Roald Dahl was a highly intelligent, complex man. He wrote realistic, sometimes frightening stories for children that parents the world over will be reading to their children for generations to come - wonderful books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He married a very beautiful and talented woman Patricia Neal - you might remember her in Breakfast at Tiffany's. They were married for 30 years and had 5 children together.
Dahl was born to Norwegian parents and served in the Royal Airforce in the Second World War as a Wing Commander as well as being a spy for England.
Patsy Neal was born in a mining camp in Kentucky, the daughter of a transportation manager for the South Coal and Coke Company. She knew she was born to be on the stage when one day she was asked to do a monologue at church when she was about 11 years old - obviously she did it very well.
She had an affair with Ronald Regan but it ended when she fell in love with Gary Cooper, her leading man in The Fountainhead. Cooper was 25 years older and had been married for 16 years. When his wife found out about the affair, she sent Neal a telegram demanding that she end it. Cooper's daughter Maria spat at Neal in public. Cooper toyed with the idea of leaving his wife but never did and when she found she was pregnant, he asked her to have an abortion and she did. She said later that she regretted it for the rest of her life. When the affair ended, she had a nervous breakdown.
She met Dahl at a dinner party when he was working for the New Yorker magazine. He was 10 years older than her and began working for MI6 as a wartime secret agent. He had the reputation of a womaniser and in general, he treated his women very badly but he fell hard for Neal and they married in 1953.
They decided to settle in Britain and also had a house in New York. In 1963, just after Neal finished Breakfast at Tiffany's, their four month old son Theo was brain-damaged in an accident. Their nanny, who was also a close family friend, was waiting at the lights with baby Theo in the pram to cross the road when a taxi came screaming around the corner and hit the pram head on. Fluid built up in his cranial cavity, seriously affecting his sight. Doctors inserted a tube to drain the fluid but it became blocked which caused him to go blind and he was continually taken back to hospital for more operations to correct the problem.
Typical of Dahl's ingenuity, he contacted toy maker Stanley Wade and Paediatric neurosurgeon Kenneth Till and together they invented a valve which ensured the tube would never become blocked again. The valve helped save the sight of almost 3,000 children around the world.
Two years after Theo's accident, disaster struck again. There was no vaccine for Measles at that time and Dahl asked advice from his friend about it who was also a doctor. He said it was quite okay - it wouldn't do her any harm to get measles, it was just another childhood problem that she would most likely sail through. And she did, her fever went down and she was well enough for her father to teach her how to play chess. Then suddenly without any warning, after being rushed to hospital, she died. It was encephalitis - a complication of measles, which affects one child in a thousand. Neal knew Dahl was destroyed and he retreated into himself. He was furious that he didn't get the chance to save her, one minute she seemed alright and the next she was gone. Neal remembers they experienced 'a landslide of anger and frustration' that almost killed them all. But nothing is written about how Neal coped with this tragic time in her life.
In 1965, pregnant with Dahl's fifth child, Neal was sitting on the bed and she experienced severe pain in her head. Dahl rushed to her side and knew she was having a stroke, in fact she suffered three severe strokes. Doctors operated to remove the blood clots from her brain and she was in a coma for 21 days. When she came to, she was paralysed down her right side, unable to walk, talk or speak properly and she was partially blind in one eye.
Luckily, their fifth child Lucy was born healthy. Dahl knew that she had to re-learn what she had lost quickly, otherwise her brain would never recover. So he imposed a ceaseless, some said a cruel regime, forcing her to ask for things by name or go without. Within 10 months she had fully recovered except for diminished sight in one eye. They made a movie about it 'The Patricia Neal Story" which told the painful, grueling story of how Dahl had bludgeoned his wife to recovery. His regime has since been adopted as standard therapy for stroke victims. Now well enough to return to work, she was offered - and turned down - the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. But in 1968 she won an Oscar nomination for The Subject Was Roses.
Sadly, the marriage didn't survive. She discovered that Felicity Crosland was Dahl's mistress - it completely destroyed her and she left the UK for good. In her 1988 biography Neal wrote "My life has been linked to a Greek tragedy and the actress in me cannot deny the comparison."
After her death from lung cancer last Sunday at her summer home in Massachusettes, her family said "She faced her final illness as she had the many trials she had endured - with indomitable grace, good humour and a great deal of her self-described stubbornness'. Her last words on her extraordinary life were 'I've had a lovely time".
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