It might seem a bit basic to choose a Roald Dahl classic as the book I most loved as a kid. I might have picked something a bit more obscure, a little more erudite. Is there a War and Peace for under-10s? And if so, why aren’t I pretending that I devoured it?
But the truth is, The Twits – the bright yellow of my 1982 Puffin edition in particular – is the book most seared into my early memory. Intriguingly, because I am not someone who has taken to audiobooks, I was introduced to The Twits by my sister who read it to me; clearly my enjoyment was not diluted by that fact. My sister read while we were in the back of a car driving down a motorway. (Even typing that makes me feel nauseous. Perhaps children are immune to the seasickness of words unanchored on a page?)
I know that it was night-black outside and raining heavily, and that we were hours late, after getting lost on the way back from a weekend camping trip. The panic of my father radiating in the car like cologne; The Twits being read to me as distraction.
What did I love so much about it? That first time, the sheer antics. The book is skinnier than a newspaper produced in coronavirus times, but its 87 pages pack in japes galore and an overstuffed box of pranks. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I am someone who will print out giant photographs of my own face and stick them to the walls of my boss’s office when she’s out. I am 30 years old.
The tricks Dahl’s characters play are not so benign, of course. The book is the story of a married couple, Mr and Mrs Twit, who despise each other. They are spiteful and vindictive and both hideously ugly but – an important lesson here – they are physically disgusting because their inner souls are awful. As Dahl puts it: “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face … A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.”
The only joy the Twits get is from doing the dirty on each other, playing grotesque tricks including mixing worms into spaghetti, throwing frogs into the other’s bed, and lengthen their chair legs to make it appear as though one has shrunk. They are horrid to each other, but in thoroughly entertaining ways.
The adult me is a great fan of dark humour and I do wonder if this budding element of my personality was what responded to The Twits. Knowing much more about Dahl now, the undeniably unpalatable elements of his person such as his well documented antisemitism, make it slightly more difficult to appreciate the dark undercurrents in his fiction. But I definitely found the macabre, sinister and disturbing aspects of his work refreshing.
There are lighter elements too, because Dahl was so good at this mix of light and shade. Rereading The Twits now, I was reminded that there is also a lesson in it: how we can overcome our differences and achieve common goals by being kind to one another. In the book, a family of former circus monkeys trapped in a cage befriends a treeful of birds, and warns them when they are in danger (and vice versa).
There are other books of Dahl’s I remember enjoying as a child: George’s Marvellous Medicine (my second favourite), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach (originally, by the way, a giant cherry), and very much so, his memoir, Boy. The Twits, however, remains No 1. Unlike so many of Dahl’s books, The Twits has never yet been successfully adapted for film or television. It has, however, been turned into a stage play – one that I unfortunately missed, and I am still unhappy about that. There are plans for it to be part of a Dahl animation series on Netflix. I’m still not convinced, however, that any visual twists on Dahl’s books can compete with the much-loved illustrations by Quentin Blake. The way he drew the beard of Mr Twit, which “grew in spikes that stuck out straight like the bristles of a nailbrush” (and virtually a character in themselves) I can conjure up in a second.
Finally, The Twits has the most satisfying payoff. Which, quite literally, turns the reader upside down. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, what are you waiting for?
