Pictures from London

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Visiting Mr. Dahl

If you happen to be in London with a 6- and 9-year old and your 6- and 9-year old companions happen to enjoy the likes of Matilda Wormwood, James Henry Trotter, Charlie Bucket, Sophie and the like, then you truly must hop aboard the Chiltern Rail out to Great Missenden for a treat. (Thank you Campbell family!) Not only is the train ride an experience unto itself, the journey out into the English country offers a nice respite from the weight of just being in London.  Your 6-year-old companion might even comment about how “peaceful” it is out in Great Missenden.

The Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden

For many years and even a few decades, Great Missenden was the home of Roald Dahl, and for ten years now, only one decade, Great Missenden has been the home of the Roald Dahl home and museum.  The walk from the train station to the Dahl museum is mostly along a crescent of a street, no wider than those oversized Humvees that masquerade as passenger vehicles – indeed, on several occasions, the 36-year old among us noticed cars having to pull to the side, their left tires up on the curb, in order to allow other cars to pass.  And these were regular sized cars, nothing special at all.  All the buildings, two stories tall and without any space between, make it feel like some impossibly quaint village where there is a single baker and a single postal carrier and just one employee for the local newspaper, which really isn’t a newspaper at all, but a weekly flier handed out to the shops along the row, the proprietors of which live within walking distance and who are the only customers at the other shops anyway so the newspaper printer really need only print a single copy of the flier because by the end of the week, everyone in town would have visited every other person in town at least once and the presence of the flier in every single shop visited by every single resident is likely superfluous, if comforting.

But the real treat is the museum and home itself, beginning with the gift shop, which brings to life the familiar characters in a whole tradoodlian way.  Indeed, it was not until the gift shop that the 36-year old realized what a central part the characters of Mr. Dahl have come to play within this particular family.  One is reminded of the 35-year old’s BFG voice during family read alouds, listening to the entirety of Jeremy Irons’s absolutely incredible rendition of James and the Giant Peach on audiobook along the drive to St. Louis (an extraordinary presentation of Aunts Sponge and Spiker), the soul-sisterly connection between the 9-year old and Matilda on page and stage (not screen).  Here they all were, together.