Roald Dahl

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. ISBN-10: 0-582-41943-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-582-41943-8 First published in the Longman Simplified English Series 1979 in association with MichaelJoseph Ltd. First published in Longman Fiction 1993 This adaptation first published in 1996 This edition first published 1999 9 10 NEW EDITION 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. This editioncopyright © Penguin Books Ltd 1999 Cover design by Bender Richardson White

Contents
page Introduction Taste A Swim Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat The Way up to Heaven The Sound Machine The Leg of Lamb Birth and Fate Poison Activities
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1 14 25 40 54 67 78 86 97

Set in ll/14pt Bembo Printed in China SWTC/09

For a complete list of titles available in the Penguin Readers series pleasewrite 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 sadevents: 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 wentto 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 inselling 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. ButDahl'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

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on his years as a pilot. Other collectionsfor 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. Headmitted 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...