The Way Up to Heaven
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Roald Dahl (1916-) Roald Dahl was born in South Wales, though his parents were Norwegian. He became a fighter pilot during the Second World War and his first book of short stories, `Over to You' (1942), deals with the tensions of war-time flying. After this carne two very successful collections of short stories, Someone Like You' (1953) and `Kiss Kiss' (1959), from which this story is taken. A later collection was 'Switch Bitch' (1974, and more recently he has written a novel, `My Uncle Oswald' (1979). Dahl is fascinated by the strange and macabre. His own kind of black humour is unique as he uncovers the abnormalities that lie beneath the surface of the most conventional relationship, such as that between a man and his wife.
The story `The Way Up to Heaven' is a story of hidden conflict in a respectable middle-class marriage. It traces the growth of this conflict and the course of events that enabled the wife to solve her problem, events which reveal an unexpected new side to her character.
The Way Up To Heaven
All her life, Mrs Foster had had an almost pathological* fear of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain. In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman, but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would begin to twitch.* It was nothing much - just a tiny vellicating muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink - but the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear until an hour or so after the train or plane or whatever it was had been safely caught. It was really extraordinary how in certain people a simple apprehension* about a thing like catching a train can grow into a serious obsession. At least half an hour before it was time to leave the house for the station, Mrs Foster would step out of the elevator* all ready to go, with hat and coat and gloves, and then, being quite unable to sit down, she would flutter and fidget* about
Roald Dahl (1916-) Roald Dahl was born in South Wales, though his parents were Norwegian. He became a fighter pilot during the Second World War and his first book of short stories, `Over to You' (1942), deals with the tensions of war-time flying. After this carne two very successful collections of short stories, Someone Like You' (1953) and `Kiss Kiss' (1959), from which this story is taken. A later collection was 'Switch Bitch' (1974, and more recently he has written a novel, `My Uncle Oswald' (1979). Dahl is fascinated by the strange and macabre. His own kind of black humour is unique as he uncovers the abnormalities that lie beneath the surface of the most conventional relationship, such as that between a man and his wife.
The story `The Way Up to Heaven' is a story of hidden conflict in a respectable middle-class marriage. It traces the growth of this conflict and the course of events that enabled the wife to solve her problem, events which reveal an unexpected new side to her character.
The Way Up To Heaven
All her life, Mrs Foster had had an almost pathological* fear of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain. In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman, but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would begin to twitch.* It was nothing much - just a tiny vellicating muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink - but the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear until an hour or so after the train or plane or whatever it was had been safely caught. It was really extraordinary how in certain people a simple apprehension* about a thing like catching a train can grow into a serious obsession. At least half an hour before it was time to leave the house for the station, Mrs Foster would step out of the elevator* all ready to go, with hat and coat and gloves, and then, being quite unable to sit down, she would flutter and fidget* about