'There are wonderful things which we hope we will be able to borrow from the V&A and the British Museum, but normally they are never on display. 'There is such a strong tradition of illustration in this country, but there is no place where you can go and see these things permanently on display,' Quentin Blake said. An old wooden shed in the back garden, with a wingbacked armchair, a sleeping bag to keep out the cold, an old suitcase to prop his feet on and always, always six yellow pencils at his hand, was where Roald created the worlds of The BFG, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and many, many more.Also on show are works by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Raymond Briggs, and The Gruffalo's illustrator Axel Scheffler. It was here that Roald Dahl began to tell his five children made-up bedtime stories and from those that he began to consider writing stories for children. Patricia and Roald were married only one year after they met! The couple bought a house in Great Missenden called Gipsy House. Roald Dahl's growing success as an author led him to meet many famous people including Walt Disney, Franklin Roosevelt, and the movie star Patricia Neal. Forester sent Roald Dahl's work straight to the Saturday Evening Post. I didn't touch a word of it.' (an opinion which would have been news to Roald's early teachers!). Forester was amazed by the result, telling Roald 'I'm bowled over. Forester (author of the Captain Hornblower series) who asked the young pilot to write down his war experiences for a story he was writing. It was there that he met famous author C.S. Later in the war Roald Dahl was sent to America. Roald wrote about these experiences in his books Boy and Going Solo.

Tragically of the 20 men in his squadron, Roald Dahl was one of only three to survive. But being nearly two metres tall he found himself squashed into his fighter plane, knees around his ears and head jutting forward. With the outbreak of the Second World War Roald Dahl joined the RAF. In Africa he learnt to speak Swahili, drove from diamond mines to gold mines, and survived a bout of malaria where his temperature reached 105.5 degrees (that's very high!). He seems incapable of marshalling his thoughts on paper!' After finishing school Roald Dahl, in search of adventure, travelled to East Africa to work for a company called Shell. When he was at school Roald Dahl received terrible reports for his writing - with one teacher actually writing in his report, 'I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means.

The bfg illustrations