Storyteller
Page 35
A frequent visitor to Wistaria Cottage was Claud Taylor, who lived in a “dark and dingy”14 flat next to the almshouses that ran off the eastern of the two alleyways on either side of the Dahls’ property. Claud was “a storyteller and a bit of a rogue,”15 who sometimes did odd jobs around the house for Sofie Magdalene. He was married, with three small children of his own, and though Dahl would later claim that Claud “had difficulty mustering a sentence of much more than four words,” the two men soon became firm friends. What brought them together was a shared love of the natural world, a mutual fascination with gambling, and the desire, as Dahl put it, “to acquire something by stealth without paying for it.”16 Claud soon became Roald’s most regular companion. Despite manifest differences of background and wealth, the two men and their families were always on first-name terms and spent a lot of time in each other’s company. Claud’s daughters, Sue and Jenny, still retain a clear image of their father and Roald “sitting on either side of the hearth in Wistaria Cottage, with two greyhounds stretched out on the floor between them, endlessly plotting how to make their fortunes.”17
Claud was practical. He helped Roald design and built a portable writing desk—a board covered in green baize from a billiard table, which he could place across the arms of a large armchair. This enabled him to write without pain and quickly became one of his totem writing accessories, along with the lined yellow legal pads and his sharpened Dixon Ti-conderoga pencils—always an even number, because odd numbers were unlucky. He would use the desk for the rest of his life. Claud possessed the gypsy spirit Roald so admired and was an expert on all things to do with animals and the countryside. Though eminently respectable—his eldest daughter did not hear her father swear until she was in her twenties—Claud shared Roald’s delight in those gray areas of rural legality and taught him much about horse racing, greyhound racing, canasta, and (best of all) poaching.18 Whether it was leading a cow across woods and fields at dead of night to be secretly inseminated by a prize bull, or bagging pheasants from the woods of Claud’s boss, George Brazil, this “sporting type of stealing,” and the “delicious element of risk”19 it generated, thrilled Roald.
Brazil was the local rich man, a “nouveau riche” landowner, who drove around town in a large Rolls-Royce that he replaced every couple of years.20 He would be the victim of a brilliant poaching stratagem that hinged on the idea of feeding pheasants large raisins that had been laced with sleeping pills. Claud’s daughters could both still remember their excitement as the two men set out at dusk for this adventure, with their bags packed with fruit they had slit open, filled with powdered sedatives, and then stitched back up again. Curiously, neither could recall whether the ruse was actually successful, but Jenny did remember that the family ate an awful lot of pheasants that winter. Dahl himself was so proud of this ingenious scheme that he recounted it in several different pieces of fiction, most memorably perhaps in 1975 in Danny The Champion of the World. In 1949, when he first lit upon the scheme, he was so excited that he wrote immediately to Ann Watkins to explain it to her: “They gobble the raisins then feel sleepy, then go up to roost and then the little buggers sleep so hard that they fall off their bough and we catch them on the way down.” “I look at it this way,” he concluded. “If anyone poached me, that’s how I’d like it to be done.”21
Dahl included this caper in his new novel, Fifty Thousand Frogskins—“frogskins,” like “greenbacks,” was slang for dollar bills—whose main characters were a pair of comic rural swindlers obsessed with making their fortune through a brilliant and ingenious scam. One of them, the cunning, mustachioed car dealer Gordon Hawes, was modelled on a local character called Ginger Henderson, who owned the filling station at the bottom of Deep Mill Lane, close by Grange Farm, and sometimes joined Dahl and Taylor on trips to the local greyhound races. “Ginger was his great friend,” recalled Nicholas Logsdail, “ginger hair, ginger mustache and a total black market dealer … a complete spiv. … Roald would often extol the virtues of his dishonesty.”22 These crooked qualities also informed the character of Dahl’s most famous used car salesman, Mr. Wormwood, from his 1988 story, Matilda. But Wormwood’s literary prototype was undoubtedly Gordon Hawes. With his stethoscope round his neck to give an air of expert professionalism, he listens to the engines of the cars he is about to buy, “like a Harley Street surgeon,” gently breaking the news to an ignorant driver that the vehicle they are trying to sell him is defective and practically worthless. A con artist, with a “snaky, gleaming look in his eye,” Hawes despised English snobbery, but knew how to use it cynically to his own advantage. Although he had never been anywhere near Eton College, for example, he would wear the old school tie, because he was aware that with certain customers it created “an astonishing friendliness.” He was astute, selfish and obsessed by money. His dreams of glory consisted only of tricks and hustles that would deliver a thick “wad of crispies”23 into his own back pocket.
Hawes meets his partner-in-crime, Sidney Cubbage, during the war. Both have served their country from the safety of the Catering Corps. Despite his “impression of slight imbecility” and his “pale expressionless ox-eyes,” Cubbage is also sly. But his vices are redeemed by his being “loyal, energetic, wary, comic … the perfect stooge in all difficult transactions.” Cubbage was modelled on Claud—who had also worked in the Catering Corps in Calgary, Canada—to such an extent that when Dahl later salvaged four stories from the book, the name Sidney was changed to Claud. Cubbage was much the more sympathetic of the two men, despising cruelty to animals, mourning the loss of traditional country values and complaining about the lack of trust in the society around him. Dahl wrote about him with warmth and humanity. “People’s changin’,” he comments wearily at the outset of the book, and as he does so, “a kind of sadness began to spread all over his face like a cloud.”24 Ann Watkins thought Cubbage by far the most successful character in the novel and described him enthusiastically as “a lovable, understandable, guy.”25 With the antihero Hawes, however, Dahl was less successful, partially because he was less detached about him. For Hawes reflected aspects of his creator’s own personality. He was a survivor: an outsider who lived off his wits, the opponent of “a vindictive and inefficient government.”26 He defied a world of unnecessary officials and regulations. His ingenuity was his trademark. And he loved gambling.
Roald himself had first felt that thrill when he worked for Shell and went to the dog races at Catford. It was in Washington, however, that his fascination with beating the odds matured. There, a clerk in the embassy initiated him into a poker circle. A man called Brett, “a tiny sly fellow,” had shown him his personal safe stashed full of hundred-dollar bills. Recounting this story at Repton in 1975, Dahl maintained that at first he thought Brett must have found a way of robbing the embassy and asked whether he could join in. The clerk explained that the money was his winnings from playing bridge and poker at Washington’s exclusive University Club whose members were mostly judges and senators, and included the future president, Harry Truman, then Senator for Missouri. Dahl was eager to join—even if his inexperience meant that initially he usually ended up a loser. “So two evenings a week I played in this high powered game in which there were usually at least $500 in the pot,” he told his audience. “In the end, I lost all my story money there, mostly to Brett.”27 The losses however did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm.
Although the world of Buckinghamshire “flapping-tracks” was a far cry from Washington’s elitist poker circles, it offered a similar gambler’s buzz. These ramshackle, unlicensed events took place in unmarked fields, their time and location communicated by word of mouth alone. There, a pack of six greyhounds chased a stuffed white rabbit, pulled on a cord by the “winder,” a man at the far end of the field, “frantically turning the pedals of an upturned bicycle with his hands.” Dishonesty was rife. A muzzle strapped on one dog so tight that it could not properly breathe, a slender thread of black cotton tying the toes of another togethe
r so it was prevented from running at top speed, a sliver of ginger inserted up the anus of a third, so that it bolted down the track to get away from the stinging sensation. Only a year before he died, Roald confessed that his memories of these “sweet days” he spent at the flaps with his greyhounds filled him with “acute nostalgia.”28
Dahl was not alone in his love of the “flaps.” So popular did they become that the government was forced to crack down on the midweek meetings because they were leading to high levels of addictive gambling and absenteeism from work.29 For Dahl, the events were particularly attractive because they were both a product of the “Scholar-Gypsy” lifestyle he so admired and an expression of defiance against excessive government controls. It was also a place where everyone was an outsider. Toward the end of the novel, Cubbage has an encounter with a ratcatcher called Bunce who—like the bizarre doctor in Foreign Intelligence—looks like a rodent. He can kill rats by biting their heads off. He is the same character, “lean and brown with a sharp face and two long sulphur-coloured teeth that protruded from the upper jaw, overlapping the lower lip, pressing it inward,”30 who will later appear in Claud’s Dog.
The ratcatcher is grotesque, but for Claud—as for Dahl—not half as repulsive as the bureaucrats and state officials, with their joyless university intellects, who seem bent on denying ordinary people their simple pleasures. “His [Cubbage’s] relationship with the ratman—much as he despised him, much as he hated his cruelty—was a close one,” Dahl wrote. “They were both men of the soil of the same county, and the eternal battle against the educated classes, and against officialdom and petty tyranny drew them together.” Fifty Thousand Frogskins is populated by these small-time crooks—spivs selling black market goods; bookmakers, “scowling, furtive men in thick belted overcoats and trilby hats, watchful, predatory characters with small eyes and closed faces”; “sly, knowing” Jews; and Gypsies, “aloof, unwashed and secretive.” In this world of petty sharks and grifters, among “the sewage and the scrapings from the bottom of the cesspools of the big and little towns,” Hawes and Cubbage plot the scam that will win them a fortune. For they have managed to acquire two identical greyhounds: one a born loser, and another, “the ringer,” who is a natural racer. They plan to pass the latter off as the former and make a fortune from the odds they will receive. Despite the attempts of their adversaries—mostly unscrupulous farmers, government officials, and bookmakers—to foil their plans, Hawes and Cubbage are eventually triumphant. They come home with plenty of “crispies”—all won from that “messy little clump of crooked humanity” that Dahl was so drawn to, “seething, shouting, slobbering and slipping about in the mud.”31 Their success was in sharp contrast to Roald’s own. He would later tell Charles Marsh that he had blown all his share of his father’s trust fund—possibly as much as £5,000—on “dog racing and the characters he chose to pal around with of that world.”32*
While he was working on the novel, Dahl kept in “training,” as he called it, writing ingenious short stories. The Sound Machine was typical. It was in some respects similar to a story he had written as a ten-year-old in the nursery at Cumberland Lodge, which he later described as his “first serious attempt at a short story.”33 In The Kumbak II, a child discovers that his uncle Aristotle has invented a machine for listening to conversations from the past and uses it to prove that a certain Benjamin Bluebottle is guilty of the murder of Miss Jemima Redbottom. Forty years later, in The Sound Machine, a similar man invents a device that can detect the noises plants make and therefore hear them cry out in pain. It was another tale about the possibilities of human cruelty, born from the kind of one-line observation or idea that Roald collected in his “Ideas Books”—compilations of characters, situations and ideas that he thought might one day inspire or generate a story. He had been compiling these fictional “germs” since 1945 and would go on doing so for the rest of his life. This one was jotted down simply as “STORY—sound apparatus that could hear trees scream.” Sometimes these ideas were sketched out in a short paragraph or two, often unpunctuated. More often than not they were simply notions, hypotheses or information that seemed pregnant with storytelling potential. It might be a fact about dog licensing in Denmark, the description of a urological ward, a thought about the “centre of intelligence” within the human brain. There are details of ingenious scams, ways of murdering people without being detected—such as tickling someone who has a weak heart or giving a diabetic an overdose of insulin.34
Some are grotesque—a man who eats his aunt’s ashes by mistake—while others are more fanciful and anticipate future children’s books. A man who captured “thoughts, jokes and pieces of knowledge” and kept them in a jar rubs shoulders with another who drops his glass eye into a tankard and a radiologist who fires X-rays through the wall of his house to cause his next-door neighbor to become sterile. One reads simply: “Man who grew cherry the size of a grapefruit.” Sometimes a newspaper cutting is pasted onto the page, the photograph of a murderer perhaps, with a comment about his eyes, or a collection of unexpected similes and whimsical connections.
People
A pale grey face like a bowl of porridge
Legs like the legs of a chair
Face like crumpled brown paper
A nose like a bathroom tap
A small crooked mouth, shaped like a keyhole
Bach’s French Suite No. 4 in E flat is “Oh dear, what can the matter be”35
Many were blueprints for later short stories. “German who made Russian child walk like a dog,” for example, or “Man with a picture tattooed on his back.”† Others were notes on subjects that compelled him—“the curse of nationalism,” for example, or this list of human cruelties toward animals:
French woman scraping scales off a live fish, small boys burning ants with a magnifying glass, small boys stoning a toad, the good chef who cuts a lobster in half when it is alive, the geese for foie gras. Feet nailed to plank—in front of fire. Also the ramming of food. In the French markets—skinning frogs alive. They jump about. Recipe. In Shanghai, the little monkey brought in, trussed up, little fire under him to keep his blood running. Good. Cleave head and take out brain to be eaten immediately as a delicacy. USA. The dipping of live turkeys in boiling water in large NY turkey farms. France. Cordon bleu teach you to make the flesh of a boiled trout “bleu,” put hand in mouth, pull out guts of live fish before boiling. Woman plucking a live chicken.36
In 1949, The Sound Machine was accepted by The New Yorker, which paid him $1,000 for it. Roald was delighted. He had long wanted the magazine to publish one of his pieces and finally, after many rejections, it had happened. But joy soon turned to anguish when the editor, Harold Ross, pointed out some inconsistencies and suggested both cuts and rewrites. His letter threw Dahl into a “howling fury.” He wrote back accusing Ross of “mincing” his carefully wrought sentences and of presenting his author with an impossible dilemma—whether to abandon writing altogether or become “a sort of literary whore who will sleep with any editor however ugly his face.”37 When Ann Watkins read his letter, which he sent off without her knowledge, she was astonished. “What a boy!” she wrote to him admiringly, “what a boy!”38 His response had been swift, instinctive and risky. He told Watkins that he was banking on the fact that the staff on the magazine were “an exceedingly reasonable bunch,” and that they would not think he was a “conceited little bastard who wants his own way—but merely someone who is trying to find his feet and refuses to have the carpet pulled from under them.”39 The gamble paid off. Ross backed down. Watkins was amazed. He “all but ate crow,” she told Roald.40
Roald added the tale to a number of other short stories and pieces of journalism he had written since his return to England, and offered the collection for publication. Collins was the first to pass on it. His editor there, Peter Wyld, compared it unfavorably with Some Time Never, acidly describing one of the stories as “failed Dorothy Parker” and another as “failed Runyon.”41 Only one tale,
he felt, was up to the standard of Over to You, and that was The Sword, which Dahl had written seven years earlier. John Wheelock also wrote to him from Scribner’s. His words were gentler, his tone more flattering, but his message was the same. A string of other rejection letters followed, mostly without comment, although Harry Maule at Random House celebrated the author’s “fiendish imagination” and commented that his stories were “pretty telling exercises in the macabre.”42 Nevertheless, no one felt the collection was either of sufficient literary merit or popular appeal to be worth publishing. It was a blow. More than a year would pass before Dahl sold another story, and so he protected himself, as he admitted, by reverting to childhood—“playing with model airplanes and greyhounds.”43 His young nephews and nieces were the grateful recipients of his energies, joining their “perfect uncle” on walks in the wood or impromptu chases in his car across the countryside in the wake of the plane. All felt their time with him was blessed. This was the carefree escapism Roald would recall nostalgically forty years later, when the stresses and anxieties, the rejections and failures, had all been forgotten.44
Of course, he enjoyed this “messing around,” but it frustrated him too, because he liked the good things in life. He liked mixing with the wealthy and famous. He liked being the provider of unusual and exotic treats for his family. When he returned from America, his mother had described him arriving “like a Father Christmas with masses of presents for us all.”45 Alfhild too remembered, even in England, that her brother “loved having a good time. And he’d always take his sisters. … It was important for him to have enough money so the family had a good time, and by that he meant everybody.”46 His current financial situation was making that role impossible. So, by the summer of 1949, Dahl began to consider a career change, albeit one that would still allow him to continue storytelling. “I’m not writing much,” he told Watkins in August, admitting that he had been upset by the fight with The New Yorker and also by “being told by Collins that the short stories in my last book were no good at all.” So he was embarking on another plan. “I am now busy organising a bookmaker’s business in London. For the next year or two I shall spend my days taking bets on horses, a thing I’ve always been fascinated by. You see, I’m broke, and if I can build up an independent business in this way, I’ll be able to write just what I want and at the same time tell all the editors and publishers to go and stuff themselves if I want to—not that I haven’t been doing that already. But of course I shall keep writing. I shall be a bookie in the daytime … leaping across the room to look at the ticker-tape, rushing back, seizing the phone to lay off an enormous bet and having, in short, a lot of fun and excitement.”47