Mangan - Inside charlies chocolate factory: the complete story of willy wonka, the golden ticket, and roald dahls most famous creation

Sophie Dahl, aged three.

I called him Mold, because when I was a toddler my baby tongue couldnt get to grips with the Norwegian pronunciation of his name, Roo-al (regal, long stretched Roo, al like the end of mall, silent D), and instead Mold he was, ever after.

At his table, I was raised on a steady diet of good food and enchantment. A meal was never just a meal; it was a recipe from a prince in Dar es Salaam, rescued from the jaws of a hungry python at the crucial moment by my grandfather. In this story, and its variants, Mold was always the blue-eyed interloper, diverting the disasters he stumbled upon. So grateful was the fictitious prince, he gave the lanky Englishman his treasured recipe for crab-stuffed baked potatoes. (Or toast with bacon and marmalade, or whatever else happened to be on the menu in rainy Buckinghamshire that day.)

He had many accoutrements of magic, Mold, like a proper magician should: amaretto biscuits whose wrapping paper you lit, which shot up into the sky like titchy hot-air balloons, falling back to earth in a wispy question mark of ash; a miniature steam train that huffed and puffed round the dining room table; a house dotted with Witch Balls, ancient, mirrored spheres that hung from a window, confronting any witch so bold as to come knocking with her own hideous reflection so shed flee. Mold was famous among his children, and later on me, for writing our names in the grass with weed killer, while we slept.

The fairies have been, hed say over breakfast, in a voice that crackled and sparked, like the beginnings of a bonfire.

There was nothing more magical, though, than the Red Tupperware Box that appeared at the end of a meal, heralding the most important and longed-for bit.

The Red Tupperware was a medium-sized, rectangular box of function. The box itself was almost irrelevant, and it could have been blue, green or see-through. Its postbox redness, though, lent an air of jaunty dissolution to the proceedings and ultimately became part of its own myth.

If you had been good at lunch or dinner, not too much of a bore, eaten things proffered without a fuss, you could collect the fabled box from its home in the kitchen and bring it to the table, while the grown-ups were having their coffee.

The Red Box contained chocolate. Lots of chocolate, in child-sized appealing bars, nothing fancy, but always compelling. And it was here, over this staunch bit of plastic, that Mold and I did a great deal of communing.

We both LOVED chocolate. Our taste in the stuff was similar. Cadburys Flake, Aero, Curly Wurly, Crunchie, KitKat and the Dime bar, a Scandinavian crunchy concoction that Mold delivered to me with great ceremony after a book tour in Sweden. Maltesers, Rolo, Fruit and Nut; a mutual horror of the Creme Egg. We were partners in a quest for the ultimate bite (light, airy, possibly featuring almonds). His knowledge of chocolate was encyclopedic. He could recall specific dates and years of invention with the glee of a patriotic child recalling the kings and queens of his country. Even his Jack Russell, Chopper, ate chocolate (four Smarties, served after lunch and dinner, daily).

Mold grew up fatherless in Wales, in an era before chocolate was readily available. Sweet shops peppered his boyhood and boyhood writing: lemon sherbets, bootlaces, gobstoppers and toffees, hard-boiled sweets served by boot-faced proprietors. Chocolate was later: the stuff of dreams, exotic and faraway.

And so, for the grown-up Mold, Willy Wonka and his factory were to embody the chocolate dream, Charlie Bucket to play the moral compass beating at its heart. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was written fifty years ago, but it remains utterly timeless and infused with a child-like magic that only a landscape of chocolate rivers and everlasting gobstoppers can conjure. For each and every one of us, there remains a powerful, Proustian memory of that first-ever something sweet, and, for so many of us, that was made flesh by the story of Charlie Bucket and his Golden Ticket.