★★★★★ (5/5)
Still remains one of my favorite Dahl books. Here’s a selection of my favorite passages from the book:
- My father owned the filling-station and the caravan and a small field behind, but that was about all he owned in the world. It was a very small filling-station on a small country road surrounded by fields and woody hills.
- With a horse to pull it, the old caravan must have wandered for thousands of miles along the roads and lanes of England. But now its wanderings were over,
- For furniture, we had two chairs and a small table, and those, apart from a tiny chest of drawers, were all the home comforts we possessed. They were all we needed.
- I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile, because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it, so watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you with his mouth but the eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be bogus.
- He loved engines. ‘A petrol engine is sheer magic,’ he said to me once. ‘Just imagine being able to take a thousand different bits of metal… and if you fit them all together in a certain way… and then if you feed them a little oil and petrol… and if you press a little switch… suddenly those bits of metal will all come to life… and they will purr and hum and roar… they will make the wheels of a motor-car go whizzing round at fantastic speeds…’
- Here I am at the age of nine. This picture was made just before all the excitement started and I didn’t have a worry in the world.
- He set off down the road and I stood on the platform of the caravan, watching him go. I loved the way he moved. He had that long loping stride all countrymen have who are used to covering great distances on foot.
- The moon had long since disappeared but the sky was clear and a great mass of stars was wheeling above my head. There was no wind at all, no sound of any kind. To my right, going away into the blackness of the countryside, lay the lonely road that led to the dangerous wood.
- When I looked up the trees had closed in above my head like a prison roof and I couldn’t see the smallest patch of sky or a single star. I couldn’t see anything at all. The darkness was so solid around me I could almost touch it.
- I cannot possibly describe to you what it felt like to be standing alone in the pitchy blackness of that silent wood in the small hours of the night. The sense of loneliness was overwhelming, the silence was as deep as death, and the only sounds were the ones I made myself.
- Go and make yourself some breakfast. Then go to bed.’ ‘I’d like to wait here till the doctor comes,’ I said. ‘You must be dead tired, Danny’ ‘I’m all right,’ I said. I found an old wooden chair and pulled it up near him and sat down. He closed his eyes and seemed to be dozing off. My own eyes kept closing, too. I couldn’t keep them open. ‘I’m sorry about the mess I made of it all,’ I heard him saying.
- ‘Yes, Dad, but can I come with you?’ ‘Come with me?’ he said, floating out of his dream at last. ‘But my dear boy, of course you can come with me! It’s your idea! You must be there to see it happening!
- It is a most marvellous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples whenever you feel like it. You can do this only in the autumn of course, when the fruit is ripe, but all the same, how many families are so lucky? Not one in a thousand, I would guess. Our apples were called Cox’s Orange Pippins, and I liked the sound of the name almost as much as I liked the apples.
- And when she smiled at him he would smile back at her in the soppiest way you can imagine, showing all his front teeth, top and bottom, and most of the others as well.
- My father took me by the hand, and together we started walking forward between the trees. I was very grateful to him for holding my hand. I had wanted to take hold of his the moment we entered the wood, but I thought he might disapprove.
- Every few seconds he would glance back at me to see if I was all right, and each time he did so, I gave him a nod and a smile.
- We were walking right in the middle of the road as though it were a private driveway running through our country estate and we were the lords of all we surveyed.
- What was so marvellous about my father, I thought, was the way he always surprised you. It was impossible to be with him for long without being surprised and astounded by one thing or another. He was like a conjuror bringing things out of a hat.
- Then Sergeant Samways mounted his bicycle and waved us goodbye and pedalled away down the road in the direction of the village. He pedalled slowly, and there was a certain majesty in the way he held himself, with the head high and the back very straight, as though he were riding a fine thoroughbred mare instead of an old black bike.
- It was a fine place to sit, the platform of the caravan. It was such a quiet comfortable place to sit and talk and do nothing in pleasant weather. People with houses have a front porch or a terrace instead, with big chairs to lounge in, but I wouldn’t have traded either of those for our wooden platform.
- What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had.
FuzzyRants 