Spotty Powder and other Splendiferous Secrets Read online

  Pour the fudge into the lined tin and leave to set. If necessary, smooth with a palette knife dipped into boiling water.

  With shaped cutters, cut out the fudge and dip one side into the melted chocolate, or decorate with piped chocolate, creating different patterns.

  Please ask a grown-up to help you when you are handling anything hot.

  Come rain, shine, frost or snow, Roald Dahl could be found inside the shed at the end of his garden. This was where he wrote. And beside him there was a table where he kept his most favourite things. They’re all still there.

  Here are some of the items on Roald Dahl’s table:

  A ball made from silver chocolate wrappers.

  A small model of a Hurricane fighter plane.

  His hipbone.

  A glass bottle filled with mauve-coloured bits of gristle taken from Roald Dahl’s spine during an operation.

  A photo of his granddaughter Sophie.

  A meteorite the size of a golf ball.

  His father’s silver-and-tortoiseshell paper-knife.

  A solar-powered musical box.

  A carving of a green grasshopper.

  A cone from a cedar tree.

  ‘I rather like the month of March … your heart is lifted by the signs of approaching spring all around you. Halfway through the month most of the hedges are covered with a pale powdering of green as the little leaf buds begin to burst, and the pussy willows are smothered in yellow pollen. Crocuses are flowering brilliantly and best of all, the nesting season is beginning to get seriously under way … I can see a pair of blackbirds building high up in the trunk of the big clipped yew tree … I watch a thrush carrying bits of dry grass up into the branches of the vine … I see a pair of blue tits popping in and out of a small hole in the wooden tool shed … I see a pair of robins making a mossy nest in the bank underneath the heather bed …

  ‘By the end of the month ladybirds are on the wing once again, and you will notice that nearly all of them are the two-spotted kind. Peacock butterflies and small tortoiseshells are emerging from their winter sleep, hunting for early flowers. Bumblebees and honeybees have also woken up and are in among the crocuses, looking for pollen.’

  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 16 December 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 coloured, 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?

  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:

  Nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings

  Eighteenth-century English furniture

  Gardening

  Orchids

  Music

  Wine

  Gambling

  Good food

  Chocolate

  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.’

  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!

  EASTER TERM, aged 15. English Composition. ‘A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.’

  SUMMER TERM, aged 16. English Composition. ‘This boy is an indolent and illiterate member of the class.’

  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!’

  Roald Dahl’s father died when Roald was only three so his mother brought up him and his sisters on her own.

  Every Easter she rented a house in Tenby, Wales, and to