A dead mouse in gobstoppers seeded Matilda’s cruelty
Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) sold more than three hundred million books with macabre warmth for children and twist endings for adults. At eight, he and four friends planted a dead mouse in Mrs Pratchett’s sweet-shop jar—the “Great Mouse Plot of 1924”—and later met her echo in Miss Trunchbull.
Born in Llandaff, Cardiff, to wealthy Norwegian immigrants Harald and Sofie Magdalene Dahl, he was named for explorer Roald Amundsen and spoke Norwegian at home. Sister Astri died of appendicitis in 1920 when he was three; weeks later his father died of pneumonia, leaving a probate fortune of £158,917. Sofie stayed in Wales so the children could attend English schools. At six he met Beatrix Potter at Hill Top. Repton School brought hazing he never forgave; Cadbury test boxes of new chocolates sparked the dream behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. An English master once wrote that Dahl persistently used words to mean the opposite of what he intended.
After Shell postings in Kenya and Tanganyika, he joined the RAF in November 1939. Soloing a Tiger Moth after seven hours forty minutes, he later crashed a Gloster Gladiator in the Egyptian desert on 19 September 1940—fractured skull, smashed nose, temporary blindness—an injury he came to credit for creative unleashing. He rose to acting wing commander as pilot and intelligence officer. Postwar fame brought the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, Children’s Author of the Year in 1990, sixteenth place on The Times’s fifty greatest British writers since 1945, and, in 2021, Forbes’s top-earning dead celebrity.
Children’s shelves carry James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches, The BFG, Fantastic Mr Fox; adults get Tales of the Unexpected. Villainous grown-ups face kindhearted children in dark comedy that still champions warmth underneath the bite—gobstoppers, witches, and all.
Source: Roald Dahl
