posted on 13 Nov 2017

Teaching Dahl by Alan Gibbons

(This article first appeared in the Letterpress Project publication Roald Dahl: The man Who Believed In Magic )

Two things made me a writer. The first was obviously books. Books and writers. Because writers make books. The second was readers. Children who read. Because children read books. Now once upon a time, when Nicky Morgan was still a fresh-faced law student with startled eyes and Michael Gove was being constructed out of bits of rejected Pinocchio dolls, teachers were much more free to read books aloud for the sheer pleasure of sharing a wonderful story. That is when I started teaching, somewhere between Margaret Thatcher deciding to snatch children’s milk and Margaret Thatcher deciding to close lots of coalmines. I used to do something very, very bad back then. I used to read aloud to the children in my class and I didn’t care whether it was called shared or paired or pared reading or whether it came in a literacy hour or a literacy ten minutes or a literacy forever. I read aloud at the end of every lesson and the start of many, regardless of what the lesson was and got the children to join in. They always wanted more and it helped to make them lifelong readers and lifelong learners. Quite simply, at every level, it worked.

Now, those days came to an end. Successive education ministers ministered and bullied and sent in busy, suited people with nine-subject curriculums (or is it curricula, lardy-dum, lardy dah?), literacy hours and translucent hundred word sheets to analyse reading, first, fast and only phonics and fronted adverbials and the time to read aloud shrivelled and shrank and schools became dark and dank and PISA them as you might, standards neither rose nor fell, but sat there like fat hornswogglers, hornswoggling away. OK, all this is history, but reading aloud should not be history. Even in these prescriptive, data-doodled, age-related Great Expectations, Pip Dangling, Neo-Wackford Squeering days, good teachers can and should read aloud to children and hook them on reading for pleasure, laughter, gasping and subversion. So here comes the towering, booming, imagination-extending Mr Dahl

I discovered Roald Dahl’s wonderful, inventive children’s books the moment I started teaching. The instant I saw Quentin Blake’s illustrations, I could not wait to read them to my class and read them I did, putting on all the voices and contorting my face to convey the characters. Most of Dahl’s work is perfect to read out loud. There is something structured and systematic and mythic and sequenced about the way these tales unfold. They are satisfying because the bits fit together like lego. Things click and hook up with the reliability and recognisability of fairy tales. Take Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not once did I ever have to shush a child when I was reading that book. As each of the wayward, selfish children got their comeuppance, each slice of the fearsome, dark morality tale ended with a perfect sense of closure. (I have to admit the Glass Elevator was less successful and felt like a sequel demanded by a publisher). The names of the chocolate bars were enough to have my young charges salivating. There were bright eyes. There was laughter. There was engagement at the very highest level. I felt like a real teacher because the air was buzzing with an electric charge that made the children want to read. Hear that, not be told to read, not be dragooned through an age-inappropriate systematised and codified grammar plucked from Edwardian England, but magically entwined, immersed and braised in reading. There was no trick, no con. I loved these books and my love of them communicated naturally and organically to the children in my care.

OK, so there was structure, but there was so much more. There was shock. There was surprise. There was life. With Dahl, you weren’t going to feel safe. There was all the precariousness and insecurity of childhood. All too often, schools now spin webs of policy-prestidigitated protections, but life is not safe. It is a tragicomedy and it can end in death. Dahl’s is a prickly, rollercoaster world of dread doings. Here is the legendary opening of James and the Giant Peach:

“Until he was four years old James Henry Trotter had had a happy life. He lived peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house by the sea. There were always plenty of other children to play with and there was a sandy beach for him to run about on and the ocean to paddle in. It was the perfect life for a small boy. Then 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 full daylight mind you and on a crowded street by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London zoo.”

Much of Dahl is here, the sense of a kind of fairy tale, the systematic unfolding, the punch in the solar plexus scariness of life and, behind it all, the author’s mischief.

Most of all, there is the language, rich, inventive, robust and ribald.

There is this from ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’:

'George couldn't help disliking Grandma. She was a selfish, grumpy old woman. She had pale brown teeth and a small puckered-up mouth like a dog's bottom.'

We have taunts at grizzly old grunions and hags. Some modern adult readers find instances of misogyny and cruelty in Dahl and he does walk a line in his gyroscopic grotesqueries, but it works a gazillion times more than it offends (and, what the hell, did he care one jot whether he offended those bloody adults? He was writing for kids.)

The Twits are ugly. Mr Twit’s beard is teeming with all kinds of grotesque gobbets of food. The ‘Vitches’ are revolting. The description of their feet and scalps could keep a legion of kids up at night, checking under the bed and behind the curtains.

There is the alliteration: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. There are the rollicking, rapid-racing rhythms of his poems and stories like the Giraffe, the Pelly and Me and The Enormous Crocodile. Who can forget the unfortunate reptile being hurled into the sun to sizzle like a sausage? Perfect. As perfect as this:

“The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.

She whips a pistol from her knickers.

She aims it at the creature's head

And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.”

I could feel the buzz of appreciation from the children sitting cross-legged on the mat. They asked for it to be read again and again and again and I obliged, with a suitable pause before unleashing that dangerous word knickers. I used to turn and glance furtively at the door.

“Do you think Mrs Giubertoni will let me say that, knickers? I mean head teachers don’t like teachers saying knickers. I could get sacked for saying knickers. I don’t think I said it. Did I say knickers?”

And on it went. And we got 100% of our kids to Level 4 a few years later under Mr Jorgensen’s reign. (Interesting that these two head teachers in working class Knowsley had foreign-sounding names, one Italian, one Danish. Norwegian-descended Dahl would have appreciated that.)

And the language, the names, the naughty nouns, acrobatic adjectives and viral verbs. We luxuriated in words like razztwizzler, scrotty, snozzcumber and the all-time favourite, the elevating power of the whizzpopper. What about the giants? There were the Fleshlumpeater, the Bonecruncher, the Manhugger, the Childchewer, the Meatdripper, the Gizzardgulper, the Maidmasher, the Bloodbottler, and the Butcher Boy.

How we trembled at the Bloodbottler’s terrifying snarl: “Runt! Is you there, Runt? I is hearing you jabbeling!”

Amid the invention and the fun, there was always a sense of danger and impending loss. Dahl was injured himself and suffered personal tragedies. One of his daughters died from measles and his son had a very bad accident. I am sure the pain leaked and oozed into the fabric of his stories. Something else infuses the pages of his books, however, and that is love. No matter how much the macabre stalks Dahl’s universe, no matter how many Rabelaisian characters leap forth, there is always a huge affection for the young protagonists picking their way through his universe.

Whether it is impoverished, true-believing Charlie Bucket, book-loving Matilda or wide-eyed Sophie stolen away in the night, Dahl treasures his heroes. Many people reflect on Dahl’s hostility to adults, but not all adults. For all the retribution he deals out to the wheeler-dealers, the cruel, the bullies, the giants, Dahl has many adults who care, who nurture, who offer a protective arm: the BFG, Grandpa in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Miss Honey in Matilda and Grandma in The Witches. A personal favourite of mine is the relationship between father and son in Danny the Champion of the World. All the classic Dahl themes are there: danger, a self satisfied villain, rich, fat Mr Hazell hosting a party for dukes, lords, barons, baronets and wealthy businessmen, in short ‘fancy folk.’ There is the invention of the pheasants and raisins, the systematic plotting. Right at the heart of the book is Danny and his dad.

As the book says: “Grown-ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.”

But they’re not all bad.

Even teachers.