Hey SuperForest
I write to you today, 13 September, on “Roald Dahl Day” – started in 2006 on the anniversary of Dahl’s birthday to commemorate the works of the prolific and much-loved author. I inhaled so many of Dahl’s books growing up and they still conjure up memories of colourful worlds – from The BFG to The Twits, Fantastic Mister Fox to Matilda, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach , George’s Marvellous Medicine and more. So I figured what better time than to share a few choice excerpts with SuperForest:
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely
The Twits
Dahl also had a playful relationship with language, coining many made-up words including the snozzcumber (and snozzberries), frobscottle and whoopsy-splunkers. A personal favourite from The BFG:
A whizzpopper!” cried the BFG, beaming at her. “Us giants is making whizzpoppers all the time! Whizzpopping is a sign of happiness. It is music in our ears! You surely is not telling me that a little whizzpopping if forbidden among human beans?
(perhaps you can guess to what function ‘whizzpopping’ refers;)
I also loved The Witches, which is the source of what, in retrospect, seems a most unusual and bittersweet “happy” ending – but which as a child I don’t recall batting an eye at (when our protagonist is transformed into a mouse, but takes it with great equanimity and looks forward to a future travelling the world with his badass, cigar-smoking grandmother: “I’ll be a very old mouse and you’ll be a very old grandmother and soon after that we’ll both die together.”)
Dahl’s writing was never saccharine or patronising, but displayed a mischievous sense of humour and of the amusing absurdity of embarrassing or gruesome aspects of humanity – coupled with a strongly defined sense of justice. But more than that Dahl fed (and feeds) the imagination – I can’t have been the only child to have tried to move books with my mind, or to surreptitiously pilfer the contents of my parents’ kitchen and bathroom in an attempt to create my own Marvellous Medicine (I seem to recall that talcum powder and perfume were key ingredients, along with ink for that all important blue colour. My poor mother). As Margaret Talbot noted in her 2005 Dahl profile in the New Yorker “in Dahl’s stories the kinds of elaborate schemes that children are forever concocting—and that sensible adults are forever rejecting as impractical or dangerous—yield triumphant results.”
(all pictures by the ever fabulous illustrator Quentin Blake)
I guess part of the enduring ability of Dahl to capture the imagination can be summed up nicely in a few words from his final work, the posthumously published The Minpins:
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it
Wondercrump
Love
P
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