The Missing Golden Ticket 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!”

  Charlie’s Chocolate Shop

  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 center 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?

  Secrets are everywhere.

  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!

  Answers to Charlie’s Quiz

  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-coursedinner 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-colored velvet

  11 Underground

  12 By waterfall

  13 He falls into the chocolate river and gets sucked up a pipe into the strawberry-flavored 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 elevator flies out through the roof of the factory

  19 About ten feet tall and thin as a wire

  20 The whole chocolate factory

  *

  THERE’S MORE TO ROALD DAHL THAN GREAT STORIES…

  Did you know that 10% of author royalties* from this book go to help the work of the Roald Dahl charities?

  Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity exists to make life better for seriously ill children because it believes that every child has the right to a marvellous life.

  This marvellous charity helps thousands of children each year living with serious conditions of the blood and the brain—causes important to Roald Dahl in his lifetime—whether by providing nurses, equipment or toys for today’s children in the UK, or helping tomorrow’s children everywhere through pioneering research.

  Can you do something marvellous to help others?

  Find out how at www.marvellouschildrenscharity.org

  The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, based in Great Missenden just outside London, is in the Buckinghamshire village where Roald Dahl lived and wrote. At the heart of the Museum, created to inspire a love of reading and writing, is his unique archive of letters and manuscripts. As well as two fun-packed biographical galleries, the Museum boasts an interactive Story Centre. It is a place for the family, teachers and their pupils to explore the exciting world of creativity and literacy.

  www.roalddahlmuseum.org

  Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity is a registered charity no. 1137409

  The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre is a registered charity no. 1085853

  The Roald Dahl Charitable Trust is a registered charity that supports the work of RDMCC and RDMSC

  * Donated royalties are net of commission

  • • •

  For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit

  www.penguin.com/dahlchecklist

  Puffin Books by Roald Dahl

  The BFG

  Boy: Tales of Childhood

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

  Danny the Champion of the World

  Dirty Beasts

  The Enormous Crocodile

  Esio Trot

  Fantastic Mr. Fox

  George’s Marvelous Medicine

  The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

  Going Solo

  James and the Giant Peach

  The Magic Finger

  Matilda

  The Minpins

  The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets

  Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes

  The Twits

  The Vicar of Nibbleswicke

  The Witches

  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar