James and the Giant Peach

by Roald Dahl

Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.

They were dead and gone in thirty-five seconds flat. Poor James, on the other hand, was still very much alive, and all at once he found himself alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world.

The garden, which covered the whole of the top of the hill, was large and desolate, and the only tree in the entire place (apart from a clump of dirty old laurel bushes at the far end) was an ancient peach tree that never gave any peaches.

James had been put to work, as usual. This time he was chopping wood for the kitchen stove. Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker were sitting comfortably in deckchairs nearby, sipping tall glasses of fizzy lemonade and watching him to see that he didn’t stop work for one moment.

“I think you’d make,” Aunt Spiker said, “a lovely Frankenstein.”

Great tears began oozing out of James’s eyes and rolling down his cheeks. He stopped working and leaned against the chopping-block, overwhelmed by his own unhappiness.

“There’s more power and magic in those things in there than in all the rest of the world put together,”

“Crocodile tongues!” he cried. “One thousand long slimy crocodile tongues boiled up in the skull of a dead witch for twenty days and nights with the eyeballs of a lizard! Add the fingers of a young monkey, the gizzard of a pig, the beak of a green parrot, the juice of a porcupine, and three spoonfuls of sugar. Stew for another week, and then let the moon do the rest!”

“Of course I’m not talking to you, you ass!” the Centipede answered. “That crazy Glow-worm has gone to sleep with her light on!”

They gaped. They screamed. They started to run. They panicked. They both got in each other’s way. They began pushing and jostling, and each of them was thinking only about saving herself.

Aunt Spiker lay ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book.

This building happened to be a famous factory where they made chocolate,

“I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican!” wailed the Old-Green-Grasshopper.

the alarm was sounded and the word went out that the biggest bomb in the history of the world was hovering over New York City, and that at any moment it might go off.

And for the next thirty seconds the whole City held its breath, waiting for the end to come.

There was a squelch. The needle went in deep. And suddenly—there was the giant peach, caught and spiked upon the very pinnacle of the Empire State Building.

And as for the enormous peach stone—it was set up permanently in a place of honor in Central Park and became a famous monument. But it was not only a famous monument. It was also a famous house. And inside the famous house there lived a famous person— JAMES HENRY TROTTER himself.