Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

“My goodness gracious me!” he burbled. “What a treat!”

“Delicious,” she said. “Try it.”

A. R. Woresley took it and sucked it and rolled it round in his mouth and chewed it and finally swallowed it. “Glorious,” he said. “How very kind of you.”

At the moment when the chocolate went down his gullet, I noted the time on my watch. I saw Yasmin doing exactly the same thing. Such a sensible girl. A. R. Woresley was standing at the blackboard giving a long exposition with many splendid chemical formulae written in chalk. I didn’t listen to it. I was counting the minutes passing by. So was Yasmin. She hardly took her eyes from the watch on her wrist.

Seven minutes gone by . . .

Eight minutes . . .

Eight minutes and fifty seconds . . .

Nine minutes! And dead on time, the hand that held the chalk against the blackboard suddenly stopped writing. A. R. Woresley went rigid.

“Mr. Woresley,” Yasmin said brightly, timing it to perfection, “I wonder if you’d mind giving me your autograph. You are the only science lecturer whose autograph I still don’t have for my collection.” She was holding out a pen and a sheet of chemistry department notepaper.

“What’s that?” he stammered, putting one hand into his trouser pocket before turning round to face her.

“Just there,” Yasmin said, placing a finger halfway down the sheet as I had instructed her. “Your autograph. I collect them. I shall treasure yours more than any of the others.”

In order to take the pen, A. R. Woresley had to remove his hand from the pocket. It was a comical sight. The poor man looked as though he had a live snake in his trousers. And now he was beginning to bounce up and down on his toes.

“Just there,” Yasmin said, keeping her finger on the notepaper. “Then I shall paste it in my autograph book along with all the others.”

With his mind fogged by gathering passions, A. R. Woresley signed. Yasmin folded the paper and put it in her purse. A. R. Woresley clutched the edge of the wooden lab bench with both hands. He started rocking about all over the place as if the whole building were in a storm at sea. His forehead was damp with sweat. I reminded myself that he had had a double dose. I think Yasmin was reminding herself of the same thing. She took a couple of paces backwards and braced herself for the coming onslaught.

Slowly, A. R. Woresley turned his head and stared at her. The powder was hitting him hard and there was a glimmer of madness in his eyes.

“I . . . er . . . I . . . I . . .”

“Is something wrong, Mr. Woresley?” Yasmin said sweetly. “Are you feeling all right?”

He went on clutching the bench and staring at her. The sweat was all over his face now and running onto his moustache.

“Can I do something to help?” Yasmin said.

A funny gurgling noise came out of his throat.

“Can I get you a glass of water?” she asked. “Or some smelling-salts perhaps?”

And still he stood there, clutching the bench and waggling his head and making those queer gurgling noises. He reminded me of a man who’d got a fishbone stuck in his throat.

Suddenly he let out a great bellow and made a rush at the girl. He grasped her by the shoulders with both hands and tried to push her to the floor but she skipped back out of his reach.

“Ah-ha!” she said. “So that’s what’s bothering you, is it? Well, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, my darling man.” Her voice as she spoke to him was as cool as a thousand cucumbers.

He came at her again with hands outstretched, pawing at her, but she was too nimble for him. “Hold on a sec,” she said, flipping open her purse and taking out the rubbery thing I had given her the night before. “I’m perfectly willing to have a bit of fun with you, Mr. W, but we don’t want anyone around here to get preggers, now do we? So be a good boy and stand still for a moment while I put your little mackintosh on.”

But A. R. Woresley didn’t care about the little mackintosh. He had no intention of standing still. I don’t think he could have stood still if he’d wanted to. From my own point of view, it was instructive to observe the curious effect a double dose had upon the subject. Above all, it made him hop. He kept hopping up and down as though he were doing calisthenics. And he kept making these absurd bellowing noises. And he kept waving his arms round and round windmill fashion. And the sweat kept trickling down his face. And there was Yasmin, dancing around him and holding out the ridiculous rubbery thing with both hands and shouting, “Oh, do keep still , Mr. Woresley! I’m not letting you come near me till I get this on!”

I don’t think he even heard her. And although he was clearly going mad with lust, he also gave the impression of a man who was in great discomfort. He was hopping, it appeared, because excessive irritation was taking place. Something was stinging him. It was stinging him so much he couldn’t stand still. In greyhound racing, to make a dog run faster, they frequently insert a piece of ginger up its rectum, and the dog runs flat out in an effort to get away from the terrible sting in its backside. With A. R. Woresley, the sting was in a rather different part of his body, and the pain of it was making him hop, skip, and jump all over the lab, and at the same time he was telling himself, or so it seemed, that only a woman could help him to get rid of that terrible sting. But the wretched woman was being too quick for him. He couldn’t catch her. And the stinging feeling kept getting worse all the time.

Suddenly, using both hands, he ripped the front of his trousers and half a dozen buttons scattered across the room with little tinkling sounds. He dropped the trousers. They fell around his ankles. He tried to kick them off, but couldn’t do so because he still had his shoes on.

With the trousers now around his ankles, A. R. Woresley was temporarily but effectively hobbled. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t even walk. He could only hop. Yasmin saw her chance and took it. She made a dive for the erect and quivering rod that was sticking out through the slit in his underpants. She grabbed it in her right hand and held onto it as tightly as if it were the handle of a tennis racquet. She had him now. He began to bellow even louder.

“For God’s sake, shut up,” she said, “or you’ll have the whole university in here! And keep still so I can get this damn thing on you!”

But A. R. Woresley was deaf to everything except his fierce and fundamental desires. He simply could not stand still. Hobbled as he was by the trousers round his ankles, he went on hopping about and waving his arms and bellowing like a bull. For Yasmin, it must have been like trying to thread a needle on a sewing machine while the machine was still in motion.

Finally, she lost patience and I saw her right hand, the one which was grasping, as it were, the handle of the tennis racquet, I saw it give a wicked little flick. It was as though she were making a sharp backhand return to a half volley with a quick roll of the wrist at the end of the shot to impart topspin. A vicious wristy little flick it was, and it was certainly a winner, because the victim let out a howl that rattled every test tube in the lab. It stopped him cold for five seconds, which gave her just enough time to get the rubbery thing on and then to jump back out of reach.

“Couldn’t we calm down just a teeny weeny little bit?” she said. “This isn’t a bullfight.”

He was tearing off his shoes now and throwing them across the room, and when he kicked off his trousers and became fully mobile again, Yasmin must have known that the moment of truth had arrived at last.

It had indeed. But there is no profit in describing the coarse rough and tumble that followed. There were no intermissions, no pauses, no half-time. The vigour that my double dose of Blister Beetle had imparted to that man was astounding. He went at her as though she were an uneven road surface and he was trying to flatten out the bumps. He raked her from stem to stern. He raked her fore and aft, and still he kept reloading and firing away although his cannon must by then have been scorching hot. They say that the ancient Britons used to make fire by rotating the point of a wooden stick very fast and for a long time on a wooden block. Well, if that made fire then A. R. Woresley was about to start a raging conflagration any moment, wood or no wood. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to see a puff of smoke come up from the wrestlers on the floor.