by Roald Dahl
'What's it feel like, Josie?' asked Grandpa Joe excitedly. 'Tell us what it feels like to be back to thirty again!... Wait a minute! You look younger than thirty! You can't be a day more than twenty now!... But that's enough, isn't it!... I should stop there if I were you! Twenty's quite young enough!...'
Mr Wonka shook his head sadly and passed a hand over his eyes. Had you been standing very close to him you would have heard him murmuring softly under his breath, 'Oh, deary deary me, here we go again...'
'Mother!' cried Mrs Bucket, and now there was a shrill note of alarm in her voice. 'Why don't you stop, Mother! You're going too far! You're way under twenty! You can't be more than fifteen!... You're... you're... you're ten...you're getting smaller, Mother!'
'Josie!' shouted Grandpa Joe. 'Hey, Josie! Don't do it, Josie! You're shrinking! You're a little girl! Stop her, somebody! Quick!'
'They're all going too far!' cried Charlie.
'They took too much,' said Mr Bucket.
'Mother's shrinking faster than any of them!' wailed Mrs Bucket. 'Mother! Can't you hear me, Mother? Can't you stop?'
'My heavens, isn't it quick!' said Mr Bucket, who seemed to be the only one enjoying it. 'It really is a year a second!'
'But they've hardly got any more years left!' wailed Grandpa Joe.
'Mother's no more than four now!' Mrs Bucket cried out. 'She's three... two... one...Gracious me! What's happening to her! Where's she gone? Mother? Georgina! Where are you? Mr Wonka! Come quickly! Come here, Mr Wonka! Something frightful's happened! Something's gone wrong! My old mother's disappeared!'
Mr Wonka signed and turned around and walked slowly and quite calmly back toward the bed.
'Where's my mother?' bawled Mrs Bucket.
'Look at Josephine!' cried Grandpa Joe. 'Just look at her! I ask you!'
Mr Wonka looked first at Grandma Josephine. She was sitting in the middle of the huge bed, bawling her head off. 'Wa! Wa! Wa!' she said. 'Wa! Wa! Wa! Wa! Wa!'
'She's a screaming baby!' cried Grandpa Joe. 'I've got a screaming baby for a wife!'
'The other one's Grandpa George!' Mr Bucket said, smiling happily. 'The slightly bigger one there crawling around. He's my wife's father.'
'That's right! He's my father!' wailed Mrs Bucket. 'And where's Georgina, my old mother? She's vanished! She's nowhere, Mr Wonka! She's absolutely nowhere! I saw her getting smaller and smaller and in the end she got so small she just disappeared into thin air! What I want to know is where's she gone to! And how in the world are we going to get her back!'
'Ladies and gentlemen!' said Mr Wonka, coming up close and raising both hands for silence. 'Please, I beg you, do not ruffle yourselves! There's nothing to worry about...'
'You call it nothing!' cried poor Mrs Bucket. 'When my old mother's gone down the drain and my father's a howling baby...'
'A lovely baby,' said Mr Wonka.
'I quite agree,' said Mr Bucket.
'What about my Josie?' cried Grandpa Joe.
'What about her?' said Mr Wonka.
'Well...'
'A great improvement, sir,' said Mr Wonka, 'don't you agree?'
'Oh, yes!' said Grandpa Joe. 'I mean NO! What am I saying? She's a howling baby!'
'But in perfect health,' said Mr Wonka. 'May I ask you, sir, how many pills she took?'
'Four,' said Grandpa Joe glumly. 'They all took four.'
Mr Wonka made a wheezing noise in his throat and a look of great sorrow came over his face. 'Why oh why can't people be more sensible?' he said sadly. 'Why don't they listen to me when I tell them something? I explained very carefully beforehand that each pill makes the taker exactly twenty years younger. So if Grandma Josephine took four of them, she automatically became younger by four times twenty, which is... wait a minute now... four twos are eight... add a nought... that's eighty... so she automatically became younger by eighty years. How old, sir, was your wife, if I may ask, before this happened?'
'She was eighty last birthday,' Grandpa Joe answered. 'She was eighty and three months.'
'There you are, then!' cried Mr Wonka, flashing a happy smile. 'The Wonka-Vite worked perfectly! She is now precisely three months old! And a plumper rosier infant I've never set eyes on!'
'Nor me,' said Mr Bucket. 'She'd win a prize in any baby competition.'
'First prize,' said Mr Wonka.
'Cheer up, Grandpa,' said Charlie, taking the old man's hand in his. 'Don't be sad. She's a beautiful baby.'
'Madam,' said Mr Wonka, turning to Mrs Bucket. 'How old, may I ask, was Grandpa George, your father?'
'Eighty-one,' wailed Mrs Bucket. 'He was eighty-one exactly.'
'Which makes him a great big bouncing one-year-old boy now,' said Mr Wonka happily.
'How splendid!' said Mr Bucket to his wife. 'You'll be the first person in the world to change her father's nappies!'
'He can change his own rotten nappies!' said Mrs Bucket. 'What I want to know is where's my mother? Where's Grandma Georgina?'
'Ah-ha,' said Mr Wonka. 'Oh-ho... Yes, indeed... Where oh where has Georgina gone? How old, please, was the lady in question?'
'Seventy-eight,' Mrs Bucket told him.
'Well, of course! laughed Mr Wonka. 'That explains it!'
'What explains what?' snapped Mrs Bucket.
'My dear madam,' said Mr Wonka. 'If she was only seventy-eight and she took enough Wonka-Vite to make her eighty years younger, then naturally she's vanished. She's bitten off more than she could chew! She's taken off more years than she had!'
'Explain yourself,' said Mrs Bucket.
'Simple arithmetic,' said Mr Wonka. 'Subtract eighty from seventy-eight and what do you get?'
'Minus two!' said Charlie.
'Hooray!' said Mr Bucket. 'My mother-in-law's minus two years old!'
'Impossible!' said Mrs Bucket.
'It's true,' said Mr Wonka.
'And where is she now, may I ask?' said Mrs Bucket.
'That's a good question,' said Mr Wonka. 'A very good question. Yes, indeed. Where is she now?'
'You don't have the foggiest idea, do you?'
'Of course I do,' said Mr Wonka. T know exactly where she is.'
'Then tell me!'
'You must try to understand,' said Mr Wonka, 'that if she is now minus two, she's got to add two more years before she can start again from nought. She's got to wait it out.'
'Where does she wait?' said Mrs Bucket.
'In the Waiting Room, of course,' said Mr Wonka.
BOOM!-BOOM! said the drums of the Oompa-Loompa band. BOOM-BOOM! BOOM-BOOM! And all the Oompa-Loompas, all the hundreds of them standing there in the Chocolate Room began to sway and hop and dance to the rhythm of the music. 'Attention, please!' they sang.
'Attention, please! Attention, please!
Don't dare to talk! Don't dare to sneeze!
Don't doze or daydream! Stay awake!
Your health, your very life's at stake!
Ho-ho, you say, they can't mean me.
Ha-ha, we answer, wait and see.
Did any of you ever meet
A child called Goldie Pinklesweet?
Who on her seventh birthday went
To stay with Granny down in Kent.
At lunchtime on the second day
Of dearest little Goldie's stay,
Granny announced, "I'm going down
To do some shopping in the town."
(D'you know why Granny didn't tell
The child to come along as well?
She's going to the nearest inn
To buy herself a double gin.)
So out she creeps. She shuts the door.
And Goldie, after making sure
That she is really by herself,
Goes quickly to the medicine shelf,
And there, her little greedy eyes
See pills of every shape and size,
Such fascinating colours too -
Some green, some pink, some brown, some blue.
"All right," she says, "l
et's try the brown."
She takes one pill and gulps it down.
" Yum-yum!" she cries. "Hooray! What fun!
They're chocolate-coated, every one!"
She gobbles five, she gobbles ten,
She stops her gobbling only when
The last pill's gone. There are no more.
Slowly she rises from the floor.
She stops. She hiccups. Dear, oh dear,
She starts to feel a trifle queer.
You see, how could young Goldie know,
For nobody had told her so,
That Grandmama, her old relation,
Suffered from frightful constipation.
This meant that every night she'd give
Herself a powerful laxative,
And all the medicines that she'd bought
Were naturally of this sort.
The pink and red and blue and green
Were all extremely strong and mean.
But far more fierce and meaner still,
Was Granny's little chocolate pill.
Its blast effect was quite uncanny.
It used to shake up even Granny.
In point of fact she did not dare
To use them more than twice a year.
So can you wonder little Goldie
Began to feel a wee bit mouldy?
Inside her tummy, something stirred.
A funny gurgling sound was heard,
And then, oh dear, from deep within,
The ghastly rumbling sounds begin!
They rumbilate and roar and boom!
They bounce and echo round the room!
The floorboards shake and from the wall
Some bits of paint and plaster fall.
Explosions, whistles, awful bangs
Were followed by the loudest clangs.
(A man next door was heard to say,
"A thunderstorm is on the way.")
But on and on the rumbling goes.
A window cracks, a lamp-bulb blows.
Young Goldie clutched herself and cried,
"There's something wrong with my inside!"
This was, we very greatly fear,
The understatement of the year.
For wouldn't any child feel crummy,
With loud explosions in her tummy?
Granny, at half past two, came in,
Weaving a little from the gin,
But even so she quickly saw
The empty bottle on the floor.
"My precious laxatives!" she cried.
"I don't feel well," the girl replied.
Angrily Grandma shook her head.
"I'm really not surprised," she said.
"Why can't you leave my pills alone?"
With that, she grabbed the telephone
And shouted, "Listen, send us quick
An ambulance! A child is sick!
It's number fifty, Fontwell Road!
Come fast! I think she might explode!"
We're sure you do not wish to hear
About the hospital and where
They did a lot of horrid things
With stomach-pumps and rubber rings.
Let's answer what you want to know:
Did Goldie live or did she go?
The doctors gathered round her bed.
" There's really not much hope," they said.
"She's going, going, gone!" they cried.
"She's had her chips! She's dead! She's dead!"
"I'm not so sure," the child replied.
And all at once she opened wide
Her great big bluish eyes and sighed,
And gave the anxious docs a wink,
And said, "I'll be okay, I think."
So Goldie lived and back she went
At first to Granny's place in Kent.
Her father came the second day
And fetched her in a Chevrolet,
And drove her to their home in Dover.
But Goldie's troubles were not over.
You see, if someone takes enough
Of any highly dangerous stuff,
One will invariably find
Some traces of it left behind.
It pains us greatly to relate
That Goldie suffered from this fate.
She'd taken such a massive fill
Of this unpleasant kind of pill,
It got into her blood and bones,
It messed up all her chromosomes,
It made her constantly upset,
And she could never really get
The beastly stuff to go away.
And so the girl was forced to stay
For seven hours every day
Within the everlasting gloom
Of what we call The Ladies Room.
And after all, the W.C.
Is not the gayest place to be.
So now, before it is too late,
Take heed of Goldie's dreadful fate.
And seriously, all jokes apart,
Do promise us across your heart
That you will never help yourself
To medicine from the medicine shelf.'
16
Vita-Wonk and Minusland
'It's up to you, Charlie my boy,' said Mr Wonka. 'It's your factory. Shall we let your Grandma Georgina wait it out for the next two years or shall we try to bring her back right now?'
'You don't really mean you might be able to bring her back?' cried Charlie.
'There's no harm in trying, is there... if that's the way you want it?'
'Oh yes! Of course I do! For Mother's sake especially! Can't you see how sad she is!'
Mrs Bucket was sitting on the edge of the big bed, dabbing her eyes with a hanky. 'My poor old mum,' she kept saying. 'She's minus two and I won't see her again for months and months and months - if ever at all!' Behind her, Grandpa Joe, with the help of an Oompa-Loompa, was feeding his three-month-old wife, Grandma Josephine, from a bottle. Alongside them, Mr Bucket was spooning something called 'Wonka's Squdgemallow Baby Food' into one-year-old Grandpa George's mouth but mostly all over his chin and chest. 'Big deal!' he was muttering angrily. 'What a lousy rotten rotten this is! They tell me I'm going to the Chocolate Factory to have a good time and I finish up being a mother to my father-in-law.'
'Everything's under control, Charlie,' said Mr Wonka, surveying the scene. 'They're doing fine. They don't need us here. Come along! We're off to hunt for Grandma!' He caught Charlie by the arm and went dancing towards the open door of the Great Glass Elevator. 'Hurry up, my dear boy, hurry up!' he cried. 'We've got to hustle if we're going to get there before!'
'Before what, Mr Wonka?'
'Before she gets subtracted of course! All Minuses are subtracted! Don't you know any arithmetic at all?'
They were in the Elevator now and Mr Wonka was searching among the hundreds of buttons for the one he wanted.
'Here we are!' he said, placing his finger delicately upon a tiny ivory button on which it said 'MINUSLAND'.
The doors slid shut. And then, with a fearful whistling whirring sound the great machine leaped away to the right. Charlie grabbed Mr Wonka's legs and held on for dear life. Mr Wonka pulled a jump-seat out of the wall and said, 'Sit down Charlie, quick, and strap yourself in tight! This journey's going to be rough and choppy!' There were straps on either side of the seat and Charlie buckled himself firmly in. Mr Wonka pulled out a second seat for himself and did the same.
'We are going a long way down,' he said. 'Oh, such a long way down we are going.'
The Elevator was gathering speed. It twisted and swerved. It swung sharply to the left, then it went right, then left again, and it was heading downward all the time - down and down and down. 'I only hope,' said Mr Wonka, 'the Oompa-Loompas aren't using the other Elevator today.'
'What other Elevator?' asked Charlie.
'The one that goes the opposite way on the same track as this.'
'Holy snakes, Mr Wonka! You mean we might have a collision?'
'I've a
lways been lucky so far, my boy... Hey! Take a look out there! Quick!'
Through the window, Charlie caught a glimpse of what seemed like an enormous quarry with a steep craggy-brown rock-face, and all over the rock-face there were hundreds of Oompa-Loompas working with picks and pneumatic drills.
'Rock-candy,' said Mr Wonka. 'That's the richest deposit of rock-candy in the world.'
The Elevator sped on. 'We're going deeper, Charlie. Deeper and deeper. We're about two hundred thousand feet down already.' Strange sights were flashing by outside, but the Elevator was travelling at such a terrific speed that only occasionally was Charlie able to recognize anything at all. Once, he thought he saw in the distance a cluster of tiny houses shaped like upside-down cups, and there were streets in between the houses and Oompa-Loompas walking in the streets. Another time, as they were passing some sort of a vast red plain dotted with things that looked like oil derricks, he saw a great spout of brown liquid spurting out of the ground high into the air. 'A gusher!' cried Mr Wonka, clapping his hands. 'A whacking great gusher! How splendid! Just when we needed it!'
'A what?' said Charlie.
'We've struck chocolate again, my boy. That'll be a rich new field. Oh, what a beautiful gusher! Just look at it go!'
On they roared, heading downward more steeply than ever now, and hundreds, literally hundreds of astonishing sights kept flashing by outside. There were giant cog-wheels turning and mixers mixing and bubbles bubbling and vast orchards of toffee-apple trees and lakes the size of football grounds filled with blue and gold and green liquid, and everywhere there were Oompa-Loompas!
'You realize,' said Mr Wonka, 'that what you saw earlier on when you went round the factory with all those naughty little children was only a tiny corner of the establishment. It goes down for miles and miles. And as soon as possible I shall show you all the way around slowly and properly. But that will take three weeks. Right now we have other things to think about and I have important things to tell you. Listen carefully to me, Charlie. I must talk fast, for we'll be there in a couple of minutes.
'I suppose you guessed,' Mr Wonka went on, 'what happened to all those Oompa-Loompas in the Testing Room when I was experimenting with Wonka-Vite. Of course you did. They disappeared and became Minuses just like your Grandma Georgina. The recipe was miles too strong. One of them actually became Minus eighty-seven! Imagine that!'
'You mean he's got to wait eighty-seven years before he can come back?' Charlie asked.
'That's what kept bugging me, my boy. After all, one can't allow one's best friends to wait around as miserable Minuses for eighty-seven years...'
'And get subtracted as well,' said Charlie. 'That would be frightful.'
'Of course it would, Charlie. So what did I do? "Willy Wonka," I said to myself, "if you can invent Wonka-Vite to make people younger, then surely to goodness you can also invent something else to make people older!"'
