Billy and the Minpins
BOOKS IN THE ROALD DAHL CLASSIC COLLECTION
James and the Giant Peach
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Magic Finger
Fantastic Mr Fox
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Danny the Champion of the World
The Enormous Crocodile
The Twits
George’s Marvellous Medicine
The BFG
Revolting Rhymes
The Witches
Dirty Beasts
Boy: Tales of Childhood
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
Going Solo
Matilda
Rhyme Stew
Esio Trot
Billy and the Minpins
MORE BOOKS BY ROALD DAHL
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More
The Great Automatic Grammatizator
Skin and Other Stories
Billy and the Minpins
Il lustr ated by Quent in Blak e
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First published as The Minpins by Jonathan Cape 1991
Published by Puffin Books 1993
Published as Billy and the Minpins 2017
Reissued 2022
This edition published 2024 001
Text copyright © The Roald Dahl Story Company Ltd, 1991
Illustrations copyright © Quentin Blake, 2017
Text and archive image © The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, 2024
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
ROALD DAHL is a registered trademark of The Roald Dahl Story Company Ltd www.roalddahl.com
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–0–241–67728–5
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Penguin Random House Children’s One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW11 7BW
For Ophelia
Being Good
Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do.
All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting.
One of the things he was NEVER NEVER allowed to do, the most exciting of them all, was to go out through the garden gate all by himself and explore the world beyond.
On this sunny summer afternoon, Little Billy was kneeling on a chair in the living room, gazing out through the window at the wonderful world beyond. His mother was in the kitchen doing the ironing and although the door was open she couldn’t see him.
Every now and again his mother would call out to him, saying, ‘Little Billy, what are you up to in there?’
And Little Billy would always call back and say, ‘I’m being good, Mummy.’
But Little Billy was awfully tired of being good.
Through the window, not so very far away, he could see the big black secret wood that was called The Forest of Sin. It was something he had always longed to explore.
His mother had told him that even grown-ups were frightened of going into The Forest of Sin.