Roald Dahl: My Uncle Oswald

“I was draped all over the sofa in a seductive attitude waiting for him to get on with it, but no, Oswald, absolutely not. For about five whole minutes his thinking processes completely blocked out his carnal desires or whatever you call them. I could almost hear the old brain whizzing round as he tried to puzzle it out.

“‘Mr. Einstein,’ I said, ‘relax.’

“You were dealing with the greatest intellect in the world,” I said. “The man has supernatural powers of reasoning. Try to understand what he says about relativity and you’ll see what I mean.”

“We’d be finished if someone twigged what we were doing.”

“No one will,” I said. “There’s only one Einstein.”

Our second important donor in Berlin was Mr. Thomas Mann. Yasmin reported that he was pleasant but uninspiring.

“Like his books,” I said.

“Then why did you choose him?”

“He’s done some fine work. I think his name is going to live.”

My travelling liquid nitrogen suitcase was now crammed full of straws. I had Clemenceau, Foch, Ravel, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Freud, Einstein, and Mann. So once again we rushed back to Cambridge with our precious cargo.

A. R. Woresley was ecstatic. He knew damn well we were onto something big now. All three of us were ecstatic, but I was in no mood to waste time yet with celebrations. “While we’re here,” I said, “we’ll polish off some of the English lads. We’ll start tomorrow.”

Joseph Conrad was possibly the most important of these, so we took him first. Capel House, Orlestone, Kent was his address and we drove down there in mid-November. To be precise, it was November 16th, 1919. I have already said that I am not keen to give a detailed description of too many of our visits for fear of becoming repetitious. I will not break this rule again unless something juicy or amusing comes along. Our visit to Mr. Conrad was neither juicy nor amusing. It was routine, although Yasmin did comment afterwards that he was one of the nicest men she had met so far.

From Kent we drove to Crowborough in Sussex where we nobbled Mr. H. G. Wells. “Not a bad sort of egg,” Yasmin said when she came out. “Rather portly and pontificating, but quite pleasant. It’s an odd thing about great writers,” she added. “They look so ordinary. There’s nothing about them that gives you the slightest clue to their greatness, as there is with painters. A great painter somehow looks like a great painter. But the great writer usually looks like the wages clerk in a cheese factory.”

From Crowborough we drove on to Rottingdean, also in Sussex, to call on Mr. Rudyard Kipling. “Bristly little bugger,” was Yasmin’s only comment on that one. Fifty straws from Kipling.

We were very much in the rhythm now, and the next day in the same county of Sussex we picked off Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as easily as picking a cherry. Yasmin simply rang the doorbell and told the maid who answered it that she was from his publishers and had important papers to deliver to him. She was at once shown into his study.

“What did you think of Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” I asked her.

“Nothing special,” she said. “Just another writer with a thin pencil.”

“Wait,” I said. “The next on the list is also a writer, but I doubt you’ll find this one boring.”

“Who is he?”

“Mr. Bernard Shaw.”

We had to drive through London to get to Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire where Shaw lived, and on the way I told Yasmin something about this smug literary clown. “First of all,” I said, “he’s a rabid vegetarian. He eats only raw vegetables and fruit and cereal. So I doubt he’ll accept the chocolate.”

“What do we do, give it to him in a carrot?”

“What about a radish?” I suggested.

“Will he eat it?”

“Probably not,” I said. “So it had better be a grape. We’ll get a good bunch of grapes in London and doctor one of them with the powder.”

“That’Il work,” Yasmin said.

“It’s got to work,” I said. “This lad won’t do it without the Beetle.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nobody quite knows.”

“Doesn’t he practice the noble art?”

“No,” I said. “He’s not interested in sex. He appears to be a sort of capon.”

“Oh hell.”

“He’s a lanky, garrulous old capon with an overwhelming conceit.”

“Are you suggesting his machinery is out of order?” Yasmin asked.

“I’m not sure. He’s sixty-three. He married at forty-two, a marriage of companionship and convenience. No sex.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t. But that’s the general opinion. He himself has stated that ‘I had no adventures of a sexual kind until I was twenty-nine.’”

“A bit retarded.”

“I doubt he’s had any at all,” I said. “Many famous women have pursued him without success. Mrs. Pat Campbell, gorgeous actress, said, ‘He’s all hen and no cock.’”

“I like that.”

“His diet,” I said, “is deliberately aimed at mental efficiency. ‘I flatly declare,’ he once wrote, ‘that a man fed on whiskey and dead bodies cannot possibly do good work.’”

“As opposed to whiskey and live bodies, I suppose.”

Pretty quick our Yasmin was. “He’s a Marxist Socialist,” I added. “He thinks the State should run everything.”

“Then he’s an even bigger ass than I thought,” Yasmin said. “I can’t wait to see his face when the old Beetle strikes.”

On the way through London, we bought a bunch of superb hothouse muscatel grapes from Jackson’s in Piccadilly. They were very costly, very pale yellowish-green, and very large. North of London, we stopped on the side of the road and got out the tin of Blister Beetle powder.

“Shall we give him a double shot?” I asked.

“Triple,” Yasmin said.

“D’you think that’s safe?”

“If what you say about him is true, he’s going to need half the tin.”

“Very well, then,” I said. “Triple it is.”

We chose the grape that was hanging at the lowest point of the bunch and carefully made a nick in its skin with a knife. I scooped out a little of the inside and then inserted a triple dose of powder, pushing the stuff well into the grape with a pin. Then we continued on to Ayot St. Lawrence.

“You do realize,” I said, “that this will be the first time anyone’s had a triple dose?”

“I’m not worried,” Yasmin said. “The man’s obviously wildly undersexed. I wonder if he’s a eunuch. Does he have a high voice?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bloody writers,” Yasmin said. She settled herself deeper into the seat and kept a grumpy silence for the rest of the trip.

The house, known as Shaw’s Corner, was a large, unremarkable brick pile with a good garden. The time, as I pulled up outside, was four twenty in the afternoon.

“What do I do?” Yasmin asked.

“You walk round to the back of the house and all the way down to the bottom of the garden,” I said. “There, you will find a small wooden shed with a sloping roof. That’s where he works. He’s certain to be in it now. Just barge in and give him the usual patter.”

“What if the wife sees me?”

“That’s a chance you’ll have to take,” I said. “You’ll probably make it. And tell him that you’re a vegetarian. He’ll like that.”

“What are the names of his plays?”

“ Man and Superman ,” I said. “ The Doctor’s Dilemma , Major Barbara , Caesar and Cleopatra , Androcles and the Lion , Pygmalion .”

“He’ll ask me which I like best.”

“Say Pygmalion .”

“All right, I’ll say Pygmalion .”