Booking a place to share a foxy story; Storyteller Roald Dahl is more popular than ever. David Whetstone talks to his widow, Felicity.

Felicity Dahl, who was married to the famous children's author for the last seven years of his life, will be paying her first visit to Newcastle tomorrow to launch the 2009 Roald Dahl City Read.

She says she is looking forward to it very much. "Your city seems to be fizzing with popularity. I did hear that it has become one of the main tourist spots."

With that music to the ears of North East tourism bosses, Felicity, who likes to be called Liccy (pronounced "Lissy") because Felicity was "for when I was naughty as a child", will do the honours at Newcastle's new City Library tomorrow. There will be a Roald Dahl Roadshow event at 10am, when schoolchildren will find out about the great man from people who knew him well, and then, an hour later, the Roald Dahl City Read will be declared open.

An annual celebration of the life and work of one of the world's most popular children's authors is focused on his birthday, September 13, which has been dubbed Roald Dahl Day.

But the City Read, hosted this year by Newcastle and Gateshead, is aimed at getting us all reading a Dahl book. This year it's Fantastic Mr Fox because a new film of the story is due for an autumn release.

Nobody knew Roald Dahl better, of course, than the woman who became his second wife in 1983 when she was 22 years his junior.

Liccy reckons her late husband would have been thrilled at the continued - indeed escalating - popularity of his now famous stories. But would he have agreed to attend tomorrow's event? "He always used to say you should never meet the creator because it's generally very disappointing. But I'd completely disagree with that as far as he was concerned because I think he was always a brilliant speaker and enormous fun to meet."

Born in 1916 in Wales, but of Norwegian descent, Dahl began writing stories after being wounded serving with the RAF during the war.

He may have seemed an unlikely pilot, being 6ft 6ins tall, and maybe an unlikely children's hero too. He would have towered above them.

"He adored children," says Liccy. "In all seriousness, that was his gift, that he was able to get into the minds of children; but also, I think, he never forgot what it was like to be a child, whereas I think most of us do."

I wonder if Dahl had modelled The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) on himself.

"I think there were certainly elements of him in The BFG but he was really based on a wonderful old Norfolk man called Wally Saunders who built half of Gypsy House (the family home in the village of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Liccy still lives).

"He had huge hands like a bunch of bananas, enormous ears and a big nose. He spoke with a very strange accent and got his words all wrong."

Dahl wrote in a garden shed which, says Liccy, is in need of repair, although there's a replica of it in the Roald Dahl Museum in the village, a former bank which "is always packed".

Liccy says that writing, for her husband, "wasn't effortless but he was incredibly disciplined. He would write every single day and with very set hours. That was always his message to anybody trying to be a writer: you have to be disciplined.

"He always used to quote Ernest Hemingway who said you must stop when the going is good so that when you return to the page in the morning it's not a struggle and you can't wait to get going again."

After Dahl's death in 1990, Liccy established the Roald Dahl Foundation, which has two main functions.

Firstly, it helps chronically sick children and their families by giving grants to charities, hospitals and individuals; and secondly, it supports the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden.

There was an extraordinary amount of tragedy in Roald Dahl's life.

He lost his older sister, Astri, to appendicitis when she was seven; then, years later, he lost his daughter, Olivia, the oldest of his five children with American actress Patricia Neal, to measles at the same age.

Baby son Theo was badly hurt in New York when his pram was hit by a taxi and subsequently suffered from hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain).

Then, when she was pregnant with fifth child Lucy in 1965, Patricia suffered three cerebral aneurysms. Dahl was heavily involved in her rehabilitation and helped her to walk again.

The medical work of the Roald Dahl Foundation, which has given out pounds 6m in grants, would greatly please the author, says Liccy. "He held nurses in the highest esteem and, indeed, so do I. They are one of the flags I personally love flying because they are part of our heritage and things have not been getting better for them recently.

"I think you have to have a vocation and be a very special person to be a nurse."

The Roald Dahl Foundation funds 42 special nurses around the country, including one in the North East. "We need to get to 92," asserts Liccy. Like Dahl, she was born in Llandaff, Wales. Like him, she has suffered personal tragedy. Lorina, the youngest of her three daughters from her previous marriage, died of a brain tumour not long before Dahl himself died.

The Dahl dynasty is a British phenomenon.

For the record, Roald's other children with Neal are Ophelia, Lucy and Tessa whose daughter, model Sophie, was the inspiration for the girl in The BFG and is to marry singer Jamie Cullum.

Liccy, who also has five grandchildren, has been the driving force behind managing and sustaining Roald Dahl's extraordinary legacy.

After his death, she says, his publishers and literary agent had the books and publishing aspect of things in good order. "But there was quite a lot of mess on the film industry side. Roald didn't have a theatre or film agent and that was one of the first things I turned my hand to."

Liccy has ensured that no Tom, Dick or Harry can turn out a Roald Dahl film on a whim, and evidently Wes Anderson had to pass a pretty stringent test.

"It has taken nine years from when he first asked for the rights," says Liccy. "We didn't say yes straight away. He is an extraordinary film-maker but he is very, very different."

But any reservations have since dissipated.

The director, who made Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, stayed at Gypsy House to write the screenplay and was suitably inspired.

Liccy, whose favourite film is James and the Giant Peach, recalls Tim Burton and Johnny Depp visiting when they were making Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

"They were nearly moved to tears when they went into the hut where Roald had written the book."

Credit to Anderson, though, because Liccy says: "I seriously think Fantastic Mr Fox is one of the best. I said to my grandson, Oscar, who's 13: 'Do you think children will like this?' He said: 'They'll be pretty boring if they don't'." That is the kind of praise Roald Dahl would have valued highly.

As part of the City Read, schools will make copies of Fantastic Mr Fox available, as will libraries. There will be a gala screening of Fantastic Mr Fox in Newcastle next month.

CAPTION(S):

GOOD READ Copies of Fantastic Mr Fox will be available in schools and libraries. LEGACY Felicity, Roald Dahl's second wife, who has a North East mission this week. DAHL ON SCREEN A 'still' from Fantastic Mr Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, which is to get a gala screening in Newcastle next month.