1. The Invention of Vita-Wonk

     Mr Willy Wonka begins by inventing Wonka-Vite, which makes people younger. But Wonka-Vite is too strong. So some people disappear, because their age becomes Minus! One person actually becomes minus eighty-seven, which means he’s got to wait eighty-seven years before he can come back.

 

     Mr Willy Wonka must invent a new thing...

     Mr Wonka said, “So once again I rolled up my sleeves and set to work. Once again I squeezed my brain, searching for the new recipe... I had to create age... to make people old... old, older, oldest... ‘Ha-ha!’ I cried, for now the ideas were beginning to come. ‘What is the oldest living thing in the world? What lives longer than anything else?’ ”

 

     “A tree,” Charlie said.

 

     “Right you are, Charlie! But what kind of a tree? Not the Douglas fir. Not the oak. Not the cedar. No, no, my boy. It is a tree called the Bristlecone pine that grows upon the slopes of Wheeler Peak in Nevada, U.S.A. You can find Bristlecone Pines on Wheeler Peak today that are over 4000 years old! This is fact, Charlie. Ask any dendrochronologist you like (and look that word up in the dictionary when you get home, will you please?). So that started me off. I jumped into the Great Glass Elevator and rushed all over the world collecting special items from the oldest living things...

 

     “All over the world, Charlie,” Mr Wonka went on “I tracked down very old and ancient animals and took an important little bit of something from each one of them — a hair or an eyebrow or sometimes it was no more than an ounce or two of the jam scraped from between its toes while it was sleeping. I tracked down THE WHISTLE-PIG, THE BOBOLINK, THE SKROCK, THE POLLYFROG, THE GIANT CURLICUE, THE STINGING SLUG AND THE VENOMOUS SQUERKLE who can spit poison right into your eye from fifty yards away. But there’s no time to tell you about them all now, Charlie. Let me just say quickly that in the end, after lots of boiling and bubbling and mixing and testing in my Inventing Room, I produced one tiny cupful of oily black liquid and gave four drops of it to a brave twenty-year-old Oompa-Loompa volunteer to see what happened.”

 

     “What did happen?” Charlie asked.

 

     “It was fantastic!” cried Mr Wonka. “The moment he swallowed it, he began wrinkling and shrivelling up all over and his hair started dropping off and his teeth started falling out and, before I knew it, he had suddenly become an old fellow of seventy-five! And thus, my dear Charlie, was Vita-Wonk invented!”

 

~ ROALD DAHL

(From Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator)