Roald Dahl's Mischief and Mayhem, Page 3

  ‘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
ld actually concentrate upon the image of his own face for no less than five and a half minutes!

  At this point, he decided the time had come to test himself with the cards. He was in the living-room of his London flat when he made this decision and it was near midnight. He got out a pack of cards and a pencil and paper. He was shaking with excitement. He placed the pack upside down before him and concentrated on the top card.

  All he could see at first was the design on the back of the card. It was a very ordinary design of thin red lines, one of the commonest playing-card designs in the world. He now shifted his concentration from the pattern itself to the other side of the card. He concentrated with great intensity upon the invisible underneath of the card, and he allowed no other single thought to creep into his mind. Thirty seconds went by.

  Then one minute . . .

  Two minutes . . .

  Three minutes . . .

  Henry didn’t move. His concentration was intense and absolute. He was visualizing the reverse side of the playing-card. No other thought of any kind was allowed to enter his head.

  During the fourth minute, something began to happen. Slowly, magically, but very clearly, the black symbols became spades and alongside the spades appeared the figure five.

  The five of spades!

  Henry switched off his concentration. And now, with shaking fingers, he picked up the card and turned it over.

  It was the five of spades!

  ‘I’ve done it!’ he cried aloud, leaping up from his chair. ‘I’ve seen through it! I’m on my way!’

  If you have X-RAY VISION like Henry Sugar, GREAT. You’re probably already very good at playing card games – and winning them. If not, never mind. Ten months is an awfully long time to spend learning how to do it. And it would be very awkward explaining to teachers why you don’t have time to do any homework.

  For more instant results:

  Simply place other card players in front of a large shiny surface. A mirror is PERFECT.

  Then just look in the mirror and you’ll be able to see the other side of their cards reflected there.

  You’ll have to learn how to read backwards, obviously. But that’s a bit simpler than learning how to see through solid objects.

  In which Sophie is VERY BRAVE and, with the help of the BFG, tackles a VERY BIG and VERY UNFRIENDLY giant.

  Sophie ran up behind the Fleshlumpeater. She was holding the brooch between her fingers. When she was right up close to the great naked hairy legs, she rammed the three-inch-long pin of the brooch as hard as she could into the Fleshlumpeater’s right ankle. It went deep into the flesh and stayed there.

  The giant gave a roar of pain and jumped high in the air. He dropped the soldier and made a grab for his ankle.

  The BFG, knowing what a coward the Fleshlumpeater was, saw his chance. ‘You is bitten by a snake!’ he shouted. ‘I seed it biting you! It was a frightsome poisnowse viper! It was a dreadly dungerous vindscreen viper!’

  ‘Save our souls!’ bellowed the Fleshlumpeater. ‘Sound the crumpets! I is bitten by a septicous venomsome vindscreen viper!’ He flopped to the ground and sat there howling his head off and clutching his ankle with both hands. His fingers felt the brooch. ‘The teeth of the dreadly viper is still sticking into me!’ he yelled. ‘I is feeling the teeth sticking into my anklet!’

  The BFG saw his second chance. ‘We must be getting those viper’s teeth out at once!’ he cried. ‘Otherwise you is deader than duck-soup! I is helping you!’

  The BFG knelt down beside the Fleshlumpeater. ‘You must grab your anklet very tight with both hands!’ he ordered. ‘That will stop the poisnowse juices from the venomsome viper going up your leg and into your heart!’

  The Fleshlumpeater grabbed his ankle with both hands.

  ‘Now close your eyes and grittle your teeth and look up to heaven and say your prayers while I is taking out the teeth of the venomsome viper,’ the BFG said.

  The terrified Fleshlumpeater did exactly as he was told.

  The BFG signalled for some rope. A soldier rushed it over to him.With both the Fleshlumpeater’s hands gripping his ankle, it was a simple matter for the BFG to tie the ankles and hands together with a tight knot.

  ‘I is pulling out the frightsome viper’s teeth!’ the BFG said as he pulled the knot tight.

  ‘Do it quickly!’ shouted the Fleshlumpeater, ‘before I is pizzened to death!’

  ‘There we is,’ said the BFG, standing up. ‘You can look now.’

  When the Fleshlumpeater saw that he was trussed up like a turkey, he gave a yell so loud that the heavens trembled. He rolled and he wriggled, he fought and he figgled, he squirmed and he squiggled. But there was not a thing he could do.

  ‘Well done you!’ Sophie cried.

  ‘Well done you!’ said the BFG, smiling down at the little girl. ‘You is saving all of our lives!’

  ‘Will you please get that brooch back for me,’ Sophie said. ‘It belongs to the Queen.’

  Unless you live in a land of thick forests and rushing rivers and hills as bare as concrete and ground that is flat and pale yellow, with great lumps of blue rock scattered around and dead trees standing around like skeletons – which is the land where the BFG lives – then you are unlikely to meet a real live giant. So the next biggest thing is a really tall grown-up. Trick one of those instead!

  Take the batteries out of the TV remote control. Hide them. Replace the remote control. Now it will be more entertaining watching the grown-up trying to make the TV work than the TV itself! (For an even better trick, secretly replace the batteries and then tell the grown-up that they must have been doing it wrong, because – look! – the remote control is working PERFECTLY.)

  Stuff newspaper inside shoes. Make sure it’s right down at the toes so the grown-up doesn’t see it before they put their feet in. Fill ALL shoes and boots, even ones that the grown-up hardly ever wears, for fun ALL THROUGH THE YEAR. How they’ll laugh!

  Change the time on the clocks. All of the clocks. Get up really early one morning and move them an hour forward. Then EVERYONE will be an hour early for work and school. Except you. You can have a lie-in. Bwa-ha-haaa!

  Press the volume button on the TV remote control to the loudest it will go when it is turned off. The next person who turns on the TV will have the FRIGHT OF HIS OR HER LIFE!

  In which the Enormous Crocodile creates the world’s best fancy-dress outfit EVER.

  The Enormous Crocodile crept over to a place where there were a lot of coconut trees.

  He knew that children from the town often came here looking for coconuts. The trees were too tall for them to climb, but there were always some coconuts on the ground that had fallen down.

  The Enormous Crocodile quickly collected all the coconuts that were lying on the ground. He also gathered together several fallen branches.

  ‘Now for Clever Trick Number One!’ he whispered to himself. ‘It won’t be long before I am eating the first part of my lunch!’

  He took all the coconut branches and held them between his teeth.

  He grasped the coconuts in his front paws. Then he stood straight up in the air, balancing himself on his tail.

  He arranged the branches and the coconuts so cleverly that he now looked exactly like a small coconut tree standing among the big coconut trees.

  Soon, two children came along. They were brother and sister. The boy was called Toto. His sister was called Mary. They walked around looking for fallen coconuts, but they couldn’t find any because the Enormous Crocodile had gathered them all up.

  ‘Oh look!’ cried Toto. ‘That tree over there is much smaller than the others! And it’s full of coconuts! I think I could climb that one quite easily if you help me up the first bit.’

  Toto and Mary ran towards what they thought was the small coconut tree.

  The Enormous Crocodil
e peered through the branches, watching them as they came closer and closer. He licked his lips. He began to dribble with excitement.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous whooshing noise. It was Humpy-Rumpy, the Hippopotamus. He came crashing and snorting out of the jungle. His head was down low and he was galloping at a terrific speed.

  ‘Look out, Toto!’ shouted Humpy-Rumpy. ‘Look out, Mary! That’s not a coconut tree! It’s the Enormous Crocodile and he wants to eat you up!’

  Don’t be put off by the three stars. This really is a very simple trick, as long as you have the following everyday items to hand.

  YOU WILL NEED:

  One speedboat (but don’t worry if you haven’t got a speedboat – a helicopter will do just fine)

  One desert island

  54 yards of coconut matting

  34 coconut leaves

  One helper

  WHAT YOU DO:

  Travel to the desert island by speedboat or helicopter.

  Ask your helper to roll you up in the coconut matting, but make sure your head is poking out of the top. Otherwise, it could get a bit boring in there.

  Ask your helper to stick the 34 coconut leaves at the top of the matting, so that they sprout outwards like A REAL TREE, while cunningly hiding your head at the same time.