PUFFIN BOOKS

Happy birthday, Puffin!

Did you know that in 1940 the very first Puffin story book (about a man with broomstick arms called Worzel Gummidge) was published? That’s 70 years ago! Since then the little Puffin logo has become one of the most recognized book brands in the world and Puffin has established its place in the hearts of millions.

And in 2010 we are celebrating 70 spectacular years of Puffin and its books! Pocket Money Puffins is a brand-new collection from your favourite authors at a pocket-money price – in a perfect pocket size. We hope you enjoy these exciting stories and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating the very best books for children. We may be 70 years old (sounds ancient, doesn’t it?) but Puffin has never been so lively and fun.

There really IS a Puffin book for everyone
– discover yours today.

Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents. He was educated in England and went on to work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa, becoming an RAF fighter pilot when the Second World War began. He wrote his first children’s story, James and the Giant Peach, in 1961 and every one of his subsequent books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Magic Finger, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Matilda, The Twits, The BFG and The Witches, has become a much-loved bestseller all over the world. Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four.

Books by Roald Dahl

The BFG

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

Danny the Champion of the World

The Enormous Crocodile

Esio Trot

Fantastic Mr Fox

George’s Marvellous Medicine

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

James and the Giant Peach

The Magic Finger

Matilda

Rhyme Stew

The Twits

The Witches

Roald Dahl

Illustrated by
Quentin Blake

art
PUFFIN

PUFFIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

puffinbooks.com

Extracts taken from: The Roald Dahl Diary 1992 first published 1991; Charlie’s Secret Chocolate Box first published 1997; D is for Dahl first published 2004; The Dahlmanac first published 2006; Dahlmanac 2 first published 2007; More About Boy first published 2008 – all published in Puffin Books; Roald Dahl’s Cookbook published by Penguin Books 1996.

‘Spotty Powder’ first published in Puffin Post Vol.7, No.1, 1973; ‘Strawberry-flavoured Chocolate-coated Fudge’ and ‘Butterscotch’ from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes published by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1994.

This edition first published 2010

Text and archive photographs copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 2010

Illustrations copyright © Quentin Blake, 2010

All rights reserved. The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196563-5

This was his advice from The Minpins: ‘Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most likely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’

 Augustus Gloop was originally named Augustus Pottle?

 Willy Wonka’s Oompa-Loompas were going to be called Whipple-Scrumpets?

 Cocoa pods are as big as rugby balls.

 Roald Dahl wanted to get rid of history teachers and have chocolate teachers instead.

These are just some of the splendiferous secrets you’ll discover in this delicious little treasure trove of Roald Dahl fun facts and surprises. You’ll also meet Quentin Blake, find out how to make strawberry-flavoured chocolate-coated fudge (YUM!), sneak a peek at Roald Dahl’s school reports and much, much more.

Contents

How Roald Dahl started writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl’s Year

Roald Dahl’s January

The Missing Children

Chocolate!

Roald Dahl’s February

The Whipple-Scrumpets

Mr Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Recipes

Roald Dahl’s Favourite Things

Roald Dahl’s March

Meet Quentin Blake

What Roald Dahl thought of Quentin Blake

Ideas Books

Roald Dahl’s April

Roald Dahl’s School Reports

Roald Dahl’s May

Roald’s Family Holidays

Roald Dahl’s June

A Missing Chapter

Spotty Powder

Roald Dahl’s July

What Roald Dahl thought about chocolate

Weird and wonderful Roald Dahl facts

He once had a tame magpie.

Roald’s Family Holidays

Roald Dahl’s August

More things that Roald Dahl liked

Advice from Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl’s September

Roald Dahl’s

Mr Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Recipes

Roald Dahl’s October

Charlie’s Quiz

Roald Dahl’s November

Roald Dahl’s Secret Writing Tips

Roald Dahl’s December

Charlie’s Chocolate Shop

‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory took me a terrible long time to write. The first time I did it, I got everything wrong. I wrote a story about a little boy who was going round a chocolate factory and he accidentally fell into a big tub of melted chocolate and got sucked into the machine that made chocolate figures and he couldn’t get out. It was a splendid big chocolate figure, a chocolate boy the same size as him. And it was Easter time, and the figure was put in a shop window, and in the end a lady came in and bought it as an Easter present for her little girl, and carried it home. On Easter Day, the little girl opened the box with her present in it, and took it out and then she decided to eat some of it. She would start with the head, she thought. So she broke off the nose, and when she saw a real human nose sticking out underneath and two big bright human eyes staring at her through the eye-holes in the chocolate, she got a nasty shock. And so it went on.

‘But the story wasn’t good enough. I rewrote it, and rewrote it, and the little tentacles kept shooting out from my head, searching for new ideas, and at last one of them came back with Mr Willy Wonka and his marvellous chocolate factory and then came Charlie and his parents and grandparents and the Golden Tickets and the nasty children, Violet Beauregarde and Veruca Salt and all the rest of them.

‘As a matter of fact, I got so wrapped up in all those nasty children, and they made me giggle so much that I couldn’t stop inventing them. In the first full version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I had no less than ten horrid little boys and girls. That was too many. It became confusing. It wasn’t a good book. But I liked them all so much, I didn’t want to take any of them out.

‘One of them, who was taken out in the end, was a horrid little girl who was disgustingly rude to her parents and also thoroughly disobedient. Her name was Miranda Mary Piker …’

Nature is full of secrets if you look hard enough. And Roald Dahl kept notes about the habits of butterflies and frogs, the colour and songs of birds, and the different flowers, plants and berries that blossomed in the countryside. Find out what Roald Dahl liked or disliked about every month of the year, including his favourite animals and birds. (And read about some of the hilarious pranks he got up to when he was a young boy too!)

‘For the last twelve months we have all been living in one year and now all of a sudden it is another. It is extraordinary how this tremendous change takes place in the space of a fraction of a second. As the clock approaches midnight on the thirty-first of December you are still in the old year, but then all at once, one millionth of a second after midnight, you are in the new. I have always found this sudden change from one year to another awfully hard to get used to, and all through the new January that follows I keep writing down the old year instead of the new one on letters and other bits of paper …

‘There is just one small bright spark shining through the gloom in my January garden. The first snowdrops are in flower.’

As you now know, Roald Dahl wrote several versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and included lots of very naughty characters. In a very early draft of the story, as many as ten children are lucky Golden Ticket finders who each win a tour of Mr Wonka’s Chocolate Factory:

Augustus Pottle who falls in the chocolate river Miranda Grope who also falls in after him Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck who climb in wagons running from the vanilla fudge mountain and end up in the Pounding and Cutting Room

Violet Strabismus who turns purple after chewing the three course-meal gum

Clarence Crump, Bertie Upside and Terence Roper who each cram a whole mouthful of warming candies and end up overheating

Elvira Entwhistle who falls foul of the squirrels in the Nut Room

And Charlie Bucket who gets stuck inside a chocolate statue and witnesses a burglary – and receives a very unusual reward …

Roald Dahl soon decided there were too many naughty children in the story. So, somewhat reluctantly, he reduced the number of lucky Golden Ticket finders to seven, and gave all the children distinct characteristics:

A nice boy

(previously Augustus Pottle) A greedy boy

A conceited boy (we never find out what happens to him)

A television-crazy boy (he became Mike Teavee in the final version!)

A girl who is allowed to HAVE anything she wants

A girl who chews gum all day long

A girl who is allowed to DO anything she wants

And it is in this draft that Charlie’s grandparents are introduced for the first time, and tiny people called ‘Whipple-Scrumpets’ become Mr Wonka’s workforce, reciting poems as each child leaves.

The Swiss eat more chocolate per person than any other nation in the world.

Belgium is the third biggest producer of chocolate in the world.

Just like Willy Wonka, many Belgian chocolate makers keep their recipes secret.

Cocoa was discovered by the South American Indians over 3,000 years ago.

The word ‘chocolate’ comes from chocolatl, the Aztec name for their chocolate drink.

The scientific name for cocoa means ‘food of the gods’.

Cocoa beans were considered so valuable, the Aztecs used them as money – ten beans would buy a rabbit!

Originally, chocolate was used just as a drink. The Spaniards took cocoa to Europe from Mexico in the sixteenth century. They kept the recipe for drinking-chocolate secret for nearly 100 years!

In 1606, an Italian took the recipe to Italy, and chocolate drinking became popular throughout Europe.

There was a royal chocolate maker at the court of Louis XIV.

At first, chocolate was only for the rich. They drank it in ‘chocolate houses’, which were like smart cafes.

The first chocolate factory in America was set up in 1765.

Cocoa powder is made from dried beans that are roasted and ground.

It takes a year’s crop of cocoa beans from one tree to make just one tin of cocoa!

Cocoa pods are as big as rugby balls. They contain about thirty beans.

Factories can produce over five million bars of chocolate a day.

‘Only once have I discovered a new molehill in our orchard in the month of February. I love seeing molehills because they tell me that only a few inches below the surface some charming and harmless little fellow is living his own private busy life scurrying up and down his tunnels hunting for food …

‘Do you know anything about moles? They are remarkable animals. They are shy and gentle and their fur coats are softer than velvet. They are so shy that you will seldom see one on the surface … The molehills that you see are not of course their houses. They are simply piles of loose soil that a mole has pushed up out of the way because, after all, if you are digging an underground tunnel you have to put the excavated soil somewhere.

‘His food consists of worms, leather-jackets, centipedes and beetle grubs, and the fantastic thing is that he actually has to eat one half of his own body weight of these tiny delicacies every single day in order to stay alive! No wonder he’s a busy fellow. Just imagine how much food you would have to eat to consume half your own body weight! Fifty hamburgers, one hundred loaves of bread and a bucketful of Mars Bars and the rest of it each and every day. It makes one quite ill to think about it!’

Have a look at an early version of the Whipple-Scrumpets’ song about greedy Augustus Gloop, and compare it to the one that actually appears in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, sung by the Oompa-Loompas. Can you spot the differences?

The Whipple-Scrumpets … began dancing about and clapping their hands and singing:

Augustus Gloop! Augustus Gloop!

The great big greedy nincompoop!

How long could we allow this beast

To gorge and guzzle, feed and feast

On everything he wanted to?

Great Scott! It simply wouldn’t do!

And so, you see, the time was ripe

To send him shooting up the pipe;

He had to go. It had to be.

And very soon he’s going to see

Inside the room to which he’s gone

Some funny things are going on.

But don’t, dear children, be alarmed.

Augustus Gloop will not be harmed,

Although, of course, we must admit

He will be altered quite a bit.

For instance, all those lumps of fat

Will disappear just like that!

He’ll shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink,

His skin will be no longer pink,

He’ll be so smooth and square and small

He will not know himself at all.

Farewell, Augustus Gloop, farewell!

For soon you’ll be a caramel!’

‘They’re teasing,’ Mr Wonka said, shaking a finger at the singing Whipple-Scrumpets. ‘You mustn’t believe a word they say.’

Strawberry-flavoured
Chocolate-coated Fudge

You will need:

20 × 25 cm shallow baking tin

Greaseproof paper

Large saucepan

Sugar thermometer

Cutters

450 g caster sugar

100 g unsalted butter

175 ml evaporated milk

A few generous drops of pink food-colouring

A generous ½ tsp (2.5 ml) of strawberry food-flavouring

100 g melted chocolate for dipping

Makes enough for ten greedy children

How to make:

[picture] | Line the tin with buttered greaseproof paper.
[picture] | Put all the ingredients except the flavouring and colouring into a large heavy-bottomed saucepan and place over a low heat.
[picture] | Stir occasionally. Once the sugar has dissolved, gently boil the mixture and now stir all the time (to prevent sticking and burning on the bottom of the pan).
[picture] | Place the sugar thermometer into the saucepan and boil the mixture to a soft ball (118°C). This takes about five minutes.

[picture] | Take the pan off the heat, stir until the bubbles subside and then add the flavouring and the colouring.
[picture] | Beat rapidly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens and becomes granular, approximately three minutes.
[picture] | Pour the fudge into the lined tin and leave to set. If necessary, smooth with a palette knife dipped into boiling water.
[picture] | With shaped cutters, cut out the fudge and dip one side into the melted chocolate, or decorate with piped chocolate, creating different patterns. | [picture]
Please ask a grown-up to help you when you are handling anything hot.

Come rain, shine, frost or snow, Roald Dahl could be found inside the shed at the end of his garden. This was where he wrote. And beside him there was a table where he kept his most favourite things. They’re all still there.

Here are some of the items on Roald Dahl’s table:

[picture] | A ball made from silver chocolate wrappers.
[picture] | A small model of a Hurricane fighter plane.
[picture] | His hipbone.
[picture] | A glass bottle filled with mauve-coloured bits of gristle taken from Roald Dahl’s spine during an operation.
[picture] | A photo of his granddaughter Sophie.
[picture] | A meteorite the size of a golf ball.
[picture] | His father’s silver-and-tortoiseshell paper-knife.
[picture] | A solar-powered musical box.
[picture] | A carving of a green grasshopper.
[picture] | A cone from a cedar tree.

‘I rather like the month of March … your heart is lifted by the signs of approaching spring all around you. Halfway through the month most of the hedges are covered with a pale powdering of green as the little leaf buds begin to burst, and the pussy willows are smothered in yellow pollen. Crocuses are flowering brilliantly and best of all, the nesting season is beginning to get seriously under way … I can see a pair of blackbirds building high up in the trunk of the big clipped yew tree … I watch a thrush carrying bits of dry grass up into the branches of the vine … I see a pair of blue tits popping in and out of a small hole in the wooden tool shed … I see a pair of robins making a mossy nest in the bank underneath the heather bed …

‘By the end of the month ladybirds are on the wing once again, and you will notice that nearly all of them are the two-spotted kind. Peacock butterflies and small tortoiseshells are emerging from their winter sleep, hunting for early flowers. Bumblebees and honeybees have also woken up and are in among the crocuses, looking for pollen.’

Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake make a perfect partnership of words and illustrations, but when Roald started writing, he had many different illustrators.

Quentin started working with him in 1976 (the first book he illustrated was The Enormous Crocodile, published in 1978) and from then on they worked together until Roald’s death. Quentin ended up illustrating all of Roald Dahl’s books, with the exception of The Minpins.

To begin with, Quentin was a bit nervous about working with such a very famous author, but by the time they collaborated on The BFG, they had become firm friends. Quentin never knew anything about a new story until the manuscript arrived. ‘You’ll have some fun with this,’ Roald would say – or, ‘You’ll have some trouble with this.’ Quentin would make lots of rough drawings to take along to Gipsy House, where he would show them to Roald and see what he thought. Roald Dahl liked his books to be packed with illustrations – Quentin ended up drawing twice as many pictures for The BFG as he had originally been asked for.

Quentin Blake was born on 16 December 1932. His first drawing was published when he was sixteen, and he has written and illustrated many of his own books, as well as Roald Dahl’s. Besides being an illustrator he taught for over twenty years at the Royal College of Art – he is a real professor!

‘It is Quent’s pictures rather than my own written descriptions that have brought to life such characters as the BFG, Miss Trunchbull, Mr Twit and The Grand High Witch. It is the faces and the bodies he draws that are remembered by children all over the world … When he and I work together on a new book and he has a pen in his hand, it is magical to watch the facility with which he can sketch out a character or a scene. “You mean more like this?” he will say, and the nib will fly over the paper at incredible speed, making thin lines in black ink, and in thirty seconds he has produced a new picture. “Perhaps,” I will say, “he should have a more threatening look about him.” Once again the pen flies over the paper and there before you is exactly what you are after. But this is not to say that I “help” him with many of the characters he draws for my books. Most of them he does entirely on his own and they are far better and funnier than anything I could think of.’

Roald Dahl kept two ideas books for about forty years. They were both old school exercise books, the first of which was sandy coloured, and the second red and very battered. He thought that good ideas were like dreams – soon forgotten – and made sure that he wrote them down straight away. He then ticked the really good ideas and crossed out the ones he had used. Some ideas were developed years and years after they were jotted down. Can you guess which books came from these ideas?

If Roald Dahl hadn’t been an author, he could have been a doctor, a boxer, a golfer, an inventor, a scientist, a botanist or a picture framer. He had a natural talent for all of these things. And he was interested in just about EVERYTHING. But here are a few of the things he was especially fascinated by:

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings

Eighteenth-century English furniture

Gardening

Orchids

Music

Wine

Gambling

Good food

Chocolate

Roald Dahl once said, ‘If I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead.’

‘Now at last we can say that spring has arrived, and with it come flocks of summer migrants, all those little birds that flew away to the warmer countries in the south when it began to get cold last October. Most of them go as far as North Africa and don’t ask me how they find their way there and back again because that is one of the great mysteries of the world. There are skylarks, greenfinches, goldfinches, whitethroats, willow-warblers, golden plovers, blackcaps, swallows, house-martins, chiffchaffs and many more besides, and soon after they arrive they pair up and start to build their nests.’

In 1929, when he was thirteen, Roald Dahl was sent to boarding school. You would expect him to get wonderful marks in English – but his school reports were not good!

EASTER TERM, aged 15. English Composition. ‘A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.’

SUMMER TERM, aged 16. English Composition. ‘This boy is an indolent and illiterate member of the class.’

There’s worse to come!

‘May is the month of the cuckoo … Everyone living in the countryside knows when the cuckoos start arriving because you cannot help hearing the loud, eerie, almost human call of the male bird. It quite literally says, “Cuck-koo, cuck-koo,” and the voice carries for miles … Unlike most other birds, cuckoos do not pair up and stay together, so there are no marriages or family life in cuckooland. No cuckoo has ever bothered to build its own nest or hatch or feed its young. The female (carrying her egg in her beak) searches the hedgerows until she finds the nest of another bird that already has eggs in it, and she slips her own egg in with the others and flies away and forgets all about it. ‘ … The mother hedge sparrow doesn’t seem to mind at all and proceeds to sit on the egg and incubate it together with her own. Little does she know what is going to happen when all the eggs hatch … the cuckoo chick grows three times as fast as the little sparrows. The overgrown baby cuckoo proceeds quite literally to push the baby hedge sparrows one by one out of the nest to die, and in the end all that is left is this grotesque, huge, fluffy cuckoo chick filling the entire nest. The hedge sparrow parents don’t seem to notice what has happened and they go on feeding this murderer until in the end it is big enough to hop out of the nest and fly away without so much as a thank you!’

Roald Dahl’s father died when Roald was only three so his mother brought up him and his sisters on her own.

Every Easter she rented a house in Tenby, Wales, and took all the children there for a holiday.

The house, called The Cabin, was right next to the sea. When the tide was in, the waves broke right up against one wall of the house. Roald and his sisters used to collect winkles and eat them on slices of bread and butter.

‘June is the month of the foxglove, perhaps the most beautiful of all the wild flowers. The foxglove also gives us a drug called digitalis which is valuable to doctors in treating heart conditions. Barley is already standing tall in the fields. Don’t confuse it with the other two main cereals, wheat and oats. Barley has long itchy spikes covering the seeds, and if you pick one of these heads and slip it under the sleeve of your jacket or shirt with the long spikes pointing downwards, the head will actually climb all the way up to your shoulder as you walk along swinging your arm.

‘During this month the tadpoles in the ponds are beginning to sprout tiny arms and legs, and soon they will be turning into small frogs. Be nice to frogs, by the way. They are your friends in the garden. They eat the beastly slugs and never harm your flowers. There is so much beauty in the countryside in June. The lovely pink dog roses are in full bloom along the hedges and wild honeysuckle is plentiful.

‘I’m afraid that if you live in a town you don’t see any of these splendid sights …’

The following secret chapter was originally included in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But because there were too many naughty children in the earlier versions of the book, ‘Spotty Powder’ – and the revolting Miranda Mary Piker – had to be dropped.

Luckily, Roald Dahl kept it in a very safe place, so you could read it here …

‘This stuff,’ said Mr Wonka, ‘is going to cause chaos in schools all over the world when I get it in the shops.’

The room they now entered had rows and rows of pipes coming straight up out of the floor. The pipes were bent over at the top and they looked like large walking sticks. Out of every pipe there trickled a stream of white crystals. Hundreds of Oompa-Loompas were running to and fro, catching the crystals in little golden boxes and stacking the boxes against the walls.

‘Spotty Powder!’ exclaimed Mr Wonka, beaming at the company. ‘There it is!’ That’s it! Fantastic stuff!’

‘It looks like sugar,’ said Miranda Piker.

‘It’s meant to look like sugar,’ Mr Wonka said. ‘And it tastes like sugar. But it isn’t sugar. Oh, dear me, no.’

‘Then what is it?’ asked Miranda Piker, speaking rather rudely.

‘That door over there,’ said Mr Wonka, turning away from Miranda and pointing to a small red door at the far end of the room, ‘leads directly down to the machine that makes the powder. Twice a day, I go down there myself to feed it. But I’m the only one. Nobody ever comes with me.’

They all stared at the little door on which it said MOST SECRET – KEEP OUT.

The hum and throb of powerful machinery could be heard coming up from the depths below, and the floor itself was vibrating all the time. The children could feel it through the soles of their shoes.

Miranda Piker now pushed forward and stood in front of Mr Wonka. She was a nasty-looking girl with a smug face and a smirk on her mouth, and whenever she spoke it was always with a voice that seemed to be saying, ‘Everybody is a fool except me.’

‘OK,’ Miranda Piker said, smirking at Mr Wonka. ‘So what’s the big news? What’s this stuff meant to do when you eat it?’

‘Ah-ha,’ said Mr Wonka, his eyes sparkling with glee. ‘You’d never guess that, not in a million years. Now listen. All you have to do is sprinkle it over your cereal at breakfast-time, pretending it’s sugar.

Then you eat it. And then, exactly five seconds after that, you come out in bright red spots all over your face and neck.’

‘What sort of a silly ass wants spots on his face at breakfast-time?’ said Miranda Piker.

‘Let me finish,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘So then your mother looks at you across the table and says, “My poor child. You must have chickenpox. You can’t possibly go to school today.” So you stay at home. But by lunch-time, the spots have all disappeared.’

‘Terrific!’ shouted Charlie. ‘That’s just what I want for the day we have exams!’

‘That is the ideal time to use it,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘But you mustn’t do it too often or it’ll give the game away. Keep it for the really nasty days.’

‘Father!’ cried Miranda Piker. ‘Did you hear what this stuff does? It’s shocking! It mustn’t be allowed!’

Mr Piker, Miranda’s father, stepped forward and faced Mr Wonka. He had a smooth white face like a boiled onion.

‘Now see here, Wonka,’ he said. ‘I happen to be the headmaster of a large school, and I won’t allow you to sell this rubbish to the children! It’s … criminal! Why, you’ll ruin the school system of the entire country!’

‘I hope so,’ said Mr Wonka.

‘It’s got to be stopped!’ shouted Mr Piker, waving his cane.

‘Who’s going to stop it?’ asked Mr Wonka. ‘In my factory, I make things to please children. I don’t care about grown-ups.’

‘I am top of my form,’ Miranda Piker said, smirking at Mr Wonka. ‘And I’ve never missed a day’s school in my life.’

‘Then it’s time you did,’ Mr Wonka said.

‘How dare you!’ said Mr Piker.

‘All holidays and vacations should be stopped!’ cried Miranda. ‘Children are meant to work, not play.’

‘Quite right, my girl,’ cried Mr Piker, patting Miranda on the top of the head. ‘All work and no play has made you what you are today.’

‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ said Mrs Piker, beaming at her daughter.

‘Come on then, Father!’ cried Miranda. ‘Let’s go down into the cellar and smash the machine that makes this dreadful stuff!’

‘Forward!’ shouted Mr Piker, brandishing his cane and making a dash for the little red door on which it said MOST SECRET – KEEP OUT.

‘Stop!’ said Mr Wonka. ‘Don’t go in there! It’s terribly secret!’

‘Let’s see you stop us, you old goat!’ shouted Miranda.

‘We’ll smash it to smithereens!’ yelled Mr Piker. And a few seconds later the two of them had disappeared through the door.

There was a moment’s silence.

Then, far off in the distance, from somewhere deep underground, there came a fearful scream.

‘That’s my husband!’ cried Mrs Piker, going blue in the face.

There was another scream.

‘And that’s Miranda!’ yelled Mrs Piker, beginning to hop around in circles. ‘What’s happening to them? What have you got down there, you dreadful beast?’

‘Oh nothing much,’ Mr Wonka answered. ‘Just a lot of cogs and wheels and chains and things like that, all going round and round and round.’

‘You villain!’ she screamed. ‘I know your tricks! You’re grinding them into powder! In two minutes my darling Miranda will come pouring out of one of those dreadful pipes, and so will my husband!’

‘Of course,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘That’s part of the recipe.’

‘It’s what!’

‘We’ve got to use one or two schoolmasters occasionally or it wouldn’t work.’

‘Did you hear him?’ shrieked Mrs Piker, turning to the others. ‘He admits it! He’s nothing but a cold-blooded murderer!’

Mr Wonka smiled and patted Mrs Piker gently on the arm.

‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘I was only joking.’

‘Then why did they scream?’ snapped Mrs Piker. ‘I distinctly heard them scream!’

‘Those weren’t screams,’ Mr Wonka said. ‘They were laughs.’

‘My husband never laughs,’ said Mrs Piker.

Mr Wonka flicked his fingers, and up came an Oompa-Loompa.

‘Kindly escort Mrs Piker to the boiler room,’ Mr Wonka said. ‘Don’t fret, dear lady,’ he went on, shaking Mrs Piker warmly by the hand. ‘They’ll all come out in the wash. There’s nothing to worry about. Off you go. Thank you for coming! Farewell! Goodbye! A pleasure to meet you!’

‘Listen, Charlie!’ said Grandpa Joe. ‘The Oompa-Loompas are starting to sing again!’

‘Oh, Miranda Mary Piker!’ sang the five Oompa-Loompas, dancing about and laughing and beating madly on their tiny drums.

‘Oh, Miranda Mary Piker,

How could anybody like her,

Such a priggish and revolting little kid.

So we said, “Why don’t we fix her

In the Spotty-Powder mixer

Then we’re bound to like her better than we did.”

Soon this child who is so vicious

Will have gotten quite delicious,

And her classmates will have surely understood

That instead of saying, “Miranda!

Oh, the beast! We cannot stand her!”

They’ll be saying, “Oh, how useful

And how good!” ’

‘Sunday afternoons were the only times we had free throughout the school week, and most boys went for long walks in the countryside. But I took no long Sunday afternoon walks during my last term. My walks took me only as far as the garage in Wilmington where my lovely motorbike was hidden. There I would put on my disguise – my waders and helmet and goggles and wind jacket – and go sailing in a state of absolute bliss through the highways and byways of Derbyshire. But the greatest thrill of all was to ride at least once every Sunday afternoon slap through the middle of Repton village, sailing past the pompous prefects and the masters in their gowns and mortarboards. … Don’t forget that those were the days when schools like mine were merciless places where serious misdemeanours were punished by savage beatings that drew blood from your backside. I am quite sure that if I had ever been caught, that same headmaster would have thrashed me within an inch of my life and would probably have expelled me into the bargain. That is what made it so exciting. I never told anyone, not even my best friend, where I went on my Sunday walks. I had learnt from a tender age that there are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself and this was the greatest secret I had ever had to keep in my life so far.’

‘My passion for chocolate did not really begin until I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and there was a good reason for this. Today chocolate-guzzling begins when the child is about five and it goes on with increasing intensity until the guzzler gets to be about twelve …

‘Things were different when I was young. The reason that neither I nor any of my generation developed the chocolate-guzzling bug early on was quite simply that in those days there were very few delicious chocolate bars available in the sweet-shops to tempt us. That’s why they were called sweet-shops and not chocolate-shops. Had I been born ten years later, it would have been another story, but, unfortunately for me, I grew up in the 1920s and the great golden years of the chocolate revolution had not yet begun.

‘When I was young, a small child going into the sweet-shop clutching his pocket money would be offered very little choice in the way of chocolate bars as we know them today. There was the Cadbury’s Bournville Bar and the Dairy Milk Bar. There was the Dairy Milk Flake (the only great invention so far) and the Whipped-cream Walnut … meagre pickings when you compare it with the splendid array of different chocolate bars that you see on display today.

‘Consequently, in those days we small boys and girls were much more inclined to spend our money either on sweets and toffees or on some of the many very cheap and fairly disgusting things … sherbet-suckers and gobstoppers and liquorice bootlaces and aniseed balls, and we did not mind that the liquorice was made from rat’s blood and the sherbet from sawdust. They were cheap and to us they tasted good. So on the whole, we made do with eating sweets and toffees and junk instead of chocolate.

‘Then came the revolution and the entire world of chocolate was suddenly turned upside-down in the space of seven glorious years between 1930 and 1937. Here’s a brief summary of what happened.

[picture] | Cadbury’s began production of milk-bars, starting with the Dairy Milk Bar.
[picture] | The plain one, the Bournville Bar, came five years later.
[picture] | Then came the first great speciality chocolate bar, the Dairy Milk Flake. This was a milestone, the first time any manufacturer had started seriously playing around with chocolate in their Inventing Rooms.
[picture] | Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bar appeared on the market.
[picture] | A chocolate manufacturing company called Frys invented the Crunchie.

Suddenly, a new company appeared called Mars. A young American man called Forrest Mars came to England and in a small laboratory in Slough he started experimenting with his father’s recipe for the Milky Way to make it better … and the Mars Bar was born … and very soon 600 million of them were being eaten every year in England alone.

[picture] | Black Magic assorted chocolates appeared in boxes.
[picture] | The lovely Aero was introduced.
[picture] | Don’t forget Forrest Mars. In spite of the phenomenal success of his Mars Bar, this genius was still experimenting in his laboratory and came up with another classic beauty – Maltesers. In the same year, Quality Street was also put on to the market.
[picture] | Another golden year during which monumental classic lines were invented: Kit Kat, Rolo and Smarties.’

And – for all you chocolate-guzzlers – they are all still available in the shops today!

He was very tall – six feet five and three-quarter inches, or nearly two metres. His nickname in the RAF was Lofty, while Walt Disney called him Stalky (because he was like a beanstalk!).

He was a terrible speller, but he liked playing Scrabble.

His nickname at home was the Apple, because he was the apple of his mother’s eye (which means her favourite!).

He pretended to have appendicitis when he was nine because he was so homesick in his first two weeks at boarding school. He fooled the matron and the school doctor and was sent home. But he couldn’t fool his own doctor, who made him promise never to do it again.

He didn’t like cats – but he did like dogs, birds and goats.

Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.

He was a keen photographer at school and, when he was eighteen, won two prizes: one from the Royal Photographic Society in London and another from the Photographic Society of Holland.

In the churchyard at Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, big friendly giant footprints lead to Roald Dahl’s grave.

Best of all were the summer holidays. From the time he was four years old to when he was seventeen, Roald and his family went to Norway every summer. There were no commercial aeroplanes in those days, so the journey was a splendid expedition. It took four days to get there, and four days to get back again! The sea crossing from Newcastle to Oslo lasted two days and a night – and Roald was generally seasick.

Finally, they would reach what Roald Dahl called ‘the magic island’, the island of Tjøme in a Norwegian fjord. The family would swim and sunbathe, mess about in rock pools, and go fishing. When Roald was seven, his mother acquired a motor boat and they could explore other islands.

‘We would cling to the sides of our funny little white motor boat, driving through mountainous white-capped waves and getting drenched to the skin, while my mother calmly handled the tiller. There were times, I promise you, when the waves were so high that as we slid down into a trough the whole world disappeared from sight … It requires great skill to handle a small boat in seas like these … But my mother knew exactly how to do it, and we were never afraid.’

‘I find August in England a rather torpid month. The trees and plants have all done their growing for the year and nature is hanging motionless in suspension before sinking slowly into the decline of winter. There is a brownish look to the countryside and the leaves are hanging heavy on the trees. But if it is nothing else, it is the month of the butterfly. Butterflies are lovely things. They do no harm to man himself either by stinging, biting or spreading disease. Nor are they beneficial to man as the silkworm is or the honeybee. The large white or cabbage butterfly is the only one that is a nuisance because it lays eggs on your cabbages and these hatch out into horrid hungry caterpillars …

‘August is, by the way, the month when young adders are born in heathy, hilly places, and baby grass snakes emerge from their eggs in rotting leaves and old compost heaps. It is the month when hedgehogs have their litters of babies, all born blind and helpless, and I’m afraid it is also the month when wasps come on the warpath, stinging humans in great numbers.’

‘At the age of eight I became a mad diary enthusiast … I was a bit of a loner in those days and a bit of a dreamer and some of the things I wrote down for the next five or six years were thoughts that I don’t think I would have dared even to speak out aloud to myself. That’s the beauty of writing. You find that you can actually write things down that are quite outlandish and outrageous and you feel all the better for it.’

‘I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.’

‘I have always loved this month. As a schoolboy I loved it because it is the Month of the Conker … We all know, of course, that a great conker is one that has been sorted in a dry place for at least a year. This matures it and makes it rock hard and therefore very formidable. We also know about the short cuts that less dedicated players take to harden their conkers. Some soak them in vinegar for a week. Others bake them in the oven at a low temperature for six hours. But such methods are not for the true conker player. No world-champion conker has ever been produced by short cuts …

‘The best conker I ever had was a conker 109, and I can still remember that frosty morning in the school playground when my one-o-nine was finally shattered by Perkins’s conker 74 in an epic contest that lasted over half an hour. After it, I felt even more shattered than my conker!’

When Roald was sixteen, he decided to go off on his own to holiday in France. He crossed the Channel from Dover to Calais with £24 in his pocket (a lot of money in 1933). Roald wanted to see the Mediterranean Sea, so he took the train first to Paris, then on to Marseilles where he got on a bus that went all the way along the coastal road towards Monte Carlo. He finished up at a place called St Jean Cap Ferrat and stayed there for ten days, wandering around by himself and doing whatever he wanted. It was his first taste of absolute freedom – and what it was like to be a grown-up.

He travelled back home the same way but, by the time he reached Dover, he had absolutely no money left. Luckily a fellow passenger gave him ten shillings (50p in today’s money!) for his tram fare home. Roald never forgot this kindness and generosity.

When Roald was seventeen he signed up to go to Newfoundland, Canada, with ‘The Public Schools’ Exploring Society’. Together with thirty other boys, he spent three weeks trudging over a desolate landscape with an enormous rucksack. It weighed so much that he needed someone to help him hoist it on to his back every morning. The boys lived on pemmican (strips of pressed meat, fat and berries) and lentils, and they experimented with eating boiled lichen and reindeer moss because they were so hungry. It was a genuine adventure and left Roald fit and ready for anything!

Butterscotch

You will need:

large saucepan

large jug

whisk

cling film

25 g butter

25 g caster sugar

25 g golden syrup

600 ml fat-free milk

75 ml natural yoghurt

Makes approx 3–4 mugs

How to make:

In a saucepan, over a low heat, melt together the butter, sugar and golden syrup, stirring all the time until the sugar has dissolved (about ten minutes). Add a little milk to the pan, then transfer to a jug.

Whisk in a little more milk, approx 50 ml, followed by all of the yoghurt.

Whisk in the remaining milk.

Cover with cling film. Chill before serving.

Please ask a grown-up to help you when you are handling anything hot.

‘This, like September, is a lovely month, mild and misty and smelling of ripe apples. We have a small orchard at the back of our house … there was so much fruit every autumn that I told all the children in the village they could come in at any time and ask to borrow a ladder and pick what they wanted. They came in droves …

‘During October swarms of migrant birds cross the North Sea from Scandinavia to our shores. Some, like starlings and blackbirds and thrushes and rooks and jackdaws, will stay here for the winter. Others, like the skylarks and goldcrests and finches, will rest before going on south to spend the winter in Africa …

‘At this time of year our hedges are covered with old man’s beard and woody nightshade. Hips and haws make splashes of crimson everywhere. In the grassy banks on either side, an enormous number of different wild flowers and ferns grow. On weekends I see groups of enthusiastic botanists from London hunting for rare specimens. They walk slowly up the lane peering into the banks and calling to one another when they find something interesting. I like these people. I like enthusiasts of any kind.’

   How many new kinds of chocolate bar has Mr Willy Wonka invented?

   What did Prince Pondicherry ask Willy Wonka to do?

   How do the chocolates and sweets come out of Mr Wonka’s factory?

   Why does Violet Beauregarde turn into a gigantic blueberry?

   How many Golden Tickets are there altogether?

   Who finds the second Golden Ticket?

   What does Violet Beauregarde do all day?

   What does Mike Teavee like doing best?

    In what kind of chocolate bar does Charlie find his Golden Ticket?

   What sort of coat does Willy Wonka wear?

   Where are the most important rooms in Willy Wonka’s factory?

   How is the chocolate mixed?

   What happens to Augustus Gloop?

   What is Willy Wonka’s private yacht made from?

   Which is the most important room in the whole factory?

   Who pushes Veruca Salt down the rubbish chute?

   Why is the lift so special?

   What happens when Willy Wonka presses the UP AND OUT button in the lift?

   What does Mike Teavee look like when he leaves the factory?

   What present does Willy Wonka decide to give Charlie?

Turn to page 118 for the answers –
if you really have to!

‘November is the middle of what we used to call the Christmas term. I had my first Christmas term away from home when I was eight years old. And it is also the month of fireworks and Guy Fawkes. Oh, how we used to look forward to the fifth of November at boarding school … We had jackie jumpers, Roman candles, crack-bangers, fire-serpents, big bombers, rockets and golden rain!

‘There is a badger’s earth in the wood above our house, and this month the badgers are busy digging their deep winter quarters and lining them with dry leaves for warmth. Before November is out, they will have blocked up the entrances to their holes and will sleep the winter through. Like the badgers, the grass snakes are all starting to hibernate, but they are not as domesticated as the badgers. They have no real homes and simply hide themselves among the twisted tree roots underneath the hedges, and quite often they will coil themselves around each other for comfort. For many small animals, the approach of winter means the time to go to sleep until spring arrives again. It would make life a lot more comfortable if we could do the same!’

‘The job of a children’s writer is to try to write a book that is so exciting and fast and wonderful that the child falls in love with it.’

Have you got what it takes to be an author? You might well have – it’s just that you don’t know it yet!

Believe it or not, Roald Dahl only found out he could write by accident. At the age of twenty-six he was ‘discovered’ by C. S. Forester, author of the Captain Horatio Hornblower stories. From that moment, he never stopped writing.

But it’s not easy. These are the qualities Roald Dahl suggested you will need if you are going to become a writer:

‘You should have a lively imagination.

You should be able to write well. By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind.

You must have stamina. In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up.

You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.

You must have strong self-discipline.

It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humour.

You must have a degree of humility. The writer who thinks that his work is marvellous is heading for trouble.’

Point 4 is crucial. Roald Dahl spent many months writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, as you know, there was a first draft, then a second, then a third, and so on. Some bits were added in, other bits taken out. With each rewrite, the story would get better and better.

‘One Christmas, when I was about nine or ten, I had been given a fine Meccano set as my main present, and I decided I would make a device that was capable of ‘bombing’ from the air the pedestrians using the public footpath across our land.

‘Briefly my plan was as follows: I would stretch a wire all the way from the high roof of our house to the old garage on the other side of the footpath. Then I would construct from my Meccano a machine that would hang from the wire by a grooved wheel and this machine would hopefully run down the wire at great speed dropping its bombs on the unwary walkers underneath.

‘Next morning, filled with the enthusiasm that grips all great inventors, I climbed on to the roof of our house by the skylight and wrapped one end of the long roll of wire around a chimney. I threw the rest of the wire into the garden below and went back down myself through the skylight. I carried the wire across the garden, over the fence, across the footpath, over the next fence and into our land on the other side. I now pulled the wire very tight and fixed it with a big nail to the top of the door of the old garage. So far so good.

‘Next I set about constructing from the Meccano my bombing machine, or chariot as I called it. I put the wheel at the top, and then running down from the wheel I made a strong column about two feet long (a metre). At the lower end of this column, I fixed two arms that projected outwards at right angles, one on either side, and along these arms I suspended five empty Heinz soup tins. The whole thing looked something like this:

‘… I filled all the soup tins with water. I lay flat on the roof waiting for a victim. Soon two ladies dressed in tweed skirts and jackets and each wearing a hat, came strolling up the path with a revolting little Pekinese dog on a lead. I knew I had to time this carefully, so when they were very nearly but not quite directly under the wire, I let my chariot go. Down she went, making a wonderful screeching-humming noise as the metal wheel ran down the wire and the string ran through my fingers at great speed. Bombing from a height is never easy. I had to guess when my chariot was directly over the target, and when that moment came, I jerked the string. The chariot stopped dead and the tins swung upside down and all the water tipped out. The ladies, who had halted and looked up on hearing the rushing noise of my chariot overhead, caught the cascade of water full in their faces. It was tremendous. A bulls-eye first time. The women screamed. I lay flat on the roof so as not to be seen, peering over the edge, and I saw the women shouting and waving their arms. Then they came marching straight into our garden through the gate at the back and crossed the garden and hammered on the door. I nipped down smartly through the skylight and did a bunk.

‘Later on my mother fixed me with a steely eye and told me she was confiscating my Meccano set for the rest of the holidays. But for days afterwards I experienced the pleasant warm glow that comes to all of us when we have brought off a major triumph!’

At one time, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was going to end very differently! This was the ending in an earlier version:

The shop has been finished now, and it is the most beautiful chocolate shop in the world. It occupies a whole block in the centre of the city, and it is nine storeys high.

Inside it, there are moving staircases and elevators to take the customers up and down, and no less than one hundred ladies, all dressed in spotless gold and chocolate uniforms, are there to serve behind the counters. They will sell you anything you want from a single little blue bird’s egg with a tiny sugary bird inside it to a life-size chocolate elephant with huge curvy tusks and a chocolate elephant driver sitting on its back.

And Charlie Bucket, coming home from school in the evenings, nearly always brings along with him about twenty or thirty of his friends and tells them that they can choose anything they want – for free.

‘It’s my shop,’ he says. ‘Just help yourselves.’

And so they do.

Isn’t it amazing how much a book can change before it is published?

If you keep looking hard enough, you might just find something new and magical that has never been seen before. Who knows? One day you may even discover the secret of what it takes to become as great a writer as Roald Dahl!

1 | More than two hundred
2 | Build him a chocolate palace
3 | Through a special trap door in the wall
4 | Because she chews a piece of the three-course-dinner chewing-gum
5 | Five
6 | Veruca Salt
7 | She chews gum
8 | Watching television
9 | A Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight
10 | A tailcoat made of plum-coloured velvet
11 | Underground
12 | By waterfall
13 | He falls into the chocolate river and gets sucked up a pipe into the strawberry-flavoured chocolate-coated fudge room
14 | An enormous hollowed-out boiled sweet
15 | The Inventing Room
16 | The squirrels

17 | It can go in any direction, and visit any room in the factory
18 | The lift flies out through the roof of the factory
19 | About ten feet tall and thin as a wire
20 | The whole chocolate factory