“Black Mamba”

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Information


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.”


“Gremlins… A Warning!”

Sections: Information | Fun Stuff


Information

  • First published:
    • April 11, 1943 issue of This Week Magazine, a nationally-syndicated Sunday magazine supplement for American newspapers
  • Credited to:
    • “Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl, Author of ‘The Gremlins’”
    • “Illustrated by Walt Disney” (in actuality, thought to have been done primarily by Disney animator Bill Justice)
  • Trivia:
    • This “preview” was part of a marketing push by Disney to “whet the public’s appetite” ahead of the planned Gremlins feature film. (Source: Leonard Maltin’s introduction to the 2006 reprint of The Gremlins.)

Fun Stuff


“The Gremlins”

Sections: Information | Fun Stuff


Information

  • First published:
    • December 1942 issue of Cosmopolitan (making this Dahl’s second published story after “Shot Down Over Libya”)
    • Written under the pen name of “Pegasus, a noted Gremlinologist”
    • Illustrated by Disney animators, thought to be primarily Bill Justice
  • Trivia:
    • This “preview” was published by Disney as an attempt to secure copyright for specific character designs ahead of a planned Gremlins feature film, since the concept of Gremlins in general were well known within the RAF and Dahl was unable to prove sole ownership. (Source: Leonard Maltin’s introduction to the 2006 reprint of The Gremlins.)

Fun Stuff


“They Shall Not Grow Old”

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Information


Plot Description

Spoiler warning! The narrator of this story is an RAF pilot fighting the Vichy French in Palestine during WW2. As the story begins, he and another pilot (“The Stag”) are waiting for the return of Fin, who flew out to check on some enemy ships. Eventually they realize that he should have been back by now, and even if he hadn’t been shot down, he’d have run out of gas. They inform the other pilots and officers that Fin is missing and discuss his girlfriend Nikki, a caberet singer in Haifa.

Two days later, an airplane is heard approaching the base. It turns out to be Fin, who lands and acts surprised when they ask him where he’s been. According to him, he’s only been gone for an “hour and five minutes”. He thinks they’re pulling a joke on him. It’s only when he goes to report to the commanding officer that he realizes he really has been gone for two days. He gets upset when he can’t explain what happened to him. The men decide to give him some time so he can try to remember.

A week later, the entire squadron is out attacking an enemy aerodrome. A pilot called Paddy is shot down and killed. Immediately Fin’s voice is heard on the radio: “I’ve remembered it… I’ve remembered it all.” When the men return to the base, Fin tells his story. He says that while he was flying his mission, he was suddenly enveloped in a thick white cloud. He tried everything to get out of it, and eventually he just put his plane into a dive in frustration. He didn’t hit land or sea though; he just kept diving. Suddenly the cloud disappeared, and he found himself flying in an endless sky of blinding blue. He saw a line of aircraft flying on the horizon, as far as the eye could see. He saw planes of every description. He somehow knew that “these were the pilots and air crews who had been killed in battle, who now, in their own aircraft were making their last flight, their last journey.” His own plane was caught up in a wind vortex of some kind and soon took its place in the line. Fin found that he wasn’t even flying and that all the controls were dead. The pilots on either side of him waved and he waved back. He felt supremely happy.

Eventually the line of planes began to dive and bank to the left. Fin saw a beautiful green plain below them, which “reached to the far edges of the horizon where the blue of the sky came down and merged with the green of the plain.” He also saw in the distance a bright white light, far bigger than the sun but without shape or form. It was brilliant but not blinding. He couldn’t look away from it. He wanted to fly towards it but the plane wouldn’t respond. As he descended further, he saw the the planes were all landing on the green plain. Hundreds of them were parked around. Fin came in for a landing but his plane wouldn’t touch down. It began to pick up speed. Fin gazed longingly at the light, knowing that if he had landed he would have been running towards it. He grew desperate as the plane continued to fly away from it. He tried to commit suicide by crashing the plane or ejecting, but something prevented him. He found himself back in the white cloud, and he gave up his struggle. He went to sleep and began to dream about his normal life. He dreamed about his mission, and then about landing at the squadron. This dreaming became reality, and he was unable to remember about the cloud and the pilots and the light. It wasn’t until he saw Paddy killed that he found himself saying, “You lucky bastard.” That’s when he remembered it all.

After Fin’s story, the squadron returned to normal. No one ever spoke of it. The campaign was coming to an end. One on of the last flights, the narrator saw Fin’s plane catch fire. “Hello Fin,” he called on the radio. “You’d better jump.” “It’s not so easy,” Fin replied. He said that his arms had been shot and he couldn’t undo his straps. As his plane dipped towards the sea, the narrator heard Fin saying over the radio, “I’m a lucky bastard. A lucky, lucky bastard.”


“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


“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.


“A Piece of Cake”

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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.


“Only This”

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Information


Plot Description

Spoiler warning! In an English cottage, an old woman lies sleeping in the moonlight of her open window. On her dressing table is a picture of her son in his Royal Air Force uniform. Suddenly there is a great throbbing noise overhead and she wakes. It is the bombers going off to battle. She stands by the window and prays that God will keep her son safe. He is her only child, and she knows that “there was nothing else to live for except this”. She sits and begins to think of him, wishing she could see him and talk to him. She closes her eyes and begins to see the aircraft, and in her mind she is standing there next to him in the cockpit. He smiles at her and she is happy. As the plane nears the battlefield, she can see searchlights and anti-aircraft fire through the windshield. She watches as the plane is hit and an engine catches fire. She is worried, but he smiles at her and continues flying. There is an explosion and the cabin fills with smoke. She watches in fear as her son fights to control the plane while the crew bail out. She panics and tries to drag him from his seat, but he’s unconscious and she can’t undo the many buckles holding him down. Knowing that survival is now impossible, she throws herself on top him and cries. The plane spirals downwards and crashes. Back in the English cottage, the woman leans back against her chair with her eyes closed, clutching the blankets around her. A gentle rumble announces that the surviving bombers are flying home to the British airfields. But the old woman never moves. “She had been dead for some time.”


“Madame Rosette”

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Information


Plot Description

This is one of Dahl’s “flying” stories and deals with three R.A.F. pilots on leave in Cairo, Egypt. It does have a slightly adult theme (Madame Rosette runs a seedy brothel) and younger readers might want to skip this one for now.

Spoiler warning! Two R.A.F. pilots, Stuffy and the Stag, are from the same squadron and have been granted leave in Cairo. They check into a hotel together to bathe and relax. Later they go out shopping and Stuffy is attracted to the beautiful Egyptian girl who sells him sunglasses. The Stag tells him that he’s heard of a woman named Madame Rosette who can arrange a rendezvous with any girl in town. Stuffy calls her up, but later he has a change of heart and convinces the Stag to call it off. The two of them meet up with William, who is from another squadron, and together they all drink beers in an Egyptian bar. On the way home they formulate a crazy plan: they want to rescue all the girls from Madame Rosette. They travel to her brothel and manage to lock her up in her office. Then they escort the fourteen girls there to a nearby bar and buy them drinks. The girls are delighted and write down their phone numbers for the rest of the squadron. At the end of the night, the three pilots escort the girls home.


“Lucky Break”

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Information


Plot Description

This isn’t really much of a story. It’s mostly just Dahl’s advice for becoming a writer and anecdotes about how he fell into the profession. A lot of the school passages seem to be reproduced in Boy.

Spoiler warning! Dahl starts off by giving advice to people who want to become full-time professional writers. He says that you have to have another day job to start, and he gives a list of qualities that you should possess. Then he flashes back to his days at St. Peter’s Prep School, where boys were savagely beaten for any infraction of the rules. He looks over some of his school reports trying to see any hint of his future career, but most of his teachers give him horrible marks in English Composition. His only good memories of those school years were the Saturday afternoons when the teachers would all go off to the pub and a local woman, Mrs. O’Connor, was brought in to watch the boys. Instead of merely babysitting them, though, she taught them about the entire history of English literature. By the time Dahl left for Repton, he was an insatiable reader. Repton was even worse for him, and when he left school he decided to work for Shell and visit exotic lands. He was posted to East Africa, but left in 1939 to join the R.A.F. and fight in World War II. He tells of his training and of the horrific crash that eventually got him invalided home. Then the R.A.F. decided to send him to America as “Assistant Air Attaché”. While there, he was contacted by the famous author C.S. Forester, who wanted to write a story about the crash. Dahl wrote down everything he could remember and sent it to Forester, who responded, “Did you know you were a writer?” The story was published “without any changes” in the Saturday Evening Post. Dahl goes on to talk about The Gremlins and how he was eventually able to meet Franklin Roosevelt. At the end of the story, Dahl talks about the red notebook that he wrotes down all of his plot ideas in. He even shows the reader the blurbs that eventually become Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and “Henry Sugar”. And that, he says, is “how I became a writer.”