Roald Dahl: My Uncle Oswald

I was reeling. I couldn’t read on. I unlocked the door and staggered inside and found a bottle of whiskey. I sloshed some into a glass and gulped it down.

If you stop and think about it, Oswald, I’m sure you’ll agree we’re not really doing the dirty on you and i’ll tell you why. Arthur says . . .

I didn’t give a damn what Arthur said. They’d stolen the precious sperm. It was worth millions. I was willing to bet it was that little sod Woresley who’d put Yasmin up to it.

Arthur says that after all it was him who invented the process, wasn’t it? And it was me who did all the hard work of collecting it. Arthur sends you his best wishes.

Toodle-oo

Yasmin Woresley

A real snorter, that. Right below the belt. It had me gasping.

I roared round the house in a wild fury. My stomach was boiling and I’m sure steam was spurting out of my nostrils. Had there been a dog in the place I’d have kicked it to death. I kicked the furniture instead. I smashed a lot of nice big things and then I set about picking up all the smaller objects, including a Baccarat paperweight and an Etruscan bowl, and flinging them through the windows, yelling bloody murder and watching the window-panes shatter.

But after an hour or so, I began to simmer down, and finally I collapsed into an armchair with a large glass of malt whiskey in my hand.

I am, as you may have gathered, a fairly resilient fellow. I explode when provoked, but I never brood about it afterwards. I scrub it out. There’s always another day. What’s more, nothing stimulates my mind so much as a whopping disaster. In the aftermath, in that period of deadly calm and absolute silence that follows the tempest, my brain becomes exceedingly active. As I sat drinking my whiskey during that terrible evening amidst the ruins of Dunroamin, I was already beginning to ponder and plan my future all over again.

So that’s that, I told myself. I’ve been diddled. It’s all over. Need a new start. I still have Proust and in years to come I shall do well with those fifty straws (and don’t think I didn’t), but that isn’t going to make me a millionaire. So what next?

It was at this point that the great and wonderful answer began trickling into my head. I sat quite still, allowing the idea to take root and grow. It was inspired. It was beautiful in its simplicity. It couldn’t fail. It would make me millions. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

I promised at the beginning of this diary to tell you how I became a wealthy man. I have taken a long time so far in telling you how I did not succeed. Let me therefore make up for lost time and describe to you in no more than a few paragraphs how I did in the end become a real multimillionaire. The great idea that came to me suddenly in Dunroamin was as follows:

I would go back at once to the Sudan. I would negotiate with a corrupt government official for a lease of that precious tract of land where the hashab tree grows and the Blister Beetle flourishes. I would obtain sole rights to all beetle hunting. I would gather the native beetle hunters together and form them into an organized unit. I would pay them generously, far more than they were getting at present by flogging their Beetles in the open market. They would work exclusively for me. Poachers would be ruthlessly eliminated. I would, in fact, corner the market in Sudanese Blister Beetles. When all this was arranged and I was assured of a large and regular supply of Beetles, I would build a little factory in Khartoum and there I would process my Beetles and manufacture in quantity Professor Yousoupoff’s Famous Potency Pills. I would package the pills in the factory. I would then set up a small secret underground sales unit with offices in Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam, and other cities throughout the world. I told myself that if a callow seventeen-year-old youth had been able to earn himself a hundred thousand pounds in one year in Paris all by himself, just think what I could do now on a world-wide basis.

And that, my friends, is almost exactly what happened. I went back to the Sudan. I stayed there for a little over two years, and I don’t mind telling you that although I learned a great deal about the Blister Beetle, I also learned a thing or two about the ladies who inhabit those regions. The tribes were sharply divided and they seldom mixed. But I mixed with them all right, with the Nubians, the Hassanians, the Baggaras, the Shilluks, the Shukrias, and the curiously light-colored Niam-Niams, who live west of the Blue Nile. I found the Nubians especially to my taste and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was where the word nubile originated.

By the end of 1923, my little factory was going full blast and turning out a thousand pills a day.

By 1925, I had agents in eight cities. I had chosen them carefully. All, without exception, were retired army generals. Unemployed generals are common in every country, and these men, I discovered, were cut out for this particular type of job. They were efficient. They were unscrupulous. They were brave. They had little regard for human life. And they lacked sufficient intelligence to cheat me without being caught.

It was an immensely lucrative business. The profits were astronomical. But after a few years I grew bored with running such a big operation and I turned the whole thing over to a Greek syndicate in exchange for one half of the profits. The Greeks were happy, I was happy, and hundreds of thousands of customers have been happy ever since.

I am unashamedly proud of my contribution to the happiness of the human race. Not many men of business and certainly very few millionaires can tell themselves with a clear conscience that the accumulation of their wealth has spread such a high degree of ecstasy and joy among their clients. And it pleases me very much to have discovered that the dangers to human health of Cantharis vesicatoria sudanii have been grossly exaggerated. My records show that not more than four or five dozen a year at the most suffer any serious or crippling effects from the magic substance. Very few die.

Just one more thing. In 1935, some fifteen years later, I was having breakfast in my Paris house and reading the morning paper when my eye was caught and held by the following item in one of the gossip columns (translated from the French):

La Maison d’Or at Cap Ferrat, the largest and most luxurious private property on the entire Cóte d’Azur, has recently changed hands. It has been bought by an English couple, Professor Arthur Woresley and his beautiful wife, Yasmin. The Woresleys have come to France from Buenos Aires where they have been living for many years, and very welcome they are. They will add great lustre to the glittering Riviera scene. As well as buying the magnificent Maison d’Or, they have just taken delivery of a superb ocean-going yacht which is the envy of every millionaire on the Mediterranean. it has a crew of eighteen and cabin accommodation for ten people. The Woresleys have named the yacht SPERM. When I asked Mrs. Woresley why they had chosen that rather curious name, she laughed and said, “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose because it’s such a whale of a ship.”

Quite a girl, that Yasmin. I have to admit it. Though what she ever saw in old Woresley with his donnish airs and his nicotine-stained moustache I cannot imagine. They say a good man is hard to find. Maybe Woresley was one of those. But who on earth wants a good man? Who, for that matter, wants a good woman?

Not me.