“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.”
After the tragic death of his parents in a car accident when he is only seven, the narrator, who never does get a name in the book, is sent to live with his Norwegian grandmother, first in Norway and then in England. Echoing Dahl’s own relationship with his Norwegian relatives, they speak both English and Norwegian to each other, hardly noticing what language they are using.
The grandmother is both a wonderfully reassuring and terrifying figure: reassuring, because she loves her grandson deeply and works to soften the horrible loss of his parents, with plenty of hugs and affection and tears. Terrifying, mostly because after he comes to live with her, she spends her time terrifying him with stories about witches, stories she insists are absolutely true, and partly because she spends her time smoking large cigars. She encourages her young grandson to follow her example, on the basis that people who smoke cigars never get colds. I’m pretty sure that’s medically invalid, a point only emphasized when the grandmother later comes down with pneumonia, which, ok, technically speaking isn’t a cold, but is hardly an advertisement for the health benefits of large cigars. (Not to mention the lung cancer risks.)
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