Roald Dahl’s Guide to Railway Safety has certainly got to rank as the oddest piece within his extensive and broadly diverse body of work. Here is a guy who wrote a story about a crocodile’s plans to eat kids for lunch being stifled by an elephant as well as a novel about a guy who bedded more women than Wilt Chamberlain. (Or Casanova, at least.) He published books of verse that modernized Snow White and Jack’s adventure up that beanstalk and he published memories of childhood torture at the hands of the British school system. This is the guy who invented introduced Willy Wonka to the world in 1964 and three years later wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Despite all that diversity, nothing else really even comes close to resembling this safety guide for kids.
The divergence is not just astonishing to readers. Dahl himself recognize the ironic chasm of everything else for which he became famous and the overarching thematic scheme of this volume. He directly addresses head-on with his opening line admitting the full scale of the difficulty presented by accepting this job. He then goes to layer the introduction with imagery involving adults who become in the eyes of kids GIANTS that are transformed into THE ENEMY.
It is abundantly clear that Dahl is not channeling the way that kids see things, but is speaking from a place within himself that has been his guiding spirit throughout his entire writing career. Those adults—and he makes it clear that this should not be confused with all adults—who make it their place in life to tell kids what to do and what not to do are viewed as horrifyingly gargantuan GIANTS from the perspective of kids down below. When these orders become a never-ending stream of authoritarianism, the GIANTS are transformed by the kid into THE ENEMY.
And as most people know, it is much harder to get someone to listen to your advice when you are unfairly group into and seen as a member of the enemy. Thus, Dahl in no way sees his writing up to this point as being the work of a GIANT whose job is to tell little kids what they should and shouldn’t do, but now he has been asked to become a member of THE ENEMY by an official government agency to fulfill a request for a very a important reason. How could he reject an offer to teach kids railway safety even if means telling them what to do and what not to do and risk the jeopardy of not just being suspected of being a GIANT, but actually becoming one?
The answer is he couldn’t and he knew it:
“I must now become one of those unpopular giants who tells you WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO.”
And yet, even despite that, he manages to go on from that point to create the most unique and idiosyncratic and absolutely Dahl-esque official public agency safety guide that has likely ever or likely ever will be published.
