Going Solo

All over to you

The Gremlins, Over to You, The Twits, Esio Trot, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, George’s Marvellous Medicine, Going Solo, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Danny the Champion of the World, The Witches, Matilda, Two Fables, The Enormous Crocodile, Revolting Rhymes, Dirty Beasts, Rhyme Stew, The Mildenhall Treasure and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl

It’s my belief, possibly not shared by many, that Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile is one of the funniest books in the English language. And it’s for the following formulation. A wild animal calls out to a couple of witless children some version of this: ‘Look out, children! That’s not a picnic bench!’ or ‘That’s not a merry-go-round pony!’

Instead, the animal says, ‘It’s an Enormous Crocodile, and it wants to eat you up!’

At which the children look down and don’t sit down on the Enormous Crocodile grinning below them and instead do the sensible thing and scarper.

I cannot tell you how funny I think this is. I cannot say it without risking my reputation for being essentially normal. I can’t say without chancing getting sectioned. I can’t tell you how funny it is to imagine clueless children walking up to something that’s plainly a gigantic, malevolent reptile, not giving it a moment’s thought, and then deciding to sit down upon it until being told by one of the natural world’s other creatures that, in fact, it’s not made of fibreglass or wood but instead cold-blooded animate matter, and it likes eating children best of all. After which, as you would in their place, they scuttle.

But what I really want to talk about today are some of Dahl’s other works. Not Matilda, which I think is pretty smug and self-satisfied. Not Henry Sugar, which is quite fun. What would do you if you learnt the yogi’s ability to see very briefly the other side of objects? Go straight to the casino, of course. There’s simply no alternative. Not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, delightful though it is. Or a personal favourite of mine, for whatever reason from long ago, Danny the Champion of the World.

I might be permitted to fly the flag a little for The Mildenhall Treasure, an enjoyable half-true-half-fiction account of the triumphs and perils of archaeology. (I may enjoy it most because my great-uncle once had a truly prodigious find while out metal detecting.)

What I’d like to talk about most are those early works of Dahl’s that relate in some way to the war and in some way to flying. Over to You, his first collection of stories, is in its own way overlooked. Dahl wrote some very good stories about aviation. He wrote some good stories in the same book that weren’t about aviation, or at least not directly, too. One, for instance, which is more about the days Dahl spent in Africa with Shell, before the war. The subject of some of his memoir of late youth and early adulthood, Going Solo.

Going out to Africa itself was a story. In Going Solo we see that Dahl claims, for instance, to have seen a man whose initials and surname proclaimed him to be dubbed U. N. Savory — and that the poor man had to have that stencilled on his trunk case, as was the style at the time.

How a bald man applied a wig most laboriously and, having done it, flicked talcum power onto his shoulders, so that he might approach his companions at the card table or the bar and say, as an opening gambit, ‘bloody dandruff.’ For the added little dash of self-deprecating verisimilitude.

And in Africa more stories. Sitting out all day and night to see which man or animal is stealing a cow’s milk, for instance. The kind of thing one might do in that part of the world in those days.

But after that, the war came. The kind of war in which, Dahl says, it was simply accepted that the done thing for boys like him was to fly aircraft. That there was no alternative for someone in his position.

And some of the stories in Going Solo of some of the RAF men are remarkable. Here’s one on their way to training camps in the Middle East: leaping from the roof of one train carriage to another, simply because they are bored and don’t think the fall would kill them, against all evidence which an older man might be able to produce and put forth for their perusal.

The first leap into children’s writing was, for Dahl, the development of the Gremlins idea as a movie proposal for Disney. Disney did not use it, so Dahl was free to, and produced a charming illustrated story of the strange creatures who are commonly known and encountered among fliers but not among the general public, who have to be gently educated about the existence of such beings.

Going Solo is a very good book. Stories about strange landing-places and attacks on Vichy French forces in Syria — a part of the war many apparent experts forget actually happened. Those are all to the good.

Yet I’ve looked but I cannot find much evidence for one thing Dahl claims and writes about wonderfully in Going Solo. This is the climactic ‘Battle of Athens,’ an aerial dogfight between an outnumbered British assemblage and a significant German force. Dahl describes it in painstaking detail. It has to be right, and it has to have played out as he said, because he has described it. All the secondary sources by which we teach our children say it happened; and they point to Dahl as their great first-hand source. What can one say? He told a good story.