Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl's Most Famous Creation - Softcover

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THE RED CHOCOLATE BOX

Sophie Dahl, aged three.

I called him Mold, because when I was a toddler my baby tongue couldn’t get to grips with the Norwegian pronunciation of his name, ‘Roo-al’ (regal, long stretched Roo, al like the end of mall, silent D), and instead Mold he was, ever after.

At his table, I was raised on a steady diet of good food and enchantment. A meal was never just a meal; it was a recipe from a prince in Dar es Salaam, rescued from the jaws of a hungry python at the crucial moment by my grandfather. In this story, and its variants, Mold was always the blue-eyed interloper, diverting the disasters he stumbled upon. So grateful was the fictitious prince, he gave the lanky Englishman his treasured recipe for crab-stuffed baked potatoes. (Or toast with bacon and marmalade, or whatever else happened to be on the menu in rainy Buckinghamshire that day.)

He had many accoutrements of magic, Mold, like a proper magician should: amaretto biscuits whose wrapping paper you lit, which shot up into the sky like titchy hot-air balloons, falling back to earth in a wispy question mark of ash; a miniature steam train that huffed and puffed round the dining room table; a house dotted with Witch Balls, ancient, mirrored spheres that hung from a window, confronting any witch so bold as to come knocking with her own hideous reflection so she’d flee. Mold was famous among his children, and later on me, for writing our names in the grass with weed killer, while we slept.

‘The fairies have been,’ he’d say over breakfast, in a voice that crackled and sparked, like the beginnings of a bonfire.

There was nothing more magical, though, than the Red Tupperware Box that appeared at the end of a meal, heralding the most important and longed-for bit.

The Red Tupperware was a medium-sized, rectangular box of function. The box itself was almost irrelevant, and it could have been blue, green or see-through. Its postbox redness, though, lent an air of jaunty dissolution to the proceedings and ultimately became part of its own myth.

If you had been good at lunch or dinner, not too much of a bore, eaten things proffered without a fuss, you could collect the fabled box from its home in the kitchen and bring it to the table, while the grown-ups were having their coffee.

The Red Box contained chocolate. Lots of chocolate, in child-sized appealing bars, nothing fancy, but always compelling. And it was here, over this staunch bit of plastic, that Mold and I did a great deal of communing.

We both LOVED chocolate. Our taste in the stuff was similar. Cadbury’s Flake, Aero, Curly Wurly, Crunchie, KitKat and the Dime bar, a Scandinavian crunchy concoction that Mold delivered to me with great ceremony after a book tour in Sweden. Maltesers, Rolo, Fruit and Nut; a mutual horror of the Creme Egg. We were partners in a quest for the ultimate bite (light, airy, possibly featuring almonds). His knowledge of chocolate was encyclopedic. He could recall specific dates and years of invention with the glee of a patriotic child recalling the kings and queens of his country. Even his Jack Russell, Chopper, ate chocolate (four Smarties, served after lunch and dinner, daily).

Mold grew up fatherless in Wales, in an era before chocolate was readily available. Sweet shops peppered his boyhood and boyhood writing: lemon sherbets, bootlaces, gobstoppers and toffees, hard-boiled sweets served by boot-faced proprietors. Chocolate was later: the stuff of dreams, exotic and faraway.

And so, for the grown-up Mold, Willy Wonka and his factory were to embody the chocolate dream, Charlie Bucket to play the moral compass beating at its heart. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was written fifty years ago, but it remains utterly timeless and infused with a child-like magic that only a landscape of chocolate rivers and everlasting gobstoppers can conjure. For each and every one of us, there remains a powerful, Proustian memory of that first-ever something sweet, and, for so many of us, that was made flesh by the story of Charlie Bucket and his Golden Ticket.

A journalist asked Mold before he died, how he liked his chocolate. He answered thus: ‘For the record, I am not overly fond of chocolate-flavoured foods such as chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream. I prefer my chocolate straight.’

So do I.

Happy 50th Birthday, Charlie.

Sophie Dahl

It’s not quite the first time I’ve had reason to be thankful for my parents’, um . . . well, let’s call them ‘eccentricities’ regarding my upbringing, but I have not felt quite such a fervent gratitude before.

I wasn’t allowed many sweets or chocolate as a child. I could take a decorous few at parties, or one chocolate digestive or a sucky-sweet after dinner when I got older, and my beloved grandma gave me a Cadbury’s Buttons egg at Easter. I used to make it last for weeks – buttons first, then shell. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory spoke to me as no other book before or since has done. I knew that feeling of watching other children cramming chocolate down their throats in front of me (yes, it was indeed pure torture) and the unspeakable elation of occasionally getting my own hands on the stuff and letting the creamy sweetness flood my mouth and fill my senses.

The book transported me with other delights. The sense of recklessness, of adventure, of dreams tethered just close enough to reality to allow you to think that they might honestly one day come true. It was, I think, the first ‘proper’ book I ever read – mostly words, not pictures (like Where the Wild Things Are), and telling just one story (not like Teddy Robinson, who had lots of little ones) that gathered you up, whizzed you along at a glorious, dizzying pace and tipped you out, dazed, breathless but – crucially – not confused at the end. At which point, all you had to do was turn back to the first page and start again, this time with the joy of anticipation infusing it all with an extra, even more mouth-watering savour.

This book is written for all those who loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when they were young, and those who love it now. It’s for anyone who wants to know a bit more about how it came to be, how it managed to permeate readers’ worlds and the world at large, and how it has endured so happily for fifty years – and counting.

It’s been a whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight to do. I hope you have half as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

Welcome to the factory.

Lucy Mangan

Roald Dahl and his dog Chopper getting his daily treat (1988). (Illustrations by Quentin Blake.)

Photograph of Roald’s jar of wine gums, and his slippers illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Introduction

In 1960 Roald Dahl was living in America with his wife, the film star Patricia Neal, their two daughters, Olivia and Tessa, and their newborn son, Theo. To entertain the children, Roald Dahl would make up stories. One of them was about a lonely boy who lived in a town that was also home to an extraordinary chocolate factory. ‘Having read my children all the available books and come across some really crummy ones,’ he said later, ‘I thought – why not try to write a children’s book?’

So began the gestation of the story that would lead to one of Roald Dahl’s best-known, bestselling, best-loved creations, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Most of us, when we read as children, imagine vaguely (if we imagine the author at all) that he or she simply sat down one day...