Ten very early short stories by Dahl, all relating to the author’s own experiences flying for the RAF during the Second World War, and published in one volume the year after it ended.
An African Story (1945)
A story within a story. The frame story is about a rebellious trainee RAF pilot in Kenya who one day flies so low he shears the head off a giraffe by accident. A few weeks later he is killed in a training accident and the ‘editor’ of the text says they found the following story among his papers.
The main text is a spooky and unpleasant story, set in Africa. A dirty miserly old man keeps a farm and the part of it that is relevant to the story is that each morning a slobbering idiot servant he keeps, named Judson, milks the one black cow who lives and grazes in the yard near the man’s house.
Judson is a cretin, slobbering at the mouth, doing what he’s told without question. At the start of the narrative, the old man discovers that the slobbering servant, who is hyper-sensitive to sounds (hyperacusis), has just whacked the old man’s dog with a stick and broken its back. Unpleasant. Why? Because it was making a ‘noise’ as it licked itself. Doubly unpleasant. The old man yells abuse at Judson then finishes the agonised dog off with a metal bar.
Judson is meant to milk the black cow once in the morning, once in the evening. On a couple of mornings in a row the cow has no milk. At first the old man accuses Judson of drinking it himself, but then he stays up all night cradling a shotgun and watching the cow, on the suspicion that maybe a native Kikuyu is sneaking in and stealing the milk.
In the event what he sees is strange: a massive black mamba snake slithers into the yard, rears its head and suckles the cow dry. The old man conceives a wicked revenge on Judson for killing his dog. He tells Judson it is a native boy sneaking in and stealing the milk, and he’ll get him, Judson, to lie in wait then jump out and beat him. So the old man gets Judson to dig a trench next to the cow and lie in it. Judson doesn’t like it because the cow is making a loud chewing noise which upsets him, but the old man covers him in straw and tells him if he pops up too soon he will shoot him dead.
The pair then wait up all night, the old man at the window with his gun, Judson in the trench. In the dark morning along slithers the huge black mamba snake and, when it is close to the cow and the trench, the old man yells at Judson to jump up and attack the phantom milk thief. Judson jumps up, the mamba leaps forward, biting him in the trench, and the story gives a long lingering description of his death throes.
As an amateur psychologist I’d say this story is overflowing with anger. Breaking the dog’s back is nasty and brutal but is only the preliminary for the contrive revenge which the old man takes. Now he hasn’t got a servant to help him. It makes no logical sense. It is a fantasia of super-human anger and vicious revenge. Was this streak in Dahl’s imagination already or is it a reaction to the war and the pointless deaths of so many friends?
Only This (September 1944)
An ageing woman alone in a cottage in the south of England hears the thundering of an immense flight of bombers flying overhead, pulls her armchair to the open window and imagines she can see her son flying one of them and slowly, as in a dream or nightmare or horror story, finds herself actually present in the cockpit as the the plane heads into flak over the enemy target, as a wing catches fire, then a sudden explosion, the cockpit fills with smoke then flames, the pilot heroically battles to keep it flying straight as the rest of his crew bail out, then slumps forward as the bomber begins its death fall.
At which the narrative cuts back to the woman in the chair by the window as dawn glimmers and the first roar becomes audible of the bombers returning. This short intense vision ends with the fact that the woman herself has died.
Katina (March 1944)
Quite a long narrative, packed with factual detail based on Dahl’s short period flying Hurricanes during the Battle of Greece, as the British force sent to try and hold the country was overrun by the German army and Luftwaffe.
It centres round the symbolic figure of a 9-year-old girl, the Katina of the title, who the narrator and his friends rescue from a bombed village where her entire family has been killed and who becomes a mascot to the entire squadron, is fed, dressed and looked after by all of them, even as German attacks become more intense, as the Germans strafe and bomb their airfields. There is a lot of affecting detail about the impact she has on the men of the squadron, her friendship with a flyer named Fin, how she is officially enlisted onto the squadron’s membership, given a tent of her own, invited to eat at all the meals and so on.
It rises to a visionary intensity when (spoilers) at the end, a huge flight of Messerschmitts is strafing the British airfield, everyone has run for the deep slit trenches but they all see Katina get out and run into the heart of the airfield, clenching her fists and defying the invader who murdered her family. Which is magnificent by a Messerschmitt fighter machine guns her to death. All the men run out to her but the doc concludes she’s dead but here’s the thing – in a non-realistic passage the narrator has a vision of flames within flames, of an intense red fire flaring up in the hearts of all the people of Greece.
All the story up till then had been underplayed, written in a muted, understated style which, for example, casually mentioned that this or that pilot didn’t return from a mission, as one by one they’re picked off. Which makes the florid efflorescence of this vision of fire and anger at the end of the story all the more startling.
Beware of the Dog (October 1944)
Opens with a Spitfire pilot badly wounded, his right leg blown away by enemy airplane cannon fire, struggling to make it back to Blighty. It is an exercise in describing the light-headedness and hallucinations resulting from loss of blood. The pilot manages to bail out and tumble through thousands of feet of cloud spinning round and round and this very cleverly turns into the alternation of day and night at the hospital where he finds himself when he comes round with no memory of how he got there.
The kindly nurse tells him he’s in a hospital in Brighton and is very kind and carefully gives him bed baths, he begins to suspect he is not in Brighton, not even in England, he suspects he fell in enemy territory and is being softened up prior to a debriefing in which he will be encouraged to give away military secrets. So when a man dressed impeccably as a British Wing Commander arrives, he refuses to reply to his questions with anything but his name, rank and serial number.
At first I thought this was a story about his paranoia, not least because of the brilliant way the point-of-view descriptions of him tumbling out of the sky morph seamlessly into his lying in the hospital bed. But then I, also, began to suspect the nurse and the so-called Wing Commander who comes to interview him and the factual basis of his suspicions appears to be given when he painfully tumbles out of bed and crawls across the floor to a window, hoists himself up and sees that he is not in busy urban Brighton at all, but in a house in the middle of country and that opposite it is a house with a sign reading ‘Garde du chien’, French for ‘Beware of the dog’ (hence the title of the story). So he is in occupied France and the entire thing really is a clever setup to lull him into a false sense of security and allow the Germans to milk him for military information.
They Shall Not Grow Old (March 1945)
The narrator is a fighter pilot based in Haifa, north Palestine, flying sorties over Vichy France-controlled Lebanon and Beirut. His mates are ‘the Stag’, ginger-haired and the oldest flyer in the squadron at 27, and Fin. The story opens with Fin failing to return from a mission. His friends kick around in the sun and conclude he must have bought it. Tents and schedules and rations are reorganised. The commanding officer, ‘Monkey’, reports him missing.
Then a miracle happens. Two days after he failed to return the others hear the droning of an engine and Fin’s Hurricane comes into land. He gets out and walks towards his stunned colleagues. But he himself is staggered and then upset when they tell him he’s been gone 2 days; for him, it was just a normal mission, he flew over Beirut harbour, confirmed the presence of two French ships, and flew back. Why all the fuss. Monkey has to carefully explain that he’s been gone for two days. Fin thinks he’s going mad.
Slowly things settle down and next day he goes out on another flight with some of the other planes. One of their colleagues, Paddy, is shot down, and as his plane hits the ground Fin suddenly remembers what happened to him, and starts yelling on the radio that he remembers, he remembers!
Once they’ve gotten back to base and gathered in the ops room, Fin tells them a long, visionary story about how he was enveloped in white cloud and dove down and down to clear it but descended beneath the surface of the earth and there was nothing there, then he looked up and saw a visionary line of planes flying across the sky, and he knew it was a procession of all the dead flyers and he flew up to join it, all sorts of planes, allied and enemy, and they fly into a wonderful light, and he realises pilots about him have opened their cockpits and are waving like children on a rollercoaster, then he sees a vast airfield where all the planes have landed and he descends towards it, sees all the pilots getting out and walking towards a beautiful light, but suddenly his plane won’t land, he tries to force it to, but it resists all his urgings and climbs away, up into the clouds so that he loses sight of the vision altogether and then he was in his plane over the sea and flying back to the airfield and landed.
Well, his audience of fellow flyers is stunned. People walk away without commenting or asking questions. The daily routine resumes and they continue flying sorties. They know the Syrian campaign is coming to an end. On one of these sorties, Fin is shot down. The narrator shouts through the radio for him to bail out, but all they hear, as his plane hurtles towards the ground, is Fin yelling: ‘I’m a lucky bastard, a lucky, lucky bastard.’
Is this because he knows he is now, at last, going to fly his ghost plane towards the great light he saw? That this time round he is going to die for real, and go to heaven? Is that where the procession of planes he saw was heading? Was there some cock-up in his passage to the afterlife, and now, after a few days hiatus, he is filling his destiny?
The impact of the story is all the greater because the style throughout is so plain and understated, and because Dahl is very good at picking out the details of scenes – the feel of the heat on the airmen’s backs as they hang round the airfield, the noise of the planes, and a little sequence about Fin’s local girlfriend, Nikki, which helps make the real world setting that much more convincing – which all makes Fin’s vision all the more spooky and supernatural.
Someone Like You (November 1945)
Two pilots are getting really drunk in a bar. The conversation is punctuated by them asking the waiter for more drinks, even while agreeing that the beer is foul and the whiskey is worse. Doesn’t stop them and the reader realises it is part of the ‘therapy’. They have both seen terrible things, have terrible emotions coiled up inside them, getting hammered is the only way they can let it out.
The older more experienced one is a bomber pilot. He has a lot to get off his chest. He admits he hates his job, He’d rather be anything else in the world. He’s become obsessed by the thought that, when he’s over the target, just a minuscule jink on his rudder will shift the plane a hundred yards to the left or right, and will mean the difference between life or death for hundreds of people on the ground. He asks his drinking buddy to look round the nightclub they’re sitting in, then drunkenly points out that he’s killed many times the number of people in this room, hundreds of times more.
They have another drink and the bomber pilot tells the story of old Stinker Sullivan. He had an Alsatian dog he doted on and named Smith. One day the squadron was ordered to up sticks and fly to Egypt, immediately. Old Stinker ran round the airfield shouting for his dog which didn’t turn up. Forced to fly off without him. Here’s the point of the story: in the new base he slowly began talking to Smith the dog, referring to Smith, then taking him for walks, then telling him to ‘behave’ in restaurants. All the time there was no Smith there. Hallucination. Or comfort.
The point of the story is the three indicators of psychological damage, namely their determination to get drunk, the bomber pilot’s obsessive worry about the innocent people he kills, the powerful story of Stinker Sullivan going mad (four, actually, since the unnamed narrator shares his own irrational behaviour which is, after he’s gotten into a car, to count to 20 before driving off in order to prevent accidents).
Death of an Old Old Man (September 1945)
‘Oh God, how I am frightened’ is how this story starts. First-person account of a fighter pilot, tired after 4 years of combat, describing how terrified he is all the time he’s on the ground, in the mess, preparing the plane, a state of continual anxiety and terror. Once he’s up in the air his computer mind takes over, making split second decisions. The Spitfire becomes an extension of his body. He has a long duel with a Focke Wulf somewhere over Holland, which ends with them flying towards each other and shearing each other’s wings off. The narrator bails out and parachutes down into a field, at the last minute realising he’s heading straight for a cows’ muddy drinking pool. The chute falls on top of him and he is struggling up to his chest in water with the huge tangled canopy when he hears steps and the enemy pilot jumps onto him, seizes him by the neck and drowns him.
Except he doesn’t die. His disembodied consciousness watches the struggle from a distance, watches the German flyer emerge from the pool dragging a wet bundle (his own body) drop it and stomp off across the field. And the consciousness of the dead pilot pursues him, talking to him, the German reacts with terror and starts running, the dead pilot considers following him but then decides to go and have a lie-down among the primroses and violets.
So a lot happens. There’s a lot of information packed into a small space. First the semi-nervous breakdown of a pilot cracking under the strain. Then the beautiful description of flying a Spitfire meshing with the intensity of aerial combat. Then the panic of parachuting from a stricken plane. The gruesome struggle in the muddy pond. And then the ghost story ending. Amazingly, this intensely male, haunted and violent story was first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in September 1945, one month after the end of the war.
Madame Rosette (August 1945)
The longest story of the collection, at 41 pages, in which two pilots who we have met in other stories (the Stag, Stuffy) go for a night on the piss in Cairo, picking up a young pilot from 33 Squadron, William, along the way. There is a great deal of background colour, about the sights and smells of Cairo, descriptions of hotels and bars, and a lot of comedy, for example when they decide to befriend and buy drinks for two local men in a belly dancing club and discuss the relative merits of thin women versus fat women.
But the core of the story is that, earlier that day, Stuffy had been enchanted with a woman who served him in a shop and is surprised when the Stag explains that any woman in Cairo can be bought, if you have enough cash. He explains there is an ageless brothel keeper named Madame Rosette, and if you give her the young woman’s details, she will send a pimp to the shop in question and make the woman in question an offer she can’t refuse. Then Stuffy will be able to ‘take her out’ for dinner or a dance or whatever, confident in the knowledge that they’ll end up having sex.
Initially Stuff is intoxicated by this revelation, and gets Madame R’s phone number off the Stag and rings her (from the bar where they’re drinking, kept by an Englishman named Tim) at the last minute giving a fake name, claiming to be one Colonel Higgins, describing the woman who served him and the shop, and Madame Rosette says she’ll see what she can do. Without thinking Stuffy gives her the phone number and room number of the hotel they’re staying in.
To cut a long story short, as the day progresses Stuffy comes to have second thoughts, gets increasingly nervous at both the cost and the squalor of the deal and eventually gets the Stag to ring Madame Rosette back to cancel the deal, holding the phone at some distance from his ear to avoid the barrage of abuse she unleashes.
So then they bathe, dress and head out for a night on the town. But something the Stag mentioned has stuck in Stuffy’s mind, the notion that Madame Rosette’s brothel is staffed by women who have been coerced into prostitution and then blackmailed to remain in it.
Eventually, completely drunk, the three pilots decide to ‘liberate’ the prostitutes and take a horse-drawn carriage to Madame Rosette’s where they bluff their way past the enormous bouncer, demand to see the Madame herself, and tie and gag her in her office, before bursting into the room containing the hookers in various states of undress, announce with fake officiality that they are the Military Police and frogmarch them down the street to the nearest bar, where all military pretence collapses and it turns into a wild party, ending with the three pilots each taking a horse-drawn cab to deliver back to their homes the ‘liberated’ prostitutes all except for the three who have taken their fancy.
Why do young men join the army? Well, you couldn’t behave like that in Huddersfield or Hackney, could you?
A Piece of Cake (1945)
An account of Dahl’s crash in the desert, which he described more fully in the memoir Going Solo. The facts are more or less the same, including the name of the airfield he took off from, but he omits the basic fact that he was given the wrong co-ordinates for the airfield he was meant to be flying to and ended up circling round empty desert looking for it till his gas ran out, he was forced to make a crash landing and really did crash, his face violently thrown against the windshield, smashing his nose, dislodging a few teeth, knocking him unconscious, hitting his forehead so hard all the skin swelled up and effectively blinded him.
This version includes one of the most powerful elements of the incident which is the way he felt so sleepy, so lethargic, he just wanted to curl up in a ball and go to bed and found the increasing heat (his cockpit was on fire) really boring and only reluctantly could persuade himself to move, only then discovering he couldn’t and how it took a long time to realise this was because he was still strapped in and even longer to realise how to undo his straps and topple out of the cockpit onto the desert.
What distinguishes this version from the one in Going Solo is that it includes a number of vivid hallucinations, described at great length which, presumably are the result of the morphine or painkillers he was given back in hospital.
(It is itself a revised version of the original article which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post titled Shot Down Over Libya which gave the entirely misleading impression that Dahl was shot down by enemy action rather than running out of gas and attempting an emergency landing.)
Yesterday Was Beautiful (1945)
An unnamed British fighter pilot has bailed out and landed safely enough, on a Greek island, but sprained his ankle so walking is difficult. He hobbles into a dusty village which seems to be deserted. He notices an old man sitting by a water trough and asks him if someone has a boat to take him across to the mainland. The man thinks about it and says, yes, there is a man in the village who can help, a Joannis Spirakis. But his house was hit this morning by a German bomb and obliterated. So he is staying in the house of Antonina Angelou. But be aware that her daughter was in the house when it was bombed and killed. Her name was Maria.
So the pilot hobbles down the little main street to the house the old man indicated and knocks and the door is answered by a woman all in black who takes him through to a kitchen where sits a very old, shrivelled up old lady. She asks him about the Germans, how far away they are. They will be on the island soon. Then she asks him how many he has killed. Then she tells him to kill them all, every man, woman and baby.
Only after delivering this angry rant does she come back to his question, about the boatman Joannis Spirakis. She gets up, little shrivelled old creature, and walks him back to the front door and points up the little high street to the old man the pilot first spoke to. That, she says, is Joannis Spirakis.
It’s a very powerful short (8 short pages) story, told in a minimal prose style and conveying the unbearable pain and suffering, the dislocation and madness, of war.
Thoughts
1. The irrational
I came to this collection from Dahl’s war memoir Going Solo which was published in 1986. That book is, for the most part, rational and factual. Therefore the most striking aspect of these stories from 40 years earlier, right at the start of his career, is the way they focus on the irrational, the weird, the uncanny and the hallucinatory. On at least two occasions people seem to live on after their deaths – we are given powerful visions of a pilot’s afterlife, in fact, along with the mother who dies when her son’s bomber crashes, the ten stories feature at least three ghost stories.
There are plentiful hallucinations, the three ghost stories being examples, along with the description of the pilot bailing out and tumbling through the clouds in Beware of the dog and the final fiery vision of the narrator of Katina, and most of the account of his crash in the desert in fact skips over that incident in order to describe at length a number of vivid and strange hallucinations.
Then there are the strange mental states explored in Yesterday was beautiful and the disturbed mental state of the bomber pilot in Someone like you.
This is all extraordinarily strong meat, very fierce psychological states, deeply disturbed individuals, visions and hallucinations littered with sudden violent deaths. They are written in Dahl’s crisp and understated prose but that makes the sound of screaming feel even louder.
2. Dahl and Hemingway
As I read through the stories it became obvious to me Dahl was deeply influenced by Hemingway. He uses very simple language and simple syntax. For example, rather than using commas to separate items he’ll write ‘and x and y and z’. He never uses contractions; he always spells everything out:
I did not use the altimeter… I do not know how long I sat there…
These are small things but they make the language feel stately, almost like the Bible at moments. I began to get irritated by his predilection for the word ‘upon’ instead of the more obvious ‘on’. ‘He laid it upon the table’.
The sun was hot upon their shoulders and upon their backs
He uses the simplest adjectives, good, bad, the simplest opinions: ‘it was fine’. Here’s an example from They Shall Not Grow Old:
We had only six Hurricanes in the air; there were many of the Junkers and it was a good fight.
The Hemingway thing is not to use contractions or short cuts or slang, but to spell everything out in a lightly mannered explicitness. Whether or not Dahl wrote like this earlier who can say. But all these stories bear the same hallmark of extreme, Hemingwayesque simplicity of style and syntax.
There is a direct parallel with the context of Hemingway’s earliest stories. Hemingway didn’t fight in it but he was a journalist during the First World War and his earliest stories, the ones collected in In Our Time, describe men trying to manage the extremely powerful emotions triggered by the terrible sights and experiences of war. The plainness of the style is in deliberate contrast with the terrible events witnessed and the riot of awful emotions the protagonists are struggling to suppress and control. Very tightly controlled mania.
In this respect, in their context, the memories of combat and the wild thoughts and feelings unleashed by it, all controlled in an artificially plain and deceptively ‘simple’ style, Dahl is not just copying a ‘style’ but an entire strategy, an entire way of thinking about what writing is for.
6-foot-6 Roald Dahl (28) and 6-foot tall Ernest Hemingway (45) in London in 1944
I thought I’d been reasonably clever figuring this out from the style alone but then 30 seconds on Google showed me that there was a well-known real life connection between the two authors. Dahl actually met Hemingway when the great man came to London working as a journalist during the war, and on the Roald Dahl Foundation website there’s a page about a student who wrote asking Dahl his advice about writing short stories, and Dahl replied telling him to ‘study Hemingway, particularly his early work’.
He only explicitly mentions one aspect of Hemingway’s style i.e. use as few adjectives as possible, but hopefully my little analysis shows that the two writers had more than just that in common. It’s about using a minimalist style in the context of suppressed emotion that gives this approach its power.
Roald Dahl reviews
- Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946)
- Someone Like You by Roald Dahl (1953)
- Kiss Kiss (1960)
- Switch Bitch (1974)
- My Uncle Oswald (1979)
- Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)
- Going Solo (1986)
Books & Boots 