There is a real scandal in children’s books – and it has nothing to do with Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl didn’t have much time for parents, which may go some way to explaining why children have so much time for Roald Dahl. Like all great children’s authors (a reliably odd, frequently unpleasant bunch), Dahl preferred the exciting state of orphanhood to the supposed comforts of the nuclear family. From Oliver Twist and Pip in Great Expectations via Alice in Wonderland and James Henry Trotter to Harry Potter himself, the heroes of juvenile fiction invariably face the trials and tribulations of this world alone.

At the shocking start of James and the Giant Peach, Dahl dispatches James’s parents with characteristic cruel brio. A runaway rhinoceros has eaten them “during a visit to London”. (But ofcoceros!)

Young James’s terrors are only just beginning. He is sent to live with Aunt Sponge, a greedy, selfish, morbidly fat woman, and the equally repulsive Aunt Spiker (played to ghastly perfection by Miriam Margoyles and Joanna Lumley, respectively, in the film). The Sisters Grimm abuse their nephew (“You nasty little beast!”) and thoroughly deserve their sticky ending; squelched to death by the eponymous giant fruit.

Deprivation and monstrous behaviour of all kinds abound in the pages of Dahl.

For Charlie Bucket, who lives on watery cabbage soup, watching other kids eat chocolate is PURE TORTURE!

Self-absorbed, telly-obsessed Mr and Mrs Wormwood cannot stand their bookish, preternaturally bright little girl. Is there a nastier, more chilling sentence in all of literature than, “They looked upon Matilda as nothing more than a scab”?

As a mum reading bedtime stories almost 20 years ago now, I confess I wasn’t sure that I much liked the morality of the anarchic, viciously unsentimental Dahl. But my enthralled, pyjamaed pair lapped him up. The more grotesque, the merrier. First, Dahl made my small people afraid, and then his words cast a spell that helped them master their fears.

Daughter and son became gleeful co-conspirators (and devout readers) of this remarkable writer, a World War II fighter pilot who once, having suffered a fractured skull in a crash, crawled away from the burning wreckage of his aircraft in a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the heat. After that, you could surely forgive Dahl a certain impatience with polite, adult society, and a mockingly macabre attitude to life, and death.

No such tolerance is to be extended, however, by po-faced Puffin. The publisher, for whom Dahl continues to make a fortune, has unleashed  “sensitivity readers” – the cultural vandals formerly known as “censors” – on his work. As the Telegraph revealed, hundreds of changes have been made in Dahl’s books despite ample evidence that millions of kids have grown up pretty well after being exposed to the trauma of words such as “ladies and gentlemen” (now rendered as “folks”. Ugh), “fat”, “hag” and “black” (even when it’s the colour of a tractor, not a person, bizarrely).

“Words matter,” states the prim notice on the copyright page of Puffin’s latest Dahl editions. “This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

And who gets to decide what language can “continue to be enjoyed by all” or, indeed, whether all might not prefer the salty original? Not young readers who, for more than six decades, have positively relished Dahl’s arcane epithets and mad creations (Oops, sorry, “mad” is now banned; on mental health grounds, I think). Certainly not the author himself, who died in 1990 but must be rolling in his grave at one change made by some cloth-eared twit to The Witches. Dahl’s witches all wear wigs (because they’re bald) but, as he wrote, “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet... Just you try it and see what happens.”

Puffin’s new, more “accessible”, less offensive version reads: “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

What the Dickens? (They’ll be coming for him next, mark my words.) There’s the problem right there. Sensitivity readers are not sensitivity writers. Wokesters of impeccable social justice credentials but very tiny (oops, sorry, not allowed to use “tiny” any more. Sizeist!) brain, they clearly cannot hear what is wrong with that sentence. Dahl was incapable of writing anything so clunking. Or so dull. Had he lived to see the sanitised, sanctimonious, health and safety caveat they have attached to his mischievous hair-pulling of witches’ wigs, he would have flown his Hawker Hurricane into Puffin HQ, and with every justification.

It’s not funny. And Dahl is, above all, scabrously, uproariously, rudely funny. That’s why kids love him. But the new unsmiling arbiters of public morality – the leftist Virtue-osi – don’t want children to find politically incorrect, aka downright truthful, things about the human condition entertaining. Instead, they must be force-fed so-called “empathetic” books which “promote health and wellbeing”, “race equality”, “caring” and “emotional intelligence”. Dreary, pious tomes which teach them that their history stinks, white people are awful and biased (especially if that bias is unconscious), everyone has to Be Kind (except white men in history who were AWFUL and beyond the pale) and sticking with the sex you were born with is nether diverse nor inclusive.

We should be very worried. The same smug forces that want to castrate Dahl because he’s supposedly a malign influence on young readers are the ones who are indoctrinating children in our schools with a pernicious, highly political creed that would appal most parents, if they only knew.

To take a recent example, a dismayed teacher at one primary school in rural East Anglia shared a photograph of a display of books. They had hastily been put up by a panicky head of English who’d been told by a visiting school improvement officer that the pupils’ reading wasn’t diverse enough. (One of the more egregious titles often cited by concerned mums and dad is My Skin, Your Skin: Let’s talk about race, racism and empowerment by Laura Henry-Allain. Children as young as five are being exposed to the book’s “meaningful discussions” about racism, which must surely be meaningless to such tiny tots.)  Every single book on the display is about slavery or some aspect of race or colour yet, as the teacher pointed out, the majority of children at her school were from Eastern Europe. Absurd, yes, but also profoundly dangerous.

James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, warns me, “There are primary schools teaching children that it is possible to be born in the wrong body, that the doctor took a guess at who they were when they were born and may have made a mistake. There are materials telling young girls that if they don’t want to play sport against a biological male, that is transphobia. There are resources suggesting to young people that to be ‘straight' or ‘cis’ is to be stale and boring. This is indoctrination. It makes it increasingly less likely that children will become comfortable with their own bodies and sets them down a slippery slope to potential harm.”

Highly divisive critical race theory and an aggressive trans ideology are being embedded in the school curriculum, even dictating the content of books, yet the censors come for Dahl who, for all his failings, had children’s best interests at heart. He would have been outraged by these contemporary witches who steal the innocence of eight-year-olds and call it kindness.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who went to a bookshop yesterday to buy copies of unbowdlerised Dahl so any future grandchildren (fingers crossed!) will not have their understanding of their history compromised by “sensitivity readers”. As I was re-reading Matilda, I came upon the list of titles her creator said the little girl devoured within six months. They include: Oliver Twist, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Animal Farm by George Orwell.

‘Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,’ Matilda said, ‘Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same.’

‘A fine writer will always make you feel that, Mrs Phelps said. ‘And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.’

What good advice. Trust a great author. Submit to the spell of their storytelling. Beware giant peaches and charging rhinoceroses. Words matter, so guard them well, especially the ones that have stood the test of time. Sensitivity readers be damned.