Over to You by Roald Dahl (1946)

Posted on 2024-09-19 by thelittleman

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying

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The wonderful thing about short-story collections is that you can read through them in snippets over a longer period of time. When your attention gets dragged away by some other series or author, you can easily come back months later to the collection without having missed a thing. No plot to recall, no characters you’ve forgotten. You’re starting fresh, and you’re no worse off than the original readers who had wait on serials and magazines to get the next story from their favorite author. With attention spans as short as they are today, I’m surprised that short stories haven’t made a rousing comeback.

It’s admittedly taken me months to read Roald Dahl’s earliest short-story collection, Over to You, but that’s all right. For the reasons mentioned above, it’s taken no wind from my sails or skin from my nose. This hard-hitting collection about the Royal Air Force during World War II carries enough weight in every story that each needed its own time to mellow–and mellow it has.

This book takes an honest look at war from the perspectives of varying characters, and none of their views are very pretty. I cover them here story by story with only moderate “spoilers.”

1. “An African Story” – Dahl opens up the book with this disturbing tale from Kenya about a dog-killing hired-hand and an old man out for revenge. Similar to one chapter in Dahl’s autobiographical book, Going Solo, a black mamba rears its ugly head in this one. I feel like there may be a lot of overlap between that book and this.

2. “Only This “ – The first intentional look at war comes from the perspective of a soldier’s mother at home. With her, we get to explore some pretty intriguing questions: How does a mother feel when she knows her son is up there flying for his country in the face of enemy fire? What thoughts might go through her head when she hears the booms and bombs in the night sky? What nightmares chase her as she tries to sleep, knowing that tonight someone’s is going to die?

3. “Katina” – Another story seemingly ripped right from the pages of Going Solo—that is, right from Dahl’s own personal experiences. He tells a tale of the same battle over Athens and of the vineyards and of his time in Greece, but this time he adds the intriguing presence of little Katina, the 9-year-old Greek girl whom the Brits have rescued after her family was killed by German bombers. She herself dies screaming at those same incoming German planes, and it’s heart-wrenching. As Dahl ends this terribly sad tale, he helps us realize how the experience provided him a better sense of what the Greeks have been enduring throughout the war. And it makes me wonder just how many children have died the same way throughout the world’s wars: suffering and childlike, yet hopeful and defiant.

4. “Beware of the Dog” – In this story, an RAF pilot gets his leg blown off while in the cockpit of his plane that’s been shot out of the air. In his delirium as the plane tumbles, he only experiences snippets of color and sound before he wakes up in a hospital room with a kindly nurse. He begins to recover, but all the while also suffers through comfort, fear, and doubt as he lies there uncertain of where he is or why. It’s a hard-hitting story, tense because of all that Dahl leaves unsaid. It ends in a way where we just have to know: and then what happened!? I don’t think we’ll ever know.

5. “They Shall Not Grow Old” – This story surprised me. At first I thought it was just a biography of one the many thousands of dead pilots, and in a small way, it was. Yet the story also has a twisted ending. It reminded me at first of an old plot idea I had years ago, that every gravesite in the world represents a life and a story worth hearing. But Dahl move beyond life and takes this one into the afterlife, and he represents it as supposedly shocking, yet it comes across as more generic that anything (the light and the lucky bastard and all). It verges on Twilight Zone, actually, and the comment I wrote in the margins of my book was this: “War is Hell, but so is Hell.”

6. “Someone Like You” – Not to be confused with Dahl’s short-story collection of the same title (because Someone Like You the book doesn’t even contain “Someone Like You” the story), this short piece describes the guilt that bombers feel in war. It doesn’t contain the typical beginning, middle and end of a short story but has more of an ”-inning, mid-” feel to it. Over bad whisky, a pair of pilots share about all the death they’ve caused, the beauties they’ve destroyed. Not a portrait at all but a sketch, barely filled in—rough lines here, barely a scratch there. You see it, then you don’t. One can’t imagine living with the shattered mind of a man whose job it was to drop bombs on cities all across Europe in the 1940s! Well, after reading this, perhaps one can.

7. “Death of an Old Old Man” – Dahl takes his experiences of fear and death in the RAF and personalizes them in the story of this pilot who takes one final flight, one final dogfight against a German plane. He watches his own death as if from a grandstand but is at peace with it. Mostly.

8. “Madame Rosette” – This one is a dirtier story with coarser language than any that have come before it. It’s a story of foreign-land war prostitution but without the sex. It’s violent and bawdy, and it makes sense that Dahl emphasizes in the beginning of this book that these stories are not all autobiographical. After all, his kids might be reading this!

9. “A Piece of Cake” – I remember portions of this story from Going Solo as well, though this one seems to be made up more from hallucinations than history. Of course, it could also be a direct repeat of that story (which we also find in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More)—I haven’t checked. I find it interesting that we readers can’t rightly tell what’s real and what’s not, and this must have been exactly what Dahl felt while in hospital in Alexandria. This being his first ever story, he actually had the help of C.S. Forrester who (rather than adapting it himself) had it published in The Saturday Evening Post as-is, thus sparking Dahl’s illustrious career.

10. “Yesterday was Beautiful” – This final installment is a super short story about a British pilot shot down on an island in Greece and looking for a boat to take him back to the mainland. He meets an old woman willing to help, but only if he promises to kill every German man, woman, and baby he meets in such a way that their families hear about the terrible loss. It comes as little surprise that this vengeful old woman speaks from a broken heart, having lost her own daughter that very morning.

This was a hard book to get through, but I’m glad I did. We’re so desensitized to war these days—what with Ukraine, the Middle East, and the constant conflicts in Myanmar and elsewhere. But whenever you need a reminder of the psychological, emotional, spiritual pains that war brings, this might be a good place to stop. It’s very human. It’s really very good.

©2024 E.T.

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