Baruch Hashem, I made it up to Meron, in the car, with my husband.

For a change, it was actually quite a nice visit. The Tzion was packed on my side with a few busloads of Beis Yaakov girls, plus an assortment of women all trying to pray there, so it was pretty busy.

But the vibe was actually quite forgiving and ‘gentle’ this time, which is not something I’m used to experiencing at the Rashbi.

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On the way back, we passed through Netanya, and I went to a second-hand book store there, where I found a copy of Roald Dahl’s ‘The Witches’ going cheap.

I bought it, brought it home, and read it.

Here is a synopsis of the main points from the chapter called: How to recognise a witch.

1. They have long, curvy claws instead of fingernails (probably, the inspiration for the ‘gel lac’ fashion of our day).
2. They are totally bald – but wear super-fancy wigs, that are so good they fool everyone into thinking they are real hair.
3. They have bigger nostrils than most people, and a very heightened sense of smell.
4. They have ‘fire and ice’ in their irises.
5. They have feet but no toes (think of the ‘chicken feet’ demons possess described in the gemara…)
6. Their spit is blue.

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Probably, at least a couple of the details above are the products of Dahl’s imagination.

Probably.

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In the next chapter, he goes on to describe what witches basically do all day:

They dream up all sorts of schemes to destroy as many children as possible.

And their most favorite ‘trick’ of all is fooling the parents into somehow destroying their own children.

In ‘The Witches’, they do this by turning the kids into slugs, mice, pheasant – all stuff that the parents happily kill, without knowing that really, it’s their kid.

The particular ‘twist’ of the witches in America, is that they turn the kids into hotdogs, which everyone then gobbles down without knowing that really, they are eating a human being.

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Ho ho ho!

Such amazingly unbelievable stuff, Mr Dahl was writing about.

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The last couple of things to tell you from ‘The Witches’, is that they pretend to be all in to charidee – and especially, charidee connected to helping children.

In The Witches, the annual convention of the British witches is held in a hotel in Bournemouth, under the guise of a meeting of the RSPCC – the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Ho ho ho!

And that convention is presided over by a ‘Grand High Witch’ who is the international head of all the witches worldwide, and who flies all over the world organising annual conferences in every country, where she gives the witches instructions on the latest plan they’ve cooked up, to kill all that country’s children.

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The Grand High Witch wears a mask of a young, beautiful woman, that is so realistic, no-one can tell it’s not  her real, actual face – which is hideously evil beyond belief.

Ho ho ho!

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Roald Dahl, amongst many other things, was a spy.

He was spying on the Roosevelt administration for Britain, during WW2. They even wrote a book about it in 2009, which is very hard to track down these days. He’s a snippet from the flyleaf:

Conant tells the story of young writer Roald Dahl who is assigned by His Majesty’s Government to Washington, D.C. as a diplomat to gather intelligence about America’s isolationist circles. In the course of his “spying,” he meets or works closely with David Ogilvy, Ian Fleming, and the great spymaster William Stephenson (aka Intrepid).

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I’m guessing, Dahl knew a whole bunch about what was really going on in the world, from the inside-out.

Another, different book about him from 2010 says this:

Sturrock’s book reveals how Dahl’s spy work was somewhat at odds with the author’s tendency to spill the beans.

‘Dad never could keep his mouth shut,’ said daughter Lucy. ‘He gossiped like a girl.’

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What to do, with all this information you gather, that you can’t tell about because if you do and you sound credible – they’ll come after you.

But in the meantime, you can’t keep your mouth shut?

Dahl hit on the perfect solution: write chldren’s books with incredible stories about the witches that really rule the world, running annual meetings to share the next big plan to annihilate all the children – preferably, by getting the parents of the children to kill them, themselves.

Ho ho ho.

Lucky it’s all just fiction, eh?