The Secret Museum Read online

  Matilda plays the same tricks on her parents as she does in the published version, but her motivation is different: in the final draft she is trying to get her own back on her parents, who couldn’t give a stuff about her, whereas in the original draft she did these things simply because she was ‘wicked’.

  The first draft is pretty short. There is hardly any mention of Miss Trunchball; Miss Honey is called Miss Hayes; and, at the end, Matilda dies. She discovers her magical powers – being able to move things with her eyes – in a class at school, and goes over to Miss Hayes’s house to investigate her new skills. On the way home to Matilda’s, she and her teacher see a car accident. Some children are trapped in a mini-bus, underneath a truck. With no time to lose Matilda lifts the truck off the mini-bus, using only the power of her eyes, and frees the trapped children. And then, exhausted from the effort, she dies.

  It’s not the story of the unloved, imaginative girl rescued by an understanding adult that everyone loves today, and has a totally different ending. It took Roald Dahl ages to get the story he wanted to tell to come out right. He handed each draft of yellow papers to his secretary, Wendy. Then he’d annotate her typed pages and carry on. It wasn’t until Draft 6 that he was satisfied with Matilda. Perfection was a long process.

  I wanted to know what the first item in the archive was, so I had a look and found a letter marked by the archivist as RDMSC RD 1/1/1. The letter is the first item in Dahl’s ‘Personal’ file. It was written by a New York literary agent, named Harold Matson, to Miss Katherine Swan, who was the writer C. S. Forester’s secretary. The letter tells an interesting story: the story of how Dahl became a writer.

  The first story Roald Dahl ever wrote was a true one – which he embellished, with his nascent storytelling skills – about his time in the RAF in the 1940s. He was sent on a mission from Egypt to Libya. He hadn’t had much training, and on the final leg of the trip he crash-landed in the desert because he couldn’t see a runway, and was running out of fuel. He fractured his skull and nose and was unable to see. Luckily, a pilot called Peter had seen the plane coming down into the desert and rushed to the wreck to pull Dahl’s body out. Dahl carried on flying, but after severe headaches, a blackout and some time recovering in England he was transferred to an office job in Washington as an assistant air attache. On the first day of his new job, he was sitting at his desk wondering what on earth he was supposed to be doing when the writer C. S. Forester came in and asked him if he had any good stories about the war. America had just joined the Allies and the public was hungry to hear stories of heroic deeds.

  Dahl and he got chatting, and Forester invited him out for lunch. They were so busy talking and eating that Forester forgot to take notes and so he asked Dahl if he would mind sending over some anecdotes about his crash in Libya, which Forester could then shape into a story. Dahl did so, but he wrote the story out in full. Forester thought the tale was brilliantly written and replied to Dahl with the life-changing question: ‘Did you know you were a writer?’

  Forester sent the piece to his agent, Harold Matson, who then wrote this letter to Katherine Swan asking: ‘Did Lt. Dahl write it without any assistance whatever? If so, he should write more. He is a natural writer of superior quality.’ No wonder the letter is stored first in Dahl’s archives. I imagine it changed his life.

  The second letter in the archives is Dahl’s reply to Matson, asking whether he’d like a piece about Greece. He asked to remain anonymous if his first story was published, as members of the RAF were not allowed to publish tales of the war. He also requested that if his writing was going to be illustrated, that the drawings of his plane be accurate. The next letter in the file is a reply from Matson saying that there was no problem about either anonymity or illustrations, and he had some good news: he’d sold the piece for £300.

  It was published verbatim in August 1942 in the Saturday Evening Post. Dahl had called the story ‘A Piece of Cake’, but it was changed to ‘Shot Down over Libya’ to sound more dramatic. Dahl had changed details of the original story: being shot down made a better story than running out of fuel. Already Dahl’s love of exaggeration for the sake of a good story shone through. He continued to write, and Matson became his agent. Dahl told the whole story himself in ‘Lucky Break’.

  Over his career Dahl wrote two novels, 19 short story collections, six film scripts, some television shows and a play. However, it was not until he moved to Buckinghamshire, asked a man named Wally Saunders (said to be the inspiration for the BFG) to build his hut and began writing fantastical children’s stories that his career really took off. How lucky that Forester popped in to meet Dahl, and Matson wrote this letter, number 1 in the archives, that set the wheel of stories, letters and ideas in motion.

  His children’s stories are still loved by children of all ages. On my way from London to Buckinghamshire to visit the museum, I stopped for petrol. The Indian man at the till asked me:

  ‘Going anywhere nice today?’

  I told him, ‘I’m going to the Roald Dahl Museum.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, perking up. ‘I love that guy! I love his stories.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Which is your favourite?’

  ‘Oh, the one with the boy who puts white powder in the drink.’

  ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ he said, lifting his hands to the heavens and laughing. ‘That one could have me giggling all day.’

  [Matilda, the musical]

  The first draft of Matilda, which I read at the museum, is a totally different story to the one everyone knows and loves today.

  [Item 1/1/1]

  I held it in my hand: the very letter that set Dahl on the path to being one of the world’s best-loved writers.

  AUGUSTE PICCARD (1884–1962) WAS AN eccentric Belgian scientist. He was fascinated by the stratosphere – the layer of the atmosphere that begins 16 kilometres above where you are sitting now – and made this gondola to take him there. Using it like the basket of a hot air balloon, he attached it to a balloon filled with hydrogen and floated up miles into the sky. It’s amazing to stand in front of it and imagine Piccard climbing inside, shutting the door over his head and taking off.

  Like many of the Science Museum’s large objects, Piccard’s gondola is stored in one of several aircraft hangars on an ex-RAF airfield in Wroughton, Wiltshire. It shares its berth with planes, including a Lockheed Constellation aircraft used to transport roadies and equipment on a Rolling Stones concert tour, and a very sleek plane designed by Burt Rutan (who also designed Voyager – the first plane to fly around the world without stopping for refuelling – as well as a hybrid flying car and space craft for Virgin Galactic). But the gondola has been higher than any of the aircraft in the hangars in Wroughton.

  Piccard made his first trip to the stratosphere in 1931. He broke a world record for the highest any man had ever been and then crash-landed in Obergurgl, a little alpine town of 14 farms which, after a lifetime of sleepy obscurity, became known internationally when Piccard accidentally arrived. This gondola in the Science Museum’s behind-the-scenes collection was used for Piccard’s second journey to the stratosphere, when he reached 16,201 metres. He and his assistant took off one summer’s day in 1932, from just outside Zurich. The launch was filmed by a news team from Pathé and released under the title ‘10½ Miles Above the Earth! Professor Piccard and Dr Cosyns, safe & sound after world’s most daring & romantic scientific adventure’. In those days, science and adventure were still deemed to be ‘romantic’.

  The newsreader says, in his old-fashioned broadcasting style, ‘The start was made at dawn from Diibendorf aerodrome near Zurich. The preparations for the flight began at midnight. And thousands of people had made the journey from Zurich in special trains, whilst a battalion of Swiss troops held down the guy ropes.’ He continues: ‘When all was ready he clambered inside the gondola, which contained a mass of scientific instruments, and gave the signal to let go. The balloon
rose quickly and eventually climbed to over 10½ miles above earth. Just imagine – whilst we were sweltering in a heatwave, he was nearly frozen to death in 15 degrees Centigrade below zero.’ He ends: ‘From the practical point of view, Professor Piccard’s experiment is of the highest scientific importance. One of the things it will definitely do will be to enable better weather forecasts to be made, and won’t that be a boon when we are picking out our holidays!’

  Watch the film online if you’d like to see Piccard leaning out of the gondola, waving goodbye with his hat in his hand. ‘Off we go into ze stratosphere,’ he seems to be saying (moustache blowing in ze wind).

  Piccard was a funny-looking man. He had a bald head, with tufts of hair on each side, wore round glasses and, usually, a lab coat. When Hergé, the creator of Tintin, saw Piccard on the street, he recognized him as the classic eccentric ‘man of science’ and was inspired to create Professor Cuthbert Calculus, who appears in many of the Tintin stories: ‘Calculus is a reduced-scale Piccard, as the real chap was very tall. He had an interminable neck that sprouted from a collar that was much too large … I made Calculus a mini-Piccard, otherwise I would have had to enlarge the frames of the cartoon strip.’

  Piccard loved adventure and believed that ‘exploration is the sport of the scientist.’ He practised this sport all his life and made 27 stratospheric ascents in total, reaching a top height of 21,946 metres. His balloon trips were useful as well as daring. He brought back information about the stratosphere, where no one had ever been, provided data that helped lead up to the first space flights and proved that it was possible for a human to survive at such an altitude (there had been several fatal attempts before). He researched cosmic rays about which nothing was known at the time. His gondola design and his balloon innovations (he used just a little hydrogen in the balloon on the ground, which expanded as he ascended) helped balloonists cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He also contributed significantly to weather forecasting. Every day, balloons are sent into high altitudes to monitor atmospheric conditions and help predict the weather. Nowadays, they go unmanned, without a zany scientist inside.

  It was not only heights that Piccard soared to: he helped set the world record for the deepest anyone has ever been down into the ocean. Jacques Piccard, his son (with his father’s help), adapted the gondola design so it worked in the water. He called it a bathyscaphe, which means ‘deep ship’ in Ancient Greek. Inside one named the Trieste, Jacques travelled with Don Walsh to the deepest spot known on Earth, the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. This was in 1960. It took them 4 hours and 48 minutes to get down there. They ate chocolate as they descended through the still, clear water until they reached the bottom, where they measured the depth as 10,916 metres. They all but landed on a fish. Piccard said, ‘Our fish was the instantaneous reply (after years of work!) to a question that thousands of oceanographers had been asking themselves for decades.’ Later on, they saw a shrimp.

  Until March 2012, they were the only humans ever to have made it so far down into the ocean. Then James Cameron made world headlines when he followed in the twosome’s bubbles – Don Walsh was there to see him off – and dropped down, alone, into the abyss.

  National Geographic streamed live news online, news stations covered the story, and he and his wife tweeted. She tweeted his last words to her: ‘Bye, baby … See you in the sunshine,’ and how a rainbow appeared over the spot where her husband had descended. Everyone wondered, will he make it? He wrote a list of things that could go wrong that was posted on the National Geographic website; it included being ‘smashed into jam’ should his pilot sphere implode. On the same webpage, it says that Don Walsh had pointed out the risks of ‘flying a research sub too close to a hydrothermal vent’ where the water temperature is around 400°C (752°F) and would melt the sub’s viewpoint. As we know, James Cameron made it there and back with no problems, and described it as ‘a very lunar, very desolate place’, a ‘completely alien world’. The next evening, he was at the London première of the 3D version of Titanic. ‘Oh yeah! I am also that guy that does the red carpet stuff,’ he said to the BBC’s reporter. He filmed the deep-sea dive for a 3D movie release and broke a record for it being the deepest solo dive ever. He went far further than his earlier dives down to the sunken Titanic, but I don’t think he got further down than Piccard.

  Cameron talked to Don Walsh, who was there when he resurfaced, about the record: ‘There’s no way of measuring it super-accurately. You can bounce a laser off the moon and know within a couple of centimetres how far away the moon is, but you’ll never know how deep the ocean is, because you’re measuring waves, the sound through seawater, the changes in temperature and salinity. The error margin is tens of metres. I said, “Let’s just share it.” We shook on that.’

  There is a younger Piccard who is carrying on the adventuring tradition. Auguste’s grandson Bertrand Piccard has been around the earth in a balloon (1999) and is currently planning to circumnavigate the globe using only solar power to demonstrate the potential of renewable energy. The main challenge is gathering enough sunlight as he flies by day to last him through the night.

  As well as the gondola, the behind-the-scenes warehouses contain thousands of scientific treasures, including one of the earliest UK cash machines; a submarine, like the one in For Your Eyes Only; the Channel Tunnel tunnelling machine; the world’s first full-size hovercraft; an electric taxi from 1897; a hundred-year-old lump of reinforced concrete; and a Soviet supercomputer called the BESM-6 that was cutting-edge technology during the Cold War but now looks like a collection of blue wardrobes. The objects are spread out between aircraft hangars.

  Peter Turvey, the curator of Wroughton’s store, took me to see them all. We zipped around between hangars in his jeep, driving along the runway. The heaviest item we saw was the Wood Press. It weighs 127 kilograms and is part of the last printing press used in Fleet Street. It spewed out 50,000 newspapers an hour until 1987. In 1999, industrial archaeologists spent four months taking it apart and five more rebuilding it on site. Beside it, some of the things that were found inside the machine are on display, such as empty beans tins and shoes.

  Piccard’s gondola shares a hangar with Peter Turvey’s favourite object: a tandem where the two riders sit side by side and cycle at the same time. Unsurprisingly – and unlike Piccard’s – this is one prototype that didn’t take off.

  [Auguste Piccard (1884–1962)]

  The classic eccentric ‘man of science’, Piccard was the inspiration for Professor Cuthbert Calculus, who appears in many of the Tintin stories.

  [Lift off]Piccard sets off in his gondola for his daring and romantic scientific adventure.

  [Piccard’s gondola]

  Piccard and his assistant tied this white gondola onto a balloon, climbed inside, shut the door, and headed upwards, towards the stratosphere.

  [Tandem bicycle]

  The curator of Wroughton’s collection has a favourite item: a tandem where the two riders sit side by side and cycle at the same time. It never really took off as an idea.

  THE FIRST THING TO SET ‘eyes’ on the Titanic, 74 years after it crashed into an iceberg in 1921 and sank to the bottom of the ocean, was a blue robot the size of a lawnmower. Its name was Jason Junior, or JJ.

  JJ is a small Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), also known as a flying eyeball. Attached to a submersible called Alvin by an umbilical cord which transmits data, Jason Junior was dropped to 3,660 metres below sea level. It moved into the wreck and descended four levels down the grand staircase into the interior of the ship, sending back haunting images of the promenade deck and a room with a chandelier, still intact after years underwater. Robert Ballard, the leader of the undersea mission, said it ‘was like landing on the moon’.

  Ballard’s dream of exploring the Titanic was made possible by investment from the US Navy. They wanted to investigate the location and state of two sunken naval submarines, USS Thresher and Scorpion. Ballard was the
man for the job, and he agreed to do it in return for permission to use the same technology to look around the Titanic.

  Jason Junior now lives at the MIT Museum. But it’s also underneath 2,745 metres of water off the South American coast. When engineers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) constructed it, they made several copies of each part so that JJ could be reconfigured for its different missions. After looking around the Titanic and the sunken submarines, JJ was adapted for other expeditions and taken on a mission by WHOI. While out at sea, the barge carrying it sank and JJ disappeared.

  I spoke to Kurt Hasselbalch, curator of the Hart Nautical Collections at the MIT Museum, who knows all about JJ. The Jason Junior kept in the museum’s stores is made from the only surviving parts of the JJ left above the ocean. ‘We had WHOI recreate a display version of Jason Junior out of the original frame and body, and a few original parts,’ explained Kurt. It sits, inactive, on a shelf, among all kinds of inventions and innovations. It’s not on display, because there are 400,000 objects in the nautical section of the museum alone and there really isn’t room to display everything at one time. Most objects are kept as a 3D reference library of ideas and inventions.

  As for the sunken version of JJ, it may yet be recovered. ‘We’re waiting for someone to say “Hey! Let’s go get it.” It’ll probably be James Cameron …’

  I imagine the director of the blockbuster film Titanic would be a good person for the job. He has sent remote cameras into the Titanic to get footage of the interior, and used footage of an ROV exploring the wreck for the opening sequence of his film. More recently, in 2012, he went down into the Mariana Trench, on the day before Titanic 3D premiered in London.