“What? Roald Dahl writes for children too?”
I’m perhaps the only person in the world to have said these words. But before you write me off, please hear me out.
Growing up in the 1980s, the characters we found on our literary landscape were Hanuman, Kalia the Crow, and anthropomorphic animals from beautifully illustrated books from the erstwhile USSR. As we grew older, we ran off with unsupervised British children who ate delicious-sounding food and had exciting adventures. The hungrier among us chewed through abridged, and then unabridged, classics by the time we reached our teens. But nowhere on the horizon did we see outlandish owners of chocolate factories or precocious girls with telekinetic abilities. Nobody in my circles had even heard of Roald Dahl.
The first meeting
Shortly after I moved to “grown-up” books, I came across a short story among the yellowing pages of my father’s copy of The World’s Greatest Short Stories. Barely into my teens, and accustomed to a diet of black-and-white characters and largely sanctimonious women, “Lamb to the Slaughter” opened up my mind to dizzying possibilities, both in the plot and the style of writing. Here was a woman who murders her husband in a blind rage (and the reader never gets to know what it was that angers her, and it was okay not to know!). She promptly conjures up an alibi, hides the murder weapon in plain sight, and at the end, actually giggles as the policemen wonder where the weapon is.
I noted the name of the author, and within a few days, I stumbled upon his name again, under another story, “Taste”, about a connoisseur of wines who asks to marry his host’s beautiful daughter if he can guess the vintage of a wine. I loved the story – the description of the wine, the tension in the room, the way the maid saves the day with her seemingly commonplace remark, and – voila! – a fan was born.
The next time I was at a bookstore, I bought the collected stories of Roald Dahl, and savoured them many times over. Clever, and deliciously devious, they sent tingles up my spine, and I felt myself smiling wickedly after every story. It tickled that dark side of me that I never knew existed.
Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss contain stories that are representative of his dark humour. A long-suffering woman “accidentally” leaves her husband trapped in a lift in “The Way Up to Heaven”. In “Dip in the Pool”, a man’s desperate attempt to win a bet has fatal consequences. And then there is “William and Mary”, a wonderfully wicked story of a man who wants to live on after his death. Mostly macabre, the stories rely on hints and implications at the end of the story to convey the twist. And as you finish, there is an infinitesimal pause, after which the realisation of the twist crashes into you, and immediately, the pure wickedness of the plot punches you in the gut, and the satisfaction is so, so sweet. Twist endings? No, these are twisted endings.
An entirely different set of stories are contained in Over To You, a collection based on Dahl’s experience as an RAF pilot. They do not have the kind of surprise endings of his other works, but are no less engaging. In all the stories, there is an undercurrent of despair at the futility of war. Some of them have a dreamlike, other-worldly quality, like in “They Shall Not Grow Old”, one of those stories that gripped me and refused to leave me, the story of a pilot who comes back to base after two days, but thinks he has been flying for just a few hours. The stories are disturbing, and yet, one doesn’t want to let go of them.
At the other extreme is Switch Bitch, a collection of stories about sex and deception. Two neighbours switching wives for a night, without the knowledge of the wives; an olfactory chemist who develops a perfume that will awaken the uncontrollable primal instincts of whoever smells it; a man who has a sexual encounter in the darkness of the night, and wakes up to find that it might have been a fatal mistake.
The discovery
As a result, Roald Dahl was firmly established in my head as a writer of dark, adult literature. Besides, the internet era had only just dawned and there was still no opportunity for Google to dispel my ignorance. So, when my little cousin told me that his parents had just bought him a Roald Dahl collection, I stumbled to my aunt, dazed and horrified, and demanded an explanation, which I got. And it was then that I uttered those words at the beginning of this piece, which, in hindsight, sound utterly ridiculous.
I borrowed my cousin’s collection and read them. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Twits, The BFG, The Witches, his Revolting Rhymes, and his terrifically entertaining autobiographical books Boy and Going Solo, and I fell headlong into the fantastical world of his scrumdiddlyumptious stories that have fascinated children for generations.
These stories were so different, and yet, they weren’t! The imagination, the wickedness, the dark humour, that confident voice, and of course, the effortless storytelling – they were all firmly present. And then, years later, I rediscovered the books with my daughter, and ensured that she was familiar with enormous child-eating crocodiles and child-crushing chokeys and gigantic fruits that roll down hillsides – and had, in short, a normal childhood.
Last year, for a school report on her favourite author, she chose to write about Roald Dahl. During her research, she suddenly turned to me, wide-eyed. “Did you know that Roald Dahl wrote for adults too?” she asked.
Life had come full circle.