When I’m writing a short story I’m haunted by the thought that I’ve got to hold the reader’s attention for literally every second, otherwise I’m dead.
(Roald Dahl, in the Introduction to the first collection of Tales of the Unexpected)

Someone Like You is a collection of 19 short stories by Roald Dahl, published in 1953. It was only after a bit of poking around that I realised what’s always confused me about Dahl’s short stories is that they a) were mostly published very early on, in the 1940s and 50s b) were subsequently repackaged and published multiple times, in different volumes, with a wide variety of titles, thus muddying the order and leading to a confusing plethora of collections.

Take the volume which I associated with Dahl as a schoolboy, the first volume of Tales of the Unexpected, published in 1979 to tie in with the ITV dramatisations which were very popular, stories I, not unnaturally, assumed must have been written during the 1970s. Except it turns out that all the stories in it had been previously published in either this 1953 collection, Someone Like You, or in Kiss Kiss, published in 1960. Presented in shiny packaging at the very end of the 1970s, all these stories in fact dated from the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, a generation earlier.

1. Man from the South (September 1948)
2. Taste (December 1951)
3. The Sound Machine (September 1949)
4. Poison (June 1950)
5. Dip in the Pool (January 1952)
6. Skin (May 1952)
7. My Lady Love, My Dove (June 1952)
8. Lamb to the Slaughter (September 1953)
9. Nunc Dimittis (September 1953)
10. Edward the Conqueror (October 1953)
11. Galloping Foxley (November 1953)
12. Neck (1953)
13. The Wish (1953)
14. The soldier (1953)
15. The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1953)
16. Claud’s Dog (1953)
    • The Ratcatcher
    • Rummins
    • Mr. Hoddy
    • Mr Feasey

Man from the South (September 1948)

Two things are made perfectly plain in this first story: It is a gruesome story, which raises the central question, whether Dahl realised early on that the gruesome, macabre and sadistic would sell. And it is written with great clarity and limpidness, plain and open.

There are at least two consequences: one is that he places you in the situation, in the mise en scène, with tremendous speed and efficiency. Witness the first sentence:

It was getting on towards six o’clock so I thought I’d buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deckchair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

The story is a first-person narrative told by the male narrator who goes down to the pool, orders a beer and sits on a lounger and is watching the guys and girls playing in the pool when the action begins. The stripped-back style acts as a foil to set off the gruesomeness of the central premise. In this case, a middle-aged fully clothed man comes and sits near the narrator, engages him in conversation speaking with an indeterminate accent, maybe Italian maybe Spanish.

They chat a bit, then one of the fit young men from the pool comes splashing out and sits nearby with his girl. He goes to light a cigarette, the man from the South admires his lighter, yes, the Yank says, It lights every time. Every time? asks the man from the South. And then quickly, with an eerie believability, he escalates the conversation, asking the Yank if he wants to bet: why sure, why not, says the young man.

The man from the south escalates it further, saying he’ll bet his car that the Yank’s cigarette lighter won’t light ten times in a row, and not just any old car but a Cadillac. The American’s eyes light up at the prospect of winning a car, but then the man from the South makes his demand…He insists that he takes from the American something he doesn’t need, something like…his little finger! From this point onwards the story becomes not only macabre but actively gripping.

Obviously the girl the American has picked up, and the sensible narrator, are scandalised by the man’s proposition and tell the Yank not to do it…But the man from the South works on him, telling him that if he’s right about his lighter, then he stands to win a Cadillac, until the young man, in a burst of boyish bravado, agrees! At which point they all go to the man’s hotel room where he tells his servant to go and get: string, a hammer, nails and a hand axe.

With these he proceeds to tie the American’s left hand to a table, splayed open in such a way that the little finger is isolated, all of which the American agrees to, and the narrator watches with horrified fascination. Then he instructs the American to start firing his lighter, whilst holding the small axe poised over the American’s finger. One light works. Then number two. Then three.

The reader is, by now, on the edge of their seat. From nowhere (lounging by the pool) this has developed into a heart-stopping thriller. The count gets up to seven successful fires when…the door opens and…the man from the South’s wife storms in.

She immediately puts a stop to everything, pushing him and the axe away, making him put the axe down, untying the American’s hand, saying the whole thing is null and void. She changes the whole mood and context of events by explaining that her husband has a psychiatric disorder, a compulsion to gamble mixed with sadism, ‘they’ have tried repeatedly to stop him. They eventually managed although at some cost and the narrator suddenly notices, as the woman swiftly unties the American’s hand, that she only has the thumb and one finger remaining on her right hand. Gruesome.

Taste (December 1951)

At a posh dinner party a City broker seeks to impress a famous epicure who he’s invited. This posh fellow ignores his food and the extremely expensive wine put in front of him in order to chat up the host’s 18-year-old daughter. Whereupon the banker-host proposes a bet that the Epicure can’t identify the rare red wine he’s just served. The stakes between the two blowhards escalate until the Epicure says that if he wins, if he identifies the wine correctly, he wants the host’s daughter as his winnings. He’ll stake his house in the country, in fact his town and country houses. The wife intervenes, the daughter screams ‘No’ but the obsessed banker-father insists.

There follow several pages in which the Epicure makes a great show of tasting the wine and forensically deducing which vineyard it came from until he announces the correct vineyard and vintage. The banker turns white and asks if they can go to another room for a private talk. Things threaten to turn nasty when the maid, an old woman nearer 70 than 60, steps forward to hand the Epicure his glasses, quietly pointing out that he left them in the study when he popped in there for a few moments just after arriving. The study where he and the host had agreed was the best place to leave opened bottles of wine to air! In other words, he cheated. The expression on the banker’s face hardens as a vast fury grows inside him, and at that moment the narrative ends, leaving us to imagine the rest. Silly but hugely effective.

The Sound Machine (September 1949)

This story has an amateur inventor, H.G. Wells vibe about it. Klausner is an inventor who works in a shed at the bottom of his garden and is putting the finishing touches to a new device. It’s like a miniature coffin filled with wiring, with knobs on the front – amateur inventor stuff.

In a first passage of exposition, Klausner explains what it’s for to Dr Scott. Humans can only hear a subset of the audible spectrum. It’s well know that dogs, for example, or bats, can hear frequencies we can’t. Therefore, he’s built a device which can detect these higher frequencies and convert them into sounds hearable by human beings.

Next day he goes out into his garden, puts on the headphones, turns it on and the, over the background hum, he suddenly hears an intense piercing scream of a sound. He’s still reeling when he hears another one. Suddenly he realises it’s his next door neighbour, Mrs Saunders, cutting yellow roses in her garden.

Klausner leans over the fence, interrupts her horticulture and asks if she can snip one more. She does so and he hears the ‘scream’ at exactly that moment. He can hear plants scream.

Bright and early next morning Klausner carries the machine over to his local park along with an axe. He sets it up by a tree and takes a swing, embedding his axe in the bark. At that exact moment he hears a deep groaning sound. Trees feel pain and trees express it through sound, in this case a deep powerful moaning. He looks at the gash he’s made in the tree with horror and remorse.

Now it becomes clear why the narrative introduced Dr Scott at the beginning because Klausner rushes home and phones the doctor, hurriedly telling him he must must must come over, despite the good doctor complaining that it’s 6.30 in the morning.

But drive round he does, and Klausner hustles him into the park where he insists that the doctor a) puts on the headphones and b) takes the axe and strikes the tree, and so become a witness of his great scientific breakthrough.

Against his better instinct the doctor hits the tree with the axe but, in the seconds before, Klausner realises that one of the tree’s enormous branches is working loose, it bends and snaps at the exact moment Dr Scott’s axe blow hits the tree. The doctor pushes Klausner to safety and they both watch the branch fall on and crush the sound machine.

Feverishly Klausner asks the doctor whether he heard the tree cry out, did he, did he? No, he didn’t. At which point Klausner topples over into madness and asks the doctor to stitch the axe gash in the tree. When the Dr says that’s ridiculous Klausner brandishes the axe menacingly and orders the doctor to paint the wound with iodine i.e. to sterilise it and prevent it becoming infected.

Poison (June 1950)

First-person narrative told by Timber Woods. We’re in India. It’s evening. Woods drives up to the house he shares with Harry Pope. He finds Pope in bed, sweating, absolutely stationary and whispering. He tells Woods there is a krait, a lethal snake, coiled on his chest; it crawled up his leg and across his body while he was lying on his back reading. Now he daren’t move. He’s been lying in an unmoving rictus of terror for hours.

Woods realises it’s an emergency, makes a couple of not very sensible suggestions, then phones Dr Ganderbai, a small Indian Hindu doctor, who comes right round. He brings some anti-venom serum and, after some thought, gets Woods to drive to his clinic and get some choloroform. Once it’s fetched, he rigs up a funnel and long flexible tube and spends fifteen or more minutes very carefully pushing it under the bedsheet to where Harry whispers that the krait is located. Then he pours the cold liquid down the tube so that it slowly spreads over Harry’s tummy, making the narrator, Woods, feel woozy.

The upshot is that after all the doctor’s scrupulous care, when he and the narrator slowly pull the sheet back, there is no snake! Maybe there never was one. As soon as this is confirmed Pope leaps up and dances with horror on the bed and starts ranting and raving. In his release from terror he abuses Dr Ganderbai in insulting racist language. The narrator tries to shut him up and then accompanies the poor abused doctor to his car and tries to apologise and say how much he appreciates all his efforts.

So there are two focuses of interest; for almost the entire story it’s the very tense situation with the supposed fatal snake which has a kind of horror/melodrama vibe; but right at the end it completely switches to being much more human and literary, as Dahl records Pope’s unforgivable racist rant against the doctor and Wood’s embarrassment and attempts to redress the balance by profusely thanking him. The last page where this happens seems like it comes from a different aesthetic and moral universe to everything which preceded it, and it has tremendous understated power.

Dip in the Pool (January 1952)

A gruesome black comedy. We’re aboard an ocean liner. Apparently, in the old days, they bet on what distance the ship would cover in the next 24 hour period. The captain gives his best guess and then gambling-minded passengers buy, at auction, a range of hours either longer or shorter than the captain’s prediction i.e. bet on whether the ship covers a greater or lesser distance than the captain predicted.

Mr William Bonibot is a small earnest American married to frequently cross and critical Ethel. He wants to impress her by returning from his cruise with a fortune. He wants to win the daily sailing auction so, in the middle of a storm, when the ship is forced to slow down, he buys the slowest speed, paying for it with his entire life savings of £200 (British currency on a British ship). The total pool which he stands to win is £2,100 or about $6,000.

Trouble is, the next day the sea is flat and calm and the ship picks up speed so Bonibot is set to lose his life savings. Into his head pops the mad idea of jumping overboard to delay the ship and win the auction.

When he goes up on deck to put his mad plan into action, there’s only one person on deck, an elderly woman. Good – he mustn’t be seen to be deliberately jumping overboard, but, on the other hand, he needs someone to raise the alarm.

It occurs to him that she might have poor eyesight or be deaf so he calls her, at which she a) turns and b) sees him and c) engages in a little conversation. Good. She can hear and see and talk, so she’ll report man overboard alright. So Bonibot takes his courage in his hands, steps onto the rail, shouts out HELP loudly to catch the woman’s attention, and jumps out and away from the ship.

She watches astonished as she sees a dressed man plummet into the ocean far below, his head reappearing after a few seconds in the ship’s wake. For a few seconds she has a little panic wondering what she’s meant to do, throw a lifebelt, run and fetch help, shout and yell. But it passes and she returns to leaning over the railing watching the tiny head dwindle into the distance and then disappear.

Some time later her minder appears, a hard-looking spinster. The elderly lady begins to explain that she saw a man jump off the ship but the spinster cuts across her, telling her not to talk such nonsense, also telling her she knows she’s not meant to go off alone without supervision, before leading her away by the hand.

Thus, in a few quick strokes, we realise that she is certainly not blind or deaf or mute as Bonibot ascertained. But he hadn’t bargained for a witness who was simple, touched in the head, not all there. And so the old lady and her minder walk away from the rail and both forget about Bonibot as if he’d never existed.

Obviously, considered rationally, the plot is ridiculous and contrived. But the feeling behind it is eminently believable, the sense of the teeth-gnashing frustration, the sense of the universe’s absolute indifference to us and our feeble plans, or, worse, that the universe is actively malevolent, teasing us and torturing us. These are childish feelings, suppressed but lurking beneath the rational adult, which Dahl’s gruesome tales reignite.

(Also, in the first part, the auction for speeds/times, Dahl conveys very well indeed the feverish, sweating excitement of real gambling, the white knuckles and small intense eyes. So these are stories designed to appeal to our irrational obsessive drives…)

Skin (May 1952)

Imagine one of the great modernist painters, living in an attic before he was famous, has a little celebration with his friend the tattooist, whose wife he fancies and paints over and over. Imagine the tattooist adores his work so much that, once they’re plastered, he suggests the artist paints a portrait of his wife on his back. In fact, why stop there? Why not get him to paint the portrait and then show him how to convert it into a tattoo?

That was back in 1913, the Paris atelier years, the early years. Then imagine that two world wars later, the old tattooist, long parted from his wife who died in the second war, is walking the streets of Paris, poor, shabby and hungry. And walks by an art gallery which is having a special private showing of an exhibition by the very same painter whose works are now worth millions. And he not only refuses to leave when politely asked to, but makes a scene, yelling how much he loved the artist and then tears his coat and shirt off and reduces the haute bourgeoisie to stunned silence, when they see the tattoo on his back, unmistakably by the master, and even signed by him.

So the artist is (the real-life artist) Chaim Soutine, the tattooist is named Drioli and now, in the present, he finds two men fighting over the work of art on his back. The gallery owner offers to pay him a fortune in exchange for which he’ll have Paris’s leading plastic surgeon cut the entire tattoo off his back and give him a skin graft to replace it. But standing behind Drioli is a tall suave man wearing lemon-yellow gloves.

This fellow claims to be the owner of the Hotel Bristol in Cannes and offers to keep Drioli in a life of luxury for the rest of his natural life – fancy food, private rooms, tailored suits, young women doing his nails – as long as, at the end of it, Drioli legally gifts him his back.

Yellow gloves wins. His offer to buy the starving old man roast duck and chambertin right now trumps all the old man’s reservations.

The story concludes with the information that just a few weeks later a dramatic new work by Soutine arrives on the market, slightly unusual portrait, stretched and varnished and framed, in Bueno Aires (i.e. far from the gallery incident). The narrator lugubriously comments that he hopes Drioli is safe and sound somewhere, being pampered in expensive suits. But the strong implication is that he isn’t. The implication is that he’s dead, murdered for the work of art on his back.

Regarding Soutine, I wrote a review of an exhibition of his paintings in 2017 at the Courtauld Gallery:

• Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys @ The Courtauld Gallery

My Lady Love, My Dove (June 1952)

The story rotates around the hen-pecked character of the first-person narrator, Arthur Beauchamp, a short man who is bullied and hectored by his large, domineering wife, Pamela. The catch is he can’t leave or even criticise her because she’s rich, comes from a titled family, and he married her for her money. So he lives the life of Riley in a big house with orchards and full-time gardeners etc, tinkering with his precious butterfly collection, seething with barely suppressed discontent (like so many married couples in Dahl).

They have invited a couple, the Snapes (Henry and Sally), to come and stay although, in the way of the English upper-middle-classes – at least in stories like this – they cordially dislike and despise the couple and are wondering why the devil they invited them. It is, in fact, because the wife in particular is potty about bridge and the couple are the best bridge players they’ve ever met.

Anyway, out of nowhere the overbearing wife suggests, well, orders the husband eavesdrop on the couple by installing a microphone in their room. He makes loads of objections (it’s like spying through a keyhole) but she rather oddly replies that they’re both complete stinkers already and they might as well be honest about it.

So Arthur finds a microphone and a load of wiring (in his workshop), goes into the room where the visiting couple are due to stay, ponders a number of places to hide the microphone and settles on the sofa, slits the undercovering, fixes it in place, and begins laying the wiring under the carpet, to the door and out into the corridor.

As he goes through all these processes I was wondering two things: 1) if you bug a couple’s private room you are liable to hear things you didn’t want to, the obvious one is sexual byplay or actual sex; or, less prurient, people burping, farting or going to the loo; 2) the more likely outcomes, especially if you embed the mic in a sofa, is that it simply doesn’t work, is smothered, and doesn’t pick up anything.

The reason they’d invited this couple they despise is because they play a good game of bridge, which our couple are particularly keen on. There’s a bit of tension/excitement when the couple arrive, knocking on the front door before the narrator has finished laying the wire as unobtrusively as he can along the top of the skirting board from the guest room to the master bedroom, and it crossed my mind that this would be a funny outcome, that the guest couple spot the wire, find the mic, and then play up to the situation, concocting and acting out who knows what outrageous scenario to punish their sneaky hosts.

In the event none of these things happen. The invited couple settle in, unpack, dress for dinner, don’t notice the mystery wire, and they all have a very civilised dinner served by servants. Henry is tall and went to Eton and knows about wine. Arthur is attracted by the bright young wife but after a while begins to sense that she is slightly brow-beaten by her husband. Then they settle down for an evening of bridge, which is described in some detail. Long story short, the guests lose because the wife makes an unwise bid at the contract stage of the game.

Finally the game ends about midnight and everyone retires to bed. The narrator and his bossy wife gather round the loudspeaker connected to the microphone. And what they hear is…the couple transformed. The husband is livid with the wife for making that mistake which cost them making any profit on the evening. It turns out that they are using a complicated system of cheating whereby the precise tone of his voice and position of his fingers indicates precisely what cards he is holding so that the wife’s bidding can be exact. And this is because they make a living by cheating rich people at bridge. He reminds her they are playing different people every night the following week and insists that they stay up for a few hours now practicing till she has it off perfect, despite her tearful refusal.

And the story ends with Arthur’s domineering wife suddenly insisting that they devise a similar form of cheating, too, and drives him off to get a pack of cards, so they can start right now!

Lamb to the Slaughter (September 1953)

Maloney, a big senior policeman comes home to his loving wife, six months pregnant, who’s ready to do anything for him, pours him a Scotch with ice and prepares to make him dinner. That’s when he sits her down and tells her he’s leaving her. She gets up dazed and insists on going down to the freezer in the cellar to get a joint of something to cook for his dinner. The first thing that comes to hand is a leg of lamb frozen solid, which she carries back up from the cellar, walks into the front room where her husband is staring out of the window and brings it down on h is head with the force of an axe. He falls dead.

She wonders what to do then dresses and walks to the local grocer. Here she buys some peas, potatoes and nice cheesecake, making a big deal of describing cooking for her husband. In fact she does such a good job convincing herself of her normality that when she returns to the house and discovers her husband’s body, she is genuinely shocked and distraught.

In this state she calls the police who flock round (given that the dead man is one of them), question her, carry out forensic procedures, interview the neighbours and even the grocer who vouches for Mrs Maloney.

oney’s normality. They come to the conclusion (a bit stupidly) that Maloney was killed by a single blow to the head by person unknown.

Since they’re there, and Mrs Maloney is has cooked the joint and had put the vegetables on…she invites the detectives to eat the roast dinner. They hesitate and say it wouldn’t be respectful but she wins them round by saying it’s what her husband would have wanted. So eventually they all sit down at table and she serves up the very leg of lamb she used to murder her husband and the story ends with some of them wondering where the murder implement can have ended up…Probably right under their noses, one of them jokes, as he raises his fork of lamb to his mouth.

And the story ends with a quietly macabre note as Mary Maloney, in the kitchen, listens to the big strong clever men tucking into the lamb, and starts to giggle…

Nunc Dimittis (September 1953)

An exercise in a style quite different from anything else in the collection, this is a first-person narrative which is deliberately different from the practical, clear, Hemingway tone of ‘the Man from the South’ or ‘Poison’. Here’s the first sentence of ‘Poison’:

It must have been around midnight when I drove home, and as I approached the gates of the bungalow I switched off the headlamps of the car so the beam wouldn’t swing in through the window of the side bedroom and wake Harry Pope.

Quick, direct, to the point. Now here’s the opening of ‘Nunc Dimittis’:

It is nearly midnight, and I can see that if I don’t make a start with writing this story now, I never shall. All evening I have been sitting here trying to force myself to begin, but the more I have thought about it, the more appalled and ashamed and distressed I have become by the whole thing.

We are inside the fevered mind of Lionel Lampson. He is a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, art collector and all round connoisseur (cf the wine connoisseurship evinced by the narrator of ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’), ‘a person of some consequence in society’ (p.385).

One evening after a drinks party he accompanies short gossipy Gladys Ponsonby back to her place and she asks him in for a drink.

Obviously flirting, she starts off by telling him about the portrait hanging in her living room. She’s just had it done by the fashionable painter, John Royden. She explains that Royden has a special technique. He only does portraits of women (Society ladies) and he insists, by way of preparation, of painting them nude, so as to fully understand the frame, the scaffold, the chassis of the dressed person. First he paints them naked, then paints on the underwear, then paints on the final clothing. When Lampson goes up close to Gladys’s painting he sees this is true because the paint of her dress is significantly raised above the surface of the canvas.

Anyway, as she continues to drink freely Gladys becomes a bit malicious and tells Lionel that his (Lionel’s) young girlfriend, Janet de Pelagia is slagging him off behind his back. Specifically, Janet freely refers to him as that ‘crashing bore’ (p.382). Lionel is very upset and goes home crushed and depressed.

Next day he conceives his revenge (on Janet). He rings this painter, John Royden, gets him round and asks him to do an unusual commission. He’ll pay for a portrait of Janet de Pelagia but doesn’t want her to know. He wants Royden to bump into her at a party somewhere and exclaim that she has exactly the figure and face he wants to paint and he’ll do her for free. She’ll be flattered. Royden can do the portrait, exhibit it at the Royal Academy, safe in the knowledge that Lampson will pay full whack and buy it off him. Deal?

Deal. For a 5 foot by 3 foot full-length portrait. Now he has to be patient and, to pass the time, goes off on holiday to Italy for four months. He returns in July just as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is opening. Royden’s portrait of Janet has been much admired but the painter has refused to sell it. When the exhibition closes the portrait is delivered to Lampson’s house.

At this point he reveals the rather contrived fact that he is not only a connoisseur but a picture restorer complete with all the equipment. So now he sets about carefully rubbing the surface layer off to reveal Janet standing in her bra and corset and suspenders, the corset indicating how fat she is, and the surprising revelation that she’s noticeably bow-legged. As the narrator drolly comments, ‘One lives and learns’ (p.392).

This done, he invites a dozen or so of society’s upper crust (‘the most distinguished men, the most brilliant and influential women in the top crust of our society’) to an elite dinner at his place, service by candlelight so in deep gloom. As the meal is ending the candles have guttered right down, Lampson order his servant to turn on the electric lights which reveal… the portrait of Janet in her underwear, trussed and contained in her stays, legs bowed like a jockey’s. Lampson doesn’t loiter to see the effect but is exiting the room as the lights go on, just long enough to hear the uproar as the assembled guests catch sight of the portrait and, above all, the sight of Janet de Pelagia like someone who’s been shot through the heart and freezes for a moment before collapsing.

At that point Lampson flees his London home, getting his chauffeur to drive him to his country house to rejoice in his revenge. After a few days Gladys phones him and gleefully tells him how he is being criticised and ostracised for this beastly treatment of Janet, rejected by his entire social circle. She (Gladys) on the other hand is only too glad to come down to his country house and ‘comfort’ him i.e. sex. But Lampson is too upset and slams the phone down.

And this is where the narrative began, with Lampson fussily aware of having been ostracised by polite society and all his ‘friends’. And here’s where we come to the sting in the tail, though, which is he says he’s had a letter from Janet which completely forgives him, tells him she understands it was a joke, assures him she still loves him. And it was accompanied by a gift, a large jar of caviar, his favourite food which he has just wolfed down. And now…he is starting to feel a bit unwell, really rather ill…

So the story ends with the strong implication that the caviar was poisoned and the narrator is dying. Upper class bitchiness turned fatal.

Edward the Conqueror (October 1953)

Third person story about a middle-aged, middle-class couple, Edward and Louisa, living in a big house without kids. He’s gardening and has made a big fire when she goes out into the garden, calls him to lunch and spots a funny-looking cat by the fire. The cat follows them indoors and she gives it a bowl of milk. After lunch Louisa sits down to play some piano. She’s a fair pianist and goes through classical numbers by Schubert and the like but notices that when she plays a piece by famous Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811 to 1886), the cat suddenly sits up and becomes attentive. Slowly, carefully, Dahl describes a number of further incidents or details which convince Louisa that the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt. It sounds bonkers writing it down in black and white which is precisely why you have to read the story and enter into the mindset of Louisa as she plays different pieces and notes the cat’s responses in ever-greater detail. She even pops out to the local library to borrow a book about reincarnation, some of which the story summarises.

Anyway, by the time her husband comes in from an arduous afternoon’s gardening, Louisa has convinced herself that the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt and proceeds to tell her husband that she is going to invite the world’s leading composers to come and meet him! She also says she needs to cook him special food appropriate for such a genius and goes into the kitchen to make the cat her best soufflé.

When she returns to the living room the cat has gone and her husband is just coming back in from the garden, sweating a bit and acting suspiciously. When she looks closely she notices a raw scratch across his hand. He tries to persuade her that it was one of the beastly brambles he’s been clearing, but she, and the reader, know better. Without being told we know he’s done away with the wondercat.

Galloping Foxley (November 1953)

A very charged story with a twist in the very last line.

The narrator is a small-minded punctilious worker in the City of London named Perkins. A big deal is made of how much he loves commuting to work on exactly the same train every morning, the 8.12. He’s been doing it five days a week for 36 years. In fact he had composed a little memo about the pleasures of the day and its predictable routine when everything is disturbed by the arrival of a new man on the station platform, a bounder with oiled hair, a white silk scarf, and twirling a cane. Worst of all, the chap insists in getting into the same train carriage as Perkins and smoking a filthy pipe.

Not just once but several days in a row. And slowly Perkins realises that this fellow was the head of his house at public school, a beast named ‘Galloping’ Foxley, and this releases a flood of memories of how he was relentlessly bullied and beaten by this sadistic, taunting bully. The details of all the trivial transgressions he could beaten for and the experience of the beatings are dwelt on with excruciating vividness.

Eventually Perkins can bear it no longer and decides to confront his old bully, who has shown no flicker of recognition. It takes quite a bit of bravery to nerve himself to confront his old persecutor but one morning he politely leans forward and introduces himself, explaining that he was at Repton in 1907, expecting the bounder to agree that he, also, was at Repton, and then to recognise the poor little boy whose life he made a misery.

By this stage the reader, like the character, is quite wound up and tense and anxious about what will happen. But the twist is that the bounder with the pipe quite simply replies, ‘I’m glad to meet you, Mine’s Fortescue, Jocelyn Fortescue, Eton 1916.’

Perkins is completely, wildly mistaken about the other man’s identity. And all it has done is reveal just how very deeply wounded he was by his schoolboy experiences, and how little it takes to bring them all flooding back.

Neck (1953)

Weird and creepy. A rich bitch gets her come-uppance when she gets head stuck in a Henry Moore sculpture.

The first-person narrator is the writer of a daily column in an evening paper, presumably of society gossip for that is the subject of this story (p.449). It’s about a chap named Basil Turton who, when his father died, inherited the Turton Press which, for the purposes of the story, is a Fleet Street newspaper company. The point is that when he inherited the title and the fortune people like the author, Society gossips and commentators all drolly speculated who the lucky young woman would be who would bag this husband and his fortune. To everyone’s surprise it was a young beauty who swept in from the Continent, Natalia something from Yugoslavia or somewhere, and led young Turton up the altar before he realised what was going on.

Six years go by and Lady Turton now has her husband wrapped round her little finger, is running the newspaper and is a power in the land. The narrator finds himself seated next to her at a dinner and very off-handedly she invites him to come and stay at her country house, anytime. Being a gossip columnist the narrator leaps at the chance and motors down to this worthy pile, a great Tudor mansion with 47 bedrooms and an awesome garden, full of topiary and rather unexpected modern sculptures.

But something is very off. The creepy butler, Jelks, speaks about his own employer with a sneer and explains that instead of a tip (which is usual) he would like a third of the narrator’s winnings, which he thinks is both steep and forward.

At dinner it becomes obvious that the wife despises little Lord Turton, and has the bold dashing Major Haddock sat on one side of her and mannish, horsey Carmen La Rosa on the other. As in previous stories, we are in the world of upper-class bitchiness. When the table is brought to play cards Lady Turton cold shoulders her husband and insists on playing a four with Haddock, Carmen and the narrator. Around 11 she dismisses her husband and the butler and the narrator who goes to be thinking it’s a most unpleasant household.

Next morning the narrator comes down to find the butler serving Sir Basil breakfast, they get chatting, and after eating he takes our man on a grand tour of the amazing gardens. After some time they stop to sit on a bench by a carp pool and have a sensitive conversation about the history of the garden and the art pieces.

Then the narrator becomes aware of two figures some distance away, just about discernible as a man and a woman, presumably unpleasant Lady Turton and her lover Haddock. He and Sir Basil carry on chatting but in reality both are watching the progress of the couple who are gallivanting about the gardens then come to one of the Henry Moore sculptures.

Even from a distance it’s clear that they are mocking it, with the woman adopting ridiculous poses while the man photographs her and they both shriek with laughter, by implication mocking and belittling the taste of much-wronged Sir Basil. Eventually the woman sticks her head through one of the characteristic holes in the sculpture and the man takes a few more snaps before bending forward and obviously kissing her a few times. The narrator feels Sir Basil stiffen next to him. But then something goes wrong. She can’t get her head out of the hole. The man puts down his camera and tries to help her.

The charge of the story doesn’t come from the scenario itself but the uneasy way the narrator, very much an outsider and almost neglected guest, uneasily observes the reaction of Sir Basil to all this, obviously deeply hurt, trying to pass it off.

Eventually he says they probably ought to go down and help. They appear through an arch in the hedging and obviously surprise Natalia and Haddock, who quickly recovers and is all British, saying the lady needs help to get her head out of the hole. Sir Basil very calmly says are you asking me to cut a section out of my Henry Moore and his wife starts flinging filthy insults at him.

Out of nowhere appears the sly repellent butler, Jelks, appears out of nowhere and Sir Basil instructs him to fetch tools. And there follows the pregnant, powerful, disturbing climax of the story. For Jelks returns with an ax and a saw. As the narrator watches he sees Jelks very slightly proffer the axe which Sir Basil takes.

And then Dahl has the narrator very powerfully say that it’s like watching a child run out into the road just as a car rushes along, it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, as Sir Basil takes the axe and he sees Lady Turton’s head helplessly caught in the hole of the sculpture and the narrator has such a vivid premonition of what will happen next that he closes his eyes. Obviously he, like all the other participants, suddenly realise that Sir Basil in his cold fury will behead his wife.

This possibility is imprinted in our minds for half a page and then the narrator opens his eyes and sees calm dignified Sir Basil reprimanding Jelks for handing him such a dangerous tool, and instead requesting the saw, before setting about the careful procedure of cutting his wife free.

But the narrator sees Lady Turton’s face has turned grey and she is opening and closing her mouth making a horrible gurgling sound. She had had the same premonition as everyone else, and had died in her imagination. And just visible on Sir Basil’s face the narrator sees two warm red spots on his cheeks at, at his eyes, the tiny wrinkles of a smile.

A fantastically weird and powerful story.

The Wish (1953)

Short hallucinatory story about a boy who has to cross the enormous carpet in the hall of his big country house, just sticking to the yellow parts of the pattern and avoiding like death the dark red and black patches. The way the story is situated entirely inside the mind of the terrified boy reminded me of the more psychotic of J.G. Ballard’s short stories, not the science fiction ones, the ones set in the contemporary world inside the minds of people going mad.

The soldier (1953)

And this is similar, a terrifying depiction of a soldier (as we know from the title) who has obviously been psychologically wrecked by the war and is experiencing extreme psychosis, hallucinating, convinced ‘they’ are changing all the fixtures of his house around when his back is turned, climaxing when he returns from walking the dog and appears in the bedroom of his sleeping wife holding a knife, demanding to know what she’s done with his wife.

Both of these stories depicting mental illness are effective but I think the subject as a whole has dated badly, with hundreds of other stories about psychotics exploding all over the 1960s and 70s till the topic became a cliché.

The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1953)

A gleeful satire on the whole business of writing.

Adolph Knipe is a lanky young fellow who invents a great automatic calculating machine, a computer which can do sums millions of times faster than any human, to the joy of his employer, Mr John Bohlen, head of a firm of electrical engineers.

But one morning he has a brainwave. If most human calculations can be broken down into smaller units which can be calculated automatically, could the same thing be done with language? Could a machine learn to break language down into its smallest components, and then build them up phrase by phrase, into sentences, paragraphs. He sets to work to build one.

His boss is sceptical until Knipe finally delivers it and explains the rationale: it can write stories. He has broken stories down into component parts (plot, setting, characters, excitement, romance etc) which the machine can now put together at the will of the programmer. In other words, it is a machine to automatically generate stories.

Dahl then sets about having gleeful boyish fun fleshing out the details of the machine, the backend fills an entire building with cables and valves and rods and levers and whatnot, and the front end is like an organ with a keyboard. You select the style of one of the popular magazines, an approach or treatment, a theme, the number of character and desired length, press all these buttons then keep your foot on the Passion Pedal and, within a few minutes, a full story is produced.

Knipe and Bohlen send the first few off to magazines and they are soon accepted. They set up a literary agency and cook up names of authors who they attribute the stories to but in reality they’re all being churned out by the machine.

Then they get ambitious and there’s comedy about Mr Bohlen’s first attempt to control the machine long enough to create a novel. He panics and puts the passion pedal to the floor with the result that the first attempt is far too rude to publish. Next time he exercises greater restraint, the novel is run off in fifteen minutes, sold to a publisher the same day, and becomes a runaway bestseller.

It’s sort of on a serious subject but the entire treatment reeks of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In the middle there’s some satire about America, which was undergoing its great postwar boom and had become the world centre of consumer capitalism:

‘Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the handmade article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country you know that. Carpets… chairs… shoes… bricks… crockery… anything you like to mention they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so
long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!’ (p.500)

The fact that is appears in what is more or less a children’s story suggests how inane and clichéd this level of criticism of consumer capitalism was even back in the 1950s.

Claud’s Dog (1953)

This is the umbrella title for four related tales which feature the character Claud Cubbage who lives in a filling station in Buckinghamshire.

The Ratcatcher

This is possibly the best ‘story’ in the book, for a number of reasons. Number one, it is not a ‘story’ at all, more an incident or anecdote. It just describes what happened when a rat-catcher was sent by the local council to the land next to the filling station (or petrol station) where the boy Claud lives and how the creepy rat-catcher proceeds to show them some tricks of the trade.

The power of it really comes from what a repulsive, physically repellent and creepy character the catcher is. For the first time, in these four stories, the physical presence of the characters becomes really central or dominant.

The man was lean and brown with a sharp face and two long sulphur-coloured teeth that protruded from the upper jaw, overlapping the lower lip, pressing it inward. The ears were thin and pointed and set far back on the head, near the nape of the neck. The eyes were almost black, but when they looked at you there was a flash of yellow somewhere inside them.

How they look, and how they sound:

‘Now, where’s them rats?’ The word “rats” came out of his mouth soft and throaty, with a rich fruity relish as though he were gargling with melted butter. ‘Let’s take a look at them rraats.’

And again:

His voice had the soft throaty sound of a croaking frog and he seemed to speak all his words with an immense wet-lipped relish, as though they tasted good on the tongue. The accent was similar to Claud’s, the broad soft accent of the Buckinghamshire countryside, but his voice was more throaty, the words more fruity in his mouth.

This is a child’s point of view. In adult fiction you tend to get one pen portrait of a character’s appearance and then their appearance, their physical presence, is forgotten about, because in adult fiction what counts is what they say and do, the matrix of dialogue and action and relationships which adults operate in. Unencumbered by all this complicated stuff, children notoriously notice first and foremost people’s appearances (and often, smell).

But the ‘grip’ of the story also comes from fantastic amount of information the catcher knows about rats, the creepy way he tells Claud and Gordon all about it, and then the uncanny way he actually produces rats from his pockets and proceeds to demonstrate gruesome tricks with them.

Rummins

Feels like an exercise in a certain aspect of Hemingway but without the logic.

Rummins is a mean dwarfish man who owns the farm opposite the filling station owned by Claud’s friend Gordon, who narrates this story. After the visit of the ratcatcher they mention the number of rats in the big hayrick he made last year to Rummins who, a few days later, turns up with his son, Bert, to dismantle it.

The narrator’s memory goes back to the previous summer, to a sweltering day in June when they’d built the big hayrick, himself, Claud, Rummins and his son Bert, Wilson the soldier and Ole Tommy. There’s a bit of Ole Tommy’s backstory, how he was chosen by the council to supervise the kids’ playground. Now he helps out on this day and when they stop for lunch turns out to have brought no food but six pint bottles of beer which he generously hands round. After a while the narrator goes back to his filling station to serve customers and when he comes back the hayrick is more or less built but Ole Tommy’s disappeared, leaving his bag behind which is unlike him. When asked, stumpy little Rummins shrugs and says he must have gone home.

That was all a flashback to last summer. The story cuts back to the present and the narrator and Claud are helping Rummins and Bert dismantle the hayrick in part to get rid of all the rats it’s hiding. Up on top of the rick, Bert is cutting through the string and then the hay itself to create chunks, like a cake, which he peels away down to his dad who loads them into a cart.

At one point the big knife he’s using encounters an obstruction. This is where things turn very weird. the narrator becomes aware that Rummins is scared. Bert is puzzled at meeting something hard in what’s meant to be a building of straw. It’s at this moment the narrator has his flashback to the hot summer’s day when they built it.

Rummins yells at his son to persist and cut through the obstacle which he does. Then he cuts the other angles of the straw and dislodges a segment to fall to the ground for his dad. But when he steps back he sees what has been revealed by his work. The narrator describes all this in a moment which has become supercharged with horror. He describes Rummins jumping down off the rick and running for his farm, just as Bert starts to scream. That’s it, the end.

Now there’s no denying the intensity of the story and the luminous details Dahl picks out to really make it come alive, all the way through, in all aspects. The only problem is it doesn’t make sense. Is he saying Rummins for some reason murdered Ole Tommy? Why on earth do that, and there would be no opportunity because the soldier Wilson was working on the rick. But anyway, why? Is he saying Rummins murdered Ole Tommy and placed his body high up in the rick? No way he could have done that without anyone noticing, not least his own son. And if Bert was in on it, how come he is staggered to screaming pitch when he’s seen what he’s cut through (presumably Ole Tommy’s corpse). Above all, if Rummy knows the body is there, why on earth does he let his son go up and start slicing up the rick, and why does he tell him to persist when he encounters the obstacle? Maybe I’m missing something but none of it makes any sense. Which doesn’t stop it, nonetheless, being eerie and intense.

Mr. Hoddy

Claud is taken by his girlfriend, Clarice, to meet her father, the self-important village grocer’s assistant, Mr Hoddy, with a view to asking him for her hand in marriage. Mr Hoddy persists in wanting to know what Claud’s plans are. Claud despises Mr Hoddy and all the small-minded men of his ilk, and would really like to come clean and explain that he and and friend are planning to pull a con involving two identical-looking greyhounds, but of course he can’t. Instead he makes up on the spot a ridiculous scheme about setting up a maggot factory, insisting despite Mr Hoddy’s scepticism that there’s a massive market for maggots among anglers and the like, and how his factory would mass produce them in old oil drums full of rotting meat before packing them into glass bottles and posting them to subscribers.

So carried away does Claud become that he doesn’t notice the look on Mr Hoddy’s face until it’s too late, realises he’s gone too far – although I wasn’t sure whether this was because Hoddy, as a greengrocer, was disgusted by the notion of maggots and took it as a sly insult to his trade (i.e. dealing in fresh, unmaggoty fruit and veg); or whether Hoddy at some point realises Claud is making it all up and the realisation makes him furious.

Mr Feasey

A really gripping tale, by far the longest of the lot, in which Claud and his partner Gordon (owner of the filling station) concoct and bring to fruition their plan to fiddle a dog race. Claud has acquired two whippets, both identical in shape and colouring. One is slow, one is fast. The plan is to take the slow one to a country dog race, and enter him there for a string of races in which he will predictably come last then, once his identity is established and the odds are long, to make heavy bets on him (small best across all 17 bookies at the race) at long odds, and then enter the superfast dog for this race, thus winning all the bests at long odds.

The story is so long because it contains an immense amount of lore about how dog owners cheat, a quite staggering range of fixes which make dogs slow or fast, and all the ways to fix the races. The effect of all this lore and the intense anxiousness of Gordon and Claud as they lock up the garage and drive to the pivotal race is to have the reader on absolute tenterhooks as to the outcome.

Thoughts

Vivid

Obviously the core of a story is the plot, the series of events. And the ability to handle dialogue convincingly over long stretches is important. But what makes Dahl’s stories so effective, for me, is the tremendous limpidity and clarity of the prose and the completeness with which he describes the actions he describes. He describes them fully and pedantically so you can feel yourself doing them, whether it’s teetering on the railings of an ocean liner or hurriedly laying a cable along a corridor, you can feel yourself doing it. Amazingly vivid.

Height

How many of Dahl’s rather pathetic male characters are short. He is always very aware of height. The painter John Royden is a small neat man (p.385). The purser is small and fat and red (p.298). The owner of the art gallery is plump and short (p.327). Basil Turton is ‘a little chap’, ‘a small man’ (p.446). Adolph Knipe’s boss, Mr Bohlen, is ‘a fat little man’ (p.510). Rummins is ‘short and squat like a frog’ (p.537). When his big wife leans over him, Arthur Beaufort feels surrounded, almost enveloped by her:

as though she were a great tub of cream and I’d fallen in. (p.341)

Gladys Ponsonby is so short that she gives Lionel Lampson, looming over her:

the comic, wobbly feeling that I am standing on a chair. (p.372)

One imagines that, at 6 foot 6, Dahl had that feeling when standing next to more or less anybody.

Gambling

The intense sweaty thrill of it, as in ‘Man from the South’, ‘Taste’ and ‘Dip in the Pool’, the central subject of his novella ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’, the competitive bridge in ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’, the game of bridge in ‘Nunc Dimittis’. Gambling is a central obsession of Dahl’s.

Class and 50s manners

Some of these characters are very nobby (Arthur Beaufort’s wife from a titled family and their guest was educated at Eton), Lionel Lampson moves in titled circles, the narrator of ‘Neck’ is a High Society gossip columnist. I think there are two aspects of this: 1) There’s an element of voyeurism in witnessing the bitchiness, spite and malevolence of posh, upper class people. It has an extra relish, for some reason. 2) It points to a broader truth which is how very dated all the stories feel.

They’re set in the early to mid-1950s, still very much in the backwash of the war, waaaay before the doors were blown off conventional morality in the 1960s. My point being that several of the scenes only make sense in a milieu of upper-class gentility which has all but vanished today. For example, the eavesdropping on a young couple would surely, nowadays, need something salacious to make it really hit home, whereas for Dahl and his audience, the most shocking thing he could imagine was their being card cheats! Similarly, the society lady who is revealed in her underwear leads to scandal and murder in ‘Nunc Dimittis’ but would barely wake anybody up in the 1990s of paparazzi and Wonderbras, and we’re 30 years beyond even that now, into Naked Attraction and Love Island, a world of plastic surgery and male depilation.

The mating game

Amazing how the simple process of human beings seeking the perfect mate, pairing off, reproducing and then trying to put up with each other for the rest of our lives, is at the heart of so much fiction – as an evolutionary interpretation of literature would expect.

Mind you, having just written that down makes you realise how few of them are actually love stories  at all, in fact most of them are ‘out of love’ stories about the frictions and resentments of long-married couples – ‘Taste’, ‘A Dip in the Pool’, ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’, ‘Edward the Conqueror’, ‘Nunc Dimittis’.

And, oddly for a man who became really famous for his children’s stories, there are no children in any of them, apart from the distinctly unchildish ‘The Wish’. Although, despite the ostensible subjects often being cruel or macabre, there is something profoundly childish about the simple glee and vengefulness of many of them. They’re obviously not children’s stories and yet they’re not quite, totally, for adults either…

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Credit

References are to the versions of the stories published in Roald Dahl: The Complete Short Stories Volume Two published by Penguin in 2013.

Related links

• List of all Dahl’s short stories
• Text of Complete Short Stories Volume Two

Roald Dahl reviews

• Roald Dahl reviews