The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets (7 page)

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 December 16, 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 colored, 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?

Ideas for
Fantastic Mr. Fox
and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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:

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.”