br> A manuscript of Fantastic Mr Fox at the Roald Dahl Centre, Great Missenden. Photograph: David Sillitoe
Many books for children are underpinned by a moral, an issue like bullying, or even a straightforward quest - moral universes delineated in black and white. Roald Dahl's landscape was never so clear cut. I remember an English teacher at my prep school expressing her disapproval of Dahl's books because they condoned, even promoted, illegal behaviour - poaching in Danny the Champion of the World; cheating in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar; even, at a stretch, attempted poisoning in George's Marvellous Medicine.
A sense of the deep unfairness of a child's world - a small figure trapped in outsize surroundings, loomed over by hectoring and monstrous controllers - is present throughout Dahl's writing for children. Matilda may be 'sensitive and brilliant', but she is nevertheless subject to her horrendous parents - they can rip up her library books, feed her unwanted TV dinners and call her a cheat and a liar. When she goes to school, the fearsome Trunchbull has the power to force-feed, imprison and generally brutalise the children under her care. When the odds are so stacked against the small but sagacious heroine and her pals, any means of evening them out - however sadistic - begins to seem like fair game.
There are many large and predatory figures in Dahl's books; not the least appalling are the Giants in The BFG, with their awful names ("Bloodbottler", "Fleshlumpeater", "Butcher Boy"). I spent many terrified summer evenings looking at the yellow translucent curtains of my bedroom, waiting for a hairy sharp-nailed hand to snatch me out of my bed. In Boy and Galloping Foxley, headmasters, and even prefects, can inflict anguish upon little boys. The Witches can do all manner of fearsome things, from imprisoning their victims in paintings to turning them into hens and mice. But the children usually win in the end. Gruesomely, comprehensively, and, best of all, with complete justification for the goriness of their victories.
That sense of fear and injustice overcome is the main reason why I remember Dahl's work so vividly. There are others, though. Everyone I know who read George's Marvellous Medicine as a child attempted to replicate the recipe with every bottle, cream and lotion available (a great many parents must have cursed the day they bought the book). Everyone drooled over the fabulous sweets, gloriously illustrated by Quentin Blake, in The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (not to mention Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). And I, for one, still dream on bad days of being able to put The Magic Finger, bringing down an unspecified but fitting vengeance, on people who push past me in queues.
