The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets (11 page)
Read The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets Online
Authors: Roald Dahl
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 meters. 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 favorite!).
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 airplanes 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.”
