She was immortalized as the grandmother in The Witches (1983).ĭahl was an undistinguished rebel at Llandaff Cathedral school, St Peter's in Weston-super-Mare, and Repton School. She gave Dahl his passion for reading-in particular Galsworthy, Kipling, and Hugh Walpole-all best-sellers of the day. In the summers she took them to Norway, where her family fostered Dahl's interest in insects and birds, Nordic trolls, and witches. His mother, a devoted matriarch, ran the family. This was the first in a series of catastrophes and mortal disasters that dogged his life, and, he claimed, gave his work a black savagery.
When Dahl was only three another beloved, older sister and his father died within two months of one another.
