Often junior doctors dread their night-time work. They have already done a full day on the wards, and as soon as the evening jobs are finished, they want to get to bed. However, I looked forward to the evenings. Once everything was under control I would head to ward 5E, the haematology ward, and the side-room where Dahl was in bed.

I remember one evening it seemed especially quiet, and so I eased the door open slowly, in case he was asleep. I found him reading, concentrating on a novel by Ed McBain. His solid meaty hands, with well-groomed nails, seemed almost too large for the book. His great bald shiny pate, with a neat rim of hair around the back and sides, was reflecting the reading light, and his brow was furrowed. His face lit up when he saw me.

‘How was the day?’ he asked, pointing for me to sit on the bedside chair. ‘Oh, fine,’ I replied. ‘Not much excitement.’ Even though it was a very busy day, with lots going on, I didn't want to waste precious time talking about that. I wanted to hear more about his adventures.

‘An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details,’ Dahl wrote in Boy: Tales of Childhood. As one of the world's greatest storytellers, he had little time for biographies; he saw no joy at all in accurately documenting every detail of an individual's life. Why would anyone choose to read a collection of tedious facts when there was so much good fiction around? Invention, he felt, is always more interesting than reality. Indeed when he came to recount details of his own life story the distinction between fact and fiction often became blurred. His second autobiographical book, Going Solo, continued his life story where Boy left off, with Dahl leaving school and planning the future.

After Repton, Dahl spent a few years working for Shell in England, before being posted to work in Tanganyika, as Tanzania was known back then. He was thrilled to be going. Now he would have the chance to see the ‘jungles and lions and elephants and tall coconut palms swaying on silver beaches’ of which he had dreamed.