Poor old Roald Dahl, remembered more or less entirely for his plucky parentless pawpers propelled into beastly circumstances (but who somehow come good in the end). Apart from bookish Dahl completists patiently working their way through the library shelf to find hidden gems to read to their son/daughter (errrm… like me), whoever would end up reading Dahl’s “Esio Trot“?
It’s a nice (if slightly mawkish, compared with Dahl’s normal writing) little story: it concerns a plot contrived by a lonely retired gentleman (Mr Hoppy) to gain the attention of the attractive widow (Mrs Silver) living in the flat immediately below him, despite her obsession with a puny tortoise called Alfie. I’d like to point you to the Wikipedia article here, but as it does nothing but summarize an already short story, that would be a mean-spirited waste of link ink. 🙂
But does this book contain a cipher mystery? Why… yes! Mr Hoppy pretends to Mrs Silver that he had been told a tortoise-enlarging secret by a Bedouin tribesman – and writes down a special chant for her to whisper to Alfie each day, which begins…
ESIO TROT, ESIO TROT,
TEG REGGIB REGGIB!
Speaking as a collector of Quattrocento letter transposition ciphers (such as Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino used, and which Alberti also described), I have to say that it came as quite a surprise to me to find a modern example with illustrations by Quentin Blake. (Though given that Dahl was employed by MI6 for some years, his interest in cryptography is perhaps not totally unexpected?)
So… can you read “Esio Trot” yet? Or are you not as backwards as a tortoise? 😉