Ah Sweet Mystery of Life Read online

  Roald Dahl

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  The Country Stories of Roald Dahl

  Illustrated by John Lawrence

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Preface

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  Parson’s Pleasure

  The Ratcatcher

  Rummins

  Mr Hoddy

  Mr Feasey

  The Champion of the World

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life

  Roald Dahl’s parents were Norwegian, but he was born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, in 1916 and educated at Repton School. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he enlisted in the RAF at Nairobi. He was severely wounded after joining a fighter squadron in Libya, but later saw service as a fighter pilot in Greece and Syria. In 1942 he went to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché, which was where he started to write, and then was transferred to Intelligence, ending the war as a wing commander. His first twelve short stories, based on his wartime experiences, were originally published in leading American magazines and afterwards as a book, Over to You. All of his highly acclaimed stories have been widely translated and have become bestsellers all over the world. Anglia Television dramatized a selection of his short stories under the title Tales of the Unexpected. Among his other publications are two volumes of autobiography, Boy and Going Solo, his much-praised novel, My Uncle Oswald, and Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories, of which he was editor. During the last year of his life he compiled a book of anecdotes and recipes with his wife, Felicity, which was published by Penguin in 1996 as Roald Dahl’s Cookbook. He is one of the most successful and well known of all children’s writers, and his books are read by children all over the world. These include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Magic Finger, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, The Witches, winner of the 1983 Whitbread Award, The BFG and Matilda.

  Roald Dahl died in November 1990. The Times described him as ‘one of the most widely read and influential writers of our generation’ and wrote in its obituary: ‘Children loved his stories and made him their favourite… They will be classics of the future.’ In 2000 Roald Dahl was voted the nation’s favourite author in the World Book Day poll.

  For more information on Roald Dahl go to www.roalddahl.com

  Roald Dahl In Penguin

  Fiction

  Over to You Someone Like You

  Kiss Kiss Switch Bitch

  Tales of the Unexpected My Uncle Oswald

  More Tales of the Unexpected

  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

  The Best of Roald Dahl

  Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (editor)

  Completely Unexpected Tales

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl

  Non-Fiction

  Boy Going Solo

  (also published together in one volume)

  Roald Dahl’s Cookbook

  (with Felicity Dahl)

  Preface

  In 1946 the war was over and I was thirty years old. I came back to England then and spent some years living in my mother’s house. First we were in Great Missenden, and later we moved a few miles away to the High Street in Old Amersham. This was fine Buckinghamshire country with its rolling hills and beech-woods and small green fields. I was writing nothing but short stories at that time and I wrote them slowly and carefully at my own pace. In this way I would complete three or sometimes four of them each year. I worked on nothing else. I was totally preoccupied with the short story, and I would sell the first serial rights of each one when it was finished either to the New Yorker or to some other American magazine like Colliers or the Saturday Evening Post. Then the second serial rights would go to magazines in other countries, and whenever I had enough stories to make a book, a book it would be.

  It was a pleasant leisurely life entailing about four hours work a day, seven days a week. I enjoyed it and I now realise how fortunate I was in being able to come up with a new plot whenever I needed one. This routine of four hours a day and never any more left me plenty of time for messing around with other things. This messing around very soon took on a particular shape because I met (I have forgotten exactly how or where) a man of my own age called Claud. Claud was married with two small children and he lived in a dark and dingy flat in Old Amersham. He worked behind the counter in a butcher’s shop in that town and he was not in the least interested in writing. In fact he had difficulty in composing a sentence of much more than four words. But Claud and I had other things in common.

  We both had a passion for gambling in small amounts on horses and greyhounds. As well as that, we shared a love of trying to acquire something by stealth without paying for it. By this I don’t mean common-or-garden thievery. We would never have robbed a house or stolen a bicycle. Ours was the sporting type of stealing. It was poaching pheasants or tickling trout or nicking a few plums from a farmer’s orchard. These are practices that are condoned by the right people in the countryside. There is a delicious element of risk in them, especially in the poaching, and a good deal of skill is required.

  Claud was an acknowledged expert on such matters and he was proud of it. He taught me everything. His knowledge of the habits of wild animals, be they rats or pheasants or stoats or rabbits or hares, was very great, and he was at his happiest when he was out in the woods in the dead of night. Poaching pheasants and tickling trout and going to the flapping-tracks: these were the three things that absorbed and thrilled us most of all.

  Flapping-tracks are unlicensed greyhound race-meetings held in some farmer’s field where six dogs chase a stuffed white rabbit which is pulled along on a cord by a man at the far end of the field who is frantically turning the pedals of an upturned bicycle with his hands. These meetings are frequented by gypsies and spivs and all manner of unsavoury characters who bring their dogs to race. Shady bookmakers set up their stands along the side of the hedge and a great deal of betting goes on. This sort of thing was made for a man like Claud. It was also made for me, and it wasn’t long before I was buying and breeding my own greyhounds for flapping-tracks. Claud and I would train them and at one time I had more than twenty dogs housed in kennels just outside Amersham, and we looked after them together. In spite of the fun of poaching pheasants, I think we probably had the most fun of all plotting and scheming to get a winner at the flapping-track than we had with anything else.

  The stories in this book all grew out of my experiences with Claud. They were written at the time when we were together, in the late 1940s, and rereading them again now fills me with acute nostalgia and with vivid memories of those sweet days many years ago.

  R.D. 1989

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  My cow started bulling at dawn and the noise can drive you crazy if the cowshed is right under your window. So I got dressed early and phoned Claud at the filling-station to ask if he’d give me a hand to lead her down the steep hill and across the road over to Rummins’s farm to have her serviced by Rummins’s famous bull.

  Claud arrived five minutes later and we tied a rope around the cow’s neck and set off down the lane on this cool September morning. There were high hedges on

  either side of the lane and the hazel bushes had clusters of big ripe nuts all over them.

  ‘You ever seen Rummins do a mating?’ Claud asked me.

  I told him I had never seen anyone do an official mating between a bull and a cow.

  ‘Rummins does it special,’ Claud said. ‘There’s nobody in the world does a mating the way Rummins does it.’

  ‘What’s so special about it?’

  ‘You got a tr