The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets (12 page)
Read The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets Online
Authors: Roald Dahl
“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.”
* Music by Beethoven
* Football
* Racing greyhounds
* The color yellow
* Medical inventions
* Breeding homing budgies
* Golf
* Conkers
* Rugby
* Onions
* The smell of bacon frying
“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 traveled 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 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!
