The year was 1980. The scene takes place in a bookshop on Westover Road in Bournemouth. I don’t think it’s there any more. My mum was in a bad mood. My brother and I had probably been messing around, and she couldn’t find anywhere to park, so she pulled up on the double yellow lines outside the bookshop and told us to “get out” and to “hurry up”.
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Fast forward to good old 2017, Day Sixteen of freelance writing comes just after the first camping trip of the summer and just before a trip to Bournemouth to see my mum. Since becoming parents, we have evolved into experienced campers, but I wouldn’t say I am a natural camper, so Day Sixteen involved recovery! Day Sixteen also involved trying to fit everything in: interview, appointments, eye test, hair cut – it was a busy day, a day when it was easy to forget the resolutions I’ve made for myself. In fact Day Sixteen is a busy-ness day and not really a writing day at all.
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Back in 1980, I remember we had to climb a set of red carpeted stairs. Either the bookshop was above a sweet shop, or they had an upstairs where they did author signings. He must have been on a book signing tour for the launch of The Twits, because when we had climbed the stairs we came face-to-face with a bookshelf covered with copies of The Twits – with bright yellow covers – and nothing else. I looked at those copies of The Twits a bit like Charlie looks at the Wonka Bars at the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That was something I couldn’t possibly afford. I wanted it, badly, but I didn’t have any money. (A quick google reveals that because The Twits was published in January 1980, I was probably seven in the scene above the bookshop and my brother was probably five. My mum, who was born in the second world war, wasn’t even forty.)
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Back in 2017, Day Sixteen, I think I got up early to write that morning. I might have thrown a half proof-read manuscript into my bag and carried it round with me. But it’s significant to me because of the amount I tried to squeeze in, and then had to speed from one thing to the next. Not entirely my fault. I was parent in charge of small boy, and parent trying to get ready to go on holiday, but I created my own experience that day. Note to self: take it slowly, and take it easy, more often.
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In that upstairs bookshop in 1980, I am pretty sure my brother and I were confronted by a shop assistant who was annoyed that we didn’t have money to buy The Twits. I only remember him or her vaguely, but I do remember the sense of embarrassment. There was also a sense that we may not be allowed, that we might be told to go away. Anyway, the man himself sat behind a desk covered in a red velvet tablecloth, and there weren’t many other people there. I think they must have been nearly done.
The room we were in was small, more like a lobby. He stood up and came over to us. To the seven-year-old me, he was huge – a giant – and grumpy, like the BFG, although I didn’t know it. I didn’t hear what he said. He may have been annoyed with us for not buying a copy of the book, or he may have been telling the shop assistant that he didn’t mind us being there. Who knows? My brother produced a scrap of paper for him to sign, and he signed it. Then we left, found my mum’s car on the double yellow lines outside, and bundled into the back.
Now I already loved Danny the Champion of the World, Fantastic Mr Fox, Charlie (of course) and James and the Giant Peach by this stage in my life. (For a sense of context, George’s Marvellous Medicine, BFG, Matilda and The Witches had yet to be published – and it’s hard to imagine the world without those stories.) In other words, this guy was a hero. I found it hard to take in.
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Fast forward to 2017 again, and nearly 40 years later, I still wish that I had had the money to buy a copy of The Twits. Now I’m a grown up, more than five years older than my Mum was in 1980. I have a son who loves Roald Dahl (and he owns at least two copies of The Twits, plus an audio version) and the other day over breakfast I told him the story of how I had met Dahl once in a bookshop in Bournemouth – and that sense of embarrassment, and of needing to look after my brother, and my mum on the double yellows outside, and the longing for a copy of the book, and the red carpet on the stairs. I realised, as I was telling the story, that this story is worth telling.
The point I’m trying to make goes something like this. I read on a book designer’s webpage recently about writing ‘a big why’. (You can take a look at what he says here.) That meeting with Roald Dahl illustrates my ‘big why’ in a way. I want my writing to make a difference in people’s lives. I think I realised what I wanted to be when I grew up when I met Dahl face-to-face. I also believe that reading makes a difference in people’s lives: a mind-boggling, awe-inspiring difference. There has to be a way to cut through the busy-ness, the squeeze-everything-in-ness, and the rush-around-ness to get back to balance, to get back in line with our ‘big whys’.