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Suddenly, out of the pram, straight up into the air, flew an enormous pheasant!

  Claud let out a cry of horror.

  The fool in the truck going along beside Bessie started roaring with laughter.

  The pheasant flapped around drunkenly for a few seconds, then it lost height and landed in the grass by the side of the road.

  A grocer's van came up behind the truck and began hooting to get by. Bessie kept running.

  Then - whoosh! - a second pheasant flew up out of the pram.

  Then a third, and a fourth. Then a fifth.

  'My God!' I said. 'It's the pills! They're wearing off!'

  Claud didn't say anything.

  Bessie covered the last fifty yards at a tremendous pace, and she came swinging into the driveway of the filling-station with birds flying up out of the pram in all directions.

  'What the hell's going on?' she cried.

  'Go round the back!' I shouted. 'Go round the back!' But she pulled up sharp against the first pump in the line, and before we could reach her she had seized the screaming infant in her arms and dragged him clear.

  'No! No!' Claud cried, racing towards her. 'Don't lift the baby! Put him back! Hold down the sheet!' But she wasn't even listening, and with the weight of the child suddenly lifted away, a great cloud of pheasants rose up out of the pram, fifty or sixty of them, at least, and the whole sky above us was filled with huge brown birds flapping their wings furiously to gain height.

  Claud and I started running up and down the driveway waving our arms to frighten them off the premises. 'Go away!' we shouted. 'Shoo! Go away!' But they were too dopey still to take any notice of us and within half a minute down they came again and settled themselves like a swarm of locusts all over the front of my filling-station. The place was covered with them. They sat wing to wing along the edges of the roof and on the concrete canopy that came out over the pumps, and a dozen at least were clinging to the sill of the office window. Some had flown down on to the rack that held the bottles of lubricating-oil, and others were sliding about on the bonnets of my second-hand cars. One cockbird with a fine tail was perched superbly on top of a petrol pump, and quite a number, those that were too drunk to stay aloft, simply squatted in the driveway at our feet, fluffing their feathers and blinking their small eyes.

  Across the road, a line of cars had already started forming behind the brick-lorry and the grocery-van, and people were opening their doors and getting out and beginning to cross over to have a closer look. I glanced at my watch. It was twenty to nine. Any moment now, I thought, a large black car is going to come streaking along the road from the direction of the village, and the car will be a Rolls, and the face behind the wheel will be the great glistening brewer's face of Mr Victor Hazel.

  'They near pecked him to pieces!' Bessie was shouting, clasping the screaming baby to her bosom.

  'You go on home, Bessie,' Claud said, white in the face.

  'Lock up,' I said. 'Put out the sign. We've gone for the day.'

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in the USA by Alfred Knopf 1959

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph 1960

  Published in Penguin Books 1962

  Copyright (c) Roald Dahl, 1959

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194163-9

  Roald Dahl

  Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales, on 13 September 1916. His parents were Norwegian and he was the only son of a second marriage. His father, Harald, and elder sister Astri died when Roald was just three years old, leaving his mother, Sofie, to raise her four children and two stepchildren.

  At the age of nine, Roald was sent away to boarding school, first in Weston-super-Mare and later in Derbyshire (not far from Cadbury's chocolate factory). He suffered acutely from homesickness and his unhappy schooling was to greatly influence his writing in later life. His childhood and schooldays became the subject of his autobiography Boy.

  At eigthteen, instead of going to university, he joined the Shell Petroleum Company and after two years training was sent to Dar es Salaam (in what is now Tanzania) to supply oil to customers. However, the outbreak of the Second World War saw him sign up as an aircraftman with the RAF in Nairobi: of the sixteen men who signed up, only Roald and two others were to survive the war.

  He detailed his exploits in the war in a further volume of autobiography, Going Solo, which included crash-landing in no-man's-land and surviving a direct hit during the Battle of Athens. Invalided out of active service, he was transferred to Washington in 1942 as an air attache, where an opportune meeting with C. S. Forester, the writer of the Hornblower series, set him on a new path.

  Roald's first piece of published writing was used to help publicize the British war effort in America. Appearing anonymously in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, 'Shot Down Over Libya' earned him $900. He published several more pieces for the paper, many of which were fictional tales, and these were eventually collected together and published as Over to You.

  Later stories appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly. They were widely regarded and he won the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times. In 1953 he married the Oscar-winning actor Patricia Neal and together they had five children.

  It was not until the 1960s, after he had settled with his family in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, that Roald began seriously to writer children's stories, publishing first James and the Giant Peach and, a few years later, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was not long before his stories were a worldwide success.

  After he and Patricia Neal divorced, Roald married Felicity Crosland in 1983. Working to the end on new books, he died aged seventy-four on 23 November 1990.

  Now, over twenty years later, Roald Dahl's legacy as a storyteller and favourite of readers around the world remains unsurpassed.

  Kiss Kiss

  'And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.'

  Eleven devious, shocking stories from the master of the unpredictable, Roald Dahl.

  What could go wrong when a wife pawns the mink coat that her love gave her as a parting gift? What happens when a priceless piece of furniture is the subject of a deceitful bargain? Can a wronged woman take revenge on her dead husband?

  In these dark, disturbing stories Roald Dahl explores the sinister side of human nature: the cunning, sly, selfish part of each of us that leads us into the territory of the unexpected and unsettling. Stylish, macabre and haunting, these tales will leave you with a delicious feeling of unease.

  'Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive' Irish Times

  My Uncle Oswald

  'My dear, dear sir! It's a mira