An old story has resurfaced: that Dahl particularly hated Jews. The Official Roald Dahl website buried an apology on its pages last week, probably because Netflix is in the process of adapting Dahl’s most famous books, and this PR problem must be addressed.

“The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements,” it said. Why do they say “hurt” and not “fear”, as if Jew hatred were merely a lapse in manners? “Those prejudiced remarks,” it goes on (“remarks” is a pale euphemism) “are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations.”

What this man they knew — and yet didn’t know — said was this, to Mike Coren of The New Statesman: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason. I mean, if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers, I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they [the Jews] were always submissive.”

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He’s wrong. Jews have a long history of not being submissive from Mount Sinai to Masada to Warsaw; but it is interesting that submission is, for Dahl, a raging man, a characteristic he appreciates only in the Charlie Buckets of this world.

What made Dahl? Like many Jew haters his life was pitted with tragedy: anger can absolve you from pain. He was bullied at the minor public school he attended because his Norwegian parents thought he should be an English child. “In the changing room,” he wrote, “they held me down while one of them filled a bath brimful of icy-cold water, and into this they dropped me, clothes and all, and held me in there for several agonising minutes. “Push his head under water!” cried W. W. Wilson. “That’ll teach him to keep his mouth shut!”

He was an immigrant then, an outsider — like the Jews. Perhaps he felt like a solitary outsider — unlike the Jews.

So, his family didn’t know him, and Dahl’s pondering on, first, how the Holocaust was a response to “the Jewish character” and, second, how much better he would have faced the death camps than Jews, who are shamed even by the manner in which they approach their murder, has nothing to do with “the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories”. The children’s books are devoid of Jew hatred, though the Feminist and the Socialist and the genuine anti-racist — the Oompa-Loompas were originally “African pygmies” — have complaints. When the NAACP complained about the Oompa-Loompas originating in “the very deepest and darkest part of the jungle where no white man had ever been before,” Dahl turned them orange while complaining that the opposition was “real Nazi stuff”. The reliably sympathetic biographer Donald Sturrock calls their African descent, “a fanciful detail”.

Dahl loved money – perhaps he was again projecting in his hatred? – too well to write anti-Jewish children’s fiction. But his second adult novel, Fifty Thousand Frogskins, (never published) contains, “sly, knowing” Jews. The leading character in the short story Madame Rosette (1946) is, “a filthy old Syrian Jewess”.

In a letter to Dirk Bogarde, Dahl called a producer, “the wrong sort of Jew. His face is matted with dirty, black hair. He is disgustingly overweight and flaccid though only forty-something, garrulous, egocentric, arrogant, complacent, ruthless, dishonourable, lascivious, slippery.” He told the Independent in 1990: “It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do”.

The more sceptical biographer Jeremy Treglown wrote this about Dahl’s first novel Sometime Never (1948): “plentiful revelations about Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust did not discourage him from satirizing ‘a little pawnbroker in Hounsditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone’.” But no one reads Sometime Never. The Netflix deal is secure.

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I don’t care about Roald Dahl. He’s not a great artist and I suspect he knew it. He turned to children’s fiction after his career in adult fiction failed. (He suggested Kingsley Amis write for children, and when Amis said he had “no feeling for that kind of thing” Dahl replied, “Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it”.) That he is smaller than his fiction is normal, though it’s depressing to find a man who wrote about friendly giants and magical peaches being quite so conventional in his spite.

What I do mind, though, is that as I write this piece, my seven-year-old son comes in and asks if he can read to me from Danny the Champion of the World. It’s not even the first time this week that I have had to think about how a writer my son admires hated Jews. My husband was reading Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill to him a few days ago. It contains a poem called The Song of the Fifth River: “There came dark Israel / For whom no river remained” until God provided “The Secret River of Gold!” “Why is Israel dark?” our son asked. My husband replied, numbly, “Because it had no river”.

In the chapter The Treasure and the Law, Kadmiel the Jew describes how the Jews control the world with their wealth, and cause mass death: “All over the world the heathen fought each other…..these meanly dressed ones [the Jews] decide between themselves how, and when, and for how long king should draw sword against king, and people rise up against people. There can be no war without gold, and we Jews know how the earth’s gold moves with the seasons”. Then Kadmiel says he poisoned the well.

I don’t know what to say to my son. I don’t want to write him A Child’s Guide to Anti-Jewish Children’s Fiction or tell him, seriously, there is no positive image of the Jew in European culture until Gottfried Lessing’s 1749 play The Jews, which closed in Berlin because no one could believe in a heroic Jew. I already tear pages detailing the Holocaust from children’s encyclopaedias and children’s history books, trying to keep a secret the world seems anxious to tell him. His bookshelf should be a place of ecstasy and security, without traps set by dead misanthropes. But Dahl didn’t really like children. Perhaps I will tell him that: and that his stories are good because he didn’t like children. He likes sucking them up tubes and turning them into mice and all this is plausible when he writes it.

Perhaps I will also show him this letter from JRR Tolkien, a far superior writer, and man, to Dahl. It is a response to a 1938 letter from Rütten & Loening, a German publishing house keen to publish The Hobbit — if Tolkien could confirm his Arian descent.

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“If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin,” Tolkien wrote, “I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride”.

That’s subtler, and kinder, than anything Dahl could write; although Tolkien too revised The Lord of the Rings after pondering whether his portrayal of dwarves was anti-Jewish. It is without end, like fiction itself.

So perhaps I will tell him the truth: that you can write wonderfully about fruit, and childhood agony, and still be not the World’s No. 1 Storyteller — as the website says — but an absolute fool.

Some stand up better than others. Matilda and Danny the Champion of the World are still wonderful, as is George’s Marvellous Medicine; The Enormous Crocodile feels, frankly, phoned in (“Will this do? Roald”), and the posthumously published Billy and the Minpins is formulaic. But it was after reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and moving — naturally enough — onto the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, that I pulled up short, and suddenly found myself skipping several pages. I hadn’t remembered it being so spectacularly racist.

It’s one bit, when the US president is ringing around other world leaders to arrange a response to an apparent alien attack (which is in fact Charlie, Willie Wonka and the Buckets in the elevator; don’t worry, it doesn’t make a great deal more sense when you’re reading it). One of the leaders he phones is the Chinese premier. But his red-phone hotline to party headquarters first accidentally rings a Chinese takeaway, because, ha ha, everyone’s called Wing and Wong in China, so it’s very easy to, ha ha, “Wing the Wong number”. Then there’s an awful lot of “velly solly Mr Plesident, the plemier is unavailable”. The Chinese politicians are called Chu-On-Dat and How-Yu-Bin.

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I don’t think of myself as especially easily shocked, and I try to remember that different times had different mores — at my grandmother’s house, there were books from her childhood that I’d read on holiday; I am still amazed at the existence of Little Black Sambo, among others. But the fact that it was fine for Dahl to put all that in a children’s book — a book published in 1972, only eight years before I was born — seemed remarkable, as was the fact that I must have read it as a child, several times, without it making a huge impression on me.

(The less said about Tintin in the Congo, the better.)

People get very concerned about the books that children read shaping their minds. It’s hard to find books for very small children that don’t have some trowelled-on message: it’s OK to be yourself, people are different and that’s fine, isn’t having friends lovely, that sort of thing. This isn’t a new phenomenon, or specific to children’s literature; every generation thinks the generation after it is being warped by something, computer games or video nasties or pulp novels.

And it’s not limited to any particular part of the political compass. The Right gets just as worked up about pasteboard books called Timmy’s Two Mummies or A Boy Called Rosie as the Left does about ones called Girls Are Princesses And Boys Are Firefighters or whatever. The theory, I think, is that children’s books have great influence on the attitudes and behaviours of that child as they grow up. Give me the child to the age of seven, and I will give you the man, and all that.

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For the record: I’m sceptical. There’s a huge and ongoing argument about whether literature reflects or shapes its age; and obviously the truth will be “a bit of both”, but I suspect it’s usually a lot more reflection than shaping. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator wouldn’t get written now because society has changed; but I doubt it inspired a great deal of anti-Chinese racism in the children who read it.

We all have books that we feel changed our lives, I realise. I read The Blind Watchmaker at a formative age and felt it twist my destiny. But it’s hard to tease out how much that is actually a book shaping my personality, or a book fitting neatly into the shape my personality already had, like a key into a lock. And I don’t imagine many people have that experience with books for the under-sevens anyway. In general, the people in a child’s life — their parents, their teachers, and, probably most importantly, their peers — must outweigh the impact of the books they read by an order of magnitude, when it comes to shaping their attitudes.

But even if you don’t think they’ll warp their tiny minds, you still might not want to read them Tintin in the Congo — or Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator — just because they’re nasty and mean-spirited and unpleasant.

We had another experience, though. When I was young, my parents used to read me the Noggin the Nog series, by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. Postgate and Firmin are probably best known for their TV work – Bagpuss, The Clangers, Postman Pat, Ivor the Engine. But they also wrote children’s books, notably the Noggin series, and my parents bought us a box set of them to read the kids, not long after we got the Dahl collection.

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There was a hint of trepidation when I read the first one to my son for the first time, with the Great Glass Elevator experience in mind. In the first book, Noggin ventures up north from his Viking-ish lands to “the Land of the Midnight Sun”; here he meets his bride, Nooka, daughter of Nan, king of the Nooks. The Nooks are obviously Greenland Inuit. Later in the series he travels to “the Land of the Silver Sand”, an orientalised Middle East, full of magic carpets and genies. The potential for cringeworthy stereotyping was enormous.

It’s not that the books avoided stereotyping altogether — the Nooks live in cartoon igloos, the Sultan has long black moustaches and lives in a palace with an onion-shaped dome on the top. But the books consistently made everyone human. The Sultan is greedy and self-interested, but only in the same way as the books’ villain, Noggin’s uncle, Nogbad the Bad, is; another Middle Eastern character, Haroun ibn Daud, is gentle and kind and unworldly, rather like Noggin himself. Wherever Noggin goes, he encounters characters — whether tiny elf-like Omruds, enormous ice dragons, or thinly disguised Inuits and Arabs — who turn out to be people, silly and self-absorbed but basically decent.

I interviewed Terry Pratchett years ago, himself the author of some wonderful children’s books — the Nome trilogy, Truckers, Diggers and Wings, have much the same gentle tone as Postgate and Firmin’s books. He identified a certain kind of voice among a certain kind of English writer of the middle decades of the 20th century — Jerome K. Jerome, Richmal Crompton, RJ Yeatman and WC Sellar, Kenneth Grahame — a “slightly satirical, people-are-rather-silly-but-they’re-not-that-bad voice, friendly about humanity, fond of its foibles”, which paved the way for him and, I’d say, for Douglas Adams. The Noggin series fitted that description perfectly.

We read the whole series, my son and I; then read it again, from the beginning, and the second time he was starting to be able to read some of it himself, which was joyous. And my parents read him some, which had me quietly dabbing at my eyes.

I’m not suggesting we strike Roald Dahl from our children’s reading lists (although you won’t be missing much if you strike Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator off it; even if you skip the racist bits, it’s just not very good). There’s a place for that misanthropic, kids-against-adults thing he has going on; I found such kicking against authority thrilling, when I was old enough to read James and the Giant Peach or Matilda myself. And as I say, I don’t think it’s going to warp your kids’ minds, in any detectable or significant way. But it’s just nicer, sometimes, to read books by people who like people. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re off to listen to Alan Bennett reading Winnie-the-Pooh.