‘How is your article coming along?’ Dahl asked me as I was tapping away on the ward computer one evening.

‘Slowly,’ I complained. ‘We have all the data, but the journals are very fussy about how you write it.’

‘Where will you send it?’

‘We'll probably try the Lancet.’

‘Ah yes, it's a good journal. We published there many years ago …’

‘Really?’ From the sparkle in his eye I thought he was probably trying to get a rise from me.

‘Yes, we invented a valve for hydrocephalus.’ He started fiddling selfconsciously with the pens on the work station. ‘Well, I was only the go-between really.’ He looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Look it up if you like, the Lancet, 1964. We were living in New York at the time, and Theo got hit by a taxi …’ I could see him thinking back. ‘He was only four months old, in the pram, you see, and, well, it was a terrible business …’ He wandered back to his side room.

From the mid 1950s, Dahl, Pat, and their children were typically spending spring and summer in Great Missenden and autumn in New York. In England Dahl would write in his hut, and in Manhattan he borrowed an empty room of their neighbours, the Goodmans. Because his back ached, he preferred to work in a large armchair; he had the green beige writing board made, which he would use for the rest of his life. It was important for Pat's acting career to be in America, but Dahl was finding the peace and quiet of the British countryside better suited his writing. Besides, he was becoming increasingly disquieted by New York, which he thought a violent city filled with threats and dangers, not the place to raise a young family. His feelings were encapsulated in the gruesome short adult story ‘Pig’. In this ghastly tale, an orphaned boy, brought up in the countryside, heads to New York to claim the fortune left for him by his aunt. Unfortunately, ill prepared for the tough and unforgiving reality of city life, he is swindled out of his inheritance by corrupt lawyers, and meets his end in a most unpleasant way.