Roald Dahl's Mischief and Mayhem

by Roald Dahl

  ‘But how in-teresting, Violet,’ said Mrs Beauregarde. ‘You are a clever girl.’

  ‘Keep chewing, baby!’ said Mr Beauregarde. ‘Keep right on chewing! This is a great day for the Beauregardes! Our little girl is the first person in the world to have a chewing-gum meal!’

  Everybody was watching Violet Beauregarde as she stood there chewing this extraordinary gum. Little Charlie Bucket was staring at her absolutely spellbound, watching her huge rubbery lips as they pressed and unpressed with the chewing, and Grandpa Joe stood beside him, gaping at the girl. Mr Wonka was wringing his hands and saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no! It isn’t ready for eating! It isn’t right! You mustn’t do it!’

  ‘Blueberry pie and cream!’ shouted Violet. ‘Here it comes! Oh my, it’s perfect! It’s beautiful! It’s . . . it’s exactly as though I’m swallowing it! It’s as though I’m chewing and swallowing great big spoonfuls of the most marvellous blueberry pie in the world!’

  ‘Good heavens, girl!’ shrieked Mrs Beauregarde suddenly, staring at Violet, ‘what’s happening to your nose!’

  ‘Oh, be quiet, mother, and let me finish!’ said Violet.

  ‘It’s turning blue!’ screamed Mrs Beauregarde. ‘Your nose is turning blue as a blueberry!’

  ‘Your mother is right!’ shouted Mr Beauregarde. ‘Your whole nose has gone purple!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Violet, still chewing away.

  ‘Your cheeks!’ screamed Mrs Beauregarde. ‘They’re turning blue as well! So is your chin! Your whole face is turning blue!’

  ‘Spit that gum out at once!’ ordered Mr Beauregarde.

  ‘Mercy! Save us!’ yelled Mrs Beauregarde. ‘The girl’s going blue and purple all over! Even her hair is changing colour! Violet, you’re turning violet, Violet! What is happening to you?’

  ‘I told you I hadn’t got it quite right,’ sighed Mr Wonka, shaking his head sadly.

  ‘I’ll say you haven’t!’ cried Mrs Beauregarde. ‘Just look at the girl now!’

  Everybody was staring at Violet. And what a terrible, peculiar sight she was! Her face and hands and legs and neck, in fact the skin all over her body, as well as her great big mop of curly hair, had turned a brilliant, purplish-blue, the colour of blueberry juice!

  ‘It always goes wrong when we come to the dessert,’ sighed Mr Wonka. ‘It’s the blueberry pie that does it. But I’ll get it right one day, you wait and see.’

  ‘Violet,’ screamed Mrs Beauregarde, ‘you’re swelling up!’

  ‘I feel sick,’ Violet said.

  ‘You’re swelling up!’ screamed Mrs Beauregarde again.

  ‘I feel most peculiar!’ gasped Violet.

  ‘I’m not surprised!’ said Mr Beauregarde.

  ‘Great heavens, girl!’ screeched Mrs Beauregarde. ‘You’re blowing up like a balloon!’

  ‘Like a blueberry,’ said Mr Wonka.

  ‘Call a doctor!’ shouted Mr Beauregarde.

  ‘Prick her with a pin!’ said one of the other fathers.

  ‘Save her!’ cried Mrs Beauregarde, wringing her hands.

  But there was no saving her now. Her body was swelling up and changing shape at such a rate that within a minute it had turned into nothing less than an enormous round blue ball – a gigantic blueberry, in fact – and all that remained of Violet Beauregarde herself was a tiny pair of legs and a tiny pair of arms sticking out of the great round fruit and a little head on top.

  ‘It always happens like that,’ sighed Mr Wonka. ‘I’ve tried it twenty times in the Testing Room on twenty Oompa-Loompas, and every one of them finished up as a blueberry. It’s most annoying. I just can’t understand it.’

  ‘But I don’t want a blueberry for a daughter!’ yelled Mrs Beauregarde. ‘Put her back to what she was this instant!’

  Mr Wonka clicked his fingers, and ten Oompa-Loompas appeared immediately at his side.

  ‘Roll Miss Beauregarde into the boat,’ he said to them, ‘and take her along to the Juicing Room at once.’

  ‘The Juicing Room?’ cried Mrs Beauregarde. ‘What are they going to do to her there?’

  ‘Squeeze her,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘We’ve got to squeeze the juice out of her immediately. After that, we’ll just have to see how she comes out. But don’t worry, my dear Mrs Beauregarde. We’ll get her repaired if it’s the last thing we do. I am sorry about it all, I really am . . .’

  But don’t chomp on one of Willy Wonka’s gourmet chewing-gum meals to turn blue, like Violet Beauregarde did. There are FAR simpler ways to make yourself look like a giant blueberry.

  YOU WILL NEED:

  A blue hat

  A pair of blue trousers

  A pair of blue socks

  A blue T-shirt

  A blue jumper

  27 more blue jumpers, each one bigger than the last

  Blue face paint

  WHAT YOU DO:

  Put on the blue hat, the blue trousers, the blue socks, the blue T-shirt and the 28 blue jumpers.

  Daub on the blue face paint.

  Look in a mirror.

  Ta-daaaaaaa! You’re a GIANT BLUEBERRY!

  Now tell grown-ups that you ate too many blueberries. They will be TOTALLY fooled and think that’s why you’re so big and round and blue.

  In which The Grand High Witch describes the spell that will turn children into mice at PRECISELY nine o’clock the next morning, just in time for school.

  ‘Attention again!’ The Grand High Witch was shouting. ‘I vill now give to you the rrrecipe for concocting Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker! Get out pencils and paper.’

  Handbags were opened all over the room and notebooks were fished out.

  ‘Give us the recipe, O Brainy One!’ cried the audience impatiently. ‘Tell us the secret.’

  ‘First,’ said The Grand High Witch, ‘I had to find something that vould cause the children to become very small very qvickly.’

  ‘And what was that?’ cried the audience.

  ‘That part vos simple,’ said The Grand High Witch. ‘All you have to do if you are vishing to make a child very small is to look at him through the wrrrong end of a telescope.’

  ‘She’s a wonder!’ cried the audience. ‘Who else would have thought of a thing like that?’

  ‘So you take the wrrrong end of a telescope,’ continued The Grand High Witch, ‘and you boil it until it gets soft.’

  ‘How long does that take?’ they asked her.

  ‘Tventy-vun hours of boiling,’ answered The Grand High Witch. ‘And vhile this is going on, you take exactly forty-five brrrown mice and you chop off their tails vith a carving-knife and you fry the tails in hair-oil until they are nice and crrrisp.’

  ‘What do we do with all those mice who have had their tails chopped off?’ asked the audience.

  ‘You simmer them in frog-juice for vun hour,’ came the answer. ‘But listen to me. So far I have only given you the easy part of the rrrecipe. The rrreally difficult problem is to put in something that vill have a genuine delayed action rrree-sult, something that can be eaten by children on a certain day but vhich vill not start vurrrking on them until nine o’clock the next morning vhen they arrive at school.’

  ‘What did you come up with, O Brainy One?’ they called out. ‘Tell us the great secret!’

  ‘The secret,’ announced The Grand High Witch triumphantly, ‘is an alarm-clock!’

  ‘An alarm-clock!’ they cried. ‘It’s a stroke of genius!’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said The Grand High Witch.

  ‘You can set a tventy-four-hour alarm-clock today and at exactly nine o’clock tomorrow it vill go off.’

  ‘But we will need five million alarm-clocks!’ cried the audience. ‘We will need one for each child!’

  ‘Idiots!’ shouted The Grand High Witch. ‘If you are vontin
g a steak, you do not cook the whole cow! It is the same vith alarm-clocks. Vun clock vill make enough for a thousand children. Here is vhat you do. You set your alarm-clock to go off at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Then you rrroast it in the oven until it is crrrisp and tender. Are you wrrriting this down?’

  ‘We are, Your Grandness, we are!’ they cried.

  ‘Next,’ said The Grand High Witch, ‘you take your boiled telescope and your frrried mouse-tails and your cooked mice and your rrroasted alarm-clock and all together you put them into the mixer. Then you mix them at full speed. This vill give you a nice thick paste. Vhile the mixer is still mixing you must add to it the yolk of vun grrruntle’s egg.’

  ‘A gruntle’s egg!’ cried the audience. ‘We shall do that!’

  Underneath all the clamour that was going on I heard one witch in the back row saying to her neighbour, ‘I’m getting a bit old to go bird’s nesting. Those ruddy gruntles always nest very high up.’

  ‘So you mix in the egg,’ The Grand High Witch went on, ‘and vun after the other you also mix in the following items: the claw of a crrrabcrrruncher, the beak of a blabbersnitch, the snout of a grrrobblesqvirt and the tongue of a catsprrringer. I trust you are not having any trrrouble finding those.’

  ‘None at all!’ they cried out. ‘We will spear the blabbersnitch and trap the crabcruncher and shoot the grobblesquirt and catch the catspringer in his burrow!’

  ‘Excellent!’ said The Grand High Witch. ‘Vhen you have mixed everything together in the mixer, you vill have a most marvellous-looking grrreen liqvid. Put vun drop, just vun titchy droplet, of this liqvid into a chocolate or a sveet, and at nine o’clock the next morning the child who ate it vill turn into a mouse in tventy-six seconds! But vun vurd of vorning. Never increase the dose. Never put more than vun drrrop into each sveet or chocolate. And never give more than vun sweet or chocolate to each child. An overdose of Delayed Action Mouse-Maker vill mess up the timing of the alarm-clock and cause the child to turn into a mouse too early. A large overdose might even have an instant effect, and you vouldn’t vont that, vould you? You vouldn’t vont the children turning into mice rrright there in your sveet-shops. That vould give the game away. So be very carrreful! Do not overdose!’

  THE GRAND HIGH WITCH’S Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker is probably not a spell you want to cast on your friends. (Not if you ever want them to speak – or even SQUEAK – to you again.) Instead, try this harmless yet HILARIOUS trick. All you need to do is stick a tiny piece of sticky tape over the optical sensor underneath a computer mouse and, as if by magic, it won’t work.

  PS This would usually be labelled a one-star trick. The extra star is awarded because of the high risk of sending grown-ups STARK STARING BONKERS when they discover that their computer doesn’t work properly. If your particular adult displays danger signs – turns beetroot, starts growling, stamps feet, shouts a lot – suggest that they turn the computer off and on again while you secretly remove the sticky tape . . . and then declare yourself a computer genius!

  In which Mr Fox and his four children bravely tunnel to Chicken House Number One to find their dinner.

  ‘This time we must go in a very special direction,’ said Mr Fox, pointing sideways and downward.

  So he and his four children started to dig once again. The work went much more slowly now. Yet they kept at it with great courage, and little by little the tunnel began to grow.

  ‘Dad, I wish you would tell us where we are going,’ said one of the children.

  ‘I dare not do that,’ said Mr Fox, ‘because this place I am hoping to get to is so marvellous that if I described it to you now you would go crazy with excitement. And then, if we failed to get there (which is very possible), you would die of disappointment. I don’t want to raise your hopes too much, my darlings.’

  For a long long time they kept on digging. For how long they did not know, because there were no days and no nights down there in the murky tunnel. But at last Mr Fox gave the order to stop. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we had better take a peep upstairs now and see where we are. I know where I want to be, but I can’t possibly be sure we’re anywhere near it.’

  Slowly, wearily, the foxes began to slope the tunnel up towards the surface. Up and up it went . . . until suddenly they came to something hard above their heads and they couldn’t go up any further. Mr Fox reached up to examine this hard thing. ‘It’s wood!’ he whispered. ‘Wooden planks!’

  ‘What does that mean, Dad?’

  ‘It means, unless I am very much mistaken, that we are right underneath somebody’s house,’ whispered Mr Fox. ‘Be very quiet now while I take a peek.’

  Carefully, Mr Fox began pushing up one of the floorboards. The board creaked most terribly and they all ducked down, waiting for something awful to happen. Nothing did. So Mr Fox pushed up a second board. And then, very very cautiously, he poked his head up through the gap. He let out a shriek of excitement.

  ‘I’ve done it! ’ he yelled. ‘I’ve done it first time! I’ve done it! I’ve done it!’ He pulled himself up through the gap in the floor and started prancing and dancing with joy. ‘Come on up!’ he sang out. ‘Come up and see where you are, my darlings! What a sight for a hungry fox! Hallelujah! Hooray! Hooray!’

  The four Small Foxes scrambled up out of the tunnel and what a fantastic sight it was that now met their eyes! They were in a huge shed and the whole place was teeming with chickens. There were white chickens and brown chickens and black chickens by the thousand!

  ‘Boggis’s Chicken House Number One!’ cried Mr Fox. ‘It’s exactly what I was aiming at! I hit it slap in the middle! First time! Isn’t that fantastic! And, if I may say so, rather clever!’

  The Small Foxes went wild with excitement. They started running around in all directions, chasing the stupid chickens.

  ‘Wait!’ ordered Mr Fox. ‘Don’t lose your heads! Stand back! Calm down! Let’s do this properly! First of all, everyone have a drink of water!’

  They all ran over to the chickens’ drinking-trough and lapped up the lovely cool water. Then Mr Fox chose three of the plumpest hens, and with a clever flick of his jaws he killed them instantly.

  ‘Back to the tunnel!’ he ordered. ‘Come on! No fooling around! The quicker you move, the quicker you shall have something to eat!’

  One after another, they climbed down through the hole in the floor and soon they were all standing once again in the dark tunnel. Mr Fox reached up and pulled the floorboards back into place. He did this with great care. He did it so that no one could tell they had ever been moved.

  If you’re reading this book, there’s a big chance you’re not a fox. So there’s really no need for you to steal a chicken. (Besides, you can buy them in all good supermarkets.) Instead, why not go for something HYSTERICALLY historical, like . . . a DODO!

  YOU WILL NEED:

  One time machine

  One sherry trifle

  One net

  WHAT YOU DO:

  Construct a time machine. (At the time of writing, there were no instructions available for how to make a time machine, but we are reasonably confident that you could knock one up using a large glass box – rather like the one from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – a large ball of string, a gearstick from a 1979 Mini 1275GT, a Mars bar, a crystal ball and a jetpack.)

  Make a sherry trifle.

  Set the time machine to any date before 1662, which is when the dodo was last spotted before becoming extinct FOREVER.

  Travel through time.

  Land.

  Disembark the time machine and locate your dodo. (Don’t worry about it flying away. It can’t.)

  Lure the dodo into your time machine with the sherry trifle. (No records exist confirming that dodos liked sherry trifle, but WHO DOESN’T?)

  Travel back through time to NOW.

  Take the dodo to a top zoolo
gist and become famous for bringing the world’s most fabulous flightless bird back from the dead.

  There – that’s more exciting than stealing a chicken, isn’t it?

  Who is this mischievous chap from one of Roald Dahl’s marvellous storybooks?

  His father is a farmer.

  He likes chocolate.

  He doesn’t like cabbage.

  He’s a brave little boy.

  He doesn’t have a brother or a sister.

  Who is he?

  The answer is here.

  Which of these tricks did Roald Dahl actually do in true life and which are TOTAL FIBS?

  He climbed a ladder up to his daughters’ bedroom, poked a bamboo cane between the curtains and pretended to be the BFG.

  He invented an everlasting gobstopper and tricked the great Quentin Blake into sucking it for THREE WEEKS.

  He hid A DEAD MOUSE in a jar of sweets in a sweetshop.

  He once pretended to be the president of the USA and governed the country for one morning in November 1969.

  He rigged up a zipwire and used it to waterbomb two unsuspecting ladies.

  The answers are here.

  In which Roald Dahl twists and turns and warps and bends the well-known story of Little Red Riding Hood into something QUITE different.