The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me who has always dreamed of owning a sweet shop. His ambition is strengthened by the fact that there is an abandoned building named The Grubber, an old English word for a sweet shop, near where he lives. One day, he finds that the old building has been renovated and has become the head office for The Ladderless Window-Cleaning Company. Billy then meets its workers: a Giraffe with an extendable neck; a Pelican, or "Pelly" as he is called by the others, who has a flexible upper beak; and a singing and dancing Monkey, all of whom he quickly befriends. Having
Roald Dahl of Dahl's birth, his letters to his mother were abridged and broadcast as BBC Radio 4's "Book of the Week". Dahl wrote about his time at St Peter's in his autobiography "Boy: Tales of Childhood". From 1929, when he was 13, Dahl attended Repton School in Derbyshire. Dahl disliked the hazing and described an environment of ritual cruelty and status domination, with younger boys having to act as personal servants for older boys, frequently subject to terrible beatings. His biographer Donald Sturrock described these violent experiences in Dahl's early life. Dahl expresses some of these darker experiences in his writings,