Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life Read online

  Roald Dahl

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  The Country Stories of Roald Dahl

  Illustrated by John Lawrence

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Preface

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  Parson’s Pleasure

  The Ratcatcher

  Rummins

  Mr Hoddy

  Mr Feasey

  The Champion of the World

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life

  Roald Dahl’s parents were Norwegian, but he was born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, in 1916 and educated at Repton School. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he enlisted in the RAF at Nairobi. He was severely wounded after joining a fighter squadron in Libya, but later saw service as a fighter pilot in Greece and Syria. In 1942 he went to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché, which was where he started to write, and then was transferred to Intelligence, ending the war as a wing commander. His first twelve short stories, based on his wartime experiences, were originally published in leading American magazines and afterwards as a book, Over to You. All of his highly acclaimed stories have been widely translated and have become bestsellers all over the world. Anglia Television dramatized a selection of his short stories under the title Tales of the Unexpected. Among his other publications are two volumes of autobiography, Boy and Going Solo, his much-praised novel, My Uncle Oswald, and Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories, of which he was editor. During the last year of his life he compiled a book of anecdotes and recipes with his wife, Felicity, which was published by Penguin in 1996 as Roald Dahl’s Cookbook. He is one of the most successful and well known of all children’s writers, and his books are read by children all over the world. These include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Magic Finger, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, The Witches, winner of the 1983 Whitbread Award, The BFG and Matilda.

  Roald Dahl died in November 1990. The Times described him as ‘one of the most widely read and influential writers of our generation’ and wrote in its obituary: ‘Children loved his stories and made him their favourite… They will be classics of the future.’ In 2000 Roald Dahl was voted the nation’s favourite author in the World Book Day poll.

  For more information on Roald Dahl go to www.roalddahl.com

  Roald Dahl In Penguin

  Fiction

  Over to You Someone Like You

  Kiss Kiss Switch Bitch

  Tales of the Unexpected My Uncle Oswald

  More Tales of the Unexpected

  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

  The Best of Roald Dahl

  Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (editor)

  Completely Unexpected Tales

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl

  Non-Fiction

  Boy Going Solo

  (also published together in one volume)

  Roald Dahl’s Cookbook

  (with Felicity Dahl)

  Preface

  In 1946 the war was over and I was thirty years old. I came back to England then and spent some years living in my mother’s house. First we were in Great Missenden, and later we moved a few miles away to the High Street in Old Amersham. This was fine Buckinghamshire country with its rolling hills and beech-woods and small green fields. I was writing nothing but short stories at that time and I wrote them slowly and carefully at my own pace. In this way I would complete three or sometimes four of them each year. I worked on nothing else. I was totally preoccupied with the short story, and I would sell the first serial rights of each one when it was finished either to the New Yorker or to some other American magazine like Colliers or the Saturday Evening Post. Then the second serial rights would go to magazines in other countries, and whenever I had enough stories to make a book, a book it would be.

  It was a pleasant leisurely life entailing about four hours work a day, seven days a week. I enjoyed it and I now realise how fortunate I was in being able to come up with a new plot whenever I needed one. This routine of four hours a day and never any more left me plenty of time for messing around with other things. This messing around very soon took on a particular shape because I met (I have forgotten exactly how or where) a man of my own age called Claud. Claud was married with two small children and he lived in a dark and dingy flat in Old Amersham. He worked behind the counter in a butcher’s shop in that town and he was not in the least interested in writing. In fact he had difficulty in composing a sentence of much more than four words. But Claud and I had other things in common.

  We both had a passion for gambling in small amounts on horses and greyhounds. As well as that, we shared a love of trying to acquire something by stealth without paying for it. By this I don’t mean common-or-garden thievery. We would never have robbed a house or stolen a bicycle. Ours was the sporting type of stealing. It was poaching pheasants or tickling trout or nicking a few plums from a farmer’s orchard. These are practices that are condoned by the right people in the countryside. There is a delicious element of risk in them, especially in the poaching, and a good deal of skill is required.

  Claud was an acknowledged expert on such matters and he was proud of it. He taught me everything. His knowledge of the habits of wild animals, be they rats or pheasants or stoats or rabbits or hares, was very great, and he was at his happiest when he was out in the woods in the dead of night. Poaching pheasants and tickling trout and going to the flapping-tracks: these were the three things that absorbed and thrilled us most of all.

  Flapping-tracks are unlicensed greyhound race-meetings held in some farmer’s field where six dogs chase a stuffed white rabbit which is pulled along on a cord by a man at the far end of the field who is frantically turning the pedals of an upturned bicycle with his hands. These meetings are frequented by gypsies and spivs and all manner of unsavoury characters who bring their dogs to race. Shady bookmakers set up their stands along the side of the hedge and a great deal of betting goes on. This sort of thing was made for a man like Claud. It was also made for me, and it wasn’t long before I was buying and breeding my own greyhounds for flapping-tracks. Claud and I would train them and at one time I had more than twenty dogs housed in kennels just outside Amersham, and we looked after them together. In spite of the fun of poaching pheasants, I think we probably had the most fun of all plotting and scheming to get a winner at the flapping-track than we had with anything else.

  The stories in this book all grew out of my experiences with Claud. They were written at the time when we were together, in the late 1940s, and rereading them again now fills me with acute nostalgia and with vivid memories of those sweet days many years ago.

  R.D. 1989

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  My cow started bulling at dawn and the noise can drive you crazy if the cowshed is right under your window. So I got dressed early and phoned Claud at the filling-station to ask if he’d give me a hand to lead her down the steep hill and across the road over to Rummins’s farm to have her serviced by Rummins’s famous bull.

  Claud arrived five minutes later and we tied a rope around the cow’s neck and set off down the lane on this cool September morning. There were high hedges on

  either side of the lane and the hazel bushes had clusters of big ripe nuts all over them.

  ‘You ever seen Rummins do a mating?’ Claud asked me.

  I told him I had never seen anyone do an official mating between a bull and a cow.

  ‘Rummins does it special,’ Claud said. ‘There’s nobody in the world does a mating the way Rummins does it.’

  ‘What’s so special about it?’

  ‘You got a tr
eat coming to you,’ Claud said.

  ‘So has the cow,’ I said.

  ‘If the rest of the world knew about what Rummins does at a mating,’ Claud said, ‘he’d be world famous. It would change the whole science of dairy-farming all over the world.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he tell them then?’ I asked.

  ‘I doubt he’s ever even thought about it,’ Claud said. ‘Rummins isn’t one to bother his head about things like that. He’s got the best dairy-herd for miles around and that’s all he cares about. He doesn’t want the newspapers swarming all over his place asking questions, which is exactly what would happen if it ever got out.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about it,’ I said.

  We walked on in silence for a while, the cow pulling ahead.

  ‘I’m surprised Rummins said yes to lending you his bull,’ Claud said. ‘I’ve never known him do that before.’

  At the bottom of the lane we crossed the Aylesbury road and climbed up the hill on the other side of the valley towards the farm. The cow knew there was a bull up there somewhere and she was pulling harder than ever on the rope. We had to trot to keep up with her.

  There were no gates at the farm entrance, just a wide gap and a cobbled yard beyond. Rummins, carrying a

  pail of milk across the yard, saw us coming. He set the pail down slowly and came over to meet us. ‘She’s ready then, is she?’ he said.

  ‘Been yelling her head off,’ I said.

  Rummins walked around my cow, examining her carefully. He was a short man, built squat and broad like a frog. He had a wide frog mouth and broken teeth and shifty eyes, but over the years I had grown to respect him for his wisdom and the sharpness of his mind.

  ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘What is it you want, a heifer calf or a bull?’

  ‘Can I choose?’

  ‘Of course you can choose.’

  ‘Then I’ll have a heifer,’ I said, keeping a straight face. ‘We want milk not beef.’

  ‘Hey, Bert!’ Rummins called out. ‘Come and give us a hand!’

  Bert emerged from the cowsheds. He was Rummins’s youngest son, a tall boneless boy with a runny nose and something wrong with one eye. The eye was pale and misty-grey all over, like a boiled fish eye, and it moved quite independently from the other eye. ‘Get another rope,’ Rummins said.

  Bert fetched a rope and looped it around my cow’s neck so that she now had two ropes holding her, my own and Bert’s. ‘He wants a heifer,’ Rummins said. ‘Face her into the sun.’

  ‘Into the sun?’ I said. ‘There isn’t any sun.’

  ‘There’s always sun,’ Rummins said. ‘Them bloody clouds don’t make no difference. Come on now. Get a jerk on, Bert. Bring her round. Sun’s over there.’

  With Bert holding one rope and Claud and me holding the other, we manoeuvred the cow round until her head was facing directly towards the place in the sky where the sun was hidden behind the clouds.

  ‘I told you it was different,’ Claud whispered. ‘You’re going to see something soon you’ve never seen in your life before.’

  ‘Hold her steady now!’ Rummins ordered. ‘Don’t let her jump round!’ Then he hurried over to a shed in the far corner of the yard and brought out the bull. He was an enormous beast, a black-and-white Friesian, with short legs and a body like a ten-ton truck. Rummins was

  leading it by a chain attached to a steel ring through the bull’s nose.

  ‘Look at them bangers on him,’ Claud said. ‘I’ll bet you’ve never seen a bull with bangers like that before.’

  ‘Tremendous,’ I said. They were like a couple of cantaloupe melons in a carrier bag and they were almost dragging on the ground as the bull waddled forward.

  ‘You better stand back and leave the rope to me,’ Claud said. ‘You get right out of the way.’ I was happy to comply.

  The bull approached my cow slowly, staring at her

  with dangerous white eyes. Then he started snorting and pawing the ground with one foreleg.

  ‘Hang on tight!’ Rummins shouted to Bert and Claud. They were leaning back against their respective ropes, holding them very taught and at right angles to the cow.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ Rummins whispered softly to the bull. ‘Go to it, lad.’

  With surprising agility the bull heaved his front part up on to the cow’s back and I caught a glimpse of a long scarlet penis, as thin as a rapier and just as stiff, and then it was inside the cow and the cow staggered and the bull heaved and snorted and in thirty seconds it was all over. The bull climbed down again slowly and stood there looking somewhat pleased with himself.

  ‘Some bulls don’t know where to put it,’ Rummins said. ‘But mine does. Mine could thread a needle with that dick of his.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘A bull’s eye.’

  ‘That’s exactly where the word come from,’ Rummins said. ‘A bull’s eye. Come on, lad,’ he said to the bull. ‘You’ve had your lot for today.’ He led the bull back to the shed and shut him in and when he returned I thanked him, and then I asked him if he really believed that facing the cow into the sun during the mating would produce a female calf.

  ‘Don’t be so damn silly,’ he said. ‘Of course I believe it. Facts is facts.’

  ‘What do you mean facts is facts?’

  ‘I mean what I say, mister. It’s a certainty. That’s right, ain’t it Bert?’

  Bert swivelled his misty eye around in its socket and said, ‘Too bloody true it’s right.’

  ‘And if you face her away from the sun does it get you a male?’

  ‘Every single time,’ Rummins said. I smiled and he saw it. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘And when you see what I’m going to show you, you’ll bloody well have to believe me. You two stay here and watch that cow,’ he said to Claud and Bert. Then he led me into the farmhouse. The room we went into was dark and small and dirty. From a drawer in the sideboard he produced a whole stack of thin exercise books. They were the kind children use at school. ‘These is calving books,’ he announced. ‘And in here is a record of every mating that’s ever been done on this farm since I first started thirty-two years ago.’

  He opened a book at random and allowed me to look. There were four columns on each page: COW’S NAME, DATE OF MATING, DATE OF BIRTH, SEX OF CALF.

  I glanced down the sex column. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.

  ‘We don’t want no bull calves here,’ Rummins said. ‘Bull calves is a dead loss on a dairy farm.’

  I turned over a page. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Here’s a bull calf.’

  ‘That’s quite right,’ Rummins said. ‘Now take a look at what I wrote opposite that one at the time of the mating.’ I glanced at column two. Cow jumped round, it said.

  ‘Some of them gets fractious and you can’t hold ’em steady,’ Rummins said. ‘So they finish up facing the other way. That’s the only time I ever get a bull.’

  ‘This is fantastic,’ I said, leafing through the book.

  ‘Of course it’s fantastic,’ Rummins said. ‘It’s one of the most fantastic things in the whole world. Do you actually know what I average on this farm? I average ninety-eight per cent heifers year in year out! Check it for yourself. Go on and check it. I’m not stopping you.’

  ‘I’d like very much to check it,’ I said. ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Help yourself,’ Rummins said. ‘I’ve got work to do.’ I found a pencil and paper and I proceeded to go through each one of the thirty-two little books with great care. There was one book for each year, from 1915 to 1946. There were approximately eighty calves a year born on the farm, and my final results over the thirty-two-year period were as follows:

  Heifer calves…..............................2,516

  Bull calves….......................................56

  Total calves b
orn, including stillborn…........2,572

  I went outside to look for Rummins. Claud had disappeared. He’d probably taken my cow home. I found Rummins in the dairy pouring milk into the separator. ‘Haven’t you ever told anyone about this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Never have,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I reckon it ain’t nobody else’s business.’

  ‘But my dear man, this could transform the entire milk industry the world over.’

  ‘It might,’ he said. ‘It might easily do that. It wouldn’t do the beef business no harm either if they could get bulls every time.’

  ‘How did you hear about it in the first place?’

  ‘My old dad told me,’ Rummins said. ‘When I were about eighteen, my old dad said to me, “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, “that’ll make you rich.” And he told me this.’

  ‘Has it made you rich?’

  ‘I ain’t done too bad for myself, have I?’ he said.

  ‘But did your father offer any sort of explanation as to why it works?’ I asked.

  Rummins explored the inner rim of one nostril with the end of his thumb, holding the noseflap between thumb and forefinger as he did so. ‘A very clever man, my old dad was,’ he said. ‘Very clever indeed. Of course he told me how it works.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He explained to me that a cow don’t have nothing to do with deciding the sex of the calf,’ Rummins said. ‘All a cow’s got is an egg. It’s the bull decides what the sex is going to be. The sperm of the bull.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘According to my old dad, a bull has two different kinds of sperm, female sperm and male sperm. You follow me so far?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘So when the old bull shoots off his sperm into the cow, a sort of swimming race takes place between the male and the female sperm to see which one can reach the egg first. If the female sperm wins, you get a heifer.’