The Witches

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A Grandmother Who Has Seen Them
2. How to Spot a Real Witch
3. The Hotel Magnificent at Bournemouth
4. Formula 86 and Bruno Jenkins
5. Soup for the Witches
6. What Sours and Who Should Wait
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up The Witches after hearing two parents argue about it at a library sale, one calling it the funniest Dahl and the other calling it too scary for bedtime. That split felt right once I reread it. First published in October 1983 by Jonathan Cape with illustrations by Quentin Blake (the edition cited here runs 224 pages), and winner of the Whitbread Award, this is a short book with a long shadow. A seven year old boy and his Norwegian grandmother take on every witch in England, and Dahl tells it like a warning passed down in a family rather than a quest with a chosen one.

The narrator has no name, which helps the story feel told rather than written. He loses his parents in a car crash when he is young and goes to live with his grandmother, his mother's mother, a retired witch hunter with endless stories and a missing thumb. She smokes small cigars, she tells tales that stretch past midnight, and she loves him with a fierce practical love. Their plan is simple. Stay watchful, learn the signs, and never trust a strange woman who wears gloves in summer.

A Grandmother Who Has Seen Them

The early chapters belong to the grandmother. She grew up in Norway, where stories about witches are treated as news rather than fairy tales, and she claims to have met them more than once. One encounter cost her a thumb, which she shows the boy as proof that the danger is physical. She does not scare him for fun. She trains him the way you might train a child to look both ways before crossing, with repetition and clear rules.

Her main lesson is that real witches do not look like storybook hags. They do not ride brooms or wear tall hats in daily life. They look like ordinary women, sometimes like kind ladies who work for charities and hand out sweets. That is what makes them dangerous. A child who waits for green skin and a cackle will walk straight into harm. A child who knows the small signs has a chance.

She tells him how a witch hunts. She does not snatch children off the street in daylight. She works slowly, offering a lost puppy or candy or money to lure a child away from parents. She hates children with a clean and total hatred, the way some people hate wasps, and she spends her life finding tidy ways to remove them. The grandmother says England has grown thick with them, which is why she keeps the boy close even on ordinary errands.

The warmth here matters as much as the fear. The boy adores his grandmother, and Dahl lets their evenings stretch with cocoa and stories. She tells him about five children she knew who vanished, a girl trapped inside a painting, a boy turned into a porpoise, and other fates she recites without softening. The boy begs for more even as he pulls the blanket higher. Anyone who had a grandparent who told slightly too vivid stories will recognize the mix of safety and thrill.

After his parents die, the two settle into a close routine in England. The grandmother tires easily and the doctor warns against strain, but her mind stays sharp. When she suggests a holiday by the sea, the boy agrees at once. Neither of them knows the holiday hotel has already been booked for a witches' convention.

How to Spot a Real Witch

Dahl pauses the plot to give a field guide, and this section is why kids still whisper about it on playgrounds. The details are concrete enough to check against any teacher or neighbor, which is exactly the effect he wants.

First, wigs. A real witch is bald. Her scalp is itchy and sore under a wig, which is why she scratches and fusses and why she always wears one, even to swim if she can avoid the water. The wigs look convincing at a distance, but up close a careful child might see the edge.

Second, gloves. A witch has claws instead of fingernails, thin curved claws she keeps hidden. She wears gloves at all times, even indoors in summer, and claims delicate skin. The grandmother tells the boy to watch for women who never take their gloves off to eat or count money.

Third, feet. Witches have no toes, just square feet that chafe in pointed shoes. They wear sensible wide shoes that still hurt, and they limp slightly by evening. The boy finds this detail both silly and convincing, which is Dahl at his best.

Fourth, spit and smell. A witch's spit is blue, like ink, and she uses it as writing fluid when no one watches. Her eyes change color in anger, shifting toward fire and ice. Her nostrils are large and pink and quivering, built to sniff out a child across a room. To a witch, a clean child smells like fresh droppings from a dog. The dirtier the child, the less he smells, which is why Dahl jokes that unwashed children are safer. Bathing once a day is still advised, the grandmother adds, since most dangers are human.

I found myself checking gloves and wigs for a week after reading this, which tells you how well Dahl plants a simple test in a child's head.

The guide works because it gives power to the powerless. A small boy cannot fight an adult, but he can watch and remember. The book invites young readers to study faces in a crowd, and that invitation is thrilling even when you know it is play.

The Hotel Magnificent at Bournemouth

For the autumn holiday the grandmother takes the boy to the Hotel Magnificent in Bournemouth, a grand seaside hotel with a ballroom and a dining room and strict rules about pets. She brings the boy's two white mice, William and Mary, in a small cage, and bribes the staff to look the other way. The boy spends his days training the mice to run tiny races in the lounge while the grandmother rests on the terrace.

Then the ladies arrive for their meeting. They call themselves the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the RSPCC, with printed programs and name tags. They are sweet voiced and well dressed, full of talk about helping the young. The boy, bored and looking for a quiet place to train his mice, slips into the empty ballroom and hides behind a folding screen to practice. The doors close. The meeting begins. He is trapped.

The chairwoman takes the stage, and Dahl stages her entrance for maximum fright. She peels off her face like a mask. Underneath is a younger and far more terrible face, scarred and fierce, and the audience does the same, wigs coming off to reveal bald shining heads. This is the Grand High Witch herself, ruler of all the witches in the world, with a harsh foreign accent and boots that spark. She is furious about the slow pace of child removal in England and demands faster results.

Her plan is simple and awful. Each witch will retire from old style tricks and use a new potion. A single dose will turn any child into a mouse within days, and England's schools and sweet shops will do the rest. Parents and teachers will set traps for mice without knowing they are killing children. The witches will watch and laugh. The Grand High Witch holds up a row of small green bottles to show the yearly supply.

The boy stays still behind the screen, trying not to breathe loudly, while the room fills with applause and the smell of something rotten. He understands enough to be terrified. He also understands that his grandmother was right about everything.

Formula 86 and Bruno Jenkins

To prove the potion works, the Grand High Witch calls for a demonstration. The witches have already caught a greedy rich boy staying at the hotel, Bruno Jenkins, who loves chocolate and boasts about eating six bars a day. They lured him earlier with the promise of a free treat and locked him in the kitchen. Now they drag him into the ballroom, half bribed and half bullied, and tip a dose of Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker into a chocolate bar in front of the crowd.

Bruno eats. Nothing happens at first, which is the point of the delayed effect. The witches explain the timetable while Bruno grins and asks for more. Then his skin tightens, his ears move upward, whiskers sprout, his hands shrink into paws, and his clothes pool around him. In minutes a brown mouse with an appetite for chocolate stands where a boy stood, squeaking in panic. The witches cheer and sweep the mouse into a cage. The Grand High Witch warns that the formula must be dosed with care, since too much acts too fast and too little fails, but the proof delights the room.

The boy makes a small mistake then, a mouse sneezing or a cage rattling, and a witch with a sharp nose sniffs him out. They drag him from behind the screen. He runs, but the doors are guarded. The Grand High Witch herself pours a full bottle of the formula down his throat, far more than Bruno received, and watches with cold interest. The change hits fast. His shoes fill with feet that are no longer feet. His hands curl. His back arches. His clothes collapse. He becomes a small grey brown mouse, able to think and speak in squeaks that other transformed children can understand, but unable to return to human form.

He escapes by luck and by smallness, darting between chair legs while the witches stamp and shout. He finds a route back to his grandmother's room through the corridors, dodging chambermaids and a kitchen cat, and climbs the furniture to reach her. She does not scream when a mouse calls her grandmother. She listens, and she believes him at once, which may be the most moving moment in the book. She holds him gently in her hands, and they sit together while he tells the whole story in high quick squeaks she somehow follows.

Bruno, meanwhile, is carried back to his parents, who think a mouse has gotten into the luggage. The Jenkins parents, loud and fond of their son in a shallow way, refuse to believe anything strange has happened. Bruno as a mouse keeps eating and growing fat, cared for without understanding. Dahl uses him for both comedy and warning, since greed made him easy to catch.

Soup for the Witches

The grandmother does not waste time on sorrow. A former hunter wakes up inside her. She questions the boy closely about the ballroom, the bottles, the timetable, and the dinner hour, and forms a plan that is bold enough to feel reckless. If one bottle turns one child into a mouse, a whole case poured into soup will turn a whole dining room of witches into mice in front of the staff.

They steal first. The boy, now tiny and quick, slips back into the Grand High Witch's room with Bruno's help and carries out a bottle of the formula, riding in a sock or a handbag while the grandmother keeps watch. It is dangerous work. Chambermaids nearly catch him. A cook nearly steps on him. The hotel cat, which has already eaten one of his pet mice, stalks him along a windowsill. He talks his way past Bruno, who as a mouse is sulky and hungry and mostly interested in food, and persuades him to help in exchange for more meals.

At dinner the dining room fills with the same ladies from the meeting, now wigged and gloved and polite, ordering soup. The grandmother orders soup too, to avoid notice, and keeps the boy hidden in her purse with the bottle. When the kitchen doors swing, the boy darts to the great soup tureen and empties the bottle in, then hides again before the waiters ladle it out. The grandmother eats bread and watches the clock.

The effect spreads table by table. A witch stops mid sentence and clutches her throat. Another scratches at her wig. Faces pinch, shoulders hunch, voices rise into squeaks. In minutes the dining room holds dozens of mice in ladies' clothes, panicking among overturned bowls. The hotel staff, who have no idea these are witches, react the way any seaside hotel staff would. They shout, they climb chairs, the manager calls for the kitchen cleaver, and the carnage follows off page while the grandmother pays the bill with calm hands and wheels the boy out in the soup trolley or under a napkin.

The Grand High Witch herself arrives late or misses the main serving, depending on how you read the rush of pages, but Dahl does not let her escape. She meets the same fate in a smaller dose, and her death breaks the chain of command for England's witches. The boy and his grandmother keep her address book and her supply of bottles, which list names and hideouts. They form a new plan. They will travel, pose as harmless tourists, and dose the food and drink of witches wherever they find them, using the enemy's own weapon.

The ending lands strangely on purpose. The boy will stay a mouse. A mouse lives about nine years, and the grandmother, who is old and tired, expects to live about nine more. The boy says he does not mind, because he does not want to outlive her and she does not want to outlive him. They will spend their remaining years hunting together, grandmother and grandson, trapper and small spy who can slip under doors.

What Sours and Who Should Wait

The Witches still delights, but parts of it drag or sting on a fresh read, and it helps to name them before handing the book to a child. The middle sags during the long hotel setup, with pages about mice training and terrace routines that test young attention before the ballroom scene pays off. Dahl repeats the sniffing and scratching jokes until they lose bite. The hotel staff are caricatures, the Jenkins parents are greedy cartoons, and the head waiter and manager exist mainly to swing cleavers at the close.

The larger problem is moral, and Dahl knows it. The heroes poison soup and celebrate mass killing, and the book treats that revenge as pure fun. There is no trial, no attempt to expose the witches to adults, no thought for waiters who serve poisoned food. Young readers may cheer without pausing, and some parents will want to pause with them to ask whether turning killers into mice and letting a hotel finish them is justice or simply satisfying. The final pact, where a boy accepts a short mouse life so he can die near the time his grandmother dies, reads tender to some and bleak to others. It avoids grief by scheduling it, which is a strange comfort to offer a seven year old.

The gender framing also dates the book in ways worth stating plainly. In Dahl's story all witches are women, and womanhood itself carries the markers of evil, wigs, gloves, square shoes, hidden appetites. A modern reader can see how that links fear to ordinary aspects of women's dress and bodies. The book never suggests men can be witches or that kindness in women counts as proof against suspicion. It helps to tell a child directly that this is a story device from an older time, not a rule about people, and that real kindness looks nothing like the test in these pages.

None of that erases what works. Quentin Blake's scratchy drawings catch the itch and twitch of the villains better than any photo could. The grandmother remains one of Dahl's warmest adults, patient and brave without speeches. The mouse level view of a hotel, all skirting boards and trolley wheels and cat whiskers, is told with sharp physical detail that kids remember. Readers from about eight up who enjoy mischief and mild fright, and who can handle a hotel kitchen that turns grim, will race through it. Very young or sensitive children, and readers who want gentle magic with clear mercy, should wait or choose Matilda or The BFG first, where the endings forgive more.

FAQ

When was The Witches published and how long is it?

Jonathan Cape first published The Witches in October 1983 with illustrations by Quentin Blake. The edition cited here runs 224 pages. It won the Whitbread Award.

How can you tell a witch in the book?

Witches wear wigs over bald heads, gloves over claws, and wide shoes for toeless feet. They also have blue spit and a sharp sense of smell for children.

Does the boy stay a mouse?

Yes, he remains a mouse and plans to hunt witches with his grandmother. Since mice live about nine years, he accepts a short life beside her.