Dolly and the giant Pumpkin

WordSmith

Gerard Smith

James was only four years' old when he lost both his parents. On a day-trip to London his parents were eaten by an angry rhinoceros that had escaped from the Zoo. Thereafter, he was taken in by his spinster aunts, who were not the most maternally minded of women, sadly.

James lived with his aunts in a large, ramshackle house at the top of a hill, overlooking a rambling, overgrown garden. In that garden stood a peach tree which, despite its size and age, had never borne a single fruit. Then, one day, James sprinkled its roots with magic crystals given to him by a mysterious old lady. Overnight, the tree began to grow a gigantic peach.

The peach grew and grew until it was enormous enough to become a home for James and a rather unlikely collection of insect companions. Eventually, it carried him on an extraordinary journey across the Atlantic to a new world and a new life, far away from his cruel aunts.

I was reminded of Roald Dahl’s ‘James and The Giant Peach’ on a recent visit to Carraig Gardens in Mountnugent. Una, the creator of these magnificent gardens, took us on a tour, pointing out many of the treasures that flourish there. And then she introduced us to a pumpkin. Not just any pumpkin, either. This was a pumpkin with big ambitions. Already impressively large, it clearly had more growing to do and looked like a definite contender for one of the pumpkin-growing competitions that take place around Halloween.

Standing there admiring it, I couldn’t help wondering what Dahl might have made of it. Perhaps, with a little further help from Una’s green-fingers, this pumpkin might be on its way to have award-winning adventures of its own.

After my visit, I began reflecting on how much influence Roald Dahl has had on my own writing. In recent columns, particularly those drawing on childhood recollections, I have written about the ‘monster’ that was mushy-peas and the ‘bogey-man under the bed’ who turned out to be nothing more frightening than a potty.

Narrative twists, perhaps, that have their origins in Dahl’s wonderfully absurd world. I don’t think I do it consciously. I certainly don’t sit down to write and think, ‘What would Roald Dahl, do?’ Rather, I suspect his stories have been living quietly somewhere in the background for most of my life. They were such an important part of my childhood that they lodged themselves in my subconscious, along with the characters, humour, the unexpected twists and that delicious sense that the ordinary world might, at any moment, turn completely upside down.

And I think that’s what the best childhood stories do. We think we leave them behind when the book is closed, but they never really leave us. They wait patiently in the imagination, until years later when something in our adult world brings them fondly flooding back.

Which is why I write this with a slightly heavy heart when I think about children and our falling reading rates. Our increasingly digital and AI driven world encourages consumption of words in small portions: a headline, a caption, a message, before the thumb moves onto the next thing. The scroll encourages the skim rather than settle, to sample rather than immerse ourselves in a story.

A book asks something different of us. It asks us to slow down and stay. It asks us to spend time with characters we’ve never met, in unfamiliar worlds, and to wonder what happens next – reading is fuel for a child’s imagination. Roald Dahl understood that.

And so, fittingly, my thoughts turn to another champion of children’s reading: Dolly Parton. She also understood the transformative power of putting a book into a child’s hands. Her ‘Imagination Library’ has grown into a worldwide programme that literally gives children a library of imaginative possibilities, where peaches can grow into enormous proportions and fly across the sea, and a pumpkin in a Cavan garden can have award-winning ambitions.

Gardens grow things. And so do books. As a child, every story I read was a little like rain and sunshine, encouraging the imagination to take root and grow. I fear that time spent scrolling and skimming risks depriving young minds of the time and space they need to do the same.

So, from a pumpkin, to Dolly Parton, via Roald Dahl and the magic of childhood reading – I think that’s a twist Dahl himself would approve of.