Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator Read online

  '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