Foreword
There’s something really rather special about short stories. Cynics might say that they suit our hectic, twenty-first century, Blackberry-distracted lifestyles. That they’re little bite-size nuggets of literature that we can pick up, read and discard in between Tweeting what we’ve had for lunch and watching some Kiwi comedy show on our iPhones. And yet, the short story has ancient and noble antecedents. It’s an obvious descendant from the ancient tradition of parables and fables. One-act stories, with a limited cast of characters, one storyline and a satisfying ending. In the best tradition of works like the Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Roald Dahl’s short stories are dark fables of a very particular kind. Very likely, this dark edge to his storytelling had something to do with his Norwegian heritage. His mother, Sofie Dahl, loved recounting the multitude of Norwegian myths and legends to Dahl and his sisters. He was also a huge enthusiast for any stories involving trolls and ghosts. I happen to have had a little glimpse into what goes to shape the Norwegian psyche – for filming purposes, I once had to spend three days just inside the Arctic Circle in Norway in a small wooden hut. We had just four hours of daylight per day in which to stare at the blank white canvas of snow that surrounded us on every side… to be honest, I didn’t think many happy thoughts. There’s definitely something about spending a long time in the dark in sub-zero temperatures that can make you start to examine the slightly weirder elements of your character. Dahl himself never lived in Norway but he clearly had those characteristics in his genes. This, mixed with being brought up in the emotionally stunted, class-obsessed society of inter-war Britain, was a recipe for something a touch darker than Willy Wonka’s darkest chocolate.
I remember first reading some of these stories at my own prep school in Oxford. I think I’d seen a couple of Tales of the Unexpected on the telly, and my parents, thrilled that I was interested in something approaching literature, bought me the book. The fact that it was written by the man who’d come up with such childhood favourites as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach lulled me into a false sense of security at the prospect of reading what looked suspiciously like an actual grown-up book.
From the moment that I started reading ‘Taste’ I was hooked. I knew that something was not quite right – something deliciously disturbing was lurking within the pages and I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s the way the ante is slowly upped in what always appears to be such civilized surroundings. It’s the little hints at the dark desires that lurk in all of us but have to be concealed from ‘polite society’. The moment in ‘Taste’ when the stakes suddenly lurch from money and houses to the ‘ownership’ of the host’s daughter is unexpected and shocking. Not for the first time in a Dahl tale does a servant, supposedly socially invisible, save the day. It’s an oft-repeated theme of their very invisibility allowing them to see far more than the rest of us. In ‘Neck’ it is the butler, ‘Jelks’, who appears to be subtly guiding his ‘master’ to do what, as a reader, we are longing for him to do. There is also a curious element of delicious sadism present in a lot of the stories. The ‘Man From the South’ who takes such pleasure in bets that can result in the loss of fingers left a big impression on me as a kid. Principally it confirmed my parent’s warning never to talk to strange men at swimming pools. ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ not only covers murder but then relishes the most extraordinary disposal of a murder weapon that I’ve ever read.
But the two stories that have stayed with me the longest are ‘The Sound Machine’ and ‘Galloping Foxley’. The latter takes place on a train, where someone is sitting opposite somebody that he is sure bullied him terribly at school. We are taken through every terrible incident and thrown back into the awful, terrifying world of English boarding-school life at the time. Reading this for the first time while at my own boarding school was a weird experience. I absolutely loathed the place but, having read ‘Galloping Foxley’, realized that things had definitely improved since Dahl’s day. I had my own Galloping Foxley at prep school. I can picture him now, almost thirty years on, and it still makes me angry. He made my life hell and I still often fantasize about confronting him and extracting some form of perfect revenge. When the hero of Dahl’s story decides to confront Foxley, I was on the edge of my seat urging him on. Dahl’s schooldays were not happy ones. At the age of eight, when he was at The Cathedral School, Llandaff, he and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of sweets at the local sweet shop, which was owned by a ‘mean and loathsome’ old woman called Mrs Pratchett. Dahl christened the
incident the ‘Great Mouse Plot of 1924’. In his book Boy: Tales of Childhood he tells of atrocious beatings at his public school, Repton. It’s no surprise that he places Galloping Foxley at Repton. I don’t know how many of the details are truthfully autobiographical but I suspect that quite a lot are.
The other story that really sticks in my head is ‘The Sound Machine’. This tells of a man who invents a machine that can pick up ultra-high frequencies, normally inaudible to the human ear. What he hears when he dons the headphones is the secret pain of plants – and it had a huge effect on me as a kid. For a long time I refused to do ‘wood duty’ at school, where we had a rota system to cut logs. Possibly I was just lazy and had used Dahl’s story as an excuse to become a conscientious objector. Whatever the case, it was another reason why I loved these stories so much. I hope you will too.
Dom Joly, 2010
Taste
There were six of us to dinner that night at Mike Schofield’s house in London: Mike and his wife and daughter, my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt.
Richard Pratt was a famous gourmet. He was president of a small society known as the Epicures, and each month he circulated privately to its members a pamphlet on food and wines. He organized dinners where sumptuous dishes and rare wines were served. He refused to smoke for fear of harming his palate, and when discussing a wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. ‘A prudent wine,’ he would say, ‘rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.’ Or, ‘A good-humoured wine, benevolent and cheerful – slightly obscene, perhaps, but none the less good-humoured.’
I had been to dinner at Mike’s twice before when Richard Pratt was there, and on each occasion Mike and his wife had gone out of their way to produce a special meal for the famous gourmet. And this one, clearly, was to be no exception. The moment we entered the dining-room, I could see that the table was laid for a feast. The tall candles, the yellow roses, the quantity of shining silver, the three wineglasses to each person, and above all, the faint scent of roasting meat from the kitchen brought the first warm oozings of saliva to my mouth.
As we sat down, I remembered that on both Richard Pratt’s previous visits Mike had played a little betting game with him over the claret, challenging him to name its breed and its vintage. Pratt had replied that that should not be too difficult provided it was one of the great years. Mike had then bet him a case of the wine in question that he could not do it. Pratt had accepted, and had won both times. Tonight I felt sure that the little game would be played over again, for Mike was quite willing to lose the bet in order to prove that his wine was good enough to be recognized, and Pratt, for his part, seemed to take a grave, restrained pleasure in displaying his knowledge.
The meal began with a plate of whitebait, fried very crisp in butter, and to go with it there was a Moselle. Mike got up and poured the wine himself, and when he sat down again, I could see that he was watching Richard Pratt. He had set the bottle in front of me so that I could read the label. It said, ‘Geierslay Ohligsberg, 1945’. He leaned over and whispered to me that Geierslay was a tiny village in the Moselle, almost unknown outside Germany. He said that this wine we were drinking was something unusual, that the output of the vineyard was so small that it was almost impossible for a stranger to get any of it. He had visited Geierslay personally the previous summer in order to obtain the few dozen bottles that they had finally allowed him to have.
‘I doubt whether anyone else in the country has any of it at the moment,’ he said. I saw him glance again at Richard Pratt. ‘Great thing about Moselle,’ he continued, raising his voice, ‘it’s the perfect wine to serve before a claret. A lot of people serve a Rhine wine instead, but that’s because they don’t know any better. A Rhine wine will kill a delicate claret, you know that? It’s barbaric to serve a Rhine before a claret. But a Moselle – ah! – a Moselle is exactly right.’
Mike Schofield was an amiable, middle-aged man. But he was a stockbroker. To be precise, he was a jobber in the stock market, and like a number of his kind, he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed, almost ashamed to find that he had made so much money with so slight a talent. In his heart he knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker – an unctuous, infinitely respectable, secretly unscrupulous bookmaker – and he knew that his friends knew it, too. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it. His little sermon about Rhine wine and Moselle was a part of this thing, this culture that he sought.
‘A charming little wine, don’t you think?’ he said. He was still watching Richard Pratt. I could see him give a rapid furtive glance down the table each time he dropped his head to take a mouthful of whitebait. I could almost feel him waiting for the moment when Pratt would take his first sip, and look up from his glass with a smile of pleasure, of astonishment, perhaps even of wonder, and then there would be a discussion and Mike would tell him about the village of Geierslay.
But Richard Pratt did not taste his wine. He was completely engrossed in conversation with Mike’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Louise. He was half turned towards her, smiling at her, telling her, so far as I could gather, some story about a chef in a Paris restaurant. As he spoke, he leaned closer and closer to her, seeming in his eagerness almost to impinge upon her, and the poor girl leaned as far as she could away from him, nodding politely, rather desperately, and looking not at his face but at the topmost button of his dinner jacket.
We finished our fish, and the maid came round removing the plates. When she came to Pratt, she saw that he had not yet touched his food, so she hesitated, and Pratt noticed her. He waved her away, broke off his conversation, and quickly began to eat, popping the little crisp brown fish quickly into his mouth with rapid jabbing movements of his fork. Then, when he had finished, he reached for his glass, and in two short swallows he tipped the wine down his throat and turned immediately to resume his conversation with Louise Schofield.
Mike saw it all. I was conscious of him sitting there, very still, containing himself, looking at his guest. His round jovial face seemed to loosen slightly and to sag, but he contained himself and was still and said nothing.
Soon the maid came forward with the second course. This was a large roast of beef. She placed it on the table in front of Mike who stood up and carved it, cutting the slices very thin, laying them gently on the plates for the maid to take around. When he had served everyone, including himself, he put down the carving knife and leaned forward with both hands on the edge of the table.
‘Now,’ he said, speaking to all of us but looking at Richard Pratt. ‘Now for the claret. I must go and fetch the claret, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘You go and fetch it, Mike?’ I said. ‘Where is it?’
‘In my study, with the cork out – breathing.’
‘Why the study?’
‘Acquiring room temperature, of course. It’s been there twenty-four hours.’
‘But why the study?’
‘It’s the best place in the house. Richard helped me choose it last time he was here.’
At the sound of his name, Pratt looked round.
‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ Mike said.
‘Yes,’ Pratt answered, nodding gravely. ‘That’s right.’