The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets (8 page)

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!

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!”

“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.