The Giants
The opening line to this guide is Dahl explaining “I have a very difficult job to do here.” The difficulty is that writing a book which tells kids what to do goes against his character. He then goes on to situate the background of writing a guidebook within the imagery of adults being GIANTS who spend their time telling kids not just what they can do, but, maybe more importantly, WHAT NOT TO DO. Writing this book has pushed the author, Dahl confesses, into the realm of GIANTS.
Pee in the Face
Dahl uses a wonderfully creative bit of imagery to get the point across of his directive “Do not throw anything out of the windows.” He tells an allegedly true anecdote shared by a friend involving being a young with an urgency to urinate who winds up going in his father’s hat and then tossing the contents out the window where it splashes onto a porter as the train passed through a small country station.
Politically Incorrect
In a sign of how times have changed, Dahl engages in some imagery which would almost certainly never make into a governmental agency-sponsored guide today. The lesson is “Never put anything on the railway line” and the accompanying illustration is of a kid carrying an overflowing garbage can up to rack tracks. Good enough so far. It is the introduction to this rule that is troubling:
“I don’t think many of you would be stupid enough to do this but believe me it has been done and still is done quite often.”
Express Trains
The danger presented by busy train stations and rail lines are easy enough to convey, but how to get across to kids that those rail lines out in the boonies somewhere are potential death tracks? Dahl’s solution is to work with the illustrator to create imagery that reveals the danger through juxtaposition. His text begins with the idea that these seemingly benign stretches of tracks are romanticized for the purpose of quite country walks before introducing the specific threat they pose: trains moving at a far more rapid speed than in those busier and more crowded areas.
