George’s Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl. Part 11.
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Chapter 12 | Mr. Kranky’s Great Idea
The next day, George’s father came down to breakfast in a state of greater excitement than ever. “I’ve been awake all night thinking about it!” he cried.
“About what, Dad?” George asked him.
“About your marvelous medicine, of course! We can’t stop now, my boy! We must start making more of it at once! More and more and more!”
The giant stewing pot had been completely emptied the day before because there had been so many sheep and pigs and cows and bullocks to be dosed.
“But why do we need more, Dad?” George asked.
“We’ve done all our own animals, and we’ve made Grandma feel as frisky as a ferret, even though she does have to to sleep in the barn.”
“My dear boy,” cried Mr. Killy Kranky, “we need barrels and barrels of it! Tons and tons! Then we will sell it to every farmer in the world so that all of them can have giant animals! We will build a Marvelous Medicine Factory and sell the stuff in bottles at ten dollars apiece. We will become rich, and you will become famous!”
“But wait a minute, Dad,” George said.
“There’s no waiting!” cried Mr. Kranky, working himself up so much that he put butter in his coffee and milk on his toast. “Don’t you understand what this tremendous invention of yours is going to do to the world? Nobody will ever go hungry again!”
“Why won’t they?” asked George.
“Because one giant cow will give fifty buckets of milk a day!” cried Mr. Kranky, waving his arms. “One giant chicken will make a hundred fried chicken dinners, and one giant pig will give you a thousand pork chops! It’s tremendous, my dear boy! It’s fantas-tic! It’ll change the world.”
“But wait a minute, Dad,” George said again.
“Don’t keep saying wait a minute!” shouted Mr. Kranky. “There isn’t a minute to wait! We must get cracking at once!”
“Do calm down, my dear,” Mrs. Kranky said from the other end of the table. “And stop putting marmalade on your cornflakes.”
“The heck with my cornflakes!” cried Mr. Kranky, leaping up from his chair. “Come on, George! Let’s get going! And the first thing we’ll do is to make one more stewpotful as a tester.”
“But, Dad,” said little George. “The trouble is …”
“There won’t be any trouble, my boy!” cried Mr.
Kranky. “How can there possibly be any trouble? All you’ve got to do is put the same stuff into the pot as you did yesterday. And while you’re doing it, I’ll write down each and every item. That’s how we’ll get the magic recipe!”
“But, Dad,” George said. “Please listen to me.”
“Why don’t you listen to him?” Mrs. Kranky said.
“The boy’s trying to tell you something.”
But Mr. Kranky was too excited to listen to anyone except himself. “And then,” he cried, “when the new mixture is ready, we’ll test it out on an old hen just to make sure we’ve got it right, and after that we’ll all shout hooray and build the giant factory!”
“But, Dad …”
“Come on then, what is it you want to say?”
“I can’t possibly remember all the hundreds of things I put into the pot to make the medicine,” George said.
“Of course you can, my dear boy,” cried Mr. Kranky. “I’ll help you! I’ll jog your memory! You’ll get it in the end, you see if you don’t! Now then, what was the very first thing you put in?”
“I went up to the bathroom first,” George said. “I used a lot of things in the bathroom and on mummy’s dressing table.”
“Come on, then!” cried Mr. Kranky. “Up we go to the bathroom!”
When they got there, they found, of course, a whole lot of empty tubes and empty aerosol cans and empty bottles. “That’s great,” said Mr. Kranky. “That tells us exactly what you used. If anything is empty, it means you used it.”
So Mr. Kranky started making a list of everything that was empty in the bathroom. Then they went to Mrs. Kranky’s dressing table. “A box of powder,” said Mr. Kranky, writing it down. “Helga’s Hair Set.
Flowers of Turnips perfume. Terrific. This is going to be easy. Where did you go next?”
“To the laundry room,” George said. “But are you sure you haven’t missed anything up here, Dad?”
“That’s up to you, my boy,” Mr. Kranky said.
“Have I?”
“I don’t think so,” George said. So down they went to the laundry room, and once again Mr. Kranky wrote down the names of all the empty bottles and cans. “My goodness me, what a mass of stuff you used!” he cried. “No wonder it did magic things! Is that the lot?”
“No, Dad, it’s not,” George said, and he led his father out to the shed where the animal medicines were kept and showed him the five big empty bottles up on the shelf. Mr. Kranky wrote down all their names.
“Anything else?” Mr. Kranky asked.
Little George scratched his head and thought and thought, but he couldn’t remember having put anything else in.
Mr. Killy Kranky leapt into his car and drove down to the village and bought new bottles and tubes and cans of everything on his list. He then went to the vet and got a fresh supply of all the animal medicines George had used.
“Now show me how you did it, George,” he said.
“Come along. Show me exactly how you mixed them all together.”