The Umbrella Man

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THE UMBRELLA MAN
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THE UMBRELLA MAN
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by ROALD DAHL
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G LOBAL V ILLAGE S HORT S TORIES
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I’ M GOING TO TELL YOU about a funny thing that happened to my mother and me yesterday evening. I am twelve years oldand I’m a girl. My mother is thirty-four but I am nearly as tall as her already. Yesterday afternoon, my mother took me up to London to see the dentist. He found one hole. It was in a back tooth and he filled it without hurting me too much. After that, we went to a caf´ . I had a e banana split and my mother had a cup of coffee. By the time we got up to leave, it was about six o’clock. When we cameout of the caf´ it had started to rain. ‘We must get a e taxi,’ my mother said. We were wearing ordinary hats and coats, and it was raining quite hard. ‘Why don’t we go back into the caf´ and wait for it to stop?’ I said. I e wanted another of those banana splits. They were gorgeous. ‘It isn’t going to stop,’ my mother said. ‘We must get home.’ We stood on the pavement in the rain, looking for ataxi. Lots of them came by but they all had passengers inside them. ‘I wish we had a car with a chauffeur,’ my mother said. Just then a man came up to us. He was a small man and he was pretty old, probably seventy or more. He raised his hat politely and said to my mother, ‘Excuse me, I do hope you will excuse me . . . ’ He had a fine white moustache and bushy white eyebrows and a wrinkly pink face.He was sheltering under an umbrella which he held high over his head. ‘Yes?’ my mother said, very cool and distant.

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‘I wonder if I could ask a small favour of you,’ he said. ‘It is only a very small favour.’ I saw my mother looking at him suspiciously. She is a suspicious person, my mother. She isespecially suspicious of two things – strange men and boiled eggs. When she cuts off the top of a boiled egg, she pokes around inside it with her spoon as though expecting to find a mouse or something. With strange men, she has a golden rule which says, ‘The nicer the man seems to be, the more suspicious you must become.’ This little old man was particularly nice. He was polite. He waswell-spoken. He was well-dressed. He was a real gentleman. The reason I knew he was a gentleman was because of his shoes. ‘You can always spot a gentleman by the shoes he wears,’ was another of my mother’s favourite sayings. This man had beautiful brown shoes. ‘The truth of the matter is,’ the little man was saying, ‘I’ve got myself into a bit of a scrape. I need some help. Not much I assure you. It’s almostnothing, in fact, but I do need it. You see, madam, old people like me often become terribly forgetful . . . ’ My mother’s chin was up and she was staring down at him along the full length of her nose. It was fearsome thing, this frosty-nosed stare of my mother’s. Most people go to pieces completely when she gives it to them. I once saw my own headmistress begin to stammer and simper like anidiot when my mother gave her a really foul frosty-noser. But the little man on the pavement with the umbrella over his head didn’t

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bat an eyelid. He gave a gentle smile and said, ‘I beg you to believe, madam, that I am not in the habit of stopping ladies in the street and telling them my troubles.’‘I should hope not,’ my mother said. I felt quite embarrassed by my mother’s sharpness. I wanted to say to her, ‘Oh, mummy, for heaven’s sake, he’s a very very old man, and sweet and polite, and he’s in some sort of trouble, so don’t be so beastly to him.’ But I didn’t say anything. The little man shifted his umbrella from one hand to the other. ‘I’ve never forgotten it before,’ he said. ‘You’ve...