senoritafish | Willie Wonka's creator...

The Ballad of Goldie Pinklesweet - by Roald Dahl, from The Great Glass Elevator.

(In junior high, my brother Doug had the entire above poem memorized, and could recite it upon request, complete with sound effects. Possibly he still can, I haven't asked him lately...).

From today's The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Roald Dahl, (books by this author) born in Llandaff, South Wales (1916). He's known for children's books such as James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). His parents were Norwegian, but they lived in Great Britain so he could attend British schools, which his father believed were the best schools in the world. But Dahl didn't do well at school. On one of his end of term reports, his teacher wrote, "Vocabulary negligible, sentences mal-constructed. He reminds me of a camel."

As soon as he finished high school, Dahl took a job with the Shell Oil Company to get as far away from England as possible. He went to live in Africa and loved it. When World War II broke out, he quit his job, drove to a British base in Kenya, and signed up with the Royal Air Force. He served as a fighter pilot until he was shot down over Egypt, and he barely crawled out of the plane before the gas tanks exploded. Doctors had to remove the end of one of his leg bones, and he kept the bone for the rest of his life, using it as a paperweight in his office. He was a compulsive collector of all kinds of things. He saved all the foil sleeves of the chocolate bars he ate as a young man, and molded them into a ball. He still had the ball at the end of his life.

Dahl's first published book was The Gremlins (1942), which was the first book to popularize those trouble-making creatures that supposedly lived on fighter planes and bombers and were responsible for all the crashes. Mrs. Roosevelt, the president's wife, read the book to her children and liked it so much that she invited Dahl to dinner, and he and the president soon became friends.

But Dahl made his name as a writer of short stories for adults. He specialized in dark stories with a twist at the end. In one story, a woman murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the lamb to the police when they come looking for the murder weapon. His stories were published in collections such as Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss, Kiss (1959).

When he got married and had children, he started telling them stories every night before they went to bed. He found that their favorite stories were those in which adults met terrible ends. In his first children's book, James and the Giant Peach (1961), Dahl wrote, "One day, James's mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in fully daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros, which had escaped from the London zoo. Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience."

Dahl went on to write many more children's books, and he said that the secret to his success was that he conspired with children against adults. Some critics attacked him for the violence in his books, but he said, "[Children] invariably pick out the most gruesome events as the favorite parts of the books...I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like."

Roald Dahl wrote, "A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men."

And, "A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."

I remember being read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Great Glass Elevator, and James and the Giant Peach when I was in probably 4th or 5th grade. They were read to us, a chapter a day, by Mrs. Miller, a tall, thin, sharpish woman with a pointed nose; I don't remember her exact looks, she comes back to me as a collection of angles with shortish blond curls and dark roots. She had a pet rat at home - one time it had a tumor removed and she brought it in a jar to show us.

I remember one time after catching several of us sticking out our tongues at each other, she stalked around the room like a disgruntled heron with the following speech:

"Some of you may have noticed that I have a very long and pointed nose. (touches the end of said pointed nose) I also have a very long and sharp tongue. (sticks out said sharp tongue) I find it very easy to do this. (Sticks out her tongue and touches it to the tip of her nose). And unless you can do this (again, sticks out her tongue and touches her nose), I don't ever (touches nose again) want to see (touches nose) your tongues (touches nose), again. Kindly (touches nose), keep your tongues (touches nose) in your mouth."

This display made quite an impression on us and we never stuck our tongues out in her sight again. However, I practiced trying to touch my tongue to my nose for months afterward. I can't quite make it to the to the tip of my nose, but I can touch it.