Tag: shortstory

“Skin”

Sections: Information | Plot Description 

Information

Plot Description

Spoiler warning! The year is 1946 and an old man named Drioli shuffles across the Parisian street in the freezing cold. He stops before a picture gallery to admire the painting in the window… and suddenly recognizes the name of the artist. “Chaim Soutine… My little Kalmuck, that’s who it is!” Drioli remembers a night thirty years before, when he had come home from his tattoo parlor flush with cash and bearing bottles of wine. The boy (Soutine) had been painting a picture of Drioli’s wife, with whom he was infatuated. The three of them get very drunk and Drioli comes up with an idea – he wants the boy to paint a picture on his back and then tattoo over it! The boy only agrees when Drioli’s wife Josie says she will pose for the picture. It takes all night, but eventually the picture is finished and signed. Not long after, the boy disappeared and they never saw him again. Josie died during the second World War and Drioli’s tattooing business collapsed. Now, in the present, he is reduced to begging in the streets. He decides to go in and see the other Soutine pictures on display. The gallery workers try to throw him out, but before they can he takes off his shirt and shows the crowd his tattooed back. They are amazed and immediately several men offer to buy the painting from him. Eventually Drioli is faced with a choice: one man offers to pay for a major skin-grafting operation, while another simply asks Drioli to come live at his hotel (the Bristol in Cannes) and exhibit the painting to his guests. Drioli chooses the latter and goes off to dinner with the man. Not long after, a strange painting by Soutine shows up for sale in Buenos Aires. And, the narrator tells us, there is no hotel called the Bristol in Cannes.

“Shot Down Over Libya”

Sections: Information | Plot Description | Fun Stuff | Controversy

Information

  • First published:
    • August 1, 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post
      • Credited to “an RAF pilot at present in this country for medical reasons”
      • Illustrated by John F. Gould
  • Connections:

Plot Description

This is the story of Dahl’s famous 1940 crash in the desert while flying planes for the Royal Air Force during World War II. It starts with the anonymous narrator lying in a hospital bed, trying to remember who he is and why he’s there. The rest of the narrative takes place in a flashback as he is slowly remembering it.

Spoiler warning! The squadron receives an order that there are a large number of Italian planes parked close together. Six Hurricanes (a type of plane) are to attack at dusk. After Dahl and the others take off, he devotes quite a few paragraphs to describing what the pilots actually do. In the midst of this reverie he is interrupted by the call that enemy aircraft have been spotted. Luckily they pass without recognizing them and the RAF pilots proceed on to their target. They find the parked Italian aircraft and being strafing them (diving and shooting with their machine guns). Dahl’s plane is hit by ground anti-aircraft fire, and despite his belief that he can make it back to base, he crashes nose-first into the desert. He manages to climb from the burning aircraft and collapses on the sand to await rescue. He is badly burnt and his nose is pushed in. Eventually he is found by other Allies and taken to safety: “I don’t remember much more, except that I was shoved about a lot, and someone kept saying ‘Take it easy.’ I believe someone had some morphia.”

Fun Stuff

Original Magazine Pages

Controversy

In the original version of this story (which you can read here), Dahl claims that he was shot down by enemy planes. In later versions, it was corrected to say that he ran out of fuel and crashed. What actually happened? Why are the stories different? Here are the differing accounts, as well as all the facts that I was able to dig up for you.

What Happened

According to Jeremy Treglown, in mid-September 1940 Dahl completed his flying training and was ordered to join 80 Squadron in western Egypt, near the frontier with Libya. This squadron had been busy engaging the Italian army and had been forced to move its headquarters and landing grounds frequently. The day of the crash, September 19, was quiet though. Dahl took off from Abu Suweir in a Gloster Gladiator, a kind of airplane he had never flown before. “He stopped twice to refuel, the second time at Fouka, where he was given directions that may have been confused by events. 80 Squadron was not where he expected to find it, and as dusk gathered over the North African desert and his fuel gauge fell, he decided to try to land.”

The Squadron Report

This is the actual report sent in by 80 Squadron the next day:

“P/O Dahl posted to this squadron from T.U.R.P. for flying duties w.e.f. 20th September. This pilot was ferrying an aircraft from No. 102 M.U. to this unit, but unfortunately not being used to flying aircraft over the Desert he made a forced landing 2 miles west of Mersa Matruh. He made an unsuccessful forced landing and the aircraft burst into flames. The pilot was badly burned and he was conveyed to an Army Field Ambulance Station.”

The Crash

Treglown goes on to describe the crash itself. He says that upon landing, the Gladiator hit a boulder and lurched forward in the sand. Dahl’s skull was fractured by hitting the metal reflector sight, and his nose was pushed back into his face. He managed to climb out of the plane before the gas tanks caught fire and was picked up later by British soldiers patrolling nearby. The squadron report got the burns part wrong, which were only slight. More serious were the injuries to his face, head, nose, and back.

“Shot Down Over Libya”

In this story from the August 1, 1942  issue of the Saturday Evening Post, the unnamed pilot is shot down while strafing enemy trucks and his Hurricane crashes in flames. (Note: the airplane has been changed from what really happened!)

“Hell’s bells, what was that? Felt like she was hit somewhere. Blast this stick; it won’t come back. They must have got my tail plane and jammed my elevators.”

“A Piece of Cake”

By the time Over to You was published in 1946, Dahl had “remembered” that he hadn’t been shot down. He appears to have tried to cover his tracks by rewriting it more factually (no Italian fighters and no battle) and calling it “A Piece of Cake.” This version also incorporates material from a little-known Dahl story called “Missing: Believed Killed.” In this version he doesn’t explicitly say that he was shot down, but he leaves it purposefully very vague and the reader assumes Dahl was shot without him ever saying it. He titles this version “My First Story – 1942” in Henry Sugar and tries to pass it off as the original version.

“I only know that there was trouble, lots and lots of trouble, and I know that we had turned round and were coming back when the trouble got worse.”

Going Solo

By the time he wrote Going Solo, I think Dahl knew that he was famous enough that someone would try to dig up his original story and publish the inaccuracies. So he tried to pass the blame off onto someone else.

“There seems, on re-reading it, to be an implication that I was shot down by enemy action, and if I remember rightly, this was inserted by the editors of an American magazine called the Saturday Evening Post who originally bought and published it. Those were the war years and the more dramatic the story, the better it was. They actually called it ‘Shot Down Over Libya’, so you can see what they were getting at. The fact is that my crash had nothing whatsoever to do with enemy action. I was not shot down either by another plane or from the ground.”

Conclusion

So my interpretation is that Dahl eventually tried to come clean about the story, but there are still some discrepancies that bother me. For instance, his claim that the Post editors deliberately changed his story contradicts his statement in Henry Sugar that not a word was touched. And what about “A Piece of Cake”? He never explains why he re-wrote the story nor why that version still gets the facts wrong.

Marvin Winitz wrote in to draw my attention to the switching of the airplane models. He notes, “People don’t always read every word and article in a magazine, but they certainly look at the pictures. The Saturday Evening Post for their own commercial reasons to sell could not possibly have shown and written about an old Gladiator biplane. Readers would have wondered are they telling about WWI or WWII. In a British TV documentary I saw recently, they showed that the Hurricane accounted for more German losses than even the Spitfire.” Marvin believes that the Post made the changes and that Dahl was shocked and simply went along with them for many years.

What do I think really happened? Dahl was in the U.S. during the War for one reason: promote the British cause and persuade the Americans to join the effort. I think he probably did write the original version of the story, thinking only of his diplomatic mission. Perhaps the R.A.F. even advised him on what factual changes to make (obviously they wouldn’t want to give out any possibly sensitive details that the Germans could pick up on). Once the War was over, though, and Dahl actually started to make his living as a writer, he realized that this initial “white lie” was going to come back to haunt him in a big way. I still have no idea why he didn’t own up to it immediately, but it may have something to do with the rumors that he was also working for British Intelligence (i.e. spying). Perhaps he thought that he shouldn’t draw attention to the subtle ways that Britain had actively campaigned for American support. I also think that he rather enjoyed the attention that he received as a “war hero” that had seen enemy action. The crash and his story about it formed part of the myth of Roald Dahl, and to admit that its foundations were a lie would damage the grandiose and romantic image of himself he had created for the public.

“Rummins”

Sections: Information | Plot Description 

Information

Plot Description

This is a rather gruesome story from the “Claud’s Dog” collection in Someone Like You.

Spoiler warning! Claud Cubbage is walking his greyhound Jackie (see “Mr. Feasey”) when he meets Rummins, an unpleasant farmer who lives nearby. Claud mentions to Rummins that the Health Officer recently sent out a ratcatcher (see “The Ratcatcher”) to poison the rats that are living in Rummins’ hayrick. Rummins says that he and his son Bert will be over later in the day to fetch in that rick. When they arrive, Claud and the narrator come to watch them work. As Bert is hacking into the hay with a knife, he suddenly begins to hear a grating noise as if the knife were rasping along something solid. Bert is frightened but Rummins shouts at him to keep cutting. The narrator starts to remember the day that he helped build the rick back in June. Ole Jimmy had quarrelled with Rummins over the coming storm, and the men decided to stop working for lunch despite Rummins’ worries for the weather. Ole Jimmy was a local drunk who also worked as a maintenance man for the children’s playground. The kids and the town loved him. Claud and the narrator headed back to the filling station to have some sandwiches, while Ole Jimmy said he wanted to take a nap. When they returned the rick was finished and Ole Jimmy had disappeared, leaving his satchel behind. The narrator asks Rummins where he went, and Rummins hesitates before guessing that he went home. All this comes flooding back to the narrator as he watches Bert struggle to cut through the hard object buried in the hay. The boy finally manages to break through and lifts out the chunk of hay, only to freeze when he sees what is before him. “Rummins, who knew very well what it was, had turned away and was climbing quickly down the other side of the rick. He moved so fast he was through the gate and halfway across the road before Bert started to scream.”

(If you don’t get it, Ole Jimmy was dead inside the hayrick. That’s what the rats were eating and what Bert cut through with the knife.)

“Royal Jelly”

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Information

Plot Description

Personally, I think this is one of Dahl’s scariest stories. The description of the baby at the end… *shudder* I read it aloud to some of college roommates once and they were freaked out.

Spoiler warning! This is a simple story and concerns the Taylor family: Albert, Mabel, and their newborn baby daughter. Mabel is frightened because the child won’t eat and has been losing weight since birth. She’s desperate and frantic, but the doctors can’t do anything. After she goes to bed, Albert begins to read from one of his many books on beekeeping. He’s always had a way with bees, and now he makes his living by maintaining over 200 hives and selling the honey. This particular night he is reading about royal jelly, which is a substance that the worker bees produce and feed to the larvae for the first three days of their lives. It allows the young bees to rapidly mature and grow in size. Queen bees, however, are continuously fed the stuff throughout their larval life. It’s what actually, physically changes them into queens. Albert gets the idea that this stuff could help his daughter grow too. When Mabel comes downstairs the next morning, she is astounded to hear that the baby has drank five ounces of milk throughout the night. She watches as Albert prepares another bottle and the child ravenously drains the entire contents. She gets curious, though, when Albert later claims to have cured the baby himself. He finally confesses that he added large quantities of royal jelly to the baby formula, much to Mabel’s shock and dismay. He tries to convince her with facts and statistics, but she will have none of it. She tells him that even if it does work, they had a terrible honey crop the previous year and she doesn’t want any bees devoted to making it. She forbids him from feeding anymore of it to the child. At the next feeding, the baby drinks two bottles and physically seems to be getting fatter. They go to weigh the child and Mabel is frightened to see that though she’s put on weight on her abdomen, her arms and legs are skinny and her tummy is beginning to sprout “yellowy-brown hairs.” Mabel accuses him of dosing the child with more royal jelly, which Albert admits to. In a last ditch attempt to convince his wife that it’s perfectly healthy, he admits that last year he turned over half his bees to the production of the jelly, which he consumed himself. He did it in the hopes that it would make him more fertile, and it obviously worked since he daughter was conceived not long after. Mabel suddenly realizes that her husband does really resemble a great big bee, and her daughter laying on the table looks like nothing so much as a gigantic grub. “Why don’t you cover her up, Mabel?” he says. “We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.”

Fun Stuff

Twilight Zone Magazine

“The Ratcatcher”

Sections: Information | Plot Description 

Information

Plot Description

This is one of the “Claud’s Dog” series of stories from Someone Like You and it features many of the same characters from the other tales.

Spoiler warning! The narrator is at the filling station one day with Claud when the ratcatcher sidles up and announces that he has been sent by the Health Officer to take care of the rat problem. He begins to expound on the difficulty of outsmarting rats and the different approaches you would take to killing them. Claud tells him that the rats he needs to kill are living in a hayrick across the road. The ratcatcher, who looks a lot like a large rat, formulates a cunning plan: he will leave oats around the rick for a few days to gain the rats’ trust, and then he’ll spread poisoned oats that will kill them. When he comes back to pick up the dead rats though, he discovers that they haven’t touched the poison. He claims that they must have another food supply from somewhere (there’s a gruesome connection here with “Rummins”) and they’re too full to eat the oats. Disappointed by his failure, he tries to make amends with the men by showing them some rat tricks. He pulls a rat out of his pockets (“Always got a rat or two about me somewhere.”) and drops it down the neck of his shirt. Then he drops in a ferret he pulled out of another pocket. A frantic chase and fight ensue in the shirt, and eventually the ratcatcher pulls out the dead rat and the bloody ferret. After that performance, he claims he can do something even more amazing: he can kill a rat himself without using his hands or arms or legs or feet. He gets Claud to bet him a shilling that he can’t. He produces another live rat and they tie it to a car antenna. The ratcatcher begins to stare at the rat, moving closer and closer, until finally he strikes like a snake with his mouth open and his yellow teeth biting. The narrator closes his eyes, and when he opens them the ratcatcher is collecting his money and spitting out blood. “Penny sticks and licorish bootlaces is all made from rat’s blood,” he claims. When he notices that his audience is no longer interested in him, he walks off in his particular rat-like way, “making almost no noise with his footsteps even on the gravel of the driveway.”

“Poison”

Sections: Information | Plot Description | Reviews | Fun Stuff | Teacher Ideas

Information

  • First published:
    • June 3, 1950 issue of Collier’s
    • Illustrated by Martha Sawyers

Plot Description

This is one of Dahl’s most famous stories, and one of the most misunderstood, I think. The entire time you’re reading it, you think that the main conflict is between the men and the krait on Harry’s stomach. It’s only in the last few paragraphs, though, that you realize that the “poison” is actually racism. Harry Pope is perfectly willing to tolerate Dr. Ganderbai as long as his life is in danger, but as soon as Ganderbai dares to question the white man, Harry lets his true colors show. The story is also a masterpiece of tension and suspense. You should check out the radio version sometime.

Spoiler warning! Timber Woods, the narrator, arrives home at his bungalow to discover his partner, Harry Pope, lying in bed and acting strangely. Harry is whispering and sweating all over. He tells Timber that a krait – an extremely poisonous little snake – crawled onto the bed and is now sleeping under the sheet on Harry’s stomach. Timber gets a knife from the kitchen in case Harry gets bitten, which he’ll use to cut the skin and suck out the poison. Harry tells him to call the doctor. Doctor Ganderbai agrees to come at once. Once he arrives, he quickly decides that the first thing to do is inject Harry with some snakebite serum. Carefully, Ganderbai rolls up Harry’s pajama sleeve and ties on a rubber tourniquet. Harry is struggling not to move or cough. Ganderbai smoothly inserts the needles and administers the serum. Outside, the doctor tells Timber that the serum is by no means a guarantee of safety. They decide to try to anesthetize the snake. The use chloroform to soak the mattress beneath Harry. The process is agonizing and takes a long time. Eventually they begin to slowly lift the sheet off Harry. They see no sign of the snake. “It could be up the leg of his pajamas,” says Ganderbai. At that, Harry goes berserk and leaps to his feet, shaking his legs violently. When he stops, they realize that he hasn’t been bitten and the snake is nowhere to be seen. “Mr. Pope, you are of course quite sure you saw it in the first place?” asks Ganderbai. Harry turns red and asks if Ganderbai is accusing him of being a liar. When the doctor doesn’t reply, Harry begins screaming horrible racist insults at him. The doctor quickly leaves. Timber stops the doctor outside and apologies for Harry. He thanks the doctor for his help. “All he needs is a good holiday,” Ganderbai says quietly before driving off.

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“Pig”

Sections: Information | Plot Description | Reviews | Fun Stuff | Criticism and Analysis | Teacher Ideas

Information

  • Note: Sometimes confused with Stanley Ellin’s famous short story “Specialty of the House,” which is about a restaurant that serves a very special lamb dish. Ellin’s story was published in 1948, whereas Dahl’s didn’t appear until 1960.

Plot Description

This is a pretty gruesome story and it’s not one of my favorites. I think Dahl was probably trying to comment on the way this cruel world takes innocents like Lexington and basically puts them through the meat-grinder. Except in this case… it’s literal. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this one for the kiddies.

Spoiler warning! Once upon a time, a boy named Lexington is born in New York City. Unfortunately he is soon orphaned when his parents are accidentally shot by the police, who mistake them for robbers. Lexington is sent to live with his Aunt Glosspan out in her cottage high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She is an eccentric old woman who schools him herself and raises him to be a strict vegetarian. As he grows older, Lexington starts to exhibit a talent for cooking and Aunt Glosspan encourages him to write a cookbook. By the time he is 17, he has invented over 9,000 different dishes. He is shocked when Aunt Glosspan suddenly dies, though, and he buries her himself behind the cowshed. The next day he finds a letter she has left him instructing him to go to New York and meet with her lawyer. Apparently the lawyer will read her Will and then give Lexington money to pursue his cooking ambitions. Unfortunately for the boy, the lawyer is an unscrupulous man who takes advantage of Lexington’s trusting nature and ends up giving him just $15,000 out of the $500,000 his Aunt left for him. Upon leaving the office, Lexington decides he is hungry and heads to the nearest restaurant for some dinner. To his surprise, he is served pork for the first time in his life and he finds it delicious. Eager to learn about this new food for his book, he bribes the waiter to take him back into the kitchen to meet the chef. The chef tells him though, that he can’t be sure it was pig’s meat. “There’s just a chance,” he says, “that it might have been a piece of human stuff.” He tells Lexington that they’ve been getting an awful lot of it from the butcher lately. He’s pretty sure that the piece Lexington had was pork though, so the boy asks him to show him how to prepare it. The cook says that it all begins with a properly butchered pig. Wanting to see how this is done, Lexington takes off for the packing-house in the Bronx. When he gets there he is ushered into a waiting room to await the Guided Tour. He watches as others go through the doors before him: a mother with two little boys, a young couple, and a pale woman with long white gloves. Finally his turn is called, and he is led to the “schackling area” where the pigs are grabbed, looped about the ankle with a chain, and then dragged up through a hole in the roof. While he is watching, one of the workers slips a chain around Lexington’s ankle and before he knows what is happening he is being dragged along the path as well. “Help!” he cries. “There’s been a frightful mistake!” But no one stops the engine, and he’s carried along to the sticker, who slices open the boy’s jugular vein with a knife. As the belt moves on and Lexington begins to feel faint, he sees the pigs ahead being dropped into a large cauldron of boiling water. One of the pigs seems to be wearing white gloves. Lexington’s strong heart pumps out the last of his blood, and he passes on “out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next.”

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“A Piece of Cake”

Sections: Information | Plot Description

Information

Plot Description

In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Dahl claims that this is his “first story” and that it tells the story of how he was shot down over the Libyan Desert. Both statements are incorrect. Dahl’s first story was called “Shot Down Over Libya” and it’s nothing like this one. This version was written by Dahl almost thirty years later. Furthermore, Dahl didn’t crash as a result of enemy fire, but rather because of poor directions and lack of fuel. (You can read more about this controversy on the “Shot Down Over Libya” page.)

Spoiler warning! The story is told entirely in the first person. The narrator explains that he doesn’t remember much before it happened. He’s a pilot, and he describes landing at Fouka with his fellow pilot Peter. They discuss the shaking airmen there who have been stretched too thin by the war effort. Once their planes are refuelled, the two of them get ready to fly off towards their destination in the Libyan Desert. The old airman who straps in the narrator tells him to be careful. “It’s a piece of cake,” the narrator replies. It turns out to be otherwise. In the desert they are surrounded by “lots and lots of trouble”, and the narrator is too low to bail out of his plane. His plane crashes into the ground and he blacks out. By the time he comes to, the plane has caught fire and is burning around him. With some struggle (“I think there was something wrong with the telegraph system between the body and brain.”) he manages to extricate himself from the cockpit and crawl to safety. Peter has landed nearby and manages to find him. The narrator slips into unconsciousness while Peter takes care of him.

The next part of the story is filled with the dreams that the narrator has while unconscious in the hospital. He dreams of Peter and the airmen painting funny pictures on their aircraft to distract the Germans. He dreams of fighting his way through a sky filled with German fighter planes. The planes begin to sing and dance and play “Oranges and Lemons”. He gets annoyed that the Germans are not laughing at his funny pictures. His plane is shot and some of the bullets penetrate his body. He spirals out of control towards the ocean. He sees white horses riding on the waves. He finds himself sitting in a red velvet chair. Someone tells him that he is missing, believed killed. He wants to call his mother, but the telephone only goes to God. Then he dreams that he is running and cannot stop. He passes his mother, who is picking mushrooms. He runs towards a cliff and tries to throw himself to the ground, but it doesn’t work. He runs off the edge and finds himself falling into infinite blackness.

When he finally awakes, he discovers that he’s been in the hospital for four days. The nurse tells him that he’ll be fine. He calls out for her, but she’s already gone.