The Great Mouse Plot by Roald Dahl. Part 2.
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We all enjoyed Thwaites’s story and we made him tell it to us many times on our walks to and from school. But it didn’t stop any of us except Thwaites from buying Liquorice Bootlaces. At two for a penny they were the best value in the shop. A Bootlace, in case you haven’t had the pleasure of handling one, is not round. It’s like a flat black tape about half an inch wide. You buy it rolled up in a coil, and in those days it used to be so long that when you unrolled it and held one end at arm’s length above your head, the other end touched the ground.
Sherbet Suckers were also two a penny. Each Sucker consisted of a yellow cardboard tube filled with sherbet powder, and there was a hollow liquorice straw sticking out of it. (Rat’s blood again, young Thwaites would warn us, pointing at the liquorice straw.) You sucked the sherbet up through the straw and when it was finished you ate the liquorice. They were delicious, those Sherbet Suckers. The sherbet fizzed in your mouth, and if you knew how to do it, you could make white froth come out of your nostrils and pretend you were throwing a fit.
Gobstoppers, costing a penny each, were enormous hard round balls the size of small tomatoes. One Gobstopper would provide about an hour’s worth of non-stop sucking and if you took it out of your mouth and inspected it every five minutes or so, you would find it had changed colour. There was something fascinating about the way it went from pink to blue to green to yellow. We used to wonder how in the world the Gobstopper Factory managed to achieve this magic. ‘How does it happen?’ we would ask each other. ‘How can they make it keep changing colour?’
‘It’s your spit that does it,’ young Thwaites proclaimed. As the son of a doctor, he considered himself to be an authority on all things that had to do with the body. He could tell us about scabs and when they were ready to be picked off. He knew why a black eye was blue and why blood was red. ‘It’s your spit that makes a Gobstopper change colour,’ he kept insisting. When we asked him to elaborate on this theory, he answered, ‘You wouldn’t understand it if I did tell you.’
Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. They smelled of nail-varnish and they froze the back of your throat. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.
Then there was a hard brown lozenge called the Tonsil Tickler. The Tonsil Tickler tasted and smelled very strongly of chloroform. We had not the slightest doubt that these things were saturated in the dreaded anaesthetic which, as Thwaites had many times pointed out to us, could put you to sleep for hours at a stretch. ‘If my father has to saw off somebody’s leg,’ he said, ‘he pours chloroform on to a pad and the person sniffs it and goes to sleep and my father saws his leg off without him even feeling it.’
‘But why do they put it into sweets and sell them to us?’ we asked him.
You might think a question like this would have baffled Thwaites. But Thwaites was never baffled. ‘My father says Tonsil Ticklers were invented for dangerous prisoners in jail,’ he said. ‘They give them one with each meal and the chloroform makes them sleepy and stops them rioting.’
‘Yes,’ we said, ‘but why sell them to children?’
‘It’s a plot,’ Thwaites said. ‘A grown-up plot to keep us quiet.’