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I was 5 when my father, Roald Dahl, wrote the story about "Fantastic Mr. Fox," who would help himself to the chickens, geese, ducks and cider from three nearby farmers. At that age, you believe everything, and Mr. Fox was very real to me.
At the top of our lane was a large beech tree with a foxhole at its base. "That is where Mr. and Mrs. Fox live with their three children," my father told me. I imagined them, as they had been illustrated in the book, sitting around a little table feasting on Farmer Boggis' chickens while drinking Farmer Bean's cider. "I'll bet he's going to Farmer Bunce's farm tonight for a delicious goose. He's a clever chap, Mr. Fox."
In the story, one of Mr. Fox's friends was a badger and during many summer nights, my father would take my sisters and brother and me up to the woods to wait for Mr. Badger to come out of his den on his way to feast with the Fox family. We knew where Badger's hole was and would patiently wait with anticipation, which was always rewarded with a big slow nocturnal badger heading out of his hole and into the darkness of the woods.
"There he goes," my father would whisper. "He's off for a slap-up supper with the foxes and those nasty farmers don't have a clue." He'd chuckle, "Marvelous, absolutely marvelous."
And that is, I suppose, how my moral compass as a child was developed. The animal my father admired so much was a food thief who, for the most part, never got caught.
It wasn't many years later that I, like all English children of that class and time, was sent to boarding school in Hertfordshire. The school was called Abbot's Hill, and it was cold and unpleasant, compared to my cozy life at home. Home was a rambling old Georgian farmhouse, filled with animals, food and love. Abbot's Hill was a huge stone medieval castle filled with great friends but shadowed by the formidable Matron. Today she would be called a “house mother” – but Matron did not possess one ounce of anything maternal. She was mean and hated us all as much as we hated her.
About midnight one night, two friends and I crept down the spooky dark school corridors of the old castle. We crept into the usually locked kitchen and quickly stuffed packaged ice-cream sandwiches into our underwear to take back to our dorm-mates for a late-night feast.
As we bolted back through the darkness we were stopped short by Matron, who demanded to know what we were doing. We knew a complete confession of the heist would mean a severe punishment, so we mumbled something about going to the bathroom. Matron, with her years of experience with adolescent alibis, was not having it. We spent the next hour standing in Matron's office. She calmly knitted, hiding her delight in watching us squirm as the ice cream slowly melted and dribbled down our legs. "You are a bunch of thieves," she said, promising to call our parents in the morning.
We were suspended for three days. Our parents arrived before lunch to take us home -- which to me was a treat!
"I'm not angry that you did it," my father said on the drive home. "I'm angry because you got caught. If you're going to do something fun, just make sure you're clever about it."
His unusual parental advice was not condoning thievery or dishonesty. He was simply saying that no matter how hungry you might be, always sniff more than once before you leave the foxhole. If you don’t, you might lose your tail -- which is the moral of the "Fantastic Mr. Fox" tale.
Lucy Dahl is an author and screenwriter in Los Angeles. Her other articles about food, memory and family can be found here.
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From café cortado to smoked fish to paella, the Spanish capital is a trove of exceptional food.