Big Fruit

The other day, I was thinking about James and the Giant Peach. I'm sure we all do every couple of weeks.

I was a big Roald Dahl fan growing up, and JATGP (as it's sometimes known) is a good one. I like that his parents get eaten by a rhinoceros in the second paragraph. That's a good opening to a story. Although, even as a child, I was sceptical about whether a rhino could eat two people. Firstly, their mouths are too small. Secondly, they're herbivores. Even if a rhino was driven mad my captivity, it would still probably not eat people. Kill, sure. But not eat. Then again, Dahl had been to Africa, so I'm sure he knew what he was talking about.

What I was thinking about was a particular bit in the story. I don't know why it sprang to mind, given that I hadn't read the book in years, but I started thinking about the little weird man that appears in James's garden.

If you don't know the plot (spoilers!), he basically gives James a paper-bag full of weird magic gem-things. He tells James to add some of his own hair and the gems to a jug of water, and down it. Fantastic things are promised. James, seeking a way out of his tortuous life with his twisted aunts, thinks this is a good idea. But he trips over on his way to the kitchen, drops the bag, and the gems go everywhere, burrowing into the ground. James tries to recover them, but can't. They then go on to cause the whole talking insect/giant peach adventure.

Anyway, I was thinking about this bit. And a couple of things came to mind.

1) What was this creepy man doing in the garden? He's obviously magic. The description suggests a leprechaun. But this event isn't giving a good example to children, is it Mr Dahl? The author is telling us that if a weird, bearded stranger offers you sweets, you should take them. What if they contained rohypnol?

Which brings me to:

2) What would have happened if James did swallow the green things? What if he'd downed them as requested? It would be funny if they were just sedatives, and the little man was getting ready for some orphan-abuse, and the whole giant peach thing was just a mistake. He was probably kicking himself.

But even if his intentions were good, what would have happened to James? The insects that swallowed the gems grew to human-size and acquired human intelligence. Would James also grow? Maybe he'd turn into a Godzilla-like creature, destroying his aunts with eye-lazers and exterminating the planet's rhino population. Maybe he'd become a God. That would have been a better book - James's attempts to cope with omnipotence.

Anyway, I was pondering this for a while, and then found that we had a copy of the book in the house. It was the copy that I'd read as a child. And the thing that hit me first was how creepy the illustrations were.

As I haven't got a scanner, I had to do a google search, and found these via someone's blog (http://racheltrobertson.blogspot.com/). I hope she doesn't mind this thievery!

I always liked consistency when I was a child (I still do, in fact), so I'm sure I was a bit annoyed by the fact that this book's illustrations were not done by Dahl mainstay Quentin Blake. But these pictures are pretty damn cool - proper fairytale pictures.

The artist is Nancy Ekholm Burkert.

The world of children's fiction is such a bizarre one. It's weird that we introduce kids to such odd and frightening worlds before they've even got used to this one. Maybe that's the goal: to provide them with such horror and insanity that the real world doesn't seem so bad by comparison.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the scariest ones online. Here's a poor-quality photo I took with my phone camera. The aunts look like something from Evil Dead.


I used to read so much more when I was a child. I think my attention span must have been at its longest. But I'm pleased we were encouraged to read such warped things. The world of Roald Dahl is like a twisted nightmare, but it's good that children are introduced to art and fantasy and imagination early. Surely it's more important than learning fractions.

If our education was two-thirds imagination, one-third affection, and three-fifths algebra, the world would be a better place.