Are writers born or made? The answer, by the end of Love from Boy — a selection of Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother drawn from the 40 years of correspondence they kept up, lovingly edited and deftly commented upon by his biographer Donald Sturrock — is surely that they are both.
Even as a 12-year-old, regaling her with tales of derring-do at Repton, the economy and vivid turn of phrase are evident that would characterise both his grand guignol short stories for adults and the children’s books for which he eventually became both loved and lauded. Out ice-skating, ‘I had eight chaps pulling me with a long rope at a terrific lick and I sat down in the middle of it. My bottom is all blue now.’ A year later, a maths teacher is described as ‘A short man with a face like a field elderberry, and…a voice like a frog, no chest and a pot-belly, no doubt a species of Rumble-hound.’
Sturrock thinks that Dahl’s mother, Sofie Magdelene (widowed when Roald was four), was the perfect reader for him.
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