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  ‘My passion for chocolate did not really begin until I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and there was a good reason for this. Today chocolate-guzzling begins when the child is about five and it goes on with increasing intensity until the guzzler gets to be about twelve …

  ‘Things were different when I was young. The reason that neither I nor any of my generation developed the chocolate-guzzling bug early on was quite simply that in those days there were very few delicious chocolate bars available in the sweet-shops to tempt us. That’s why they were called sweet-shops and not chocolate-shops. Had I been born ten years later, it would have been another story, but, unfortunately for me, I grew up in the 1920s and the great golden years of the chocolate revolution had not yet begun.

  ‘When I was young, a small child going into the sweet-shop clutching his pocket money would be offered very little choice in the way of chocolate bars as we know them today. There was the Cadbury’s Bournville Bar and the Dairy Milk Bar. There was the Dairy Milk Flake (the only great invention so far) and the Whipped-cream Walnut … meagre pickings when you compare it with the splendid array of different chocolate bars that you see on display today.

  ‘Consequently, in those days we small boys and girls were much more inclined to spend our money either on sweets and toffees or on some of the many very cheap and fairly disgusting things … sherbet-suckers and gobstoppers and liquorice bootlaces and aniseed balls, and we did not mind that the liquorice was made from rat’s blood and the sherbet from sawdust. They were cheap and to us they tasted good. So on the whole, we made do with eating sweets and toffees and junk instead of chocolate.

  ‘Then came the revolution and the entire world of chocolate was suddenly turned upside-down in the space of seven glorious years between 1930 and 1937. Here’s a brief summary of what happened.

  Cadbury’s began production of milk-bars, starting with the Dairy Milk Bar.

  The plain one, the Bournville Bar, came five years later.

  Then came the first great speciality chocolate bar, the Dairy Milk Flake. This was a milestone, the first time any manufacturer had started seriously playing around with chocolate in their Inventing Rooms.

  Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bar appeared on the market.

  A chocolate manufacturing company called Frys invented the Crunchie.

  Suddenly, a new company appeared called Mars. A young American man called Forrest Mars came to England and in a small laboratory in Slough he started experimenting with his father’s recipe for the Milky Way to make it better … and the Mars Bar was born … and very soon 600 million of them were being eaten every year in England alone.

  Black Magic assorted chocolates appeared in boxes.

  The lovely Aero was introduced.

  Don’t forget Forrest Mars. In spite of the phenomenal success of his Mars Bar, this genius was still experimenting in his laboratory and came up with another classic beauty – Maltesers. In the same year, Quality Street was also put on to the market.

  Another golden year during which monumental classic lines were invented: Kit Kat, Rolo and Smarties.’

  And – for all you chocolate-guzzlers – they are all still available in the shops today!

  He was very tall – six feet five and three-quarter inches, or nearly two metres. His nickname in the RAF was Lofty, while Walt Disney called him Stalky (because he was like a beanstalk!).

  He was a terrible speller, but he liked playing Scrabble.

  His nickname at home was the Apple, because he was the apple of his mother’s eye (which means her favourite!).

  He pretended to have appendicitis when he was nine because he was so homesick in his first two weeks at boarding school. He fooled the matron and the school doctor and was sent home. But he couldn’t fool his own doctor, who made him promise never to do it again.

  He didn’t like cats – but he did like dogs, birds and goats.

  Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.

  He was a keen photographer at school and, when he was eighteen, won two prizes: one from the Royal Photographic Society in London and another from the Photographic Society of Holland.

  In the churchyard at Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, big friendly giant footprints lead to Roald Dahl’s grave.

  Best of all were the summer holidays. From the time he was four years old to when he was seventeen, Roald and his family went to Norway every summer. There were no commercial aeroplanes in those days, so the journey was a splendid expedition. It took four days to get there, and four days to get back again! The sea crossing from Newcastle to Oslo lasted two days and a night – and Roald was generally seasick.

  Finally, they would reach what Roald Dahl called ‘the magic island’, the island of Tjøme in a Norwegian fjord. The family would swim and sunbathe, mess about in rock pools, and go fishing. When Roald was seven, his mother acquired a motor boat and they could explore other islands.

  ‘We would cling to the sides of our funny little white motor boat, driving through mountainous white-capped waves and getting drenched to the skin, while my mother calmly handled the tiller. There were times, I promise you, when the waves were so high that as we slid down into a trough the whole world disappeared from sight … It requires great skill to handle a small boat in seas like these … But my mother knew exactly how to do it, and we were never afraid.’

  ‘I find August in England a rather torpid month. The trees and plants have all done their growing for the year and nature is hanging motionless in suspension before sinking slowly into the decline of winter. There is a brownish look to the countryside and the leaves are hanging heavy on the trees. But if it is nothing else, it is the month of the butterfly. Butterflies are lovely things. They do no harm to man himself either by stinging, biting or spreading disease. Nor are they beneficial to man as the silkworm is or the honeybee. The large white or cabbage butterfly is the only one that is a nuisance because it lays eggs on your cabbages and these hatch out into horrid hungry caterpillars …

  ‘August is, by the way, the month when young adders are born in heathy, hilly places, and baby grass snakes emerge from their eggs in rotting leaves and old compost heaps. It is the month when hedgehogs have their litters of babies, all born blind and helpless, and I’m afraid it is also the month when wasps come on the warpath, stinging humans in great numbers.’

  ‘At the age of eight I became a mad diary enthusiast … I was a bit of a loner in those days and a bit of a dreamer and some of the things I wrote down for the next five or six years were thoughts that I don’t think I would have dared even to speak out aloud to myself. That’s the beauty of writing. You find that you can actually write things down that are quite outlandish and outrageous and you feel all the better for it.’

  ‘I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.’

  ‘I have always loved this month. As a schoolboy I loved it because it is the Month of the Conker … We all know, of course, that a great conker is one that has been sorted in a dry place for at least a year. This matures it and makes it rock hard and therefore very formidable. We also know about the short cuts that less dedicated players take to harden their conkers. Some soak them in vinegar for a week. Others bake them in the oven at a low temperature for six hours. But such methods are not for the true conker player. No world-champion conker has ever been produced by short cuts …

  ‘The best conker I ever had was a conker 109, and I can still remember that frosty morning in the school playground when my one-o-nine was finally shattered by Perkins’s conker 74 in an epic contest that lasted over half an hour. After it, I felt even more shattered than my conker!’

  When Roald was sixteen, he decided to go off on his own to holiday in France. He crossed the Channel from Dover to Calais with £24 in his pocket (a lot of money in 1933). Roald wante