Ha-ha, thought Charlie. What’s coming now?
‘I suppose,’ said Mr Wonka, placing the tip of one finger on the point of his nose and pressing gently, ‘I suppose . . . because this is a very special case . . . I suppose I could spare you just a tiny little bit of . . .’ He stopped and shook his head.
‘A tiny little bit of what?’ said Grandma Josephine sharply.
‘No,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘It’s pointless. You seem to have decided to stay in that bed whatever happens. And anyway, the stuff is much too precious to waste. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’ He started to walk away.
‘Hey!’ shouted Grandma Georgina. ‘You can’t begin something and not go on with it! What is too precious to waste?’
Mr Wonka stopped. Slowly he turned around. He looked long and hard at the three old people in the bed. They looked back at him, waiting. He kept silent a little longer, allowing their curiosity to grow. The Oompa-Loompas stood absolutely still behind him, watching.
‘What is this thing you’re talking about?’ said Grandma Georgina.
‘Get on with it, for heaven’s sake!’ said Grandma Josephine.
‘Very well,’ Mr Wonka said at last. ‘I’ll tell you. And listen carefully because this could change your whole lives. It could even change you.’
‘I don’t want to be changed!’ shouted Grandma Georgina.
‘May I go on, madam? Thank you. Not long ago, I was fooling about in my Inventing Room, stirring stuff around and mixing things up the way I do every afternoon at four o’clock, when suddenly I found I had made something that seemed very unusual. This thing I had made kept changing colour as I looked at it, and now and again it gave a little jump, it actually jumped up in the air, as though it were alive. “What have we here?” I cried, and I rushed it quickly to the Testing Room and gave some to the Oompa-Loompa who was on duty there at the time. The result was immediate! It was flabbergasting! It was unbelievable! It was also rather unfortunate.’
‘What happened?’ said Grandma Georgina, sitting up.
‘What indeed,’ said Mr Wonka.
‘Answer her question,’ said Grandma Josephine. ‘What happened to the Oompa-Loompa?’
‘Ah,’ said Mr Wonka, ‘yes . . . well . . . there’s no point in crying over spilled milk, is there? I realized, you see, that I had stumbled upon a new and tremendously powerful vitamin, and I also knew that if only I could make it safe, if only I could stop it doing to others what it did to that Oompa-Loompa . . .’
‘What did it do to that Oompa-Loompa?’ said Grandma Georgina sternly.
‘The older I get, the deafer I become,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘Do please raise your voice a trifle next time. Thank you so much. Now then. I simply had to find a way of making this stuff safe, so that people could take it without . . . er . . .’
‘Without what?’ snapped Grandma Georgina.
‘Without a leg to stand on,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘So I rolled up my sleeves and set to work once more in the Inventing Room. I mixed and I mixed. I must have tried just about every mixture under the moon. By the way, there is a little hole in one wall of the Inventing Room which connects directly with the Testing Room next door, so I was able all the time to keep passing stuff through for testing to whichever brave volunteer happened to be on duty. Well, the first few weeks were pretty depressing and we won’t talk about them. Let me tell you instead what happened on the one hundred and thirty-second day of my labours. That morning, I had changed the mixture drastically, and this time the little pill I produced at the end of it all was not nearly so active or alive as the others had been. It kept changing colour, yes, but only from lemon-yellow to blue, then back to yellow again. And when I placed it on the palm of my hand, it didn’t jump about like a grasshopper. It only quivered, and then ever so slightly.