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Taste
and Other Tales
ROALD DAHL
Level 5
Selected and retold by Michael Caldon
Series Editors: Andy Hopkins and Jocelyn Potter
Pearson Education Limited
Edinburgh Gate, Harlow,
Essex CM20 2JE, England
and Associated Companies throughout the world.
Contents
ISBN-10: 0-582-41943-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-582-41943-8
page
Introduction
V
First published in the Longman Simplified English Series 1979
in association with Michael Joseph Ltd.
First published in Longman Fiction 1993
This adaptation first published in 1996
Taste
1
A Swim
14
This edition first published 1999
Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat
25
9 10
The Way up to Heaven
40
NEW EDITION
The Sound Machine
54
The stories contained in this edition are published internationally,
in translation, by the following publishers: Gallimard in France,
Rowohlt in Germany, Meulenhoff in The Netherlands, Hayakawa in Japan,
Trebi in Sweden and Gyldendal in Denmark.
The Leg of Lamb
67
Birth and Fate
78
Poison
86
This edition copyright © Penguin Books Ltd 1999
Cover design by Bender Richardson White
Activities
97
Set in ll/14pt Bembo
Printed in China
SWTC/09
For a complete list of titles available in the Penguin Readers series please write to your local
Pearson Education office or contact: Penguin Readers Marketing Department,
Pearson Education, Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, Essex, CM20 2JE.
Introduction
These strange and unusual stories were written by a man who is
one of the most popular storytellers of our time. Roald Dahl was
born in South Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, and his early
life was overshadowed by sad events: his sister and his father died
within a few weeks of each other when he was very young. He
was educated at a boarding school for boys, but he did not fit in
easily with the life of the school and had a very unhappy time. As
a result of his experiences there, some of the stories he wrote later
feature characters who are cruel to those who have been cruel to
them.
After leaving school, Dahl went to work for the Shell Oil
Company in London and in Africa, and when the Second World
War started he joined the Royal Air Force. He served as a fighter
pilot in North Africa, where he was badly injured in a plane
crash, and then in Greece and Syria. In 1942 he accepted a post
as a British military official in Washington, and it was here that he
began to have some success as a writer. He succeeded in selling a
number of stories based on his wartime flying adventures to a
newspaper called the
Saturday Evening Post,
and after the war
ended he became increasingly known as a writer.
In 1953 Dahl married the American actress Patricia Neal,
with whom he had one son and four daughters. Many of his best
books for young people grew out of stories that he invented for
his children at bedtime. But Dahl's life was still clouded by family
misfortune: one of his daughters died when she was seven years
old, and his wife was very ill while the children were young. In
1983 his marriage to Patricia ended, and he married Felicity Ann
Crosland. Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four.
Over to You
(1946) was Dahl's first collection of stories, based
v
on his years as a pilot. Other collections for adults which achieved
wide popularity include
Someone Like You
(1953),
Kiss, Kiss
(1960)
and
Switch Bitch
(1974). A number of these stories were rewritten
for television as
Tales of the Unexpected.
It is the development of
the action rather than that of the characters that is central to
Dahl's writing, and his stories are characterized by the presence
of an unusual twist at the end. He admitted that he found it
increasingly hard to find new ideas for his adult fiction, and this
was when he began to write for children. He had great success
with his young readers, who love Dahl's dark humour and the
sense that his characters can make anything happen if they want
it enough. Many adults, among them parents, teachers and
librarians, have voiced objections to what they consider to be bad
manners and violence in Dahl's books, but children do not seem
to share these worries.
Dahl wrote nineteen children's books in all. The first was James
and the Giant Peach
(1961), in which a boy crosses the Atlantic
Ocean inside a large piece of fruit, together with some very big
insects. While on a tour of a magical and mysterious chocolate
factory in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(1964), Charlie sees
four unpleasant children disappear. This book became a best-
seller as soon as it appeared and was made into a very successful
film in 1971. Many of the children's stories present ugly and
unpleasant characters to whom unpleasant things happen.
George's
Marvellous Medicine
(1981) is about a boy who has a mean, unkind
grandmother; in return for her unkindness, he gives her a
medicine which does strange and terrible things to her. Children
love
Revolting Rhymes
(1982), in which traditional stories are
retold as poems in amusing ways.
Dahl also wrote for the cinema, including the screenplay for
You Only Live Twice
(1967) and
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
(1968).
Parts of his own life story are told in
Boy
(1984), about his early
life and schooldays, and
Going Solo
(1986), in which he describes
his flying days. Dahl has won many prizes for his writing over the
years, and his work continues to be popular with children and
adults all over the world.
All the stories in this book have wonderfully inventive story lines
with a twist in the tail. The characters are ordinary and
respectable on the surface, but many of them have an
unexpectedly dark and cruel side to their personality. Tension is
built up around the relationships between the various characters.
Often a husband and wife are involved in mind games in which
their hatred for each other is rarely mentioned or acted on until
it has built up to an unbearable level.
A harmless guessing game between two lovers of good wine
suddenly becomes deadly serious, while a competition on board
a ship has an even more serious result for one of the competitors.
Mrs Bixby is faced with a difficult problem when her lover gives
her an expensive gift, and Mrs Foster's terrible fear of being late
is cruelly used by her husband. And what are the frightening
sounds that Klausner can hear on the strange machine he has
built? These situations, and more, develop in unexpected ways in
this excellent collection of Dahl's finest stories.
vi
vii
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