Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator: Chapters 11–15

At the front end were the eyes, big and white with red centers, at the back a kind of tapering tail and at the very end of the tail was the enormous round swollen bump it had gotten when it crashed against the glass.

“It’s tying us up like a parcel!” yelled Grandma Josephine.

The sheet-white faces of Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler were pressed against the glass of the little windows, terror-struck, stupefied, stunned, their mouths open, their expressions frozen like fishfingers.

Rockets started firing out of the Elevator from all sides. It tilted and gave a sickening lurch and then plunged downward into the earth’s atmosphere at a simply colossal speed.

“Retro-rockets!” bellowed Mr. Wonka.

“Have no fears, dear lady,” answered Mr. Wonka. “My Elevator is air-conditioned, ventilated, aerated and automated in every possible way. We’re going to be all right now.”

“Have no fears, dear lady,” answered Mr. Wonka. “My Elevator is air-conditioned, ventilated, aerated and automated in every possible way. We’re going to be all right now.”

“Parachutes!” said Mr. Wonka with contempt.

Charlie waved to the three astronauts in the front window. None of them waved back. They were still sitting there in a kind of shocked daze, gaping at the old ladies and the old men and the small boy floating about in the Glass Elevator.

As for Grandma Josephine, Grandma Georgina and Grandpa George, they must have fallen right back onto the bed because they were now all three on top of it and scrabbling to get under the blanket.

“A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men,” Mr. Wonka said.

And behold, within half a minute, another twenty years had fallen away from his face and body and he was now a slim and sprightly young Oompa-Loompa of thirty.

‘I’m ecstatic!’ he cried, jumping up and down. ‘I’m happy as a horse in a hayfield!’

A tiny Oompa-Loompa, looking young and perky, ran forward out of the crowd and did a marvelous little dance in front of the three old people in the big bed.

“If you are old and have the shakes,
If all your bones are full of aches,
If you can hardly walk at all,
If living drives you up the wall
If you’re a grump and full of spite,
If you’re a human parasite,
Then what you need is Wonka-Vite!"

“The most valuable bottle of pills in the world! And that, by the way,” he said, giving Grandma Georgina a saucy glance, “is why I haven’t taken any myself. They are far too valuable to waste on me.”

Take a block of finest chocolate weighing one ton (or twenty sackfuls of broken chocolate, whichever is the easier). Place chocolate in very large cauldron and melt over red-hot furnace.

Now add the following, in precisely the order given, stirring well all the time and allowing each item to dissolve before adding the next:
THE HOOF OF A MANTICORE
THE TRUNK (AND THE SUITCASE) OF AN ELEPHANT
THE YOLKS OF THREE EGGS FROM A WHIFFLEBIRD

THE SQUARE ROOT OF A SOUTH AMERICAN ABACUS
THE FANGS OF A VIPER (IT MUST BE A VINDSHIELD VIPER)
THE CHEST (AND THE DRAWERS) OF A WILD GROUT

“Will you solemnly swear,” said Grandpa George, “that it will do what you say it will and nothing else?”
Mr. Wonka placed his free hand on his heart. “I swear it,” he said.

He hated squabbles. He hated it when people got grabby and selfish.

Then came the voice of Grandpa Joe, cutting in sternly through the rabble. “Stop this at once!” he ordered. “All three of you! You’re behaving like savages!”

“Where’s my mother?” bawled Mrs. Bucket.

“Four,” said Grandpa Joe glumly. “They all took four.”

Mr. Wonka made a wheezing noise in his throat and a look of great anguish came over his face.

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.

Young Goldie clutched herself and cried,
‘There’s something wrong with my inside!’
This was, we very greatly fear,
The understatement of the year.

You see, if someone takes enough
Of any highly dangerous stuff,
One will invariably find
Some traces of it left behind.

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

So now, before it is too late.
Take heed of Goldie’s dreadful fate.