Someone Like You Read online

  ROALD DAHL

  Someone Like You

  With a Foreword by Dom Joly

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Taste

  Lamb to the Slaughter

  Man from the South

  The Soldier

  My Lady Love, My Dove

  Dip in the Pool

  Galloping Foxley

  Skin

  Poison

  The Wish

  Neck

  The Sound Machine

  Nunc Dimittis

  The Great Automatic Grammatizator

  Claud’s Dog

  The Ratcatcher

  Rummins

  Mr Hoddy

  Mr Feasey

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Someone Like You

  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 was then 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 infuential 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 a World Book Day poll. For more information on Roald Dahl go to www.roalddahl.com

  Since Trigger Happy TV, Dom Joly has continued to make edgy and entertaining TV, including World Shut Your Mouth for BBC1 and This is Dom Joly for BBC3. He presented and wrote Dom Joly’s Happy Hour – a spoof travel show for Sky One – and most recently presented The Complainers for Five. Dom is an award-winning travel writer for the Sunday Time s and also writes an eclectic weekly column for the Independent on Sunday, covering subjects as varied as Middle East politics, fifty-foot chickens and stalking Liz Hurley. He is currently working on his book, The Dark Tourist, which will be released in 2010.

  This book is for C.E.M.

  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