Chapter Prologue: It was 1976. Ann was 38. Jumbeelia was 36. Woozly was 22. On a giant scale, Ann was 5 foot 9 inches tall. Woozly was 5 foot. Jumbeelia was somewhere in between.

Charlie Bucket couldn’t sleep. A brilliant moonbeam was slanting through a gap in the curtains. It was shining right onto his pillow. The other children in the dormitory had been asleep for hours. Charlie closed his eyes and lay quite still. He tried very hard to doze off. It was no good. The moonbeam was like a silver blade slicing through the room onto his face. The house was absolutely silent. No voices came up from downstairs. There were no footsteps on the floor above either. 

The window behind the curtain was wide open, but nobody was walking on the pavement outside. No cars went by on the street. Not the tiniest sound could be heard anywhere. Charlie had never known such a silence. The moonbeam was brighter than ever on Charlie’s face. He decided to get out of bed and close the gap in the curtains. When he reached them, he hesitated. He longed to duck underneath them and lean out the window, to see what the world outside looked like now. 

The longing to look became so strong, that he couldn’t resist it. Quickly, he ducked under the curtains and leaned out of the window. In the silvery moonlight, the village street he knew so well seemed completely different. The houses looked bent and crooked. Everything was pale and white. Across the road he could see Mrs Rance’s shop. It didn’t look real. There was something dim and misty about that too. 

Charlie allowed his eyes to travel further and further down the street. Suddenly he froze. There was something coming up the street on the opposite side; something very tall, much taller than the tallest person she’d ever met. It was so tall, that its head was higher than the upstairs windows of the houses. Charlie opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He was frozen with fright.

The tall figure was coming his way. It was keeping very close to the houses across the street, hiding in the shadowy places where there was no moonlight. On and on it came, nearer and nearer. It was moving, stopping, and starting to move again. Now Charlie could see what it was up to. It would stop and peer into the upstairs window of each house in the street. It actually had to squat down to peer into the upstairs windows. Doing this took up most of the space outside in the street. It was much closer now, and Charlie could see it more clearly. Looking at it carefully, he decided that it had to be some kind of person, but it was a giant person.

Charlie gave a yelp and pulled back from the window, jumped into his bed and hid under the blanket. There he crouched, still as a mouse and tingling all over. After a minute, he lifted a corner of the blanket and peeped out. There at the window, with the curtains pushed aside, was the enormous face of a giant woman staring in. The large eyes were fixed on Charlie’s bed.

The next moment, a huge hand with pale fingers came in through the window. This was followed by an arm. The fingers of the hand were reaching out across the room towards Charlie’s bed. Charlie, crouching underneath the blanket, felt strong fingers grasping hold of him, and then he was lifted up from his bed, blanket and all, and whisked out of the window. When the giantess got Charlie outside, she ran off with him.