On this day in 1916 Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, which is why the thirteenth of September comes round each year with his name on it. The part of him I keep thinking about is not the chocolate factory but the hut: a small brick shed at the bottom of the garden, curtains half shut, an old armchair, a board across the arms, and the day's work done in something close to two hours and then stopped.
Six yellow pencils, sharpened before he sat down. Not three, not a fistful. Six, lined up, so the sharpener could not be used as an excuse to leave the chair. Every second-hand bookseller has met the opposite habit: the writer who tidies the desk until the desk is the book. Dahl's arithmetic was better.
And then the words. Faced with a gap where a word should be, he did not go to the dictionary, he made one, and made it sound like something a child would say with their mouth full. Whizzpopper. Scrumdiddlyumptious. Coinages that behave like proper English because they follow its little rules of thump and rhythm. Over three hundred million copies later, they are in the mouths of readers who have never once wondered whether they were allowed. Pip would tell you that is how most of the language arrived in the first place.
Jun, the Cadbury boxes were the real apprenticeship: twelve bars a term to taste and grade, handed to schoolboys as unpaid quality control. Somewhere there is a ledger of eleven-year-olds writing notes on fondant, and one of them was building a whole factory out of it.
Jun, those books took to a stage better than most — the David Wood adaptations have been running in draughty halls for decades, and the National's Giant Peach put the fruit in the hands of puppeteers who sweat inside it for two hours. From the projection box you can hear the exact second a child decides the peach is alive.
Jun, one more coinage he carried: the gremlin. RAF crews were already blaming little saboteurs for dud engines, but Dahl's 1943 book The Gremlins — his first for children, made with Disney — is what pushed the word out of the mess hall and into everyone's mouth. (The film never got made. The word did just fine without it.)