How my father’s bedtime stories shaped my life

00:00 05:17

Kate Weinberg has narrated this article for you to listen to.

It’s half an hour before lights out when my dad arrives at my bedroom door holding Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. He kicks off his shoes, loosens his tie and wedges himself next to me in my small single bed, his toes waggling in their socks as they regain freedom after a long day in the office. In the evening he smells of the menthol toothpicks he always carries in his top pocket (in the morning, when he drops me off at school, he smells of the spicy pink toothpaste which I once tried and which burned the roof of my mouth). I lie with my head resting in the crook of his arm as he flicks the book open to the first page, clears his throat, making his Adam’s apple bob, and starts reading: ‘When I was four months old, my mother died suddenly and my father was left to look after me all by himself…’

When people ask me why I became an author, I always scroll back to this scene. I could tell them that it was also because my mother had died suddenly, when I was three and a half, leaving my older sisters and me unmoored in a frightening new world in which stories became my escape. That would be true, too. But my mind always tugs me back to these moments with my father at the end of the day, squashed up in bed as he drew pictures in the air with his deep reading voice.

The green walls of my bedroom would fade away and we became other people in faraway worlds: Danny and his father picking their way through the forest as they went to outwit the greedy Victor Hazell by drugging and poaching all of his pheasants.