a handsome, brave, British chap who had done his best to win the war. It wasn’t difficult, because he was and he had.
Meanwhile, inside his head, the gremlins were stirring. And Roald couldn’t keep them to himself. He wrote to a magazine about his idea:
This is the Roald Dahl I recognize – the Roald Dahl who writes about amazing, funny, odd creatures, making it seem as if they’re part of everyday life and – guess what – doing something rude!
Next, he got down to writing an actual story. He called the gremlins’ wives ‘Fifinellas’ and their children ‘Widgets’ or ‘Flipperty-Gibbets’. They lived in a ‘beautiful green wood far up in the North. They could walk up and down trees in their special suction boots’. Then horrible humans came and chopped down their trees so that they could build factories and roads and airports. So the gremlins took revenge! They attached themselves to planes and caused accidents. They moved mountains so that the planes would fly straight into them. And they made tiny holes in the side of a plane flown by a pilot called Gus. But Gus was wily and inventive. He fed the gremlins postage stamps and played tricks on them. And, in the end, they become friends.
Roald had created a story – a good story. But what was he to do with it? How could he turn it into a book?
First, believe it or not, he had to show the story to his bosses for their approval because he was still working for the RAF and everything he did, said and wrote belonged to them. Then he sent it to a magazine where it was published for the first time.
Most writers will tell you that they had a lucky break. Perhaps someone sitting at a desk or next to them on a train or at a party was just the right person at just the right time to help. And perhaps this someone not only was able to see something good in the writing but was also in a job where they could help the story to get out there. For Roald, this someone was a friend who knew the famous film-maker Walt Disney. Walt Disney read Roald’s gremlin story and cabled back a message saying that he was interested in turning it into a movie.
WOW. How cool is that!
I don’t know what Roald did when he heard this. I like to think that he jumped up and down, ran round the block, rang his mother and sisters in England and threw a party. But if he did, he kept it quiet. He was pleased. But he didn’t let himself get carried away.
Roald was invited to Hollywood. He took leave from his job and, before he knew it, he was in the most glamorous place on earth, meeting top movie stars, like the great silent-movie actor Charlie Chaplin. They thought Roald was funny and cute and quite extraordinary, with a really cool accent. They’d read his story. And they loved it. It wasn’t long before Disney ‘shot a test reel’ – that’s a try-out bit of film.
But, although The Gremlins had become his very first book and it was going to be a Walt Disney movie, Roald wasn’t happy. He didn’t particularly like the Disney drawings or the toy gremlins you could buy in the shops. And he found out that Walt Disney himself was worrying whether the time had passed for this kind of film about pilots in the war. Eventually, Disney gave up on the project and told Roald that he wasn’t going to finish the movie. That was it. The End.
Except it wasn’t The End.
Roald Dahl was nearly twenty-seven years old and now ready to become a great writer. All he needed was a place to write, time to write and enough reasons to go on writing.
It was really The Beginning …