Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Tomorrow I am finding alternative accommodation.”

“You mean you’re leaving?” he cried.

“I’m afraid I must. But you may keep the advance rent my father has paid you.”

There was a bit of an uproar around the table about all this, much of it from Mademoiselle Nicole, but I stuck to my guns. And the next morning I went out and found myself a quite grand ground-floor apartment with three large rooms and a kitchen. It was on the avenue Jena. I packed all my possessions and loaded them into a hackney coach. Madame Boisvain was at the front door to see me off. “Madame,” I said, “I have a small favour to ask of you.”

“Yes?”

“And in return I want you to take this.” I held out five gold twenty-franc pieces. She nearly fell over. “From time to time,” I said, “people will call at your house asking for me. All you have to do is tell them I have moved and redirect them to this address.” I gave her a piece of paper with my new address written on it.

“But that is too much money, Monsieur Oswald!”

“Take it,” I said, pushing the coins into her hand. “Keep it for yourself. Don’t tell your husband. But it is very important that you inform everyone who calls where I am living.”

She promised to do this, and I drove away to my new quarters.

MY BUSINESS FLOURISHED. My ten original clients all whispered the great news to their own friends and those friends whispered it to other friends and in a month or so a large snowball had been created. I spent half of each day making pills. I thanked heaven I had had the foresight to bring such a large quantity of powder from the Sudan in the first place. But I did have to reduce my price. Not everyone was an ambassador or a foreign minister, and I found early on that a lot of people simply couldn’t afford to pay my absurd original fee of one thousand francs per pill. So I made it two hundred and fifty instead.

The money gushed in.

I started buying fine clothes and going out into Paris society.

I purchased a motor car and learnt to drive it. It was De Dion Bouton’s brand-new model, the Sports DK, a marvellous little monobloc four with a three-speed gearbox and a pull-on handbrake. Top speed, believe it or not, was as much as 50 mph, and more than once I took her to the limit up the Champs Elysées.

But above all, I rolicked and frolicked with women to my heart’s content. Paris in those days was an exceptionally cosmopolitan city. It was filled with ladies of quality from practically every country in the world, and it was during this period that a curious truth began to dawn upon me. We all know that people of different nations have different national characteristics and different temperaments. What is not quite so well recognized is the fact that these different national characteristics become even more marked during sexual, as opposed to merely social, intercourse. I became an expert on national sexual characteristics. It was extraordinary how the women of one nation or another ran true to form. You could take, for example, half a dozen Serbian ladies (and don’t think I didn’t) and you would find, if you were paying close attention, that every one of them possessed a number of very definite common eccentricities, common skills, and common preferences. Polish women also, because of certain habits they all had in common, were easily recognizable. So were the Basques, the Moroccans, the Ecuadorians, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Guatemalans, the Belgians, the Russians, the Chinese, and all the rest of them. Toward the end of my stay in Paris, you could have put me on a couch blindfolded with any lady from any country, and within five minutes, though she never uttered a word, I would have told you her nationality.

Now for the obvious question. Which country produced the most exhilarating females?

I myself became rather partial to Bulgarian ladies of aristocratic stamp. They had, amongst other things, the most unusual tongues. Not only were these tongues of theirs exceptionally muscular and vibrant, but they had a roughness about them, a kind of abrasive quality that one normally finds only in cats’ tongues. Get a cat to lick your finger sometime and you will see exactly what I mean.

Turkish ladies (I think I’ve mentioned them before) were also high on my list. They were like water-wheels. They never stopped turning until the river dried up. But by gad, you had to be fit before you challenged a Turkish lady, and I personally never allowed one into my house until after I’d had a good breakfast.

Hawaiian women interested me because they had prehensile toes, and in almost any situation you care to mention, they used their feet rather than their hands.

As far as Chinese women went, I learned by experience to tamper only with those that came from Peking and the neighbouring province of Shantung. And even then, it was essential that they were from noble families. In those days, it was the custom among the nobility of Peking and Shantung to put their girls into the hands of wise old women as soon as they reached the age of fifteen. For two years thereafter, these girls were subjected to a rigorous course of instruction designed to teach them only one thing— the art of giving physical pleasure to their future husbands. And at the end of it all, after a severe practical examination, certificates were issued indicating a pass or a failure. If the girl was exceptionally dexterous and inventive, she might get what was called Pass with Distinction, and most prized of all was the Diploma of Merit. A young lady with a Diploma could virtually pick her own husband. Unfortunately though, at least half the Diploma girls were whisked away at once into the Emperor’s palace. I discovered only one Chinese lady in Paris who had earned a Diploma of Merit. She was the wife of an opium millionaire and she had come over to select a wardrobe. She selected me as well, and I must admit it was a memorable experience. She had developed into a sublime art the practice of what she called so-far-and-no-further . Nothing ever quite finished. She didn’t allow it to. She took one to the brink. Two hundred times she took me to the brink of the golden threshold, and for three and a half hours, which was the duration of my suffering, it felt as though a long live nerve was being drawn very very slowly and with exquisite patience out of my burning body. I hung onto the edge of the cliff with my fingertips, screaming for succour or release, but the blissful torture went on and on and on. It was an amazing demonstration of skill and I have never forgotten it.

I could describe if I wished the curious feminine habits of at least fifty other nationalities, but I am not going to do so. Not here anyway, because I really must proceed with the main theme of this story, which is how I made money.

During my seventh month in Paris, a lucky incident took place that doubled my income. This is what happened. One afternoon, I had a Russian lady in my apartment who was some sort of a relation to the Tsar. She was a slim, whiteskinned little herring, rather cool and casual, almost offhand she was, and I had to stoke her up pretty vigorously before I succeeded in raising a good head of steam in her boilers. That sort of blasé attitude only makes me more determined than ever, and I can promise you that by the time I’d finished with her, she’d had a fair old roasting.

When it was over, I lay back on the couch sipping a glass of champagne as a cooler. The Russian was languidly dressing herself and wandering round my room looking at this and that.

“What are all these red pills in this bottle?” she asked me.

“They’re none of your business,” I said.

“When am I going to see you again?”

“Never,” I said. “I told you my rules.”