Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

“You are being disagreeable,” she said, pouting. “Tell me what these pills are for or I also will become disagreeable. I will throw them all out the window.” She picked up the bottle that contained five hundred of my precious Blister Beetle pills just made that morning and she opened the window.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Then tell me.”

“They are tonic pills for men,” I said. “Pick-me-ups, that’s all.”

“Why not for women also?”

“They’re only for men.”

“I shall try one,” she said, unscrewing the bottle top and tipping out a pill. She popped it into her mouth and washed it down with champagne. Then she continued putting on her clothes.

She was fully dressed and was adjusting her hat in front of the looking-glass when suddenly she froze. She turned and faced me. I lay where I was, sipping my drink, but I was now watching her closely and with some trepidation.

She remained frozen for maybe thirty seconds, staring at me with a cold hard dangerous stare. Then all at once, she reached both hands up to her neckline and ripped her silk dress clean off her body. She tore off her underclothes. She flung her hat across the room. She crouched. She began to move forward. She came softly across the room toward me with the slow deliberate tread of a tigress stalking an antelope.

“What’s up?” I said. But by now I knew very well what was up. Nine minutes had gone by and the pill had hit her.

“Steady on,” I said.

She kept coming.

“Go away,” I said.

Still she kept coming.

Then she sprang, and all I could see in those first few moments was a blurred flurry of legs and arms and mouth and hands and fingers. She went quite mad. She was wild with lust. I hauled in my canvas and lay there trying to ride out the storm. That wasn’t good enough for her. She began to throw me around all over the place, snorting and grunting as she did so. I didn’t like it. I’d had my fill. This must stop, I decided. But I still had a terrific job pinning her down. In the end, I got her wrists locked behind her back and I carried her kicking and screaming into my bathroom and held her under the cold shower. She tried to bite me but I gave her an uppercut to the chin with my elbow. I held her under that freezing shower for at least twenty minutes while she went on yelling and swearing in Russian all the time.

“Had enough?” I said at last. She was half-drowned and pretty cold.

“I want you!” she spluttered.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to keep you here until you cool down.”

Finally she gave in. I let her go. Poor girl, she was shivering terribly and she looked a sight. I got a towel and gave her a good rub down. Then a glass of brandy.

“It was that red pill,” she said.

“I know it was.”

“I want some of them to take home.”

“Those are too strong for ladies,” I said. “I will make you some that are just right.”

“Now?”

“No. Come back tomorrow and they’ll be ready.” Because her dress was ruined, I wrapped her in my overcoat and drove her home in the De Dion. Actually, she had done me a good turn. She had demonstrated that my pill worked just as well on the female as it did on the male. Probably better. I immediately set about making some ladies’ pills. I made them half the strength of the men’s pills, and I turned out one hundred of them, anticipating a ready market. But the market was even more ready than I had anticipated. When the Russian woman came back the next afternoon, she demanded five hundred of them on the spot!

“But they cost two hundred and fifty francs each.”

“I don’t care about that. All my girl friends want them. I told them what happened to me yesterday and now they all want them.”

“I can give you a hundred, that’s all. The rest later. Do you have money?”

“Of course I have money.”

“May I make a suggestion, madame?”

“What is it?”

“If a lady takes one of these pills on her own, I fear she may appear unduly aggressive. Men don’t like that. I didn’t like it yesterday.”

“What is your suggestion?”

“I suggest that any lady who intends taking one of these pills should persuade her partner also to take one. And at exactly the same time. Then they’ll be all square.”

“That makes good sense,” she said.

It not only made good sense, it would also double the sales.

“The partner,” I said, “could take a larger pill. It’s called the men’s pill. That’s simply because men are bigger than women and need a bigger dose.”

“Always assuming,” she said, smiling a little, “that the partner is a male.”

“Whatever you like,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Very well, then, give me also one hundred of these men’s pills.”

By gum, I thought, there’s going to be some fun and frolics around the boudoirs of Paris tonight. Things were hot enough with just the man getting himself all pilled up, but I shuddered to think what was going to happen when both parties took the medicine.

It was a howling success. Sales doubled. They trebled. By the time my twelve months in Paris were up, I had around two million francs in the bank! That was one hundred thousand pounds! I was now nearly eighteen. I was rich. But I was not rich enough. My year in France had shown me very clearly the path I wanted to follow in my life. I was a sybarite. I wished to lead a life of luxury and leisure. I would never get bored. That was not my style. But I would never be completely satisfied unless the luxury was intensely luxurious and the leisure was unlimited. One hundred thousand pounds was not enough for that. I needed more. I needed a million pounds at least. I felt sure I would find a way to earn it. Meanwhile, I had not made a bad start.

I had enough sense to realize that first of all I must continue my education. Education is everything. I have a horror of uneducated people. And so, in the summer of 1913, I transferred my money to a London bank and returned to the land of my fathers. In September, I went up to Cambridge to begin my undergraduate studies. I was a scholar remember, a scholar of Trinity College, and as such, I had a number of privileges and was well treated by those in authority.

It was here at Cambridge that the second and final phase of my fortune-making began. Bear with me a little longer and you shall hear all about it in the pages to come.

MY CHEMISTRY TUTOR at Cambridge was called A. R. Woresley. He was a middle-aged, shortish man, paunchy, untidily dressed, and with a grey moustache whose edges were stained yellow ochre by the nicotine from his pipe. In appearance, therefore, a typical university don. But he struck me as being exceptionally able. His lectures were never routine. His mind was always darting about in search of the unusual. Once he said to us, “And now we need as it were a tompion to protect the contents of this flask from invading bacteria. I presume you know what a tompion is, Cornelius?”

“I can’t say I do, sir,” I said.

“Can anyone give me a definition of that common English noun?” A. R. Woresley said.

Nobody could.

“Then you’d better look it up,” he said. “It is not my business to teach you elementary English.”

“Oh, come on, sir,” someone said. “Tell us what it means.”

“A tompion,” A. R. Woresley said, “is a small pellet made out of mud and saliva which a bear inserts into his anus before hibernating for the winter, to stop the ants getting in.”

A strange fellow, A. R. Woresley, a mixture of many attitudes, occasionally witty, more often pompous and sombre, but underneath everything there was a curiously complex mind. I began to like him very much after that little tompion episode. We struck up a pleasant studenttutor relationship. I was invited to his house for sherry. He was a bachelor. He lived with his sister, who was called Emmaline of all names. She was dumpy and frowsy and seemed to have something greenish on her teeth that looked like verdigris. She had a kind of surgery in the house where she did things to people’s feet. A pedicurist, I think she called herself.