Grandma better start to pray.’
Brown Paint
George turned off the heat under the saucepan. He must leave plenty of time for
it to cool down.
When all the steam and froth had gone away, he peered into the giant pan to see
what colour the great medicine now was. It was a deep and brilliant blue.
‘It needs more brown in it,’ George said. ‘It simply must be brown or she’ll get
suspicious.’
George ran outside and dashed into his father’s toolshed where all the paints
were kept. There was a row of cans on the shelf, all colours, black, green, red,
pink, white and brown. He reached for the can of brown. The label said simply
DARK BROWN GLOSS PAINT ONE QUART. He took a screwdriver and prised off the lid.
The can was three-quarters full. He rushed it back to the kitchen. He poured the
whole lot into the saucepan. The saucepan was now full to the brim. Very gently,
George stirred the paint into the mixture with the long wooden spoon. Ah-ha! It
was all turning brown! A lovely rich creamy brown!
‘Where’s that medicine of mine, boy?!’ came the voice from the living-room.
‘You’re forgetting me! You’re doing it on purpose! I shall tell your mother!’
‘I’m not forgetting you, Grandma,’ George called back. ‘I’m thinking of you all
the time. But there are still ten minutes to go.’
‘You’re a nasty little maggot!’ the voice screeched back. ‘You’re a lazy and
disobedient little worm, and you’re growing too fast.’
George fetched the bottle of Grandma’s real medicine from the sideboard. He took
out the cork and tipped it all down the sink. He then filled the bottle with his
own magic mixture by dipping a small jug into the saucepan and using it as a
pourer. He replaced the cork.
Had it cooled down enough yet? Not quite. He held the bottle under the cold tap
for a couple of minutes. The label came off in the wet but that didn’t matter.
He dried the bottle with a dishcloth.
All was now ready!
This was it!
The great moment had arrived!
‘Medicine time, Grandma!’ he called out.
‘I should hope so, too,’ came the grumpy reply.
The silver tablespoon in which the medicine was always given lay ready on the
kitchen sideboard. George picked it up.
Holding the spoon in one hand and the bottle in the other, he advanced into the
living-room.
Grandma Gets the Medicine
Grandma sat hunched in her chair by the window. The wicked little eyes followed
George closely as he crossed the room towards her.
‘You’re late,’ she snapped.
‘I don’t think I am, Grandma.’
‘Don’t interrupt me in the middle of a sentence!’ she shouted.
‘But you’d finished your sentence, Grandma.’
‘There you go again!’ she cried. ‘Always interrupting and arguing. You really
are a tiresome little boy. What’s the time?’
‘It’s exactly eleven o’clock, Grandma.’
‘You’re lying as usual. Stop talking so much and give me my medicine. Shake the
bottle first. Then pour it into the spoon and make sure it’s a whole spoonful.’
‘Are you going to gulp it all down in one go?’ George asked her. ‘Or will you
sip it?’
‘What I do is none of your business,’ the old woman said. ‘Fill the spoon.’
As George removed the cork and began very slowly to pour the thick brown stuff
into the spoon, he couldn’t help thinking back upon all the mad and marvellous
things that had gone into the making of this crazy stuff — the shaving soap, the
hair remover, the dandruff cure, the automatic washing-machine powder, the flea
powder for dogs, the shoe polish, the black pepper, the horseradish sauce and
all the rest of them, not to mention the powerful animal pills and powders and
liquids . . . and the brown paint.
‘Open your mouth wide, Grandma,’ he said, ‘and I’ll pop it in.’
The old hag opened her small wrinkled mouth, showing disgusting pale brown
teeth.
‘Here we go!’ George cried out. ‘Swallow it down!’ He pushed the spoon well into
her mouth and tipped the mixture down her throat. Then he stepped back to watch
the result.
It was worth watching.
Grandma yelled ‘Oweeeee!’ and her whole body shot up whoosh into the air. It was
exactly as though someone had pushed an electric wire through the underneath of
her chair and switched on the current. Up she went like a jack-in-the-box . . .
and she didn’t come down . . . she stayed there . . . suspended in mid air . . .
about two feet up . . . still in a sitting position . . . but rigid now . . .
frozen . . . quivering . . . the eyes bulging . . . the hair standing straight
up on end.
‘Is something wrong, Grandma?’ George asked her politely. ‘Are you all right?’
Suspended up there in space, the old girl was beyond speaking.
The shock that George’s marvellous mixture had given her must have been
tremendous.
You’d have thought she’d swallowed a red-hot poker the way she took off from
that chair.
Then down she came again with a plop, back into her seat.
‘Call the fire brigade!’ she shouted suddenly. ‘My stomach’s on fire!’
‘It’s just the medicine, Grandma,’ George said. ‘It’s good strong stuff.’
‘Fire!’ the old woman yelled. ‘Fire in the basement! Get a bucket! Man the
hoses! Do something quick!’
‘Cool it, Grandma,’ George said. But he got a bit of a shock when he saw the
smoke coming out of her mouth and out of her nostrils. Clouds of black smoke
were coming out of her nose and blowing around the room.
‘By golly, you really are on fire,’ George said.
‘Of course I’m on fire!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll be burned to a crisp! I’ll be fried
to a frizzle! I’ll be boiled like a beetroot!’
George ran into the kitchen and came back with a jug of water. ‘Open your mouth,
Grandma!’ he cried. He could hardly see her for the smoke, but he managed to
pour half a jugful down her throat. A sizzling sound, the kind you get if you
hold a hot frying-pan under a cold tap, came up from deep down in Grandma’s
stomach. The old hag bucked and shied and snorted. She gasped and gurgled.
Spouts of water came shooting out of her. And the smoke cleared away.
‘The fire’s out,’ George announced proudly. ‘You’ll be all right now, Grandma.’
‘All right?’ she yelled. ‘Who’s all right? There’s jacky-jumpers in my tummy!
There’s squigglers in my belly! There’s bangers in my bottom!’ She began
bouncing up and down in the chair. Quite obviously she was not very comfortable.
‘You’ll find it’s doing you a lot of good, that medicine, Grandma,’ George said.
‘Good?’ she screamed. ‘Doing me good? It’s killing me!’
Then she began to bulge.
She was swelling!
She was puffing up all over!
Someone was pumping her up, that’s how it looked!
Was she going to explode?
Her face was turning from purple to green!
But wait! She had a puncture somewhere! George could hear the hiss of escaping
air. She stopped swelling. She was going down. She was slowly getting thinner
again, shrinking back and back slowly to her shrivelly old self.
‘How’s things, Grandma?’ George said.
No answer.
Then a funny thing happened. Grandma’s body gave a sudden sharp twist and a
sudden sharp jerk and she flipped herself clear out of the chair and landed
neatly on her two feet on the carpet.
‘That’s terrific, Grandma!’ George cried. ‘You haven’t stood up like that for
years! Look at you! You’re standing up all on your own and you’re not even using
a stick!’
Grandma didn’t even hear him. The frozen pop-eyed look was back with her again
now. She was miles away in another world.
Marvellous medicine, George told himself. He found it fascinating to stand there
watching what it was doing to the old hag. What next? he wondered.
He soon found out.
Suddenly she began to grow.
It was quite slow at first . . . just a very gradual inching upwards . . . up,
up, up . . . inch by inch . . . getting taller and taller . . . about an inch
every few seconds . . . and in the beginning George didn’t notice it.
But when she had passed the five foot six mark and was going on up towards being
six feet tall, George gave a jump and shouted, ‘Hey, Grandma! You’re growing!
You’re going up! Hang on, Grandma! You’d better stop now or you’ll be hitting
the ceiling!’
But Grandma didn’t stop.
It was a truly fantastic sight, this ancient scrawny old woman getting taller
and taller, longer and longer, thinner and thinner, as though she were a piece
of elastic being pulled upwards by invisible hands.
When the top of her head actually touched the ceiling, George thought she was