James and the Giant Peach
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
British (General) North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
James and the giant peach by Roald Dahl Here is James, Henry Trotter when he was about four years old. Up until this time he had had a happy life living peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house beside the sea. There were always plenty of other Children for him to play with and there was the sandy beach for him to run about on and the ocean to paddle in. It was the perfect life for a small boy. Then one day James's mother and father went to London to do some shopping and they're a terrible thing happened. 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. Now, this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience for two such gentle parents. But in the long run it was far nastier for James than it was for them. Their troubles were all over in a jiffy. They were dead and gone in 35 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 lovely house by the seaside had to be sold immediately, and the little boy carrying nothing but a small suitcase containing a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush was sent away to live with his two aunts. Their names were aunt sponge and aunt Spiker and I am sorry to say that they were both really horrible people. They were selfish and lazy and cruel and right from the beginning they started beating poor James for almost no reason at all. They never called him by his real name, but always referred to him as you disgusting little beast, or you filthy nuisance, or you miserable creature. And they certainly never gave him any toys to play with or any picture books to look at. His room was as bare as a prison cell. They lived and sponge and Spiker, and now James as well, in a queer ramshackle house on the top of a high hill in the south of England. The hill was so high that from almost anywhere in the garden James could look down and see for miles and miles across a marvelous landscape of woods and fields, and on a very clear day if he looked in the right direction he could see a tiny gray dot far away on the horizon which was the house that he used to live in with his beloved mother and father, and just beyond that he could see the ocean itself, a long thin streak of blackish blue like a line of ink beneath the rim of the sky. But James was never allowed to go down off the top of that hill. Neither Aunt sponge nor Aunt Spiker could ever be bothered to take him out herself, not even for a small walk or a picnic, and he certainly wasn't permitted to go alone. The nasty little beast will only get into mischief if he goes out of the garden, Aunt Spiker had said, and terrible punishments were promised him such as being locked up in the cellar with the rats for a week if he even so much as dared to climb over the fence. 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. There was no swing, no seesaw, no sandpit, and no other Children were ever invited to come up the hill to play with poor James. There wasn't so much as a dog or a cat around to keep him company, and as time went on he became sadder and sadder and more and more lonely. And he used to spend hours every day standing at the bottom of the garden, gazing wistfully at the lovely but forbidden world of woods and fields and ocean that was spread out below him like a magic carpet