James and the Giant Peach

Roald Dahl gets rid of the parents in James and the Giant Peach within a page and a half, and he does it entirely on purpose.

What happens

James is four and perfectly happy beside the sea when his mother and father go up to London to do some shopping and are eaten by an escaped rhinoceros. In full daylight. On a crowded street. Dahl points out that it was all over for them in thirty-five seconds and considerably worse for James, who has years of it still ahead.

He is sent to live with Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker high on a hill in the south of England, and they are two of the nastiest adults Dahl ever wrote. They beat him for almost no reason. They call him a disgusting little beast. His room is as bare as a prison cell and he is not allowed off the hill at all.

The cruelty is broad and ridiculous rather than upsetting. The aunts sit in deck chairs with fizzy lemonade taking it in turns to recite poems about how beautiful they are, then insulting each other in verse when the compliments run out. One is a great white soggy overboiled cabbage. The other spits when she talks.

Even so, it is worth a word beforehand. James is beaten, threatened with a night down a well, and made to chop wood in the heat until he cries. A tender reader may want a hand through the first few chapters. Everything afterwards is joy.

The turn is a small old man in a dark green suit who comes out of the laurel bushes with a paper bag. Inside are thousands of tiny green things, glowing, stirring, sliding over one another. Crocodile tongues, he says, boiled in the skull of a dead witch. Ten hairs from your own head will set them off.

James bolts for the kitchen, trips under the peach tree, and every single one of them burrows into the soil before he can catch it.

That is the engine of the book and it is a wonderful one, because your reader knows exactly what is coming and the aunts have no idea.

The growing of the peach is worth the price on its own. Melon. Twice that again. A butter-coloured pumpkin. As big as Aunt Sponge herself and probably as heavy. The aunts hop round the tree clapping and shouting Magnifico while James stands underneath saying quietly that it is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

What to read next

For more of a neglected boy and an impossible stroke of luck, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in the library too. Charlie lives on cabbage soup in a two-room house with one bed and four grandparents in it, and presses his nose to the sweet shop window on the way to school.