UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the USA 1961
First published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin 1967
Published in Puffin Books 1973
Colour edition published 1999
Text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1961
Illustrations copyright © Quentin Blake, 1995, 1999
Colour treatment by Vida Williams
The moral right of the illustrator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-37853-4
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
This book is for
Olivia and Tessa
Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had a happy life. He lived peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house beside the sea. There were always plenty of other children for him to play with, and there was the sandy beach for him to run about on, and the ocean to paddle in. It was the perfect life for a small boy.
Then, one day, James’s mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.
Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience for two such gentle parents. But in the long run it was far nastier for James than it was for them. Their troubles were all over in a jiffy. They were dead and gone in thirty-five seconds flat. Poor James, on the other hand, was still very much alive, and all at once he found himself alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world. The lovely house by the seaside had to be sold immediately, and the little boy, carrying nothing but a small suitcase containing a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush, was sent away to live with his two aunts.
Their names were Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, and I am sorry to say that they were both really horrible people. They were selfish and lazy and cruel, and right from the beginning they started beating poor James for almost no reason at all. They never called him by his real name, but always referred to him as ‘you disgusting little beast’ or ‘you filthy nuisance’ or ‘you miserable creature’, and they certainly never gave him any toys to play with or any picture books to look at. His room was as bare as a prison cell.
They lived – Aunt Sponge, Aunt Spiker, and now James as well – in a queer ramshackle house on the top of a high hill in the south of England. The hill was so high that from almost anywhere in the garden James could look down and see for miles and miles across a marvellous landscape of woods and fields; and on a very clear day, if he looked in the right direction, he could see a tiny grey dot far away on the horizon, which was the house that he used to live in with his beloved mother and father. And just beyond that, he could see the ocean itself – a long thin streak of blackish-blue, like a line of ink, beneath the rim of the sky.
But James was never allowed to go down off the top of that hill. Neither Aunt Sponge nor Aunt Spiker could ever be bothered to take him out herself, not even for a small walk or a picnic, and he certainly wasn’t permitted to go alone. ‘The nasty little beast will only get into mischief if he goes out of the garden,’ Aunt Spiker had said. And terrible punishments were promised him, such as being locked up in the cellar with the rats for a week, if he even so much as dared to climb over the fence.
The garden, which covered the whole of the top of the hill, was large and desolate, and the only tree in the entire place (apart from a clump of dirty old laurel bushes at the far end) was an ancient peach tree that never gave any peaches. There was no swing, no seesaw, no sand pit, and no other children were ever invited to come up the hill to play with poor James. There wasn’t so much as a dog or a cat around to keep him company. And as time went on, he became sadder and sadder, and more and more lonely, and he used to spend hours every day standing at the bottom of the garden, gazing wistfully at the lovely but forbidden world of woods and fields and ocean that was spread out below him like a magic carpet.
After James Henry Trotter had been living with his aunts for three whole years there came a morning when something rather peculiar happened to him. And this thing, which as I say was only rather peculiar, soon caused a second thing to happen which was very peculiar. And then the very peculiar thing, in its own turn, caused a really fantastically peculiar thing to occur.
It all started on a blazing hot day in the middle of summer. Aunt Sponge, Aunt Spiker and James were all out in the garden. James had been put to work, as usual. This time he was chopping wood for the kitchen stove. Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker were sitting comfortably in deck-chairs near by, sipping tall glasses of fizzy lemonade and watching him to see that he didn’t stop work for one moment.
Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth, and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled. She was like a great white soggy overboiled cabbage. Aunt Spiker, on the other hand, was lean and tall and bony, and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles that fixed on to the end of her nose with a clip. She had a screeching voice and long wet narrow lips, and whenever she got angry or excited, little flecks of spit would come shooting out of her mouth as she talked. And there they sat, these two ghastly hags, sipping their drinks, and every now and again screaming at James to chop faster and faster. They also talked about themselves, each one saying how beautiful she thought she was. Aunt Sponge had a long-handled mirror on her lap, and she kept picking it up and gazing at her own hideous face.
‘I look and smell,’ Aunt Sponge declared, ‘as lovely as a rose!
Just feast your eyes upon my face, observe my shapely nose!
Behold my heavenly silky locks!
And if I take off both my socks
You’ll see my dainty toes.’
‘But don’t forget,’ Aunt Spiker cried, ‘how much your tummy shows!’
Aunt Sponge went red. Aunt Spiker said, ‘My sweet, you cannot win,
Behold MY gorgeous curvy shape, my teeth, my charming grin!
Oh, beauteous me! How I adore
My radiant looks! And please ignore
The pimple on my chin.’
‘My dear old trout!’ Aunt Sponge cried out. ‘You’re only bones and skin!’
‘Such loveliness as I possess can only truly shine
In Hollywood!’ Aunt Sponge declared: ‘Oh, wouldn’t that be fine!
I’d capture all the nations’ hearts!
They’d give me all the leading parts!
The stars would all resign!’
‘I think you’d make,’ Aunt Spiker said, ‘a lovely Frankenstein.’
Poor James was still slaving away at the chopping-block. The heat was terrible. He was sweating all over. His arm was aching. The chopper was a large blunt thing far too heavy for a small boy to use. And as he worked, James began thinking about all the other children in the world and what they might be doing at this moment. Some would be riding tricycles in their gardens. Some would be walking in cool woods and picking bunches of wild flowers. And all the little friends whom he used to know would be down by the seaside, playing in the wet sand and splashing around in the water …
Great tears began oozing out of James’s eyes and rolling down his cheeks. He stopped working and leaned against the chopping-block, overwhelmed by his own unhappiness.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Aunt Spiker screeched, glaring at him over the top of her steel spectacles.
James began to cry.
‘Stop that immediately and get on with your work, you nasty little beast!’ Aunt Sponge ordered.
‘Oh, Auntie Sponge!’ James cried out. ‘And Auntie Spiker! Couldn’t we all – please – just for once – go down to the seaside on the bus? It isn’t very far – and I feel so hot and awful and lonely …’
‘Why, you lazy good-for-nothing brute!’ Aunt Spiker shouted.
‘Beat him!’ cried Aunt Sponge.
‘I certainly will!’ Aunt Spiker snapped. She glared at James, and James looked back at her with large frightened eyes. ‘I shall beat you later on in the day when I don’t feel so hot,’ she said. ‘And now get out of my sight, you disgusting little worm, and give me some peace!’
James turned and ran. He ran off as fast as he could to the far end of the garden and hid himself behind that clump of dirty old laurel bushes that we mentioned earlier on. Then he covered his face with his hands and began to cry and cry.
It was at this point that the first thing of all, the rather peculiar thing that led to so many other much more peculiar things, happened to him.
For suddenly, just behind him, James heard a rustling of leaves, and he turned round and saw an old man in a funny dark-green suit emerging from the bushes. He was a very small old man, but he had a huge bald head and a face that was covered all over with bristly black whiskers. He stopped when he was about three yards away, and he stood there leaning on his stick and staring hard at James.
When he spoke, his voice was very slow and creaky. ‘Come closer to me, little boy,’ he said, beckoning to James with a finger. ‘Come right up close to me and I will show you something wonderful.’
James was too frightened to move.
The old man hobbled a step or two nearer, and then he put a hand into the pocket of his jacket and took out a small white paper bag.
‘You see this?’ he whispered, waving the bag gently to and fro in front of James’s face. ‘You know what this is, my dear? You know what’s inside this little bag?’
Then he came nearer still, leaning forward and pushing his face so close to James that James could feel breath blowing on his cheeks. The breath smelled musty and stale and slightly mildewed, like air in an old cellar.
‘Take a look, my dear,’ he said, opening the bag and tilting it towards James. Inside it, James could see a mass of tiny green things that looked like little stones or crystals, each one about the size of a grain of rice. They were extraordinarily beautiful, and there was a strange brightness about them, a sort of luminous quality that made them glow and sparkle in the most wonderful way.
‘Listen to them!’ the old man whispered. ‘Listen to them move!’
James stared into the bag, and sure enough there was a faint rustling sound coming up from inside it, and then he noticed that all the thousands of little green things were slowly, very very slowly stirring about and moving over each other as though they were alive.
‘There’s more power and magic in those things in there than in all the rest of the world put together,’ the old man said softly.
‘But – but – what are they?’ James murmured, finding his voice at last. ‘Where do they come from?’
‘Ah-ha,’ the old man whispered. ‘You’d never guess that!’ He was crouching a little now and pushing his face still closer and closer to James until the tip of his long nose was actually touching the skin on James’s forehead. Then suddenly he jumped back and began waving his stick madly in the air. ‘Crocodile tongues!’ he cried. ‘One thousand long slimy crocodile tongues boiled up in the skull of a dead witch for twenty days and nights with the eyeballs of a lizard! Add the fingers of a young monkey, the gizzard of a pig, the beak of a green parrot, the juice of a porcupine, and three spoonfuls of sugar. Stew for another week, and then let the moon do the rest!’
All at once, he pushed the white paper bag into James’s hands, and said, ‘Here! You take it! It’s yours!’
James Henry Trotter stood there clutching the bag and staring at the old man.
marvellousfabulous, unbelievableareallyouWhoever they meet firstbe it bug, insect, animal, or tree, that will be the one who gets the full power of their magic!
With that, the old man turned away and disappeared into the bushes.
