Inside Roald Dahl's Buckinghamshire cottage

The writer Roald Dahl died on November 23, 1990; almost exactly a year later, a foundation was set up in his name by his second wife, Liccy Dahl. It is funded through the original endowment, some royalties, and private donations, as well as fund-raising events such as Readathon, the national reading scheme, and provides financial support for causes that were important to Roald Dahl during his lifetime. Over the last 15 years, the fund has given over £5.5 million to young people with neurological, haematological and literacy problems. At present, it sponsors 41 specialist nurses across the country, trained to help children with epilepsy, head injuries, haemophilia and sickle-cell anaemia.

Liccy has also set up a Roald Dahl music programme, which commissions orchestral music specifically for children, as her husband had always bemoaned the lack of such pieces. The royalties from the performances are donated to the foundation. Her enthusiasm and energy are limitless, but she is at pains to attribute much of her considerable success to the power of Roald's name - 'It opens countless doors,' she says. These include those of the Royal Albert Hall, which was filled to capacity for a musical performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in December 1996.

Liccy is chairman of Dahl & Dahl, the literary estate, whose director is Amanda Conquy, and is gatekeeper to her husband's legacy. Recently, she opened the award-winning Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Here, children can explore the joys of make-believe and storytelling, and choose from gloriously over-the-top cakes at Café Twit.

The centre of all this industry - and Liccy's home - remains Gipsy House in Great Missenden, which provided the inspiration for many stories and was home to all five Dahl children. Roald Dahl bought the house in 1953, while he and his family were living in New York. Theo, his young son, was badly injured in a road accident and he was brought to England to be treated. 'Roald was a great believer that problems can be solved,' explains Liccy, 'a trait that came to the fore when he successfully developed, along with engineer Stanley Wade and neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, the Wade-Dahl-Till shunt, a system for draining fluid from the brain.

Medicine was his passion.' It was also at Gipsy House, some time later, that he organised an extraordinarily successful programme of rehabilitation after his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a stroke.

Gipsy House was the scene of much of Roald Dahl's inspired magic. The children would wake to find their names spelt out in weedkiller on the lawn to celebrate a birthday, or a long hunting horn would appear through the windows at night to blow dreams into their bedrooms. 'Roald's gift was that he never forgot what it was to be a child,' explains Liccy. 'We think that we can remember, but we don't.'

The house was named after a band of Romanies whom Roald Dahl befriended, and who lived in the 'Minpin' woods nearby. The original building was a simple, five-windowed, square doll's house. With the help of Wally Saunders, a gentle giant of a builder, who inspired the BFG character, a guest house was built on one side; on the other was a two-floor addition of what is now the dining room, kitchen and spare room, but was then the much-used snooker room. 'Wally was wonderful,' explains Liccy. 'Theo followed him everywhere and, even to this day, if we try to hang a picture on a particularly impenetrable wall, it is known as a "Wally wall".'

Together, Wally and Roald laid the path and planted the limes that led to the writing hut, the design of which was based on Dylan Thomas's 'wordsplashed hut' in Laugharne, Wales. Here, Roald Dahl would lose himself in his work, writing only in pencil and on lined yellow paper - his favourite colour.

Liccy and Roald were married in 1983. She had three daughters from a previous marriage, Charlotte, Neisha and Lorina, and had previously worked as a fashion stylist, then trained and set up the restoration studio Carvers & Gilders.

'When I moved in, the house was essentially open plan. The dining room was in the hall and the kitchen was in what is now my "bogey hole",' Liccy explains. With the help of her brother-in-law, architect Marius Barran, she set about reorganising the house and building an annexe in the garden for further bedrooms and the essential snooker room. 'Roald insisted that we carry on living in the house throughout. I remember a dinner we held in the hall for Christie's, which Callie, who was our cook at the time, had to produce, surrounded by rubble.'

'Life was never dull,' Liccy continues. Her husband's obsession with vegetables, and in particular onions, led to an annual competition for the largest specimen, held between Wally, the plumber, the electrician and a group of snooker-playing friends. 'I think Roald cheated one year by sending off for a particularly large variety,' she laughs. Food and wine, friends and family, were enormously important, and together, the couple collaborated on the first of Liccy's three cookbooks, Roald Dahl's Cookbook - 'celebrating the memories of events as much as the food that was eaten'.

Wendy Kress worked for Roald Dahl from 1984 until his death, and has worked as Liccy's assistant ever since. It is a change from dealing with fan mail: 'Roald always answered fan letters from schools and particularly loved those which the teacher had signed using their first name. These he would address as "Gorgeous So-and-So and the class of wherever" - knowing that the children would enjoy that small act of anarchy,' she recalls.

'Roald was definitely on the side of the child, against the adult.'

Roald Dahl's works, instantly recognisable and beautifully and quirkily illustrated by the artist Quentin Blake, have been translated into 47 languages - from Serbian to Mandarin - and made into films, plays, musicals and operas. The world he created in and around Gipsy House lives on in the minds of children across the globe.

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