The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories Read online

  ROALD DAHL

  The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Great Automatic Grammatizator

  Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat

  The Butler

  Man from the South

  The Landlady

  Parson’s Pleasure

  The Umbrella Man

  Katina

  The Way up to Heaven

  Royal Jelly

  Vengeance Is Mine Inc.

  Taste

  Neck

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories

  Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents. He was educated in England before starting work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa. He began writing after a ‘monumental bash on the head’ sustained as an RAF fighter pilot during the Second World War. Roald Dahl is one of the most successful and well known of all children’s writers. His books, which are read by children the world over, include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Magic Finger, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Twits, The BFG and The Witches, winner of the 1983 Whitbread Award. Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four.

  Books by Roald Dahl

  BOY: TALES OF CHILDHOOD

  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

  CHARLIE AND THE GREAT GLASS ELEVATOR

  DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

  GEORGE’S MARVELLOUS MEDICINE

  GOING SOLO

  JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH

  MATILDA

  THE WITCHES

  For younger readers

  THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE

  ESIO TROT

  FANTASTIC MR FOX

  THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME

  THE MAGIC FINGER

  THE TWITS

  Picture books

  DIRTY BEASTS (with Quentin Blake)

  THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE (with Quentin Blake)

  THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME (with Quentin Blake)

  THE MINPINS (with Patrick Benson)

  REVOLTING RHYMES (with Quentin Blake)

  Plays

  THE BFG: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: A PLAY (Adapted by Richard George)

  DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  FANTASTIC MR FOX: A PLAY (Adapted by Sally Reid)

  JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH: A PLAY (Adapted by Richard George)

  THE TWITS: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  THE WITCHES: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood)

  Teenage fiction

  THE GREAT AUTOMATIC GRAMMATIZATOR AND OTHER STORIES

  RHYME STEW

  SKIN AND OTHER STORIES

  THE VICAR OF NIBBLESWICKE

  THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR AND SIX MORE

  Collections

  THE ROALD DAHL TREASURY

  SONGS AND VERSE

  Introduction

  ‘Would you mind,’ asked Liz Attenborough, the Children’s Publisher at Penguin Books, ‘looking at the complete collection of Roald Dahl’s adult stories and suggesting some for a possible collection for teenagers?’ What better excuse could anyone have for revisiting favourite books and being able to call it ‘work’!

  As I re-read, I experienced again surprise, shock and amazement; I still caught my breath in the middle of stories and I was moved by the sensitivity – yes, I do mean sensitivity (a word not often used in connection with Dahl’s writing) of stories such as Katina.

  The heavy hardback volume of Roald Dahl’s collected short stories sat around in my home for several weeks and no one visited without commenting on it. As soon as a collection for young adults was mentioned, they offered advice: ‘You MUST include …’, or a memory: ‘I remember at school when we used to nick a copy of Kiss Kiss from the English cupboard to read aloud in the loos at lunchtime.’ I visited secondary schools and was received with enthusiasm and more advice. If all my friends and all the young readers had had their way, this book would be a much fatter one. Instead, if you come to it remembering your earlier enjoyment of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, Matilda and others, you will have much to enjoy now and still more to look forward to later.

  Roald Dahl the writer and the man needs no introduction from me, for in Boy and Going Solo he invited his readers into his life. Somehow, through his extraordinary stories he belongs to us, rather as families do, for in some curious way he became part of our lives. He loved books and really wanted children and young people ‘to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted’. He said, ‘Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage. If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.’

  Roald Dahl’s work is not always liked by adults but has long been loved by young people and has switched many of them on to books. I think the stories in this book have all the right ingredients: the fun, excitement and wonder that Dahl mentioned, originality, horror, ingenuity, a touch of the macabre, unexpected twists and turns and much more besides – read on and enjoy!

  Wendy Cooling, 1996

  The Great Automatic Grammatizator

  ‘Well, Knipe, my boy. Now that it’s finished, I just called you in to tell you I think you’ve done a fine job.’

  Adolph Knipe stood still in front of Mr Bohlen’s desk. There seemed to be no enthusiasm in him at all.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Bohlen.’

  ‘Did you see what the papers said this morning?’

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

  The man behind the desk pulled a folded newspaper towards him, and began to read: ‘The building of the great automatic computing engine, ordered by the government some time ago, is now complete. It is probably the fastest electronic calculating machine in the world today. Its function is to satisfy the ever-increasing need of science, industry, and administration for rapid mathematical calculation which, in the past, by traditional methods, would have been physically impossible, or would have required more time than the problems justified. The speed with which the new engine works, said Mr John Bohlen, head of the firm of electrical engineers mainly responsible for its construction, may be grasped by the fact that it can provide the correct answer in five seconds to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month. In three minutes, it can produce a calculation that by hand (if it were possible) would fill half a million sheets of foolscap paper. The automatic computing engine uses pulses of electricity, generated at the rate of a million a second, to solve all calculations that resolve themselves into addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For practical purposes there is no limit to what it can do …’

  Mr Bohlen glanced up at the long, melancholy face of the younger man. ‘Aren’t you proud, Knipe? Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Bohlen.’

  ‘I don’t think I have to remind you that your own contribution, especially to the original plans, was an important one. In fact, I might go so far as to say that without you and some of your ideas, this project might still be on the drawing-boards today.’

  Adolph Knipe moved his feet on the carpet, and he watched the two small white hands of his chief, the nervous fingers playing with a paperclip, unbending it, straightening out the hairpin curves. He didn’t like the man’s hands. He didn’t like his face either, with the tiny mouth and the nar
row purple-coloured lips. It was unpleasant the way only the lower lip moved when he talked.

  ‘Is anything bothering you, Knipe? Anything on your mind?’

  ‘Oh no, Mr Bohlen. No.’

  ‘How would you like to take a week’s holiday? Do you good. You’ve earned it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir.’

  The older man waited, watching this tall, thin person who stood so sloppily before him. He was a difficult boy. Why couldn’t he stand up straight? Always drooping and untidy, with spots on his jacket, and hair falling all over his face.

  ‘I’d like you to take a holiday, Knipe. You need it.’

  ‘All right, sir. If you wish.’

  ‘Take a week. Two weeks if you like. Go somewhere warm. Get some sunshine. Swim. Relax. Sleep. Then come back, and we’ll have another talk about the future.’

  Adolph Knipe went home by bus to his two-room apartment. He threw his coat on the sofa, poured himself a drink of whisky, and sat down in front of the typewriter that was on the table. Mr Bohlen was right. Of course he was right. Except that he didn’t know the half of it. He probably thought it was a woman. Whenever a young man gets depressed, everybody thinks it’s a woman.

  He leaned forward and began to read through the half-finished sheet of typing still in the machine. It was headed ‘A Narrow Escape’, and it began ‘The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs …’

  Adolph Knipe took a sip of whisky, tasting the malty-bitter flavour, feeling the trickle of cold liquid as it travelled down his throat and settled in the top of his stomach, cool at first, then spreading and becoming warm, making a little area of warmness in the gut. To hell with Mr John Bohlen anyway. And to hell with the great electrical computing machine. To hell with …

  At exactly that moment, his eyes and mouth began slowly to open, in a sort of wonder, and slowly he raised his head and became still, absolutely motionless, gazing at the wall opposite with this look that was more perhaps of astonishment than of wonder, but quite fixed now, unmoving, and remaining thus for forty, fifty, sixty seconds. Then gradually (the head still motionless), a subtle change spreading over the face, astonishment becoming pleasure, very slight at first, only around the corners of the mouth, increasing gradually, spreading out until at last the whole face was open wide and shining with extreme delight. It was the first time Adolph Knipe had smiled in many, many months.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, speaking aloud, ‘it’s completely ridiculous.’ Again he smiled, raising his upper lip and baring his teeth in a queerly sensual manner.

  ‘It’s a delicious idea, but so impracticable it doesn’t really bear thinking about at all.’

  From then on, Adolph Knipe began to think about nothing else. The idea fascinated him enormously, at first because it gave him a promise – however remote – of revenging himself in a most devilish manner upon his greatest enemies. From this angle alone, he toyed idly with it for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes; then all at once he found himself examining it quite seriously as a practical possibility. He took paper and made some preliminary notes. But he didn’t get far. He found himself, almost immediately, up against the old truth that a machine, however ingenious, is incapable of original thought. It can handle no problems except those that resolve themselves into mathematical terms – problems that contain one, and only one, correct answer.

  This was a stumper. There didn’t seem any way around it. A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Their own electronic calculator had a marvellous memory. Simply by converting electric pulses, through a column of mercury, into supersonic waves, it could store away at least a thousand numbers at a time, extracting any one of them at the precise moment it was needed. Would it not be possible, therefore, on this principle, to build a memory section of almost unlimited size?

  Now what about that?

  Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! Given the words, and given the sense of what is to be said, then there is only one correct order in which those words can be arranged.

  No, he thought, that isn’t quite accurate. In many sentences there are several alternative positions for words and phrases, all of which may be grammatically correct. But what the hell. The theory itself is basically true. Therefore, it stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section as a vocabulary, and arrange for them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.

  There was no stopping Knipe now. He went to work immediately, and there followed during the next few days a period of intense labour. The living-room became littered with sheets of paper: formulae and calculations; lists of words, thousands and thousands of words; the plots of stories, curiously broken up and subdivided; huge extracts from Roget’s Thesaurus; pages filled with the first names of men and women; hundreds of surnames taken from the telephone directory; intricate drawings of wires and circuits and switches and thermionic valves; drawings of machines that could punch holes of different shapes in little cards, and of a strange electric typewriter that could type ten thousand words a minute. Also a kind of control panel with a series of small push-buttons, each one labelled with the name of a famous American magazine.

  He was working in a mood of exultation, prowling around the room amidst this littering of paper, rubbing his hands together, talking out loud to himself; and sometimes, with a sly curl of the nose he would mutter a series of murderous imprecations in which the word ‘editor’ seemed always to be present. On the fifteenth day of continuous work, he collected the papers into two large folders which he carried – almost at a run – to the offices of John Bohlen Inc., electrical engineers.

  Mr Bohlen was pleased to see him back.

  ‘Well, Knipe, good gracious me, you look a hundred per cent better. You have a good holiday? Where’d you go?’

  He’s just as ugly and untidy as ever, Mr Bohlen thought. Why doesn’t he stand up straight? He looks like a bent stick. ‘You look a hundred per cent better, my boy.’ I wonder what he’s grinning about. Every time I see him, his ears seem to have got larger.

  Adolph Knipe placed the folders on the desk. ‘Look, Mr Bohlen!’ he cried. ‘Look at these!’

  Then he poured out his story. He opened the folders and pushed the plans in front of the astonished little man. He talked for over an hour, explaining everything, and when he had finished, he stepped back, breathless, flushed, waiting for the verdict.

  ‘You know what I think, Knipe? I think you’re nuts.’ Careful now, Mr Bohlen told himself. Treat him carefully. He’s valuable, this one is. If only he didn’t look so awful, with that long horse face and the big teeth. The fellow had ears as big as rhubarb leaves.

  ‘But Mr Bohlen! It’ll work! I’ve proved to you it’ll work! You can’t deny that!’

  ‘Take it easy now, Knipe. Take it easy, and listen to me.’

  Adolph Knipe watched his man, disliking him more every second.

  ‘This idea,’ Mr Bohlen’s lower lip was saying, ‘is very ingenious – I might almost say brilliant – and it only goes to confirm my opinion of your abilities, Knipe. But don’t take it too seriously. After all, my boy, what possible use can it be to us? Who on earth wants a machine for writing stories? And where’s the money in it, anyway? Just tell me that.’

  ‘May I sit down, sir?’

  ‘Sure, take a seat.’

  Adolph Knipe seated himself on the edge of a chair. The older man watched him with alert brown eyes, wondering what was coming now.

  ‘I would like to explain something, Mr Bohlen, if I may, about how I came to do all this.’

  ‘Go right ah
ead, Knipe.’ He would have to be humoured a little now, Mr Bohlen told himself. The boy was really valuable – a sort of genius, almost – worth his weight in gold to the firm. Just look at these papers here. Darndest thing you ever saw. Astonishing piece of work. Quite useless, of course. No commercial value. But it proved again the boy’s ability.

  ‘It’s a sort of confession, I suppose, Mr Bohlen. I think it explains why I’ve always been so … so kind of worried.’

  ‘You tell me anything you want, Knipe. I’m here to help you – you know that.’

  The young man clasped his hands together tight on his lap, hugging himself with his elbows. It seemed as though suddenly he was feeling very cold.

  ‘You see, Mr Bohlen, to tell the honest truth, I don’t really care much for my work here. I know I’m good at it and all that sort of thing, but my heart’s not in it. It’s not what I want to do most.’

  Up went Mr Bohlen’s eyebrows, quick like a spring. His whole body became very still.

  ‘You see, sir, all my life I’ve wanted to be a writer.’

  ‘A writer!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bohlen. You may not believe it, but every bit of spare time I’ve had, I’ve spent writing stories. In the last ten years I’ve written hundreds, literally hundreds of short stories. Five hundred and sixty-six, to be precise. Approximately one a week.’

  ‘Good heavens, man! What on earth did you do that for?’

  ‘All I know, sir, is I have the urge.’

  ‘What sort of urge?’

  ‘The creative urge, Mr Bohlen.’ Every time he looked up he saw Mr Bohlen’s lips. They were growing thinner and thinner, more and more purple.

  ‘And may I ask you what you do with these stories, Knipe?’

  ‘Well, sir, that’s the trouble. No one will buy them. Each time I finish one, I send it out on the rounds. It goes to one magazine after another. That’s all that happens, Mr Bohlen, and they simply send them back. It’s very depressing.’