11. Mr Snape's Great Idea | << Back | Home | Next >>
No harm intended, no profit made.
Mr Snape's Great Idea
The next day, Severus' 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?' Severus asked him.
'About your marvellous 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 saucepan 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?' Severus 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 sleep in the barn.'
'My dear boy,' cried Mr Snape, '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 built a Marvellous Medicine Factory and sell the stuff in bottles at five pounds a time. We will become rich and you will become famous!'
'But wait a minute, dad,' Severus said.
'There's no waiting!' cried Mr Snape, 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 Severus.
'Because one giant cow will give fifty buckets of milk a day!' cried Mr Snape, 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 fantastic! It'll change the world.'
'But wait a minute, dad,' Severus said again.
'Don't keep saying wait a minute!' shouted Mr Snape. 'There isn't a minute to wait. We must get cracking at once!'
'Do calm down, my dear,' Mrs Snape said from the other end of the table. 'And stop putting marmalade on your cornflakes.'
'The heck with my cornflakes!' cried Mr Snape, leaping up from his chair. 'Come on, Severus! Let's get going! And the first thing we'll do is to make one more saucepanful as a tester.'
'But dad,' said little Severus. 'The trouble is...'
'There won't be any trouble, my boy,' cried Mr Snape. 'How can there possibly be any trouble? All you've got to do is put the same stuff into the saucepan 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,' Severus said. 'Please listen to me.'
'Why don't you listen to him,' Mrs Snape said. 'The boy's trying to tell you something.'
But Mr Snape 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 absolutely 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 saucepan to make the medicine,' Severus said.
'Of course you can, my dear boy,' cried Mr Snape. 'I'll help you! I'll job 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,' Severus said. 'I used a lot of things in the bathroom and on mummy's dressing-table.'
'Come on, then!' cried Mr Snape. 'Up we go to the bathroom!'
When they got there, they found, of course, a whole lot of empty tubes and empty aerosols and empty bottles. 'That's great,' said Mr Snape. 'That tells us exactly what you used. If anything is empty, it means you used it.'
So Mr Snape started making a list of everything that was empty in the bathroom. Then they went to Mrs Snape's dressing-table. 'A box of powder,' said Mr Snape, writing it down. 'Helga's hairset. Flowers of Turnips perfume. Terrific. This is going to be easy. Where did you go next?'
'To the laundry-room,' Severus said. 'But are you sure you haven't missed anything out up here, dad?'
'That's up to you, my boy,' Mr Snape said. 'Have I?'
'I don't think so,' Severus said. So down they went to the laundry-room and once again Mr Snape 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,' Severus 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 Snape wrote down all their names.
'Anything else?' Mr Snape asked.
Little Severus scratched his head and thought and thought but he couldn't remember having put anything else in.
Mr Snape 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 Severus had used.
'Now show me how you did it,' Severus,' he said. 'Come along. Show me exactly how you mixed them all together.'
