ROALD DAHL’S attachment to the country ran deep. In the year he died, he claimed that he had ‘never lived in a town or city in my life and I would hate to do so’. Like Danny’s father in Danny the Champion of the World, he regarded himself as ‘a true countryman’: ‘the fields, the streams, the woods and all the creatures who lived in these places were a part of his life’. Albeit a partially misleading statement, his denial of town-dwelling and assertion of his love of the country accurately reflected his feelings.
In fact, Dahl, who was born in 1916, spent much of his childhood in the north of Cardiff. His father died when he was three, prompting his mother to sell their large Victorian farmhouse outside the city, Ty Mynydd, which had a working piggery, woodland, pasture and,
