Roald Dahl's Mischief and Mayhem Read online

  ‘Be quiet!’ the father snapped. ‘Just keep your nasty mouth shut, will you!’

  All in all it was a most satisfactory exercise. But it was surely too much to hope that it had taught the father a permanent lesson.

  Attention, please. However mean and nasty someone has been, unless you are the heroine of a Roald Dahl story, it is best NOT to superglue someone’s hat to their head. It would make the lovely doctors and nurses at the nearest hospital VERY CROSS. So, step away from the head of an actual human and step towards something truly ASTRONOMICAL.

  YOU WILL NEED:

  One rocket

  One launchpad

  18 buckets (approx.) of industrial-grade superglue

  One spacesuit (with helmet)

  One tank of oxygen

  Go to your nearest space centre. (There’s a rather nice one at Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA. You could go to a theme park while you’re there. Maybe visit the beach.)

  Locate the launchpad and wait for the dead of night.

  Carefully pour each of your 18 buckets of industrial-grade superglue on to the launchpad to form a thin coating.

  DO NOT STEP IN THE SUPERGLUE. (This is very important. You don’t want to be glued to the launchpad too.)

  Go back to your motel and wait until a rocket is wheeled v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y to the launchpad and popped on top of it. You should hear a very sticky SLURP when this happens.

  Go back to the space centre on launch day, wearing your spacesuit. Don’t forget your oxygen tank too.

  Count down with everyone else so that NO ONE SUSPECTS your fiendishly clever plan.

  Then . . . ta-daaaaa! When the countdown reaches zero, the rocket won’t go ANYWHERE.*

  * There is a slim chance that the rocket’s engines will be so megawattingly POWERFUL that it will shoot into space anyway and take the launchpad, the surrounding tarmac and quite possibly YOU with it, which is why you need the spacesuit and the oxygen too. NEVER go to space without them.

  Study the clues to identify one of Roald Dahl’s STICKIEST, SWEETEST characters ever.

  His voice is high and flutey. (Try talking in a high and flutey voice for a whole day. Your family will love it. Seriously.)

  He wears a black top hat. He wears a tail coat made of beautiful plum-coloured velvet. His trousers are bottle green. His gloves are pearly grey. (Goodness, how smart!)

  He’s like a quick clever old squirrel from the park. (Except he’s NOT a squirrel. But he does employ squirrels . . .)

  He can make rich caramels that change colour every ten seconds as you suck them. (Mmm . . .)

  He once built a colossal palace entirely out of CHOCOLATE. The bricks were chocolate, and the cement holding them together was chocolate, and the windows were chocolate and all the walls and ceilings were made of chocolate, so were the carpets and the pictures and the furniture and the beds; and when you turned on the taps in the bathroom hot chocolate came pouring out.

  Who is he?

  The answer is here

  Congratulations! You’ve NEARLY reached the end of the first chapter. All you have to do is answer these icky, sticky, super-tricky questions about GOO and then you’re done.

  But be warned: they are for Roald Dahl Experts only.

  Inside which type of chocolate bar did Charlie find a Golden Ticket?

  Who did Willy Wonka build a chocolate palace for?

  What did George add to make his marvellous medicine brown?

  How did Mr Twit catch the birds for his Bird Pie?

  The answers are here. If you got all four correct, cartwheel around your nearest supermarket. If you didn’t, go for a ride on a fuzzy fruit with a squidgy worm inside . . . or read James and the Giant Peach again. Whichever’s easier.

  In which Roald Dahl’s school friend Wragg makes Matron go CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH and then GRR, GRR, GRRRRRRR.

  After ‘lights out’ the Matron would prowl the corridor like a panther trying to catch the sound of a whisper behind a dormitory door, and we soon learnt that her powers of hearing were so phenomenal that it was safer to keep quiet.

  Once, after lights out, a brave boy called Wragg tiptoed out of our dormitory and sprinkled caster sugar all over the linoleum floor of the corridor. When Wragg returned and told us that the corridor had been successfully sugared from one end to the other, I began shivering with excitement. I lay there in the dark in my bed waiting and waiting for the Matron to go on the prowl. Nothing happened. Perhaps, I told myself, she is in her room taking another speck of dust out of Mr Victor Corrado’s eye.

  Suddenly, from far down the corridor came a resounding crunch! Crunch crunch crunch went the footsteps. It sounded as though a giant was walking on loose gravel.

  Then we heard the high-pitched furious voice of the Matron in the distance. ‘Who did this?’ she was shrieking. ‘How dare you do this!’ She went crunching along the corridor flinging open all the dormitory doors and switching on all the lights. The intensity of her fury was frightening. ‘Come along!’ she cried out, marching with crunching steps up and down the corridor. ‘Own up! I want the name of the filthy little boy who put down the sugar! Own up immediately! Step forward! Confess!’

  ‘Don’t own up,’ we whispered to Wragg. ‘We won’t give you away!’

  Wragg kept quiet. I didn’t blame him for that. Had he owned up, it was certain his fate would have been a terrible and a bloody one.

  Soon the Headmaster was summoned from below. The Matron, with steam coming out of her nostrils, cried out to him for help and now the whole school was herded into the long corridor, where we stood freezing in our pyjamas and bare feet while the culprit or culprits were ordered to step forward.

  Nobody stepped forward.

  I could see that the Headmaster was getting very angry indeed. His evening had been interrupted. Red splotches were appearing all over his face and flecks of spit were shooting out of his mouth as he talked.

  ‘Very well!’ he thundered. ‘Every one of you will go at once and get the key to his tuck-box! Hand the keys to Matron, who will keep them for the rest of the term! And all parcels coming from home will be confiscated from now on! I will not tolerate this kind of behaviour!’

  We handed in our keys and throughout the remaining six weeks of the term we went very hungry.

  Why not try the Super Fine Sugar Trick for yourself? It’s so cunning that it is rumoured top-secret spies use the technique to predict when baddies are approaching. But if you’re going to do it at home remember these three simple rules:

  Never sprinkle sugar on a carpet. It must be a hard floor, always.

  The bigger the grains of sugar, the louder the crunch. If you really want to make people sit up and listen, go for muscovado or Demerara. But for a crunch so gentle that it just tickles the edge of the sugar-cruncher’s hearing, making them wonder if they’ve heard it at all, do as Wragg did and go for superfine sugar. Then you can use the rest to make a cake.

  Learn how to use a vacuum cleaner before you start. Because there’s a fairly big chance you will have to use it afterwards.

  In which Henry Sugar develops his X-ray vision and learns to see THROUGH playing cards and read what’s on the other side. This means that he’s very, very, very, very (now, imagine another 258 verys because he’s that good and there isn’t room on this page to write them all down) good at playing card games – and winning them.

  Some time during the tenth month, Henry became aware, just as Imhrat Khan had done before him, of a slight ability to see an object with his eyes closed. When he closed his eyes and stared at something hard, with fierce concentration, he could actually see the outline of the object he was looking at.

  ‘It’s coming to me!’ he cried. ‘I’m doing it! It’s fantastic!’

  Now he worked harder than ever at his exercises with the candle, and at the end of the first year he cou