pilots and flying

“Katina”

Sections: Information | Plot Description

Information

First published:
- March 1944 issue of the Ladies Home Journal
Connections:
- The setting is the RAF’s Greek campaign in World War II, which Dahl took part in and describes in Going Solo

Related books:
Magazine publications:
- Ladies Home Journal (v61 #3) - March 1944
Audio Books:
- “Katina” read by Cillian Murphy

Plot Description

This is a story about the “last days of RAF fighters during the first Greek campaign” of World War II. Dahl himself fought in these battles and it’s not hard to imagine that a lot of it is autobiographical.

Spoiler warning! The story opens in Paramythia, Greece in early April, 1941. Three off-duty RAF pilots go to the village to help in the aftermath of a German bombing. There they find a little Greek girl sitting silently and bleeding from a cut on her forehead. They take her back to their landing field to have the company doctor help her. Once she’s better, they find out that her name is Katina and that her family were killed in the village. During a German raid on the aerodrome, the men hide in the trenches while Katina stands in the field yelling at the enemy bombers. That night they officially add her name to the list of squadron members. She travels with them as the squadron keeps moving, each time losing more planes as the situation becomes more desperate. Eventually they end up in a village called Megara, forced to use a homemade landing strip and hide their planes in the forests. The pilots are ordered to take off to protect an important shipping move, but the Germans are ready. Before the first plane can even leave the ground it is shot down. Everyone runs to hide in the trenches as the Messerschmitts buzz past and destroy the parked aircraft. The narrator peeps out and sees Katina running into the middle of the field, shaking her fists at the Germans. A Messerschmitt shoots her and she falls to the ground. The men all run to her but it is too late; she’s dead. The narrator stands and stares at the flaming planes around him. “…I saw beyond it not a tangled mass of smoking wreckage, but the flames of a hotter and intenser fire which now burned and smouldered in the hearts of the people of Greece.”

“An African Story”

Sections: Information | Plot Description | Reviews

Information

First published:
- Over to You

Related books:
Magazine publications:
- Jack London’s Adventure Magazine (v1 #1) - October 1958
Audio Books:
- “An African Story” read by Cillian Murphy

Plot Description

“An African Story” was first published in Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying, but it actually has very little to do with that aeronautical theme. The story comes to us in the form of a found manuscript, which the narrator (Dahl) supposedly found in the suitcase of a fellow RAF pilot and friend who died in combat. The manuscript is the dead pilot’s recollection of a story that was told to him by a strange old African man following a forced landing in the Nairobi Highlands. In other words, “An African Story” is about a story about a story.

Spoiler warning! In the found manuscript’s story, the old African man lives in his small shack with his dog, some chickens, a cow, and another man named Judson (evidently some sort of helper). Judson is an irritable fellow, and the sound of the dog licking its paw practically drives him mad. He strikes it with a bamboo rod and breaks its back. The old man puts the dog out of its misery and curses at Judson. Later they begin to have a mysterious problem with the cow: her milk is disappearing during the night. The old man waits up one night and sees something amazing – a deadly poisonous black mamba snake is visiting the cow and drinking milk from her udders! After making sure that this goes on every night, he tells Judson that a small boy is stealing the milk and that Judson should hide beside the cow and catch him in the act. Judson does this and is of course bitten by the snake. He dies there in the meadow, and as the old man watches the snake again begin to suckle at the cow, he says quietly, “You can have his share… Yes, we don’t mind your having his share.”

Reviews

“The Art of Vengeance” by Joyce Carol Oates (The New York Review of Books)

Going Solo

Information

Information on identifying editions is from Richard Walker’s “Roald Dahl – A Guide to Collecting His First Editions”.

First editions:
- Jonathan Cape, 1986, UK.
  - To identify: Used a standard single statement (‘First published’ followed by the date with later printings stated underneath) and published with a jacket priced at £7.95.
- Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, USA.
  - To identify: Used a First Edition statement and published with a jacket priced at $14.95.
Connections:
- Over to You is a collection of short stories about pilots and flying, much of which is autobiographical and similar to the stories in this book
- “Katina” tells a story set in the Greek campaign that Dahl describes in this book

Related books:
Audio Books:
- Going Solo read by Dan Stevens
- Going Solo read by Derek Jacobi
- Going Solo read by Ian Holm
- Going Solo read by Andrew Sachs
- Solo 1938-1941 read by Jan Meng
Radio Shows:
- Going Solo (2016)

Buy this book:

Important note: From 2022 onwards, Puffin has edited selected Dahl books to remove sensitive language and insert new sentences not written by Dahl. If you would prefer to read the original text, ensure you get a copy published before 2022 or one of the “Classic Collection” published by Penguin.

Description

In Going Solo, the world’s favourite storyteller, Roald Dahl, tells of life as a fighter pilot in Africa.

‘They did not think for one moment that they would find anything but a burnt-out fuselage and a charred skeleton, and they were astounded when they came upon my still-breathing body lying in the sand nearby.’

In 1938 Roald Dahl was fresh out of school and bound for his first job in Africa, hoping to find adventure far from home. However, he got far more excitement than he bargained for when the outbreak of the Second World War led him to join the RAF. His account of his experiences in Africa, crashing a plane in the Western Desert, rescue and recovery from his horrific injuries in Alexandria, flying a Hurricane as Greece fell to the Germans, and many other daring deeds, recreates a world as bizarre and unnerving as any he wrote about in his fiction.

Reviews

“Young Man, Old Empire, Bad War” by Gahan Wilson from the October 12, 1986 issue of New York Times – New York, USA
“More pleasure in Dahl’s accounts from life than from his fables” by Ralph Elliott from the February 14, 1987 issue of The Canberra Times – Canberra, Australia (read online)
Student Review by Melanie Burd