by Ben Holden
(1959)
The nineteen novels by Joanne Harris include Chocolat (1999), which was turned into an Academy Award-nominated film, Blackberry Wine (2000), Five Quarters of the Orange (2001) and the Rune series of fantasy novels. She has also published two collections of short stories and co-written two French cookery books.
★
‘I had been telling my small daughters a story in bed at nights about a peach that went on growing and growing until it got as big as a house. They liked that story. Mind you, up until then, I had been writing stories only for grown-ups. I’d been doing it for twenty years. But why, I asked, shouldn’t I try to write a book for children?’
Roald Dahl’s first children’s novel, James and the Giant Peach, followed in 1961, and the modern master of children’s storytelling was born, thanks to the bedtime stories he’d been making up for Olivia and Tessa, who were just five and three years old.
A night owl, Dahl’s motto was:
My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But oh my foes and oh my friends
It gives a lovely light.
Towards the end of his life, Dahl would recount his years of service in the RAF during the Second World War in Going Solo, his memoir for young adult readers, including his crash in the Western Desert of North Africa. He would spend six months in hospital recovering from his injuries.
Later in the war years, once recovered and working also as a part-time writer, he would support fellow wounded servicemen by giving them the proceeds of the stories he sold: for example, he donated a handsome $1,000 fee received for a story called ‘Bedtime’ to the widow of an RAF colleague killed the previous week.
This anthology’s Dahl offering, ‘Only This’, which relates a night’s raid with startling detail, is therefore not so fanciful a flight of the imagination. Dahl melds the waking and sleeping worlds, navigating – for protagonist and reader alike – a night of the soul as long as his story is short. His story weaves the fates of a mother and her pilot son. (Dahl was very close to his own mother, Sofie, writing that when he was a child she ‘was undoubtedly the absolute primary influence on my own life. She was the matriarch, the materfamilias, and her children radiated round her like planets round a sun.’)
Like all ghost stories, ‘Only This’ is really about loss. Of course, Dahl being Dahl, there is also a ‘stingaling’ in the tale’s tail. One that is dark, sure – but also heartbreakingly full of love.
Only This
by Roald Dahl
That night the frost was very heavy. It covered the hedges and whitened the grass in the fields so that it seemed almost as though it had been snowing. But the night was clear and beautiful and bright with stars, and the moon was nearly full.
The cottage stood alone in a corner of the big field. There was a path from the front door which led across the field to a stile and on over the next field to a gate which opened on to the lane about three miles from the village. There were no other houses in sight and the country around was open and flat and many of the fields were under the plough because of the war.
The light of the moon shone upon the cottage. It shone through the open window into the bedroom where the woman was asleep. She slept lying on her back, with her face upturned to the ceiling, with her long hair spread out around her on the pillow, and although she was asleep, her face was not the face of someone who is resting. Once she had been beautiful, but now there were thin furrows running across her forehead and there was a tightness about the way in which her skin was stretched over the cheekbones. But her mouth was still gentle, and as she slept, she did not close her lips.
The bedroom was small, with a low ceiling, and for furniture there was a dressing-table and an armchair. The clothes of the woman lay over the back of the armchair where she had put them when she undressed. Her black shoes were on the floor beside the chair. On the dressing-table there was a hairbrush, a letter and a large photograph of a young boy in uniform who wore a pair of wings on the left side of his tunic. It was a smiling photograph, the kind that one likes to send to one’s mother and it had a thin, black frame made of wood. The moon shone through the open window and the woman slept her restless sleep. There was no noise anywhere save for the soft, regular noise of her breathing and the rustle of the bedclothes as she stirred in her sleep.
Then, from far away, there came a deep, gentle rumble which grew and grew and became louder and louder until soon the whole sky seemed to be filled with a great noise which throbbed and throbbed and kept on throbbing and did not stop.
Right at the beginning, even before it came close, the woman had heard the noise. In her sleep she had been waiting for it, listening for the noise and dreading the moment when it would come. When she heard it, she opened her eyes and for a while lay quite still, listening. Then she sat up, pushed the bedclothes aside and got out of bed. She went over to the window and placing her hands on the window sill, she leaned out, looking up into the sky; and her long hair fell down over her shoulders, over the thin cotton nightdress which she wore. For many minutes she stood there in the cold, leaning out of the window, hearing the noise, looking up and searching the sky; but she saw only the bright moon and the stars.
‘God keep you,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh dear God keep you safe.’
Then she turned and went quickly over to the bed, pulled the blankets away and wrapped them round her shoulders like a shawl. She slipped her bare feet into the black shoes and walked over to the armchair and pushed it forward so that it was right up in front of the window. Then she sat down.
The noise and the throbbing overhead was very great. For a long time it continued as the huge procession of bombers moved towards the south. All the while the woman sat huddled in her blankets, looking out of the window into the sky.
Then it was over. Once more the night became silent. The frost lay heavy on the field and on the hedges and it seemed as though the whole countryside was holding its breath. An army was marching in the sky. All along the route people had heard the noise and knew what it was; they knew that soon, even before they had gone to sleep, there would be a battle. Men drinking beer in the pubs had stopped their talking in order to listen. Families in their houses had turned off the radio and gone out in their gardens, where they stood looking up into the sky. Soldiers arguing in their tents had stopped their shouting, and men and women walking home at night from the factories had stood still on the road, listening to the noise.
It is always the same. As the bombers move south across the country at night, the people who hear them become strangely silent. For those women whose men are with the planes, the moment is not an easy one to bear.
Now they had gone, and the woman lay back in the armchair and closed her eyes, but she did not sleep. Her face was white and the skin seemed to have been drawn tightly over her cheeks and gathered up in wrinkles around her eyes. Her lips were parted and it was as though she were listening to someone talking. Almost she could hear the sound of his voice as he used to call to her from outside the window when he came back from working in the fields. She could hear him saying he was hungry and asking what there was for supper, and then when he came in he would put his arm around her shoulder and talk to her about what he had been doing all day. She would bring in the supper and he would sit down and start to eat and always he would say, why don’t you have some and she never knew what to answer except that she wasn’t hungry. She would sit and watch him and pour out his tea, and after a while take his plate and go out into the kitchen to get him some more.
It was not easy having only one child. The emptiness when he was not there and the knowing all the time that something might happen; the deep conscious knowing that there was nothing else to live for except this; that if something did happen, then you too would be dead. There would be no use sweeping the floor or washing the dishes or cleaning the house; there would be no use in gathering wood for the fire or in feeding the hens; there would be no use in living.
Now, as she sat there by the open window she did not feel the cold; she felt only a great loneliness and a great fear. The fear took hold of her and grew upon her so that she could not bear it, and she got up from the chair and leaned out of the window again, looking up into the sky. And as she looked the night was no longer beautiful; it was cold and clear and immensely dangerous. She did not see the fields or the hedges or the carpet of frost upon the countryside; she saw only the depths of the sky and the danger was there.
Slowly she turned and sank down again into her chair. Now the fear was great. She could think of nothing at all except that she must see him now because tomorrow would be too late. She let her head rest against the back of the chair and when she closed her eyes she saw the aircraft; she saw it clearly in the moonlight, moving forward through the night like a great, black bird. She was so close to it and she could see the way in which the nose of the machine reached out far ahead of everything, as though the bird was craning its neck in the eagerness of its passage. She could see the markings on the wings and on the body and she knew that he was inside. Twice she called to him, but there was no answer; then the fear and the longing welled up within her so that she could stand it no longer and it carried her forward through the night and on and on until she was with him, beside him, so close that she could have touched him had she put out her hand.
He was sitting at the controls with gloves on his hands, dressed in a great bulky flying-suit which made his body look huge and shapeless and twice its normal size. He was looking straight ahead at the instruments on the panel, concentrating upon what he was doing and thinking of nothing except flying the machine.
Now she called to him again and he heard her. He looked around and when he saw her, he smiled and stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder, and then all the fear and the loneliness and the longing went out of her and she was happy.
For a long time she stood beside him watching him as he flew the machine. Every now and then he would look around and smile at her, and once he said something, but she could not hear what it was because of the noise of the engines. Suddenly he pointed ahead through the glass wind-shield of the aeroplane and she saw that the sky was full of searchlights. There were many hundreds of them; long white fingers of light travelling lazily across the sky, swaying this way and that, working in unison so that sometimes several of them would come together and meet in the same spot and after a while they would separate and meet again somewhere else, all the time searching the night for the bombers which were moving in on the target.
Behind the searchlights she saw the flak. It was coming up from the town in a thick many-coloured curtain, and the flash of the shells as they burst in the sky lit up the inside of the bomber.
He was looking straight ahead now, concentrating upon the flying, weaving through the searchlights and going directly into this curtain of flak, and she watched and waited and did not dare to move or to speak lest she distract him from his task.
She knew that they had been hit when she saw the flames from the nearest engine on the left side. She watched them through the glass of the side panel, licking against the surface of the wing as the wind blew them backwards, and she watched them take hold of the wing and come dancing over the black surface until they were right up under the cockpit itself. At first she was not frightened. She could see him sitting there, very cool, glancing continually to one side, watching the flames and flying the machine, and once he looked quickly around and smiled at her and she knew then that there was no danger. All around she saw the searchlights and the flak and the explosions of the flak and the colours of the tracer, and the sky was not a sky but just a small confined space which was so full of lights and explosions that it did not seem possible that one could fly through it.
But the flames were brighter now on the left wing. They had spread over the whole surface. They were alive and active, feeding on the fabric, leaning backwards in the wind which fanned them and encouraged them and gave them no chance of going out.
Then came the explosion. There was a blinding white flash and a hollow crumph as though someone had burst a blown-up paper bag; then there was nothing but flames and thick whitish-grey smoke. The flames were coming up through the floor and through the sides of the cockpit; the smoke was so thick that it was difficult to see and almost impossible to breathe. She became terrified and panicky because he was still sitting there at the controls, flying the machine, fighting to keep it on an even keel, turning the wheel first to one side, then to the other, and suddenly there was a blast of cold air and she had a vague impression of urgent crouching figures scrambling past her and throwing themselves away from the burning aircraft.
Now the whole thing was a mass of flames and through the smoke she could see him still sitting there, fighting with the wheel while the crew got out, and as did so he held one arm up over his face because the heat was so great. She rushed forward and took him by the shoulders and shook him and shouted, ‘Come on, quickly, you must get out, quickly, quickly.’
Then she saw that his head had fallen forward upon his chest and that he was limp and unconscious. Frantically she tried to pull him out of the seat and towards the door, but he was too limp and heavy. The smoke was filling her lungs and her throat so that she began to retch and gasp for breath. She was hysterical now, fighting against death and against everything and she managed to get her hands under his arms and drag him a little way towards the door. But it was impossible to get him farther. His legs were tangled around the wheel and there was a buckle somewhere which she could not undo. She knew then that it was impossible, that there was no hope because of the smoke and the fire and because there was no time; and suddenly all the strength drained out of her body. She fell down on top of him and began to cry as she had never cried before.
Then came the spin and the fierce rushing drive downwards and she was thrown forward into the fire so that the last she knew was the bright yellow of the flames and the smell of the burning.
Her eyes were closed and her head was resting against the back of the chair. Her hands were clutching the edges of the blankets as though she were trying to pull them tighter around her body and her long hair fell down over her shoulders.
Outside the moon was low in the sky. The frost lay heavier than ever on the fields and on the hedges and there was no noise anywhere. Then from far away in the south came a deep gentle rumble which grew and grew and became louder and louder until soon the whole sky was filled with noise and the singing of those who were coming back.
But the woman who sat by the window never moved. She had been dead for some time.
(1946)
★
Out on the River
by Guy de Maupassant
Last summer I rented a small country house on the banks of the Seine several leagues downstream from Paris and each evening I travelled down to spend the night there. A few days after settling in, I got to know one of my neighbours who was maybe thirty or forty and far and away the oddest man I ever clapped eyes on. He was not just a practised hand with boats, he was mad about them, and was always near the water or on it or in it. He must have been born in a boat and he’ll die in a boat.
One evening as we were strolling quietly along the banks of the Seine, I asked this chap to tell me some tales of his nautical life. He perked up at once, a change came over him, and he started talking fifteen to the dozen, waxing almost lyrical. He had one great passion in him, all-consuming irresistible passion: the river.
Oh yes! (he said) I’ve a good few memories of that old river you see rolling along there. People like you from city streets have no conception of what the river’s like. But just listen to the way a fisherman says the word. For him, a river is something mysterious, deep, and unknown, a place of mirages and ghostly visions where some nights you see things that don’t exist, hear sounds you’ve never heard before, and you shake in your boots as though you were walking through a cemetery. Come to that, a river is the most sinister cemetery
there is: a graveyard where the dead don’t have graves.
To a fisherman, dry land is confined and circumscribed, but on dark moonless nights the river has no limits. Sailors don’t feel the same way about the sea. True enough, the sea can often be merciless and full of spite, but it shrieks and howls and at least the open sea plays fair. But a river is silent and treacherous. It never roars and thunders but just slips quietly on its way, and that never-ending flow of water gliding smoothly along is to me more frightening than any mountainous ocean waves.
People with too much imagination say that the depths of the sea hide vast blue lands where drowned men roam among great fish through strange forests and caves of crystal. The river bottom is just black and full of mud where bodies rot. Yet it can be beautiful when it shines at daybreak and laps quietly at its murmuring reedy banks.
Talking of the ocean, a poet once said:
The foaming waves play host to sombre tales;
O Angry billows, feared by mothers who pray,
You tell those tales with each tide rise
And this no less explains those awful cries
Which roar as beaching rollers surge at end of day.
Well, I believe that stories whispered by quiet-voiced slender reeds are even more sinister than the sombre tales told by the waves’ roar.
But since you’ve asked to hear some of the things I remember, I’ll tell you about something odd that happened to me here about ten years ago.