‘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.