Category: Media

“Someone Like You”

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Information

Plot Description

Spoiler warning! Two bomber pilots are having a drink in a bar and discussing the War. One of them has been in it since the beginning and he has become obsessed with the arbitrariness of the fate he has been dealing out. “I keep thinking during a raid, when we are running over the target, just as we are going to release our bombs, I keep thinking to myself, shall I just jink a little; shall I swearve a fraction to one side, then my bombs will fall on someone else.” They agree that everybody jinks at one time or another. Then they discuss a fellow pilot, Stinker, who went crazy after he was forced to leave his dog behind after a mission. Stinker walked around for the rest of the war talking to his invisible pet. Then they discuss “car-waiting”, which means waiting for twenty seconds before you leave an intersection. Then you avoid hitting the car or person you might have twenty seconds earlier. They admire a beautiful woman in the bar with a “marvellous bosom.” “I bet I’ve killed lots of women more beautiful than that one”, says the fatalistic one. He wonders what would happen if all the people in the bar fell down dead. They finish their drinks and head out onto the street. They decide to take a taxi somewhere else and drink more whisky. “Somewhere where there are no other people but just us and the man with egg on his beard.”

Reviews

“The Soldier”

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Information

Plot Description

Spoiler warning! Robert is a soldier back from the war, and he has problems. He seems to have some sort of nerve damage that makes it difficult for him to feel heat or pain. He longs to return to the seaside holidays of his youth. He’s married to a woman named Edna, who seems to delight in tormenting him (or so he thinks). He cringes whenever he hears a plane fly overheard. He believes that Edna is changing the hot water taps and the doorknobs to confuse him. He sees faces peering at the window. He hears people following him outdoors at night. One night, returning home, “something small but violent exploded inside his head and with it a surge of fury and outrage and fear.” He goes inside and heads upstairs to Edna, but finds that it is another woman instead. She claims to be Edna’s friend Mary. She tells him to put down the knife in his hand. Robert tells “Mary” that though he loves Edna, she’s an “awful cruel little bitch.” He tells her that she rather looks like Edna. He wants to check for Edna’s birthmark behind her left ear. He moves in close and she suddenly turns and slaps him hard across the fact. As he sits on the bed and cries, she takes the knife from his hand and goes swiftly downstairs to the telephone.

Reviews

“Smoked Cheese”

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Information

Plot Description

Spoiler warning! A pilot named Bipou lived alone in a house that was infested by mice. Bipou hatches a plan to get rid of the mice. He starts by gluing mousetraps to his ceiling and baiting them with smoked cheese. The mice just laughed. Then Bipou glued his furniture and carpet to the ceiling, with everything hanging upside-down. When the mice came out that night, they grew alarmed. “This is awful,” said the oldest mouse of all. “This is awful. We must do something about this at once.” They decide to stand on their heads, and they all end up dying due to a “rush of blood to the brain”. Bipou was very pleased to see all the dead mice the next morning. “Ah-ha. I knew they’d go for smoked cheese.”

Fun Stuff

Complete Text

Special thanks to site contributor Marvin Winitz, who tracked down this story and provided me with a copy. Marvin also notes:

“John L. Lewis [there is a reference to him in the story] was a trade union leader in charge at that time of labor strike action. The Atlantic Monthly was a sophisticated magazine that included current events analysis, considered several grades above the more popularistic Saturday Evening Postand their ‘factual’ stories. [Marvin is referring to the “Shot Down Over Libya” controversy.] … Another change [from “The Upsidedown Mice”] that really hit me funny was that instead of a television set glued to the ceiling it was changed to a radio set glued to the ceiling. … R. Dahl was really with it on glue. The glue episodes here and in The Twits evolved into superglue in Matilda.”

“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”

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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.”