My Uncle Oswald Read online

  And that, my friends, is almost exactly what happened. I went back to the Sudan. I stayed there for a little over two years, and I don't mind telling you that although I learned a great deal about the Blister Beetle, I also learned a thing or two about the ladies who inhabit those regions. The tribes were sharply divided and they seldom mixed. But I mixed with them all right, with the Nubians, the Hassarians, the Beggaras, the Shil-luks, the Shukrias and the curiously light-coloured Niam-Niams who live west of the Blue Nile. I found the Nubians especially to my taste and I wouldn't be surprised if that was where the word nubile originated.

  By the end of 1923, my little factory was going full blast and turning out a thousand pills a day.

  By 1925, I had agents in eight cities. I had chosen them carefully. All, without exception, were retired army generals. Unemployed generals are common in every country, and these men, I discovered, were cut out for this particular type of job. They were efficient. They were unscrupulous. They were brave. They had little regard for human life. And they lacked sufficient intelligence to cheat me without being caught.

  It was an immensely lucrative operation. The profits were astronomical. But after a few years I grew bored with running such a big operation and I turned the whole thing over to a Greek syndicate in exchange for one-half of the profits. The Greeks were happy, I was happy and hundreds of thousands of customers have been happy ever since.

  I am unashamedly proud of my contribution to the happiness of the human race. Not many men of business and certainly very few millionaires can tell themselves with a clear conscience that the accumulation of their wealth has spread such a high degree of ecstasy and joy among their clients. And it pleases me very much to have discovered that the dangers to human health of cantharis vesicatoria sudanii have been grossly exaggerated. My records show that not more than four or five dozen a year at the most suffer any serious or crippling effects from the magic substance. Very few die.

  Just one more thing. In 1935, some fifteen years later, I was having breakfast in my Paris house and reading the morning paper when my eye was caught and held by the following item in one of the gossip columns (translated from the French):

  'La Maison d'Or' at Cap Ferrat, the largest and most luxurious private property on the entire Cote d'Azur, has recently changed hands. It has been bought by an English couple, Professor Arthur Woresley and his beautiful wife Yasmin. The Woresley's have come to France from Buenos Aires where they have been living for many years, and very welcome they are. They will add great lustre to the glittering Riviera scene. As well as buying the magnificent 'La Maison d'Or', they have just taken delivery of a superb oceangoing yacht which is the envy of every millionaire on the Mediterranean. It has a crew of eighteen and cabin accommodation for ten people. The Woresleys have named the yacht SPERM. When I asked Mrs Woresley why they had chosen that rather curious name, she laughed and said, 'Oh, I don't know. I suppose because it's such a whale of a ship.'

  Quite a girl, that Yasmin. I have to admit it. Though what she ever saw in old Woresley with his donnish airs and his nicotine-stained moustache I cannot imagine. They say a good man is hard to find. Maybe Woresley was one of those. But who on earth wants a good man? Who for that matter wants a good woman?

  Not me.

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  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1979

  First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1980

  Published in Penguin Books 1980

  Copyright (c) Roald Dahl, 1979,1980

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194199-8

  Roald Dahl

  Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales, on 13 September 1916. His parents were Norwegian and he was the only son of a second marriage. His father, Harald, and elder sister Astri died when Roald was just three years old, leaving his mother, Sofie, to raise her four children and two stepchildren.

  At the age of nine, Roald was sent away to boarding school, first in Weston-super-Mare and later in Derbyshire (not far from Cadbury's chocolate factory). He suffered acutely from homesickness and his unhappy schooling was to greatly influence his writing in later life. His childhood and schooldays became the subject of his autobiography Boy.

  At eigthteen, instead of going to university, he joined the Shell Petroleum Company and after two years training was sent to Dar es Salaam (in what is now Tanzania) to supply oil to customers. However, the outbreak of the Second World War saw him sign up as an aircraftman with the RAF in Nairobi: of the sixteen men who signed up, only Roald and two others were to survive the war.

  He detailed his exploits in the war in a further volume of autobiography, Going Solo, which included crash-landing in no-man's-land and surviving a direct hit during the Battle of Athens. Invalided out of active service, he was transferred to Washington in 1942 as an air attache, where an opportune meeting with C. S. Forester, the writer of the Hornblower series, set him on a new path.

  Roald's first piece of published writing was used to help publicize the British war effort in America. Appearing anonymously in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, 'Shot Down Over Libya' earned him $900. He published several more pieces for the paper, many of which were fictional tales, and these were eventually collected together and published as Over to You.

  Later stories appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly. They were widely regarded and he won the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times. In 1953 he married the Oscar-winning actor Patricia Neal and together they had five children.

  It was not until the 1960s, after he had settled with his family in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, that Roald began seriously to writer children's stories, publishing first James and the Giant Peach and, a few years later, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was not long before his stories were a worldwide success.

  After he and Patricia Neal divorced, Roald married Felicity Crosland in 1983. Working to the end on new books, he died aged seventy-four on 23 November 1990.

  Now, over twenty years later, Roald Dahl's legacy as a storyteller and favourite of readers around the world remains unsurpassed.

  Kiss Kiss

  'And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.'

  Eleven devious, shocking stories from the master of the unpredictable, Roald Dahl.

  What could go wrong when a wife pawns the mink coat that her love gave her as a parting gift? What happens when a priceless piece of furniture is the subject of a deceitful bargain? Can a wronged woman take revenge on her dead husband?

  In these dark, disturbing stories Roald Dahl explores the sinister side of human nature: the cunning, sly, selfish part of each of us that leads us into the territory of the unexpected and