There’s a book by Roald Dahl that sometimes gets underrated or overlooked these days: Tales of the Unexpected. It’s hard to say what’s my favourite thing Dahl wrote – my opinion changes all the time! – but right now it just might be a story from that book, called Lamb to the Slaughter.
Lamb to the Slaughter concerns a housewife who commits a perfect murder. I first read it when I was about twelve years old, and today I still think it’s one of the very best short stories I’ve ever come across. I’m not going to tell you much more about the story itself: if you haven’t read it I don’t want to spoil it for you. What I do want to tell you is that I’ve been lucky enough to have seen Roald Dahl’s original handwritten pages.
A few years back, as a birthday treat, my girlfriend Laura took me to the Roald Dahl Museum, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. If you’re a Dahl fan like me, visiting the museum is a must – it’s full of all sorts of great stuff. But if you go to the museum’s website, to their What’s On page, and check their monthly events list, you’ll see that on certain special days they give visitors the chance to look at things from the Roald Dahl Archives. On the day Laura and I went, guess what the archivist brought out and showed us? Yep.
In front of me were the actual sheets of paper on which Roald Dahl had written Lamb to the Slaughter. You could see the furrows his pencil had left as he pressed it into the pad. I got so excited, I could hardly breathe.
Why? Because it reminded me of something important: Roald Dahl wasn’t a wizard, or an alien, or a superbeing. He was a writer – someone who sat in a room and made up stories. Lamb to the Slaughter is a wonderfully sinister story – one of my absolute favourites, as I say. But it didn’t arrive in a flash of light. It wasn’t trumpeted in by choirs of angels, or beamed down from space. It was written by a person sitting in a chair with a pad and a pencil.
For an up and coming author like me, that’s hugely inspiring. It reminds you that, if you work hard and put in the hours, one day you might write something that good, too.
Happy Roald Dahl day. Happy reading – and writing – everyone.
12/09/2009 at 2:44 pm Permalink
I’ve read and loved many Roald Dahl books, but I think what stays with me most is his description of the hunger that poor Charlie Bucket has to endure, day in, day out, in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. Any time I’m feeling REALLY hungry…. just fading away to grey with hunger (which of course, isn’t often)… I think of Charlie Bucket trudging along in the cold with only thin cabbage soup to look forward to. Brilliant stuff.