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  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. And I remember she fell into a machine that made peanut-brittle. And at the end of it all the Oompa-Loompas sang this song (which never appeared in the book):

  Oh Miranda Mary Piker

  Now could anybody like her,

  Such a rude and disobedient little kid.

  So we said why don’t we fix her

  In the peanut-brittle mixer.

  Then we’re sure to like her better than we did.

  Soon this child who was so vicious

  Will have gotten quite delicious,

  And her father will have surely understood,

  That instead of saying, ‘Miranda, oh the beast I

  cannot stand her’,

  He’ll be saying, ‘Oh, how luscious and how good!’

  * * *

  These lucky characters did make it into the final draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  * * *

  VERUCA SALT

  MIKE TEAVEE

  AUGUSTUS GLOOP

  VIOLET BEUREGUARDE

  * * *

  Corkers

  There were about thirty or more masters at Repton and most of them were amazingly dull and totally colourless and completely uninterested in boys. But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes. He wore creaseless flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with patches all over it and bits of dried food on the lapels. He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be. His lessons consisted of an endless series of distractions all invented by him so that the subject of mathematics would never have to be discussed. He would come lumbering into the classroom and sit down at his desk and glare at the class. We would wait expectantly, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the crossword puzzle in today’s Times,’ he would say, fishing a crumpled newspaper out of his jacket pocket. ‘That’ll be a lot more fun than fiddling around with figures. I hate figures. Figures are probably the dreariest things on this earth.’

  ‘Then why do you teach mathematics, sir?’ somebody asked him.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said, smiling slyly. ‘I only pretend to teach it.’

  * * *

  Major Noel Strickland (also known as ‘Strickers’ or ‘Corkers’).

  * * *

  Corkers would proceed to draw the framework of the crossword on the blackboard and we would all spend the rest of the lesson trying to solve it while he read out the clues. We enjoyed that.

  The only time I can remember him vaguely touching upon mathematics was when he whisked a square of tissue-paper out of his pocket and waved it around. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘This tissue-paper is one-hundredth of an inch thick. I fold it once, making it double. I fold it again, making it four thicknesses. Now then, I will give a large bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut Milk Chocolate to any boy who can tell me, to the nearest twelve inches, how thick it will be if I fold it fifty times.’

  We all stuck up our hands and started guessing. ‘Twenty-four inches, sir’ … ‘Three feet, sir’ … ‘Five yards, sir’ … ‘Three inches, sir.’

  ‘You’re not very clever, are you,’ Corkers said. ‘The answer is the distance from the earth to the sun. That’s how thick it would be.’ We were enthralled by this piece of intelligence and asked him to prove it on the blackboard, which he did.

  Another time, he brought a two-foot-long grass-snake into class and insisted that every boy should handle it in order to cure us for ever, as he said, of a fear of snakes. This caused quite a commotion.

  * * *

  Here’s another of Roald Dahl’s favourite facts:

  ‘You each have or had four grandparents. Taking each generation as thirty years you can easily prove that back in the fifteenth century you had about eight million direct ancestors. This was more that the entire population of Britain at that time. Therefore, everyone was your own direct ancestor. Chaucer and Shakespeare must have been one of your great great grandparents. And I’ve never been able to find out why this isn’t really true although the arithmetic proves it.’

  * * *

  I cannot remember all the other thousands of splendid things that old Corkers cooked up to keep his class happy, but there was one that I shall never forget which was repeated at intervals of about three weeks throughout each term. He would be talking to us about this or that when suddenly he would stop in mid-sentence and a look of intense pain would cloud his ancient countenance. Then his head would come up and his great nose would begin to sniff the air and he would cry aloud, ‘By God! This is too much! This is going too far! This is intolerable!’

  We knew exactly what was coming next, but we always played along with him. ‘What’s the matter, sir? What’s happened? Are you all right, sir? Are you feeling ill?’

  Up went the great nose once again, and the head would move slowly from side to side and the nose would sniff the air delicately as though searching for a leak of gas or the smell of something burning. ‘This is not to be tolerated!’ he would cry. ‘This is unbearable!’

  ‘But what’s the matter, sir?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s the matter,’ Corkers would shout. ‘Somebody’s farted!’

  ‘Oh no, sir!’ … ‘Not me, sir!’ … ‘Nor me, sir!’ … ‘It’s none of us, sir!’

  At this point, he would rise majestically to his feet and call out at the top of his voice, ‘Use door as fan! Open all windows!’

  This was the signal for frantic activity and everyone in the class would leap to his feet. It was a well-rehearsed operation and each of us knew exactly what he had to do. Four boys would man the door and begin swinging it back and forth at great speed. The rest would start clambering about on the gigantic windows which occupied one whole wall of the room, flinging the lower ones open, using a long pole with a hook on the end to open the top ones, and leaning out to gulp the fresh air in mock distress. While this was going on, Corkers himself would march serenely out of the room, muttering, ‘It’s the cabbage that does it! All they give you is disgusting cabbage and Brussels sprouts and you go off like fire-crackers!’ And that was the last we saw of Corkers for the day.

  * * *

  The school shop at Repton was known as ‘the Grubber’. Recognize the name? Roald Dahl used it for the sweetshop in The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me. But unlike the shop in the story, the Grubber at Repton sold everything from sweets to cricket shoes.

  * * *

  * * *

  The boys at Repton were allowed to cook for themselves – and here are just some of the letters in which Roald Dahl describes what he liked to eat …

  * * *

  * * *

  Mr and Mrs Jenkyns with their family and the boys from Priory House. Roald Dahl is on the far right of the second row from the front.

  * * *

  Fagging

  I spent two long years as a Fag at Repton, which meant I was the servant of the studyholder in whose study I had my little desk. If the studyholder happened to be a House Boazer, so much the worse for me because Boazers were a dangerous breed. During my second term, I was unfortunate enough to be put into the study of the Head of the House, a supercilious and obnoxious seventeen-year-old called Carleton. Carleton always looked at you right down the length of his nose, and even if you were as tall as him, which I happened to be, he would tilt his head back and still manage to look at you down the length of his nose. Carleton had three Fags in his study and all of us were terrified of him, especially on Sunday mornings, because Sunday was study-cleaning time. All the Fags in all the studies had to take off their jackets, roll up their sleeves, fetch buckets and floor-cloths and get down to cleaning out their studyholder’s study. And when I say cleaning out, I mean practically sterilizing the