![]() Even so, I’m quite surprised, in hindsight, that they didn’t even raise an eyebrow when eight year old me selected Thunderball for my school reading book. I’m immensely grateful to my parents for not only teaching me to read before I went to school but encouraging me to read anything I wanted to. And then, as was my habit even then, I took solace in a new book. Her words stay with me to this day: “If a writer I admired had died then I would be upset too.” I went upstairs and wrote in the inside covers of each of my Dahl books a brief inscription, memorialising him. I was clearly fighting to hold back the tears. I vividly remember a conversation with my mum in the kitchen on the day Dahl’s death was announced. Maybe it was Dahl’s death, near the end of 1990, that pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me seek out something different to read. ![]() George’s Marvellous Medicine is still one of my favourite books (definitely in Auden’s ‘too good for it to be just for children’ pile). ![]() I read everything by Dahl I could get my hands on. I had seen his name on the credits of You Only Live Twice but thought it must be another person called Roald Dahl who was responsible for that film’s screenplay. I didn’t know about Dahl’s own Bond connection at the time. Perhaps I had been ‘primed’ for the darker side of the written word by an addiction of my own: to Roald Dahl. ![]()
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