Mole Control
February ends with a highly informative section about moles. The reader is invited into the world of Dahl to learn about the mating habits, tunneling abilities and diet of moles. This transitions into an imagery-laden lesson on how to avoid having to kill the cute little guys so that they don’t become burrowing little garden-raising pests:
“I get an empty wine bottle (plenty of those around our house) and I bury it in the ground close to the molehill, leaving only the neck of the bottle sticking up. Now when the wind blows across the open top of the bottle it makes a soft humming sound. This goes on all day and night because there is almost always some sort of a breeze blowing. The constant noise just above his tunnel drives the mole half-crazy and he very soon packs up and goes somewhere else.”
The Call of the Cuckoo
Sound-related imagery is also paramount in the author’s description of the cuckoo. “May is the month of the cuckoo,” Dahl writes before launching into a digressive essay devoted to the migrant fowl that calls the British Isles home only from spring to autumn. But during that time, the bird makes sure every Brit knows he’s there:
“Everyone living in the countryside knows when the cuckoos start arriving because you cannot help hearing the loud, eerie, almost human call of the male bird. It quite literally says `Cuck-koo, cuck-koo’, and the voice carries for miles, a strange high-pitched mocking call that seems to be shouting out to all the other birds in the sky that they had better watch out.”
September Berries
If May is the month of the cuckoo, then September is the month of berries. Dahl doesn’t actually make that distinction, but he also fails to leave his own personal feelings on the issue ambiguous. Taking a break from the sound of things, berries at their seasonal peak stimulate the author’s visual sense of imagery:
“Berries are at their best in September. You can still find blackberries and elderberries in the hedges. On the honeysuckle, the berries are brilliant dark red, on the guilder-rose they are scarlet, and on the rowans they are deep orange. Hazelnuts are now ripe brown and ready to be picked, and across are dropping down off the oak trees…Even the plane trees, the last to lose their leaves are turning yellow. The color of the entire landscape is slowing changing from green to gold.”
How Times Change
The imagery that Dahl uses to describe his recollections of how times have changed significantly relative to the traditional celebrating of Guy Fawkes Day with fireworks is of a more peculiar and distinctive type related to sound. Notice the highly suggestive figurative terms he uses to describe the field and danger level of the fireworks. And then the short list of fireworks themselves: one need not have any real idea of exactly what he is talking about because just the sound of the names lend them an aura of appropriate peril:
“Each of us eighty small boys…were given a box of fireworks…and we were allowed to go out onto the football field in the dark and set them off. The field was seething with boys from seven to twelve years old all setting off their own fireworks with their own matches. Pretty lethal fireworks, too. We had jackie jumpers, Roman candles, crack-bangers, fire-serpents, big bombers, rockets and golden rain. Light fuse and stand well away. Do not hold in the hand.”
