Page 146 - The Secret Museum

creations was brought to life, with HB pencil, on that imported yellow paper.

The seeds of some ideas live in the pages of Dahl’s notebooks, two of which I

saw. Each one is red, with the word ‘Masterpiece’ embossed on the cover. The
books are filled with one- or two-line pencil scribbles: ‘a pale grey face like a bowl
of porridge’, ‘a woman with one large muscular calf. What does this denote?’ and
‘man in bathtub using kite to channel electricity’. Each thought shimmers with
potential.

Some stayed in the notebook, while others were developed into stories, for
instance, The BFG. I saw the moment Dahl thought of the character: he wrote the
letters of the giant’s name in one of the notebooks and circled them. Indeed Matilda

had been in his ideas book for 20 years before he began to write about her.
Each story took a while to get right. In an early draft of Charlie and the

Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas were called Whipple-scrumpets. At first
the BFG befriends a boy named Jody, rather than a tiny girl named Sophie who saw
the giant at her window, catching dreams.

I pulled down the Matilda box because I was curious to see how that tale had
evolved. I read through Draft 1. The story was called ‘The Miracle Child’, and
Chapter 1 was called ‘Wickedness’. In this first version, handwritten by Dahl in
1986, ‘Matilda was born wicked and she stayed wicked no matter how hard her
parents tried to make her good. She was just about the most wicked child in the

world.’

Matilda plays the same tricks on her parents as she does in the published version,
but her motivation is different: in the final draft she is trying to get her own back on
her parents, who couldn’t give a stuff about her, whereas in the original draft she did
these things simply because she was ‘wicked’.

The first draft is pretty short. There is hardly any mention of Miss Trunchball;
Miss Honey is called Miss Hayes; and, at the end, Matilda dies. She discovers her
magical powers – being able to move things with her eyes – in a class at school, and
goes over to Miss Hayes’s house to investigate her new skills. On the way home to

Matilda’s, she and her teacher see a car accident. Some children are trapped in a
mini-bus, underneath a truck. With no time to lose Matilda lifts the truck off the mini-
bus, using only the power of her eyes, and frees the trapped children. And then,
exhausted from the effort, she dies.

It’s not the story of the unloved, imaginative girl rescued by an understanding adult
that everyone loves today, and has a totally different ending. It took Roald Dahl ages
to get the story he wanted to tell to come out right. He handed each draft of yellow
papers to his secretary, Wendy. Then he’d annotate her typed pages and carry on. It

wasn’t until Draft 6 that he was satisfied with Matilda. Perfection was a long
process.
I wanted to know what the first item in the archive was, so I had a look and found