The Twits Read online

  Other books by Roald Dahl

  THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE

  ESIO TROT

  FANTASTIC MR FOX

  THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME

  THE MAGIC FINGER

  For older readers

  THE BFG

  BOY: TALES OF CHILDHOOD

  BOY and GOING SOLO

  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

  CHARLIE AND THE GREAT GLASS ELEVATOR

  THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF CHARLIE AND MR WILLY WONKA DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

  GEORGE'S MARVELLOUS MEDICINE

  GOING SOLO

  JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH

  MATILDA

  THE WITCHES

  Picture books

  DIRTY BEASTS (with Quentin Blake) THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE (with Quentin Blake) THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME (with Quentin Blake) THE MINPINS (with Patrick Benson) REVOLTING RHYMES (with Quentin Blake) Plays

  THE BFG: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood) CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: A PLAY (Adapted by Richard George) FANTASTIC MR FOX: A PLAY (Adapkd by Sally Reid) JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH: A PLAY (Adapkd by Richard George) THE TWITS: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood) THE WITCHES: PLAYS FOR CHILDREN (Adapted by David Wood) Teenage fiction

  THE GREAT AUTOMATIC GRAMMATIZATOR AND OTHER STORIES

  RHYME STEW

  SKIN AND OTHER STORIES

  THE VICAR OF NIBBLESWICKE

  THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR AND SIX MORE

  Roald Dahl

  The Twits

  illustrated by

  Quentin Blake

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario. Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland. 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England puffinbooks.com

  First published by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1980

  Published in Puffin Books 1982

  This edition published 2007

  2

  Text copyright (c) Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1980

  Illustrations copyright (c) Quenlin Blake, 1980

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-14-193016-9

  For Emma

  Contents

  Hairy Faces

  Mr Twit

  Dirty Beards

  Mrs Twit

  The Glass Eye

  The Frog

  The Wormy Spaghetti

  The Funny Walking-stick

  Mrs Twit Has the Shrinks

  Mrs Twit Gets a Stretching

  Mrs Twit Goes Ballooning Up

  Mrs Twit Comes Ballooning Down

  Mr Twit Gets a Horrid Shock

  The House, the Tree and the Monkey Cage

  Hugtight Sticky Glue

  Four Sticky Little Boys

  The Great Upside Down Monkey Circus

  The Roly-Poly Bird to the Rescue

  No Bird Pie for Mr Twit

  Still No Bird Pie for Mr Twit

  Mr and Mrs Twit Go Off to Buy Guns

  Muggle-Wump Has an Idea

  The Great Glue Painting Begins

  The Carpet Goes on the Ceiling

  The Furniture Goes Up

  The Ravens Swoop Over

  The Twits Are Turned Upside Down

  The Monkeys Escape

  The Twits Get the Shrinks

  Hairy Faces

  What a lot of hairy-faced men there are around nowadays.

  When a man grows hair all over his face it is impossible to tell what he really looks like.

  Perhaps that's why he does it. He'd rather you didn't know.

  Then there's the problem of washing.

  When the very hairy ones wash their faces, it must be as big a job as when you and I wash the hair on our heads.

  So what I want to know is this. How often do all these hairy-faced men wash their faces? Is it only once a week, like us, on Sunday nights? And do they shampoo it? Do they use a hairdryer? Do they rub hair-tonic in to stop their faces from going bald? Do they go to a barber to have their hairy faces cut and trimmed or do they do it themselves in front of the bathroom mirror with nail-scissors?

  I don't know. But next time you see a man with a hairy face (which will probably be as soon as you step out on to the street) maybe you will look at him more closely and start wondering about some of these things.

  Mr Twit

  Mr Twit was one of these very hairy-faced men. The whole of his face except for his forehead, his eyes and his nose was covered with thick hair. The stuff even sprouted in revolting tufts out of his nostrils and ear-holes.

  Mr Twit felt that this hairiness made him look terrifically wise and grand. But in truth he was neither of these things. Mr Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.

  The hair on Mr Twit's face didn't grow smooth and matted as it does on most hairy-faced men. It grew in spikes that stuck out straight like the bristles of a nailbrush.

  And how often did Mr Twit wash this bristly nailbrushy face of his?

  The answer is NEVER, not even on Sundays.

  He hadn't washed it for years.

  Dirty Beards

  As you know, an ordinary unhairy face like yours or mine simply gets a bit smudgy if it is not washed often enough, and there's nothing so awful about that.

  But a hairy face is a very different matter. Things cling to hairs, especially food. Things like gravy go right in among the hairs and stay there. You and I can wipe our smooth faces with a flannel and we quickly look more or less all right again, but the hairy man cannot do that.

  We can also, if we are careful, eat our meals without spreading food all over our faces. But not so the hairy man. Watch carefully next time you see a hairy man eating his lunch and you will notice that even if he opens his mouth very wide, it is impossible for him to get a spoonful of beef-stew or ice-cream and chocolate sauce into it without leaving some of it on the hairs.

  Mr Twit didn't even bother to open his mouth wide when he ate. As a result (and because he never washed) there were always hundreds of bits of old breakfasts and lunches and suppers sticking to the hairs around his face. They weren't big bits, mind you, because he used to wipe those off with the back of his hand or on his sleeve while he was eating. But if you looked closely (not that you'd ever want to) you would see tiny little specks of dried-up scrambled eggs stuck to the hairs, and spinach and tomato ketchup and fish fingers and minced chicken livers and all the other disgusting things Mr Twit liked to eat.

  If you looked closer still (hold y
our noses, ladies and gentlemen), if you peered deep into the moustachy bristles sticking out over his upper lip, you would probably see much larger objects that had escaped the wipe of his hand, things that had been there for months and months, like a piece of maggoty green cheese or a mouldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.

  Because of all this, Mr Twit never went really hungry. By sticking out his tongue and curling it sideways to explore the hairy jungle around his mouth, he was always able to find a tasty morsel here and there to nibble on.

  What I am trying to tell you is that Mr Twit was a foul and smelly old man.

  He was also an extremely horrid old man, as you will find out in a moment.

  Mrs Twit

  Mrs Twit was no better than her husband.

  She did not, of course, have a hairy face. It was a pity she didn't because that at any rate would have hidden some of her fearful ugliness.

  Take a look at her.

  Have you ever seen a woman with an uglier face than that? I doubt it.

  But the funny thing is that Mrs Twit wasn't born ugly. She'd had quite a nice face when she was young. The ugliness had grown upon her year by year as she got older.

  Why would that happen? I'll tell you why.

  If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.

  A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

  Nothing shone out of Mrs Twit's face.

  In her right hand she carried a walking-stick. She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on the sole of her left foot and walking was painful. But the real reason she carried a stick was so that she could hit things with it, things like dogs and cats and small children.

  And then there was the glass eye. Mrs Twit had a glass eye that was always looking the other way.

  The Glass Eye

  You can play a lot of tricks with a glass eye because you can take it out and pop it back in again any time you like. You can bet your life Mrs Twit knew all the tricks.

  One morning she took out her glass eye and dropped it into Mr Twit's mug of beer when he wasn't looking.

  Mr Twit sat there drinking the beer slowly. The froth made a white ring on the hairs around his mouth. He wiped the white froth on to his sleeve and wiped his sleeve on his trousers.

  'You're plotting something,' Mrs Twit said, keeping her back turned so he wouldn't see that she had taken out her glass eye. 'Whenever you go all quiet like that I know very well you're plotting something.'

  Mrs Twit was right. Mr Twit was plotting away like mad. He was trying to think up a really nasty trick he could play on his wife that day.

  'You'd better be careful,' Mrs Twit said, 'because when I see you starting to plot, I watch you like a wombat.'

  'Oh, do shut up, you old hag,' Mr Twit said. He went on drinking his beer, and his evil mind kept working away on the latest horrid trick he was going to play on the old woman.

  Suddenly, as Mr Twit tipped the last drop of beer down his throat, he caught sight of Mrs Twit's awful glass eye staring up at him from the bottom of the mug. It made him jump.

  'I told you I was watching you,' cackled Mrs Twit. 'I've got eyes everywhere so you'd better be careful.'

  The Frog

  To pay her back for the glass eye in his beer, Mr Twit decided he would put a frog in Mrs Twit's bed.

  He caught a big one down by the pond and carried it back secretly in a box.

  That night, when Mrs Twit was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, Mr Twit slipped the frog between her sheets. Then he got into his own bed and waited for the fun to begin.

  Mrs Twit came back and climbed into her bed and put out the light. She lay there in the dark scratching her tummy. Her tummy was itching. Dirty old hags like her always have itchy tummies.

  Then all at once she felt something cold and slimy crawling over her feet. She screamed.

  'What's the matter with you?' Mr Twit said.

  'Help!' screamed Mrs Twit, bouncing about. 'There's something in my bed!'

  'I'll bet it's that Giant Skillywiggler I saw on the floor just now,' Mr Twit said.

  'That what?' screamed Mrs Twit.

  'I tried to kill it but it got away,' Mr Twit said. 'It's got teeth like screwdrivers!'

  'Help!' screamed Mrs Twit. 'Save me! It's all over my feet!'

  'It'll bite off your toes,' said Mr Twit.

  Mrs Twit fainted.

  Mr Twit got out of bed and fetched a jug of cold water. He poured the water over Mrs Twit's head to revive her. The frog crawled up from under the sheets to get near the water. It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one was having a good time.

  When Mrs Twit came to, the frog had just jumped on to her face. This is not a nice thing to happen to anyone in bed at night. She screamed again.

  'By golly it is a Giant Skillywiggler!' Mr Twit said. 'It'll bite off your nose.'

  Mrs Twit leapt out of bed and flew downstairs and spent the night on the sofa. The frog went to sleep on her pillow.

  The Wormy Spaghetti

  The next day, to pay Mr Twit back for the frog trick, Mrs Twit sneaked out into the garden and dug up some worms. She chose big long ones and put them in a tin and carried the tin back to the house under her apron.

  At one o'clock, she cooked spaghetti for lunch and she mixed the worms in with the spaghetti, but only on her husband's plate. The worms didn't show because everything was covered with tomato sauce and sprinkled with cheese.

  'Hey, my spaghetti's moving!' cried Mr Twit, poking around in it with his fork.

  'It's a new kind,' Mrs Twit said, taking a mouthful from her own plate which of course had no worms. 'It's called Squiggly Spaghetti. It's delicious. Eat it up while it's nice and hot.'

  Mr Twit started eating, Twitsing the long tomato-covered strings around his fork and shovelling them into his mouth. Soon there was tomato sauce all over his hairy chin.

  'It's not as good as the ordinary kind,' he said, talking with his mouth full. 'It's too squishy'

  'I find it very tasty' Mrs Twit said. She was watching him from the other end of the table. It gave her great pleasure to watch him eating worms.

  'I find it rather bitter,' Mr Twit said. 'It's got a distinctly bitter flavour. Buy the other kind next time.'

  Mrs Twit waited until Mr Twit had eaten the whole plateful. Then she said, 'You want to know why your spaghetti was squishy?'

  Mr Twit wiped the tomato sauce from his beard with a corner of the tablecloth. 'Why?' he said.

  'And why it had a nasty bitter taste?'

  'Why?' he said.

  'Because it was worms!' cried Mrs Twit, clapping her hands and stamping her feet on the floor and rocking with horrible laughter.

  The Funny Walking-stick

  To pay Mrs Twit back for the worms in his spaghetti, Mr Twit thought up a really clever nasty trick.

  One night, when the old woman was asleep, he crept out of bed and took her walking-stick downstairs to his workshed. There he stuck a tiny round piece of wood (no thicker than a penny) on to the bottom of the stick.

  This made the stick longer, but the difference was so small, the next morning Mrs Twit didn't notice it.

  The following night, Mr Twit stuck on another tiny bit of wood. Every night, he crept downstairs and added an extra tiny thickness of wood to the end of the walking-stick. He did it very neatly so that the extra bits looked like a part of the old stick.

  Gradually, but oh so gradually, Mrs Twit's walking-stick was getting longer and longer.

  Now when something is growing very slowly, it is almost impossible to notice it happening. You yourself, for example, are actually
growing taller every day that goes by, but you wouldn't think it, would you? It's happening so slowly you can't even notice it from one week to the next.

  It was the same with Mrs Twit's walking-stick. It was all so slow and gradual that she didn't notice how long it was getting even when it was halfway up to her shoulder.

  'That stick's too long for you,' Mr Twit said to her one day.

  'Why so it is!' Mrs Twit said, looking at the stick. 'I've had a feeling there was something wrong but I couldn't for the life of me think what it was.'

  'There's something wrong all right,' Mr Twit said, beginning to enjoy himself.

  'What can have happened?' Mrs Twit said, staring at her old walking-stick. 'It must suddenly have grown longer.'

  'Don't be a fool!' Mr Twit said. 'How can a walking-stick possibly grow longer? It's made of dead wood, isn't it? Dead wood can't grow.'

  'Then what on earth has happened?' cried Mrs Twit.

  'It's not the stick, it's you!' said Mr Twit, grinning horribly. 'It's you that's getting shorter! I've been noticing it for some time now.'

  'That's not true!' cried Mrs Twit.

  'You're shrinking, woman!' said Mr Twit.

  'It's not possible!'

  'Oh yes it jolly well is,' said Mr Twit. 'You're shrinking fast! You're shrinking dangerously fast! Why, you must have shrunk at least a foot in the last few days!'

  'Never!' she cried.

  'Of course you have! Take a look at your stick, you old goat, and see how much you've shrunk in comparison! You've got the shrinks, that's what you've got! You've got the dreaded shrinks!'

  Mrs Twit began to feel so trembly she had to sit down.

  Mrs Twit Has the Shrinks

  As soon as Mrs Twit sat down, Mr Twit pointed at her and shouted, 'There you are! You're sitting in your old chair and you've shrunk so much your feet aren't even touching the ground!'