I will be forever grateful to Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916 – November 23, 1990) for the deeply grooved etchings of my childhood. The unlikely gentle heroes, the impossibly complete settings, the villains, the love of sweets. Somewhere in his pages, I decided to live in England; in my childhood mind, I was already there.

Roald Dahl's Boy: Tales of Childhood brings us directly to a childhood that, while embellished, wasn't imagined. It is every bit as wondrous as his books (as are his memories of flying off into young adulthood).

This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten. None of these things is important, but each of them made such a tremendous impression on me that I have never been able to get them out of my mind.

New York artist Maira Kalman once admitted that "the desire to empty my mind" was her launching point for writing and illustration. I imagine Dahl was similarly motivated.

Born in 1916 in Wales to Norwegian parents, Dahl remembers his father as inventive, industrial, and whimsical:

He harboured a curious theory about how to develop a sense of beauty in the minds of his children. Every time my mother became pregnant, he would wait until the last three months of her pregnancy and then he would announce to her that 'the glorious walks' must begin. These glorious walks consisted of him taking her to places of great beauty to the countryside and walking with her for about an hour each day so that she could absorb the splendor of the surroundings.

His father's early death left Roald and his four siblings alone in Wales with their young Norwegian mother. "A less courageous woman," writes Dahl, "would almost certainly have sold the house, packed her bags, and headed straight back to Norway." His mother's fortitude, conviction in the English school system, and ability to steward each child to adulthood were among the brightest lights of Dahl's life.   The way we write about our mothers and how we see their effect on us and see them as individuals (or fail to), and whether we see them differently when we become adults, fascinates me. I believe it is impossible to paint our mothers without including a high degree of self-reflection.  
I gathered some of these thoughts in What We Write About When We Write About Our Mothers but read more from Maya Angelou, Rebecca Solnit, and John Cleese.

"The Last Chapter" by Quentin Blake, Dahl's longtime illustrator. This print hangs over my desk.

The world should be grateful Mrs. Dahl enrolled young Roald in English schools. From them comes a treasure trove of characters and narratives and, of course, villains.

We called them masters in those days, not teachers, and at St. Peter's the one I feared most of all … was Captain Hardcastle. This man was slim and wiry and he played football. On the football field, he wore white running shorts, white gymshoes and short white socks. His legs were as hard and thin as ram's legs and the skin around his calves was almost exactly the colour of mutton fat. The hair on his head was not ginger. It was a brilliant dark vermilion, like a ripe orange, and it was plastered back with immense quantities of brilliantine.

As one would imagine, there is also incredible pain and emotion in these early days. The all-encompassing heaviness that overwhelms a child but which adult Dahl puts to words.

I was homesick during the whole of my first term at St. Peter's. Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don't know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die. The only comfort is that both homesickness and seasickness are instantly curable. The first goes away the moment you walk out of the school grounds.

In Dahl's childhood, adults had power and wielded it viciously.

The Matron was a large fair-haired woman with a bosom. Her age was probably no more than twenty-eight but it made no difference whether she was twenty-eight or sixty-eight because to us a grown-up was a grown-up and all grown-ups were dangerous creatures at this school.

Once you climbed to the top of the stairs and set foot on the dormitory floor, you were in the Matron's power, and the source of this power was the unseen but frightening figure of the Headmaster lurking down in the depths of the study below. At any time she liked the Matron could send you down in your pyjamas and dressing-gown to report to this merciless giant, and whenever this happened you got caned on the spot.

Compare the stodgy, uniformed, and often violent existence of prep school with the Dahl family summer holidays back in Norway:

The summer holidays! Those magic words! The mere mention of them used to send shivers of joy rippling over my skin. All my summer holidays, from when I was four years old to when I was seventeen (1920 to 1932), were totally idyllic. This, I am certain, was because we always went to the same idyllic place and that place was Norway. In a way ... going to Norway every summer was like going home.

There is something in Dahl that forever seeks freedom denied to him during his school days and granted in Norway. "A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."

Dahl is not cuddly; he's not avuncular, he's not even sweet. And yet, his writing persists. Like those of Dickens, his characters are some of the most memorable in literature. His characters seek freedom, safety, comfort, and joy.

Don't we all?

Roald Dahl and friend at his writing desk. Photo courtesy of The Roald Dahl Museum.

Dahl is buried in Great Missenden, a town just west and worlds away from London. On these streets, the BFG blew dreams through windows, and Matilda read piles of books in the library. The Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden has lots of artifacts, like his doodles, drafts, uniforms, and even his chair in which he hand-wrote his books, a wooden board laid flat over the arms for a desk.

 Roald Dahl's inventive list of made-up words.

Something about Dahl's experience sounded familiar, and I realized he went to the same prep school as John Cleese, whose childhood contained mirth and sorrow.  These two men have much in common: strong relationships with their mothers (though Cleese's was a negative relationship), commanding height (both hit six feet before they were twelve), and brutal schooling. They also share the ability to perpetuate and expand their imagination to a massive body of creative work.

What formed these men? What forms any of us?

Who knows what flotsam in our unconscious floats to the top and forms our narrative of who we are. Dahl wrote, "This is not an autobiography" because that would suggest he'd be contained therein. And he's not.

The pages of Boy: Tales of Childhood are, like all Dahl's books, full of stories. Beautiful, life-forming stories. I think Dahl and the more contemporary Charlie Mackesy, illustrator and child at heart, would have been quite simpatico. On the other hand, Dahl's contemporary A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh and other children's verse, might have bristled his feathers a bit with Dahl's propensity to youthful silliness.