Antonyms
Words with opposite meanings are called antonyms. Look at
this list of antonyms.
Nasty/nice
Friendly/unfriendly
Kind/unkind
Mean/generous
Ugly/beautiful
Clean/messy
Choose one antonym from each pair to complete six sentences:
The Twits are ________________________people.
The Twits are ________________________people.
The Twits are ________________________people.
The Twits are ________________________people.
The Twits are ________________________people.
The Twits are ________________________people.
Character Study
In the twits Roald Dahl tells us that a person who has good
thought can never be ugly.
Choose the words to fill the spaces
Good
Ugly
Double
Stick-out
Mouth
Wonky
Lovely
Sunbeams
A person who has good thoughts can never be ___________.
You can have a ____________ nose and a crooked
___________ and a _____________ chin and ___________
Teeth, but if you have _____________ thoughts they will
shine out of your face like _____________ and you will
always look _________________.
Imagine that Mr and Mrs Twit have a dog that is as horrible as they
are. What would it look like? Look back to the descriptions of Mr and
Mrs Twit to help with ideas. Write a short description of the dog on
another piece of paper and use the lines below to jot down some ideas.
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
MR and Mrs Twits Dog
Name _________________________________________
Description
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________
About Roald Dahl
As recounted in Boy, Roald Dahl's father, Harald Dahl, immigrated to England from Norway around the turn
of the century (1900). Not long after the death of his first wife, he took a trip back to Norway in hopes of
finding a wife to help him raise his young son and daughter. He married Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg in 1911
and the couple moved to Dahl's home in Llandaff, Wales. Over the next six years they had five children:
Astri, Alfhild, Roald, Else, Asta. Roald was born on September 13, 1916 in Llandaff. Unfortunately Astri,
the eldest, died of appendicitis in 1920. Harald Dahl quickly deteriorated after his daughter's death and he died
of pneumonia a few months later. Sofie Dahl, pregnant at the time with Asta, was left with three of her own
children, two step–children, a sizeable estate, and her husband's dying wish that his children would be
educated in English schools, which he thought the best in the world.
A less determined woman would have packed up and moved back home to Norway, but Sofie decided to stay
in Wales and carry out Harald's wish. But she wasn't ready to move to England yet. First she moved the
family into a smaller, more manageable home in Llandaff and then one–by–one sent each of her children to
Elmtree House, a local school, for kindergarten. When Roald was seven Sofie decided it was time for him to
go to a proper boy's school, so she sent him to nearby Llandaff Cathedral School. He spent two years there
and his only memories of it are described in Boy – one involves an older boy whizzing by on a bicycle, and
the other involves The Great Mouse Plot that earned him and his friends a savage caning by the school's
headmaster. This violent incident was what prompted Sofie to withdraw Roald from the Llandaff school and
finally send him off to an English boarding school: St. Peter's.
St. Peter's Preparatory School in Weston–super–Mare was founded in 1900 and is described at length by Dahl
in his book Boy (published in 1984). Roald attended St. Peter's from ages nine to thirteen, and he was so
homesick at first the he even faked the symptoms of appendicitis (which he remembered from Astri and his
older half-sister Ellen) [see note] to earn a trip home. He eventually adjusted to school life, but he never learned
to like it. In Boy he describes savage beatings, sadistic headmasters, prejudiced teachers, and even an abusive
dormitory Matron. His nightmarish description though, is somewhat tempered by his concession that his
memory of it was "coloured by my natural love of fantasy" (Treglown, 20). Schoolmates remembered him as
a tall, soft–faced boy, not especially popular but very close to the few boys who became his friends. He was
good at sports like cricket and swimming, but academically he was toward the bottom of his class. One of his
main hobbies was reading, and some of his favorite novelists were the adventure writers Rudyard Kipling,
Captain Marryat, H. Rider Haggarrd, and G.A. Henty. Their books emphasized a kind of heroism and
masculinity that would later influence both Dahl's life and his own
writing.
By the time Roald was thirteen the family had moved to Kent in England,
and he was soon sent off to the famous Repton Public School. His sisters
all attended Roedean in Sussex. To Roald, Repton was even worse than
St. Peter's. His account of it in Boy includes fagging (younger boys,
"fags", were basically personal slaves to the older prefects, called
"boazers"), beatings, the torture of new boys, and other miseries common
to many, although not all, boys' boarding schools of the time. One
particularly scandalous section alleges that a former headmaster of
Repton, Geoffrey Fisher (who had subsequently become Archbishop of
Canterbury), was a sadistic flogger. According to Dahl, the vicious beatings that this man would deliver,
combined with the fact that twenty years later he crowned Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey, made
Dahl doubt the existence of God. In Jeremy Treglown's biography, however, he discoveres that Dahl got his
dates mixed up. The beatings he was referring to happened in 1933, a year after Fisher left Repton.
Dahl must have gotten Fisher mixed up with J. T. Christie, his successor.
Not all memories of Repton were bad, though. Dahl fondly recalls in Boy that "every now and again, a plain
grey cardboard box was dished out to each boy in our House, and this, believe it or not, was a present from the
great chocolate manufacturers, Cadbury" (BOY, 147). Inside were twelve new chocolate bar inventions that
the boys were asked to sample and critique. Dahl and his schoolmates took this very seriously, and Roald used
to dream of working in a chocolate company's inventing room. He said in Boy, "It was lovely dreaming those
dreams, and I have no doubt at all that, thirty–five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second
book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly–invented chocolates inside them,
and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (BOY, 149).
After completing his education at Repton, Dahl decided that he wanted a career that would take him to
"wonderful faraway places like Africa or China" (BOY, 166). He won a coveted position with the Shell
Company and spent two years training in England. Soon after he was posted to East Africa and started off on
the two week sea voyage to get there. This voyage marks the end of Boy and the beginning of Going Solo.
Once he reached Mombasa (in Kenya), Dahl transferred to another ship for the voyage down to Dar es Salaam
in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). There he lived with two other Shell representatives and the three of them
together administered the entire vast East African territory. Going Solo describes many of the exciting
adventures Dahl lived through, including the time a green mamba [see note] entered his friend's house and the
snake–catcher had to be called in. Another time a lion carried off a native woman, and Dahl's subsequent
account of her rescue was printed in an African newspaper and became his first
published work.
In 1939, it became clear to Dahl that something big was coming. It was World War
II. Soon all the Englishmen in the territory were rounded up and transformed into
temporary soldiers, responsible for containing the German population. This
experience prompted Dahl to formally join the RAF (Royal Air
Force) and learn to fly warplanes. Thus in November 1939 he drove
cross–country to Nairobi to enlist and was awarded with the rank of
Leading Aircraftman (LAC). After eight weeks of basic training and
six months of advanced flying instruction, the RAF deemed him
ready for battle.
Unfortunately Dahl's very first venture into combat territory resulted
in his famous 1940 crash in the Libyan desert. He was flying an
unfamiliar airplane (a Gladiator) and was supposed to join 80
Squadron in the Western Desert. Unfortunately the co–ordinates he was given were incorrect,
and he suddenly found himself losing both daylight and fuel in the middle of nowhere. He
was forced to attempt a crash landing, praying for luck that he didn't get. His undercarriage hit
a boulder and the nose of the Gladiator slammed into the sand at over 75 miles an hour. Dahl's
head struck the reflector–sight and fractured his skull, pushing his nose in and blinding him
for days. He managed to pull himself from the burning wreckage, though, and was later
rescued by three brave soldiers from the Suffolk regiment. After convalescing for months in
various army hospitals, Dahl was finally deemed fit to resume flying duties again in the spring
of 1941.
80 Squadron was now engaged in the tragic RAF campaign in Greece, and after rejoining them Dahl was soon
thrust into the desperate routine of trying to stay alive. On his first trip up, he encountered six Ju 88's (enemy
planes) and managed to shoot one of them down. The next day he shot down another over Khalkis Bay. His
victory was short–lived, though, as the German Messerschmitt fighters swarmed down upon him and he
barely made it back to the base alive. Over the next four days he went up twelve more times, fighting against
incredible odds and miraculously making it back to base each time. On the 20th of April the Germans
discovered the camp and ground–strafed it, but luckily they didn't hit any of the seven remaining aircraft. Dahl
and the other man in 80 Squadron fought bravely for many more months, and their battles are described at
length in Going Solo. Dahl was not fated to remain with them for long though, and when he began to get
blinding headaches (from his earlier accident) he was invalided back home to Britain. His career in the RAF
was over.
Thus, in 1941, Roald Dahl went home to England. He wasn't there for long, though. Through his friendship
with artist Matthew Smith, he became acquainted with some very important men in the British government.
Dahl was a cultivated, forceful young injured pilot who seemed able to talk about anything. It wasn't long
before he was shipped off to the United States to help with the British War Effort as "assistant air attache." [see
note]
One of Dahl's first duties in America was to get close to as many well–
placed people as possible. Newspaper–owner Charles Marsh was one
of these, and he and Dahl struck up an immediate friendship. Another
duty was to help create a kind of British propaganda to keep America
interested in the war and sympathetic to Britain's effort. Famous
English author C.S. Forester asked Dahl to tell him his own story, so
that he could write it up. Dahl thought it easier to put something on
paper himself, and the result was so good that Forester decided not to
change a thing. The finished story appeared anonymously in The
Saturday Evening Post in August 1942 under the title "Shot Down
Over Libya."
The story was introduced as a "factual report on Libyan air fighting"
by an unnamed RAF pilot "at present in this country for medical
reasons." Of course, the "factual" part might have been a little bit of a
stretch. As mentioned previously, Dahl's crash was actually caused by
lack of fuel and wrong directions, not from any enemy shooting. Much
later, when this discrepancy was pointed out to him, Dahl claimed that
the story had been edited and misleadingly captioned by magazine editors looking for a more dramatic tale.
As time passed and Dahl became more popular among Washington's rich and famous, he became known for
the wild yarns he would spin about his RAF adventures. He even wrote a story called "Gremlin Lore" about
the mythical creatures that supposedly sabotaged RAF planes. Since he was a serving officer, Dahl was
required to submit everything he wrote for approval by British Information Services. The officer who read it,
Sidney Bernstein, decided to pass it along to his good friend Walt Disney, who was looking for War–related
features for his fledgling film company. Disney decided to turn Dahl's story into an animated feature called
The Gremlins.
Problems immediately began to surface with the project. What did Gremlins look like? How could Disney
copyright a name already known (and invented) by countless RAF pilots? Should the film be satirical or
purely fantastic? Beyond these concerns, audience enthusiasm for the film began to wane as the War dragged
on. Ultimately the project was scrapped, though Disney did put together a picture book in 1943 entitled Walt
Disney: The Gremlins (A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl). This book, published by
Random House in the United States and by Collins in Australia and Great Britain, is extremely rare and is
considered a prize by any serious Dahl collector. It was his first book.
If the Gremlins never reached the big screen, the experience certainly made Dahl's name as a writer. By the
fall of 1944 he had a literary agent, Ann Watkins, and he had published a number of stories in American
magazines: "Shot Down Over Libya" in The Saturday Evening Post; The Gremlins both and Cosmopolitan
and in book form; "The Sword" in The Atlantic Monthly; "Katina" and "Only This" in the Ladies' Home
Journal; and "Beware of the Dog" in Harper's. While Dahl, like any young writer, was trying out styles, he
was also making sure each story contained some overt propaganda for the War effort. It's also worth nothing
(in light of Dahl's later career) that two of these stories – The Gremlins and "Katina" – either featured or were
written for children.
In 1945 Dahl moved back home to Amersham, England to be near his mother,
Sofie. He enjoyed the rustic country life, making friends with some of the
working–class men in the village. Among them was a butcher named Claud
Taylor, who would later be immortalized in the "Claud's Dog" series of stories.
Meanwhile, in 1946 Reynal and Hitchcock published Over to You, a collection
of Dahl's war stories. It was released in England soon after by Hamish Hamilton.
The book received mixed reviews but was ultimately successful enough to
prompt Dahl's next effort: a full–blown novel about the possibilities of nuclear
war.
The novel Dahl wrote, Sometime Never, was published in the United States in
1948 by Scribner's, and in England a year later by Collins. There's no easy way
to put this: the book was a total flop. It was almost an adult version of the
Gremlins story, beginning with the Battle of Britain and continuing on to the end of the world. Despite its
utter failure, the book is remarkable for being the first book about nuclear war to be published in the United
States after Hiroshima.
In the years following Sometime Never, Dahl renewed his friendship with American Charles Marsh, helping
the newspaper man amass a valuable collection of British art and antiques. Dahl also helped his mentor set up
a charity known as the Marsh's Public Welfare Foundation. In return, Marsh set up a trust in Dahl's name and
invested thousands of dollars in a Dahl–family forestry operation in Norway.
These years in England had been profitable ones for Dahl, but he came to miss the sophistication of New
York life. As the 1950's began, Dahl finally began to see some money from stories sold to Collier's and The
New Yorker. He applied for and was granted a permanent American visa, and soon found himself taking up
residence with the Marsh family back in the Big Apple. He slid easily back into the circuit of celebrity parties,
and it was at one of these functions in 1951 that he met his future wife, actress Patricia Neal.
Patricia Neal was born in Packard, Kentucky on January 20, 1926. Her father was a manager for the Southern
Coal and Coke Company, and though the family was not sophisticated, they were comfortably well off. Neal's
theatrical ambitions were evident early in her school career, and she later enjoyed a measure of success at
Northwestern University. After her father's early death, Neal left to pursue life as an actress in New York.
"Before she was twenty–one, she had been taken to lunch by Richard Rodgers, pursued by David O. Selznick,
had turned down one Broadway role in favor of another, and had made the cover of Life" (Treglown, 111).
Patricia Neal's most scandalous claim to fame, however, was her long affair with Gary Cooper, her co–star
from The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949). The affair with Cooper began two years earlier, in 1947, and by
1950 Cooper's wife had found out and joined the battle. On one occasion, Treglown reports, Neal received the
following telegram: "I HAVE HAD JUST ABOUT ENOUGH OF YOU. YOU HAD BETTER STOP NOW
OR YOU WILL BE SORRY. MRS. GARY COOPER." Eventually Mrs. Cooper got her way, but not before
her husband had made Pat pregnant and persuaded her to have an abortion. Guilty and scared, Neal
called off the relationship.
After this trying period, Neal won a part in The Children's Hour, a new play by Lillian Hellman. It was
at one of Hellman's dinner parties in 1951 that she first met the newly relocated author Roald Dahl. He had
become quite a favorite amongst the New York elite, and he loved to shock and scorn unsuspecting
newcomers with his wit and sarcasm. When he found himself seated next to the beautiful (and ten years his
junior) rising star Patricia Neal, his tactic was to ignore her all evening. It wasn't long, though, before the two
of them were going out together on a regular basis.
Dahl was also enjoying a measure of commercial success now as well. The sixty–year–old publisher Alfred
Knopf had recently discovered some of Dahl's short stories and was eager to sign him to a deal. The collection
Dahl later delivered in 1953 included such tales as "Taste," "My Lady Love, My Dove," "Skin," and "Dip in
the Pool." Also included were four country stories gathered under the sub–title "Claud's Dog." The resulting
book was entitled Someone Like You and received some very good reviews: "At disconcertingly long
intervals, the compleat short–story writer comes along... Tension is his business; give him a surprise
denouement, he'll give you a story leading up to it. His name in this instance is Roald Dahl" (James Kelly,
quoted in Treglown, 119).
The publicity department at Knopf soon had even more to work with: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal were
married on July 2, 1953 at Trinity Church in New York.
In 1953 Dahl married actress Patricia Neal, whom he had first met at a party in 1951. She was a promising
Warner Bros. star who had recently ended a much–publicized affair with Gary Cooper. They had five children
together and he attributes his success as a writer of children's books to them. "Had I not had children of my
own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so." Neal
suffered a series of near–fatal strokes in 1965 and her road to recovery (with Roald's help) was described in
Barry Farrell's book Pat and Roald (later made into the film The Patricia Neal Story).
In 1983, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal divorced after thirty years of marriage. Dahl quickly remarried Felicity
Dahl, with whom he had fallen in love and carried on an affair for some time. Thus the last years of his life
were relatively happy and productive, and some of his best books were written during this period: The BFG,
The Witches, and Matilda. Roald Dahl died on November 23, 1990 in Oxford, England. He was buried in
Great Missenden.
Influences
Boy – Tales of Childhood and Going Solo are accounts of Dahl's childhood experiences which explain where
some of the ideas for his books originated.
Roald Dahl and his siblings were raised to be very conscious of their Norwegian heritage. Not only did his
mother speak the language around the house, she also read them Norse myths and took them on annual trips to
Norway to visit relatives. This heritage is most evident in Dahl's book The Witches, but its influence can be
seen in other books as well.
Danny The Champion of the World, Matilda, and Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes are examples of stories
resulting from Dahl's beliefs that "The writer for children must be a jokey sort of fellow... he must be
unconventional and inventive."
Of children, he said, "They love being spooked... They love chocolates and toys and money... They love being
made to giggle."
The stories of Roald Dahl are indeed treasures for our children and for generations to come.
Collecting words
Roald Dahl kept all sort of notes and lists to help him when he
wrote his stories. Words that have the same or very similar
meanings are called synonyms.
At the beginning of his career as a writer, Roald Dahl collected lists of
words in an old school notebook. ‘When you’re describing something or
someone,’ he said, ‘you can’t just choose dull words like beautiful, pretty
or nice. You must search for meaty and imaginative words
Here is a list of words Roald Dahl collected under the heading Beautiful
Agreeable Beaming Brilliant Charming Comely
Dazzling Delicate
Elegant
Engaging Exquisite
Glowing Graceful Handsome Intriguing Lovely
Pretty
Radiant
Shining
Sparkling Splendid
Dainty
Glorious
Nice
Superb
See if you can make your own list up for Angry. Make sure your words are meaty and imaginative.
inflamed
venomous
infuriated
evil
Now see if you can do the same for said
screeched
screamed
whispered
spoke
Now make a list of all the words you can think of that mean the same as:
Big, rich and funny.