Page 145 - The Secret Museum

GOING BEHIND THE SCENES AT the museum devoted to the genius of Roald Dahl, I felt a

little like Charlie Bucket must have felt, clutching his golden ticket as he walked
through the wrought-iron gates of the factory belonging to confectionary wizard Willy
Wonka.

Famously, Roald Dahl wrote in a writing hut, which he called his ‘nest’ or
‘womb’, in the garden of his home, Gypsy House, in Great Missenden, a pretty
village in Buckinghamshire. Every morning, Dahl would wander out of his house,
across the garden, and go through a yellow door into his hut. Inside, he had
everything just the way he liked it. He sat in a wingback chair, which had been his

mother’s and placed a specially made writing table covered in a green billiard-table
cover over his knees, just so.

He had a heater taped to the ceiling in the winter and covered the windows
throughout the year – one with a shower curtain, the other with curtains in a fabric
covered in blackbirds. On the walls he taped letters from his family and other things
he loved. On a low table to his right he kept curious objects – a metallic ball made
up of crushed silver chocolate-wrapping paper, a cuneiform tablet and his own
invention, the ‘Wade-Dahl-Til1’ (or WDT) valve.

When Dahl was living in New York, his son, Theo, was out in his pram, being

pushed along by his nanny, when a taxi hit him. His skull was shattered and he started
to go blind because of fluid on his brain. Dahl contacted Stanley Wade, a hydraulic
engineer and Kenneth Till, a neurosurgeon. Dahl loved knowing what made things
tick, had experienced brain injury first hand, and he imagined that, as a threesome,
they could come up with something truly brilliant. The trio invented the WDT valve
to help Dahl’s son recover. Three thousand children around the world were helped
by their invention.

Also on the table, right beside his chair, he kept a mug containing six trusty yellow

HB pencils and, above them, stuck to the wall, an electric pencil sharpener. He wrote
with the pencils each day, on yellow A4 paper imported from America. As he wrote,
Dahl stored everything – letters, notebooks, first, second and third drafts – in order,
neatly tucked away inside his hut.

When the Roald Dahl Museum opened in the village just down the road from
Dahl’s house, all of these letters, notebooks and drafts of stories were moved to the
museum. They are kept under lock and key in a small room, next to the museum
archivist’s desk. I went to have a look.

To get to the archive I went up some stairs leading off the courtyard of the
museum. As the archivist unlocked the door, I looked out of the window of her office,

down into a room of the museum below. It was filled with giggling children, and
images of Dahl’s creations.

We stepped inside the room, filled with row upon row of grey boxes. Inside each
box are piles of letters, photographs and drafts of stories, in which each of these