‘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
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