‘Yes, but how do they turn that into Liquorice Bootlaces, Daddy?’ the young Thwaites had asked, and this question, according to Thwaites, had caused his father to pause and think for a few moments before he answered it. At last he had said, ‘The two men who were doing the stirring with the long poles now put on their wellington boots and climb into the cauldron and shovel the hot rat-mash out on to a concrete floor. Then they run a steam-roller over it several times to flatten it out. What is left looks rather like a gigantic black pancake, and all they have to do after that is to wait for it to cool and to harden so they can cut it up into strips to make the Bootlaces. Don’t ever eat them,’ the father had said. ‘If you do, you’ll get ratitis.’
‘What is ratitis, Daddy?’ young Thwaites had asked.
‘All the rats that the rat-catchers catch are poisoned with rat-poison,’ the father had said. ‘It’s the rat-poison that gives you ratitis.’
‘Yes, but what happens to you when you catch it?’ young Thwaites had asked.
‘Your teeth become very sharp and pointed,’ the father had answered. ‘And a short stumpy tail grows out of your back just above your bottom. There is no cure for ratitis. I ought to know. I’m a doctor.’
* * *
Ratitis sounds as deadly as Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker, a truly nasty spell that appeared in The Witches. It is used to turn a child into … a mouse!
* * *
* * *
‘Bruno was getting smaller by the second. I could see him shrinking … Now his clothes seemed to be disappearing and brown fur was growing all over his body … Suddenly he had a tail … And then he had whiskers … Now he had four feet … It was all happening so quickly … It was a matter of seconds only … And all at once he wasn’t there any more … A small brown mouse was running around on the table top …’
* * *
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.
* * *
An old-fashioned penny would be worth less than half of one pence in today’s money.
* * *
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.
* * *
Roald Dahl simply adored sweets. He sucked them, chewed them and crunched them. And he wrote about them whenever he got the chance …
‘I have always longed and longed to own a sweet-shop. The sweet-shop of my dreams would be loaded from top to bottom with Sherbert Suckers and Caramel Fudge and Russian Toffee and Sugar Snorters and Butter Gumballs and thousands and thousands of other glorious things like that.’