Spotty Powder and other Splendiferous Secrets

Spotty Powder and other Splendiferous Secrets is a Roald Dahl scrapbook for 7 year olds. The best thing in it is a chapter he threw away.

What happens

It is not a story. It is the drawer everything else came out of.

There is a month-by-month diary of Dahl's year, with frogs sprouting legs in June and the first snowdrops coming up in a January garden. There are his school reports. There are recipes. There is a bit about Quentin Blake.

And in among all that sits Spotty Powder, a chapter cut from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because there were too many horrid children in the first draft.

Mr Wonka has invented a powder that looks like sugar and tastes like sugar. Sprinkle it on your cereal, wait five seconds, and you come out in bright red spots. Your mother takes one look and decides you cannot possibly go to school.

Charlie's reaction is the reaction of every child who has ever sat an exam.

The horrid child this time is Miranda Piker, who is top of her form, has never missed a day of school in her life, and thinks holidays should be abolished. Her father is a headmaster. They go off to smash the machine. What happens after that is pure Dahl and I will leave it there.

The rest of the book works best dipped into rather than read straight through. A child who already loves the stories will be delighted by the offcuts. Augustus Gloop was nearly called Augustus Pottle. The Oompa-Loompas were nearly Whipple-Scrumpets.

A child who has not read the novels yet will find a lot of it puzzling, because most of it assumes you know them.

One thing worth a look first. The Miranda Piker chapter plays a child and her father apparently being ground into powder for laughs, screams included. Mr Wonka then says he was joking. Dahl fans will know that register, but a younger or more literal reader may not be sure he is.

There is also a passage where Dahl explains an early version of the story in which a boy is sealed inside a chocolate figure and a little girl bites his nose off. Again, funny if you know the voice. Genuinely startling if you don't.

What to read next

Start with the finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is in the library, and come back to this afterwards. It is much better when you know what he cut and why.