Taste And Other Tales

Taste
and Other Tales
R OALD 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 withMichael Joseph 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 inDenmark.
This edition copyright © Penguin Books Ltd 1999
Cover design by Bender Richardson White

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

For a complete list of titles available in the Penguin Readers series please write to your local
Pearson Education office or contact: Penguin Readers Marketing Department,
Pearson Education, Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, Essex, CM20 2JE.

Contents
page
I ntroduction

V

Taste

1

A S wim

14

Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat

25

The Way up to Heaven

40

The Sound Machine

54

The Leg of Lamb

67

Birth and Fate

78

Poison

86

Activities

97

Introduction
T hese 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 SouthWales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, and his early
life was overshadowed by sad events: 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
featurecharacters who are cruel to those who have been cruel to
them.
After leaving school, Dahl went to 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 militaryofficial in Washington, and it was here that he
began to have some success as a writer. He succeeded in selling 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 ofhis best
books for young people grew out of stories that he invented for
his children at bedtime. But Dahl'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.
Overto You (1946) was Dahl's first collection of stories, based

v

on his years as a pilot. Other collections for 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 iscentral to
Dahl's writing, and his stories are characterized by the presence
of an unusual twist at the end. He admitted 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...