I have a VERY DIFFICULT job here.
Young people are fed up with being told by grownups WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO. They get that all through their young lives. And now I am going to have to tell you WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO, but this time it’s a bit different because the DOs and DON’Ts that I am going to give you may easily SAVE YOUR LIFE. That is the only reason I agreed to write this message to you.
This is the opening to the book. The Guide to Railway Safety is not one of those cute little titles that sounds like it is a non-fiction book but actually is entirely fictional and only relates to a non-fictional title. This is the title and this is the guide to railway safety. A slender volume designed for distribution to kids, it was commissioned by the British Rail system who specifically charged Roald Dahl and illustrator Quentin Blake to work together. The result is, as might be expected, an official guide to safety produce by a government agency unlike any other.
DO NOT THROW ANYTHING OUT OF THE WINDOWS — I know a true story about this. A friend of mine, when he was a little boy, was travelling in a train with his father who a captain in the navy. The little boy wanted to desperately have a pee, but there were no corridors on the train. He told his father that he had to go. He simply couldn’t wait.
And here is a perfect example of why. This is the opening paragraph on a page devoted to advice about the dangers of tossing things from a moving train. Rather than simply list the potential dangers, Dahl transforms the lesson into tiny little self-contained short story. Not only that, but the sketch designed to teach the lesson about tossing things from a moving train is about a little boy needing to urinate. You don’t find that in many official government publications. The result, of course, is that the lesson does permeate through the magic of entertainment. Dahl—like Dr. Seuss—intuitively understood that children’s books are expect to teach lessons of one sort of another but that any educational purpose had better be subjugated to the entertainment value or else it won’t be read at all and the lesson will go unlearned.
NEVER NEVER NEVER STICK YOUR HEAD
OUT OF THE WINDOW OF A MOVING TRAIN.
This guide is a collaboration, after all, so it would hardly be fair to attribute all its mood, tone and imagery just to Roald Dahl. The page featuring this insistent advice is an excellent example of how the text and illustrations work together in tandem to make the reading experience one that allowing this book to fit snugly into the Dahl canon. He is a writer know for inserting a darker vision than usual into his stories for kids and is often described using words like grotesque and macabre. There is certainly nothing particularly macabre or grotesque about the essential advice to keep your head inside a moving train, but when that triple never is juxtaposed with a cartoon drawing of a severed boy’s head flying off into the distance while the headless shoulders and torso are still leaning out the train window, the point is unforgettably made.
