“Shut up and listen!” snapped The Grand High Witch. “Listen very carefully and let us not be having any muck-ups!”
The audience leaned forward, eager to learn how this magic was going to be performed.
“Each and every vun of you”, thundered The Grand High Witch, “is to go back to your home towns immediately and rrree-sign from your jobs. Rrree-sign! Give notice! Rrree-tire!”
“We will!” they cried. “We will resign from our jobs!”
“And after you have rrree-signed from your jobs,” The Grand High Witch went on, “each and every vuri of you vill be going out and you vill be buying… ” She paused.
“What will we be buying?” they cried. “Tell us, O Brilliant One, what is it we shall be buying?”
“Sveet-shops!” shouted The Grand High Witch.
“Sweet-shops!” they cried. “We are going to buy sweet-shops! What a frumptious wheeze!”
“Each of you vill be buying for herself a sveetshop. You vill be buying the very best and most rrree-spectable sweet-shops in Inkland.”
“We will! We will!” they answered. Their dreadful voices were like a chorus of dentists’ drills all grinding away together.
“I am vonting no tuppenny-ha’penny crrrummy little tobacco-selling-newspaper-sweet-shops!” shouted The Grand High Witch. “I am vonting you to get only the very best shops filled up high with piles and piles of luscious sweets and tasty chocs!”
“The best!” they cried. “We shall buy the best sweet-shops in town!”
“You will be having no trouble in getting vot you wont,” shouted The Grand High Witch, “because you will be offering four times as much as a shop is vurth and nobody is rrree-fusing an offer like that! Money is not a prrroblem to us witches as you know very well. I have brrrought with me six trrrunks stuffed full of Inklish banknotes, all new and crrrisp. And all of them,” she added with a fiendish leer, “all of them homemade.”
The witches in the audience grinned, appreciating this joke.
At that point, one foolish witch got so excited at the possibilities presented by owning a sweetshop that she leapt to her feet and shouted, “The children will come flocking to my shop and I will feed them poisoned sweets and poisoned chocs and wipe them all out like weasels!”
The room became suddenly silent. I saw the tiny body of The Grand High Witch stiffen and then go rigid with rage. “Who spoke? ” she shrieked. “It vos you! You over there!”
The culprit sat down fast and covered her face with her clawed hands.
“You blithering bumpkin!” screeched The Grand High Witch. “You brrrainless bogvumper! Are you not rrree-alising that if you are going rrround poisoning little children you vill be caught in five minutes flat? Never in my life am I hearing such a boshvolloping suggestion coming from a vitch!”
The entire audience cowered and shook. I’m quite sure they all thought, as I did, that the terrible white-hot sparks were about to start flying again.
Curiously enough, they didn’t.
‘If such a tomfiddling idea is all you can be coming up vith,” thundered The Grand High Witch, “then it is no vunder Inkland is still svorming vith rrrotten little children!”
There was another silence. The Grand High Witch glared at the witches in the audience. “Do you not know”, she shouted at them, “that vee witches are vurrrking only with magic?”
“We know, Your Grandness!” they all answered.
“Of course we know!”
The Grand High Witch grated her bony gloved hands against each other and cried out, “So each of you is owning a magnificent sweet-shop! The next move is that each of you will be announcing in the window of your shop that on a certain day you will be having a Great Gala Opening with frree sweets and chocs to every child!”
“That will bring them in, the greedy little brutes!” cried the audience. “They’ll be fighting to get through the doors!”
“Next,” continued The Grand High Witch, “you will prepare yourselves for this Great Gala Opening by filling every choc and every sweet in your shop with my very latest and grrreatest magic formula! This is known as FORMULA 86 DELAYED ACTION MOUSE-MAKER!”
“Delayed Action Mouse-Maker!” they chanted. “She’s done it again! Her Grandness has concocted yet another of her wondrous magic child-killers! How do we make it, O Brilliant One?”