Liquorice Bootlace and Ratitis...
an excerpt of Roald Dahls Childhood Memories.
(.../...)On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop. No we didn't, we never passed it. We always stopped. We lingered outside, gazing in at the glass jars of Bull's-eyes and Strawberry Bonbons and Acid Drops and the rest. Each of us received sixpence a week for pocket-money, and whenever there was money in our pockets, we would troop in for a pennyworth of this or that. My favourites were Sherbet Suckers and Liquorice Bootlaces.
One of the boys, named Thwaites, told me I should never eat Liquorice Bootlaces. Thwaites's father, who was a doctor, said they were made from rats' blood. "Every rat-catcher," the father had said, "takes his rats to the Liquorice Bootlace Factory, and the manager pays tuppence for each. Many a rat-catcher has become a millionaire selling rats to the Factory." "But how do they turn the rats into liquorice?" the young Thwaites had asked his father. "They wait until they've got 10,000 rats," the father had answered, "then they dump them all into a shiny steel cauldron and boil them up for several hours. Two men stir the bubbling cauldron with long poles and in the end they have a thick, steaming rat-stew. After that, a cruncher is lowered into the cauldron to crunch the bones, and what's left is a pulpy substance called rat-mash."
"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 onto the 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 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. "The rats the rat-catchers catch are poisoned with rat-poison," the father had said. "It's 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."
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 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.) 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 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. We used to wonder how in the world the Gobstopper Factory managed to achieve this magic. "It's your spit that does that," Thwaites proclaimed. As the son of a doctor, he considered himself 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, he answered, "You wouldn't understand if I did tell you".
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." (.../...)
(excerpt from "The bicycle and the sweet-shop", in "Boy" by Roald Dahl)
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