Spotty Powder and other Splendiferous Secrets Read online

  ‘Later on my mother fixed me with a steely eye and told me she was confiscating my Meccano set for the rest of the holidays. But for days afterwards I experienced the pleasant warm glow that comes to all of us when we have brought off a major triumph!’

  At one time, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was going to end very differently! This was the ending in an earlier version:

  The shop has been finished now, and it is the most beautiful chocolate shop in the world. It occupies a whole block in the centre of the city, and it is nine storeys high.

  Inside it, there are moving staircases and elevators to take the customers up and down, and no less than one hundred ladies, all dressed in spotless gold and chocolate uniforms, are there to serve behind the counters. They will sell you anything you want from a single little blue bird’s egg with a tiny sugary bird inside it to a life-size chocolate elephant with huge curvy tusks and a chocolate elephant driver sitting on its back.

  And Charlie Bucket, coming home from school in the evenings, nearly always brings along with him about twenty or thirty of his friends and tells them that they can choose anything they want – for free.

  ‘It’s my shop,’ he says. ‘Just help yourselves.’

  And so they do.

  Isn’t it amazing how much a book can change before it is published?

  If you keep looking hard enough, you might just find something new and magical that has never been seen before. Who knows? One day you may even discover the secret of what it takes to become as great a writer as Roald Dahl!

  1 More than two hundred

  2 Build him a chocolate palace

  3 Through a special trap door in the wall

  4 Because she chews a piece of the three-course-dinner chewing-gum

  5 Five

  6 Veruca Salt

  7 She chews gum

  8 Watching television

  9 A Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight

  10 A tailcoat made of plum-coloured velvet

  11 Underground

  12 By waterfall

  13 He falls into the chocolate river and gets sucked up a pipe into the strawberry-flavoured chocolate-coated fudge room

  14 An enormous hollowed-out boiled sweet

  15 The Inventing Room

  16 The squirrels

  17 It can go in any direction, and visit any room in the factory

  18 The lift flies out through the roof of the factory

  19 About ten feet tall and thin as a wire

  20 The whole chocolate factory