Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Blessed be the fruit

Laura Freeman talks to the woman behind the magical drawings of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach

Bunnies were out. Beatrix Potter had the monopoly on rabbits, kittens, ducks and Mrs Tittlemouses. ‘I knew I had to bring in creatures of some kind,’ wrote Roald Dahl on his first thoughts towards a children’s book. ‘But I didn’t want to use all the old favourites that had been used so often before, like bunnies and squirrels and hedgehogs. I wanted new creatures that no one else had ever used.’ After making a long list of earwigs, pond skaters and Devil’s coach-horse beetles, Dahl cast a centipede, an earthworm, a silkworm, a glow-worm, a spider, a ladybird and an old-green-grasshopper. ‘It was fun,’ the author wrote, ‘to sit down and try to make a slimy old earthworm, for instance, into a rather loveable interesting character.’

Fun to draw, too. The illustrator chosen for James and the Giant Peach (1961), Dahl’s first book for children, was the American artist Nancy Ekholm Burkert, now 86. She got the gig with a ‘test insect’: a sketch of a grasshopper taking off in an aviator jacket and flying goggles. In the second world war, Dahl had been an RAF pilot. He wrote about the crash on his maiden flight in ‘Shot Down Over Libya’. (‘Lost Bearings Over Libya’ was more like it, but never let the truth get in the way of a good short story.) Dahl’s first serious success, The Gremlins (1943), had imagined the bogys that sabotage pilots and planes. Sitting in the chair of his writer’s hut at the bottom of the garden with a board across his lap was, said Dahl, like being in a cockpit. The Dahlhopper is a highlight of an exhibition at the Roald Dahl Museum dedicated to Burkert’s magnificent illustrations for the first edition of James and the Giant Peach.

On 5 June 1957, Dahl’s agent Sheila Saint Lawrence had encouraged him to ‘get away from the short story formula which is imprisoning you at the moment, and to reindulge yourself in the realm of fantasy writing’.

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