Peter Watson, lying helpless between the rails, realized now that they were not going to release him. These were dangerous, crazy boys. They lived for the moment and never considered the consequences.
“The Swan” sounds like it might be one of Dahl’s stories about anthropomorphic animals, but in this case, the swan is very real and serves an agent in the mechanism of plotting. Raymond is smaller, more intelligent, and far exceeding in sensitivity than Ernie and Raymond, the dangerously crazy boys bullying him. Bullying is not quite apt; the situation has reached the point where they are actually putting Peter’s life in danger by threatening him at the point of .22-caliber rifle Ernie recently received on his birthday. Those familiar with Dahl’s traumatic childhood memories recollected in his memoir Boy will doubtlessly be moved to instantly view Peter Watson as his youth alter ego. “The Swan” is yet another work of fiction which effectively provides insight into the psychology of its creator.
But nastiest of all, I think was the fact that the prefects were allowed to beat their pupils. This was a daily occurrence. The big boys (aged 17 or 18) would flog the smaller boys (aged 13, 14, 15) in a sadistic ceremony that took place after you had gone up to the dormitory and got into your pajamas.
“Lucky Break” differs from most of the rest of the collection in that it is not a story or fiction, but an essay. In it, Dahl recalls episodes from his childhood to provide backstory and thematic meat to the essay’s ostensible subject: how to become a successful writer. One need not even be familiar with the author’s childhood memoir to understand how “The Swan” can be interpreted autobiographically. Just read “Lucky Break” in this same volume and it will become abundantly clear how an author’s own past experiences can inform his fiction. In fact, just this one little excerpt describing the author’s experience as a British public school called Repton provides substantial insight.
I do not remember much of it, not beforehand anyway, not until it happened.
“A Piece of Cake” is forward as another “true” essay rather than a work of fiction, but in reality the line is blurry at best. The story told here is essentially a reworking of an earlier version of the same historical event published as “Shot Down Over Libya.” The change in title is notable since controversy connected with the original has to do with the fact that Dahl’s plane was not actually shot down during combat. “A Piece of Cake” opens with the author discussing the vagaries of memory and that is not by accident as it becomes the first in a series of recollections over the succeeding years in which the memory detailed in “Shot Down over Libya” gradually transforms into an admission in his second memoir Going Solo (albeit an admission which shifts blame for the misunderstanding onto his editors) that his infamous plane crash was in no way related to enemy action.
