“Katina”
The most visceral imagery in the book might well be the description of the ultimate fate of the title character of this story. Katina is a young girl who has been orphaned as a result of German bombs raining down on her Greek village. The story itself is a weird collision between brutally realistic war fiction and something that is almost but not quite a horror story:
“She was running out from the far corner of the aerodrome, running right out into the middle of this mass of blazing guns and burning aircraft, running as fast as she could. Once she stumbled, but she scrambled to her feet again and went on running. Then she stopped and stood looking up, raising her fists at the planes as they flew past. Now as she stood there, I remember seeing one of the Messerschmitts turning and coming in low straight towards her and I remember thinking that she was so small that she could not be hit. I remember seeing the spurts of flame from his guns as he came, and I remember seeing the child, for a split second, standing quite still, facing the machine. I remember that the wind was blowing in her hair. Then she was down.”
“An African Story”
For some readers, however, even more disturbing will be the imagery that solves the mystery at the heart of this story. The many who suffer from the effects of ophidiophobia will likely want to skip this story—and perhaps the excerpt from it below—as Dahl’s genius for description is put on full display. The fear of snakes often originates from that place of repulsion toward the unnatural quality of their physical being. Those who dislike the creatures partly because they somehow just don’t seem “right” are not going to feel any better about them with this imagery stuck forever in their heads:
“A large black snake, a Mamba, eight feet long and as thick as a man’s arm, was gliding through the wet grass, heading straight for the cow and going fast. Its small pear-shaped head was raised slightly off the ground and the movement of its body against the wetness made a clear hissing sound like gas escaping from a jet…he sat there not moving, watching the Mamba as it approached the cow, listening to the noise it made as it went, watching it come up close to the cow and waiting for it to strike. But it did not strike. It lifted its head and for a moment let it sway gently back and forth; then it raised the front part of its black body into the air under the udder of the cow, gently took one of the thick teats into its mouth and began to drink.”
“They Shall Not Grow Old”
This is another story that veers between straightforward realism and something that is much abstract and surreal. The narrative revolves around a strange incident involving a pilot and his plane that went missing for two days, but when the pilot finally returns, he swears his entire mission took no longer than an hour and a half. It will take him another week to finally remember exactly what happened and the imagery is highly suggestive of the more surrealistic experiences of airmen under the intense pressure of combat in the skies:
“When I opened them everything was blue, more blue than anything that I had ever seen. It was not a dark blue, nor was it a bright blue; it was a blue blue, a pure shining colour which I had never seen before and which I cannot describe. I looked around. I looked up above me and behind me. I sat up and peered below me through the glass of the cockpit and everywhere it was blue. It was bright and clear, like pleasant sunlight, but there was no sun.”
“Someone Like You”
Two pilots are swapping war stories over a drink some few years after the war has ended. But these are not typical tales of swaggering heroics. They are stories offering much darker insights into the psyche of men at war. Including a fellow known only as Stinker who becomes attached to Alsatian dog named Smith in Malta that he is forced to leave behind in order to execute immediate orders to transfer to Egypt. The imagery presents a portrait of a man who has finally succumbed to the extreme pressures of cheating death on a daily basis in the form of believing he has not been forced to leave his loyal companion behind:
“He walked into the big lounge and as he went in he held the door open and started calling his dog. Then when he thought the dog had come in, he closed the door and started walking right down the length of the room…He got on to his hands and knees and said, `Smith, come on out of there; come here at once,’ and he put out his hand and started dragging nothing at all from under the table. Then he apologized to the people at the table. `This is the hell of a dog,’ he said to them. You should have seen their faces. He went on like that all down the room and when he came to the other end he held the door open for the dog to go out and then went out after it.”
