SUGAR-COATED PENCILSWriting the Book

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

2 Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory

clockwise from above left:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been translated into fifty-five languages, including: Swedish (Tidens Forlag, 2007); Georgian (Bakur Sulakauri Publishing, 2010); Tamil (Vikatan, 2008); French (Gallimard Jeunesse, 1978); and Arabic (Samir Éditeur, 2011).

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

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Introduction

In 1960 Roald Dahl was living in America with his wife, the fi lm star Patricia Neal, their two daughters, Olivia and Tessa, and their newborn son, Theo. To entertain the children, Roald Dahl would make up stories. One of them was about a lonely boy who lived in a town that was also home to an extraordinary chocolate factory. ‘Having read my children all the available books and come across some really crummy ones,’ he said later, ‘I thought – why not try to write a children’s book?’

So began the gestation of the story that would lead to one of Roald Dahl’s best-known, bestselling, best-loved creations, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Most of us, when we read as children, imagine vaguely (if we imagine the author at all) that he or she simply sat down one day and wrote seamlessly, line after line, page after page, exactly the book we were reading – as if transcribing something already fully realized in his or her head. Today’s children in English schools – well versed in the national-curriculum directive to plan, draft and edit their writing – are probably less naive, but it’s still tempting to imagine that, to the best writers, stories all come easily.

Of course, with very rare exceptions, the creative process isn’t that kind. It is almost never a matter of simply putting thoughts on to paper,

previous spread:Roald Dahl and his dog

Chopper getting his daily treat (1988). (Illustrations by

Quentin Blake.)

above:Photograph of Roald’s jar of

wine gums, and his slippers illustrated by Quentin Blake.

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

4 Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory

typing it up and handing it in. Writers draft and redraft, paring down parts of their original version, building up others, adding and subtracting characters, plotlines, chapters, paragraphs and generally doing whatever is necessary to narrow the distance between what exists in the mind’s eye and what turns up on the page.

For all its casual, effortless-looking brilliance, Roald Dahl took his writing seriously and worked hard at it. The plot of a short story – which was the form of writing that first made him famous – could take him weeks to perfect. His first book for children, James and the Giant Peach (published in 1961), took two years to write. Charlie, however, took even longer to bring to fruition because during its writing Roald suffered two of the greatest blows of his life.

The first came on 5 December 1960, a few months after Roald had sent a first draft of the story, then titled ‘Charlie’s Chocolate Boy’, to his US literary agent, Mike Watkins.

The Dahls’ nanny was pushing their baby, Theo, in his pram through New York City as she brought three-year-old Tessa home from her nursery school for lunch. As they crossed the road at the corner of 85th Street and Madison Avenue, a taxi hit the pram. The pram was thrown into the side of a bus and crushed. Theo was terribly, terribly injured and at first it looked to the doctors as if he would not survive. He did, but developed hydrocephalus (when spinal fluid accumulates around the brain, putting damaging pressure on it) and had to undergo repeated operations to insert a shunt into his head to drain the fluid away. It had to be done again and again because the shunt’s valve kept clogging, causing Theo to develop a fever and become temporarily blind each time. Shortly after the family returned to England in May 1961, Theo suffered another relapse.

While the doctors were doing everything they could for Theo, Roald set himself to investigating whether there was

Ukrainian edition (A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha Publishers, 2005).

Romanian edition (Editura Arthur, 2012).

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

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any better shunt available. When he found there wasn’t – many children with Theo’s type of injuries were having to undergo the same multiple surgeries – Roald began discussing the matter with Theo’s neurosurgeon, Kenneth Till, mining every ounce of Till’s expert understanding of the problem. Roald then took the problem to his friend Stanley Wade. Wade was an engineer whose hobby was making miniature engines for toy aeroplanes and who ran a factory in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, which produced precision hydraulic pumps.

Together, and almost unbelievably, the three men invented and produced a new and better valve. In June 1962 the first Wade–Dahl–Till valve was inserted into the head of a patient in Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. It worked beautifully. Eighteen months later, it was on the market, and at less than a third of the cost of its rival. It happened so swiftly and cost so little because the three men had agreed from the beginning never to accept any profit from it. It was exported all over the world and – although Theo was well enough to not need it by the time his father’s invention was ready – it was used to treat thousands of children before it was superseded by newer technology.

The Dahl family in the garden of Gipsy House, in

Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire (1961). From left to right: Olivia,

Patricia, Theo, Tessa, Roald.

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

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Roald Dahl dedicated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to his son. ‘I don’t remember when I fi rst opened the book and saw my name in it,’ says Theo, who now lives in Florida with his wife and daughter. ‘But I always found Charlie unwrapping his Golden Ticket the best part. I love the book. It was a beautiful book to have dedicated to me.’

In January 1962, Sheila St Lawrence, who’d worked with Mike Watkins, wrote to Roald Dahl, evidently in response to a letter from him saying that he was suffering from writer’s block: ‘It is wonderful news that Theo is doing so well. I suppose that Pat and you rarely have a calm and unworried moment. “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy” will just have to come along in his own good time when you’re in the moodfor him.’

By the autumn of 1962, relief and happiness at Theo’s recovery seemed to have freed Roald enough to produce a second draft of ‘Charlie’s Chocolate Boy’ – now renamed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – in which he had enough confi dence to send it to his publisher, Knopf. He had just received an enthusiastic letter about it from Virginie Fowler, Knopf’s editor of children’s books, when a second and even crueller blow struck the family.

Olivia and Tessa arrived home from school with a note warning parents about a measles outbreak. Wholesale vaccination against the disease did not exist then – trials were being held, and it would be

from left to right:Greek edition (Psichogios Publications, 2013).

Vietnamese edition (Kim Dong Publishing House, 2008).

Chinese edition (Global Kids Books, 2011).

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

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introduced in the US just a year later and in the UK in 1968 – and while a special dose was obtained for the still terribly fragile Theo, it could not be made available for anyone else.

Seven-year-old Olivia caught the bug and was put to bed. She slept for twenty-four hours and her mother called the doctor, who came and went without notable alarm. Roald tried to entertain her by making little animals out of coloured pipe cleaners, but she remained drowsy and eventually fell asleep again. When the doctor returned, he realized she had slipped into a coma and called an ambulance. Olivia was taken to hospital and died there that night.

It is perhaps both impossible and unwise to try to describe the depths of anyone’s grief at losing a child. Recalling it twenty years later in her autobiography, Patricia Neal still struggled to articulate her own grief, and says simply of her husband that he ‘all but lost his mind’.

Writing is a solitary and inward-looking profession, which was unhelpful in such a situation as Roald’s at that time. In a letter to his publishers six months later Roald wrote, ‘I feel right now as though I’ll never in my life do any more! I simply cannot seem to get started again.’

Eventually, however, the need – both financial and personal – to work reasserted itself and another draft of Charlie took shape. And another. And another.

from left to right:

Lithuanian edition (Garnelis, 2008).

Japanese edition (Hyoron-Sha, 2005).

Hebrew edition (Kinneret, 2005).

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd

Manuscript page from the earliest existing draft of ‘Charlie’s Chocolate Boy’ (c. 1961).

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Text copyright (c) Lucy Mangan. Courtesy of Penguin Books Ltd