Independent Women

Galloping gargoyles! Roald Dahl wrote such strong women – of great personalities – quite unusual for a guy. I’ll tackle to short stories this time, The Way up to Heaven and other is Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat. Click on to the links to read the stories yourself or if you're too lazy to read, get the gist here below.

In the 'The Way up to Heaven', Mrs. Forster has a terrible fear of being late and it was cruelly used by her husband to put her into a state of panic. When Mrs. Forster was scheduled for a flight to Paris, her husband suggested that they drop him off at his club on the way. Knowing this will make her late, she protested in vain. As their car was about to leave, Mr. Foster ran back to the house on the pretense of picking up a gift he forgot for his daughter. But Mrs. Foster discovered the box lodged between the seat cushions and ran up to the house to tell him that she has the gift... and suddenly she paused and listened. She stayed outside their door frozen for 10 seconds, straining to hear something. She then turned and ran back to the car, telling the driver that they're too late and her husband would have to find another ride. She spent the next six weeks with her grandchildren and wrote Mr. Foster letters. When she flew back home, there's no one to meet her at the airport, and upon entering the house she noticed a curious odor. Satisfied, she enters her husband's study and calls the elevator repairman.

This story goes to the perfect murder list alongside Lamb to the Slaughter, which I have already cited in my previous blog. Have I mentioned that Mr. and Mrs. Forster is an old couple? Get them stuck in an elevator and don't inform anyone – that's another way to kill someone, isn't it? Who's to blame Mrs. Foster? Her husband had been mean to her. Lesson learned, if your partner has a pet peeve don't aggravate it by doing things intentionally to cause much irritation.

The second story is quite different from the two stories I have previously mentioned, The Way up to Heaven and Lamb to the Slaughter, wherein this time it was the husband who won over the wife. In 'Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat', Mrs. Bixby led a duplicitous life, escapes from her boring dentist husband once a month supposedly to spend some time with her aunt but really meets up with her lover, the Colonel. When the Colonel gives her an expensive mink coat as a parting gift for he has ended their relationship, she then realizes that she has to prevent her husband from knowing who it came from. She devised a scheme, so she went to a pawnshop and borrowed $50 against the coat, receiving a blank pawn ticket in return. She then lied to her husband saying that she found the ticket in a cab and he excitedly explained how they go about claiming it. Since she did not want to be recognized by the pawnbroker, she let him go to the pawnshop to collect it. When Mrs. Bixby went to his clinic to get the coat, he gave her a little fur necklace instead. She feigned joy, of course, and went out of the office fumingly mad at the pawnbroker who switched the item. But everything changed when she passed by her husband's young assistant secretary, Miss Pulteney... wearing the beautiful black mink coat that the Colonel had given to Mrs. Bixby.

Right back at yah! No wonder Mr. Bixby stays at his clinic late at night, I guess he's working on Miss Pulteney, and I'm pretty sure he isn't drilling her teeth. Mrs. Bixby couldn't confront his husband, could she? Because she wasn't supposed to know what's the item behind the blank ticket. And raising the issue, if ever, would get her into more trouble for an ended affair could surface.