Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

“At the farm I had everything ready. I scooped out the bull’s semen from the bag and mixed it with my special solution of milk, egg yolk, and glycerol. I filled two hundred and fifty of my little rubber straws with half a cc each. This was not as difficult as it sounds. I always have the straws lined up in rows on a metal rack and I use an eye dropper. I transferred the rack of filled straws onto ice for half an hour. Then I lifted it into a container of nitrogen vapour for ten minutes. Finally, I lowered it into a second vacuum container of liquid nitrogen. The whole process was finished before my brother arrived back with the cow. I now had enough semen from a prize Friesian bull to fertilize two hundred and fifty cows. At least I hoped I had.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

“It worked fantastically,” A. R. Woresley said. “The following year my brother’s Hereford cattle began producing calves that were one-half Friesian. I had taught him how to do the hypodermic insemination himself, and I left the canister of frozen “straws” with him on the farm. Today, my dear Cornelius, three years later, nearly every cow in his herd is a cross between a Hereford and a prize Friesian. His milk yield is up by something like sixty per cent and he has sold his bull. The only trouble is that he’s running out of straws. He wants me to go with him on another of those dangerous journeys to Lord Somerton’s bull. Quite frankly, I dread it.”

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take your place.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Just grab the old pizzle and bung it in the bag,” I said. “You can be waiting back at the farm all ready to freeze the semen.”

“Can you manage a bicycle?”

“I’ll take my car,” I said. “Twice as quick.”

I had just bought a brand new Continental Morris Cowley, a machine superior in every way to the 1912 De Dion of my Paris days. The body was chocolate brown. The upholstery was leather. It had nickel fittings, mahogany cappings, and a driver’s door. I was very proud of it. “I’ll get the semen back to you in no time,” I said.

“What a splendid idea,” he said. “Would you really do that for me, Cornelius?”

“I’d love to,” I said.

I left him soon after that and drove back to Trinity. My brain was humming with all the things A. R. Woresley had told me. There was little doubt he had made a tremendous discovery, and when he published his findings he would be hailed all over the world as a great man. He was probably a genius.

But that didn’t bother me one way or the other. What did concern me was this: How could I myself make a million pounds out of it all? I had no objection to A. R. Woresley’s getting rich at the same time. He discovered it. But yours truly came first. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner. But I doubted it was from bulls and cows.

I lay awake in bed that night and applied my mind assiduously to this problem. I may seem, to a reader of these diaries, like a pretty casual sort of fellow where most things are concerned, but I promise you that when my own most important interests are at stake I am capable of some very concentrated thinking. Somewhere around midnight an idea came to me and began whizzing around in my head. It appealed to me at once, this idea, for the simple reason that it involved the two things in life that I found most entertaining—seduction and copulation. It appealed to me even more when I realized that it involved a tremendous amount of seduction and copulation.

I got out of bed and put on my dressing-gown. I began making notes. I examined the problems that would arise. I thought up ways of overcoming them. And at the end of it all I came to the very definite conclusion that the scheme would work. It was bound to work.

There was only one snag. A. R. Woresley had to be persuaded to go along with it.

THE NEXT DAY, I sought him out in college and invited him to dine with me that evening.

“I never dine out,” he said. “My sister expects me home for dinner.”

“It’s business,” I said. “It’s your whole future. Tell her it’s vital, which it is. I am about to make you a rich man.” Eventually he agreed to come.

At seven p.m., I took him to the Blue Boar in Trinity Street and I ordered for both of us. A dozen oysters each and a bottle of Clos Vougeot Blanc, a very rare wine. Then a dish of roast beef and a good Volnay.

“I must say you do yourself well, Cornelius,” he said.

“I wouldn’t do myself any other way,” I told him. “You do like oysters, don’t you?”

“Very much.”

A man opened the oysters at the bar of the restaurant and we watched him doing it. They were Coichesters, medium-sized, plump. A waiter brought them to us. The wine waiter opened the Clos Vougeot Blanc. We began the meal.

“I see you are chewing your oysters,” I said.

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Swallow them whole.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “When eating oysters, the primary pleasure comes from the sensation you get as they slide down your throat.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“And then again, the knowledge that they are actually alive as you swallow them adds enormously to that pleasure.”

“I prefer not to think about it.”

“Oh, but you must. If you concentrate hard enough, you can sometimes feel the living oyster wriggling in your stomach.”

A. R. Woresley’s nicotine moustache began twitching about. It looked like a bristly nervous little animal clinging to his upper lip.

“If you examine very closely a certain part of the oyster,” I said, “just here . . . you can see a tiny pulse beating. There it is. D’you see it? And when you stick your fork in . . . like this . . . the flesh moves. It makes a shrinking movement. It does the same if you squeeze lemon juice onto it. Oysters don’t like lemon juice. They don’t like forks being stuck into them either. They shrink away. The flesh quivers. I shall now swallow this one—isn’t he a beauty? . . . There, down he goes . . . and now I shall sit very still for a few seconds so as to experience the sensation of him moving about gently in my stomach . . .”

The little bristly brown animal on A. R. Woresley’s upper lip began jumping around more than ever and his cheeks had become visibly paler. Slowly, he pushed his plate of oysters to one side.

“I’ll get you some smoked salmon.”

“Thank you.”

I ordered the salmon and took the rest of his oysters onto my plate. He watched me eating them as he waited for the waiter to bring the salmon. He was silent now, subdued, and this was how I wanted him to be. Dash it, the man was twice my age, and all I was trying to do was soften him up a trifle before dumping my big proposition in his lap. I simply had to unsettle him first and try to dominate him if I was to have the slightest chance of getting him to go along with my plan. I decided to soften him up a bit more. “Did I ever tell you about my old nanny?” I asked.

“I thought we came here to talk about my discovery,” he said. The waiter put a plate of smoked salmon in front of him. “Ah,” he said. “That looks good.”

“When I went away to boarding-school at the age of nine,” I said, “my dear old nanny was pensioned off by my parents. They bought her a small cottage in the country and there she lived. She was about eighty-five and a marvellously tough old bird. She never complained about anything. But one day, when my mother went down to see her, she found her looking very ill. She questioned her closely and Nanny at last admitted that she had the most awful pains in her stomach. Had she had them for long, my mother asked her. Well, as a matter of fact, yes, she had had pains in her stomach, she finally admitted, for many years. But never as bad as they were now. My mother got a doctor. The doctor sent her to hospital. They X-rayed her and the X-ray showed something quite unusual. There were two smallish opaque objects about three inches apart in the middle of her stomach. They looked like marbles. Nobody at the hospital had any idea what these two objects might be, so it was decided to perform an exploratory operation.”