Chapter 1: The start

A message from Roald Dahl

Sometimes, a person writes a book all about his or her life. These books are normally very boring. This is not one of those books. I do not want to write everything about me.

But some things happened to me in my early life, and I did not forget them. They are not important, but I remember them fifty or sixty years later. Some things are funny. Some things are not nice. All of them are true.

Chapter 1: The start

My father, Harald Dahl, was Norwegian. He came from a small town near Oslo in Norway. His father - my grandfather - had a shop in the town. People went to the shop to buy food and things for their houses. The shop had nearly everything!

At the age of fourteen, my father had an accident and badly hurt his arm. A doctor came, but he was not a good doctor. He hurt my father’s arm more, and then the arm had to be cut from my father’s body.

My father had only one arm, but he learned to do lots of things with it. He made one side of a fork into a knife because he wanted to cut his own food. He took his special fork everywhere with him in a little bag.

My father lived in a small town, but he wanted to see the world. He finished school and got a job on a ship. It took him to Calais in France. From there, he went to Paris. In Paris, my father met a young woman called Marie and married her.

At that time, many ships travelled across the world, and they needed fuel, food and thousands of other things. My father started a company that had all these things. The ships bought everything they needed from his company, and my father made a lot of money. He took his family to Wales because Cardiff was an important city for ships. My father and Marie had two children (a girl and a boy), but then Marie sadly died.

My father was sad, and he wanted a new wife. In 1911, he went on holiday to Norway. There, he met a young Norwegian woman called Sofie and married her. They had four more children: two girls, a boy (me, in 1916) and a third girl. Now they had a happy family with six children.

We all lived together in a big house in Wales, in a village eight miles west of Cardiff. We had chickens, cows and horses.

Our big family was very happy. But then my sister Astri got an illness, and she died. She was only seven years old. My father got a different illness, and he died, too. Maybe he did not fight his illness because he was very sad about Astri. Today, these illnesses do not often kill people. Doctors can give people something to make them better, but, in 1920, doctors could not help my family.

Now my mother had five children, a new baby and no husband. She was a young Norwegian in a strange country, and her family were all in Norway. But my mother stayed in the United Kingdom because my father wanted his children to go to school in England. “English schools are the best schools in the world,” he always said.

I do not remember a lot from my earliest years, but I can remember one thing very well: my tricycle. A tricycle is a bike for small children, but it has three wheels.

My sister and I loved to ride our tricycles as fast as we could in the middle of the road. It felt good to go very fast. We could ride in the road because there were not many cars in those days.