The Bare Bum Gang and the Valley of Doom by Anthony McGowan Page B

said wearily. 'Poo is even
more disgusting than wee, and not scientific
at all. We're going to invent a stinky potion,
and attack the Dockery den with that.'
    'Brilliant idea,' said Noah, who nearly always supported my
    plans.
     
    So then we spent the next week developing
the right formula. To begin with we tried
following the instructions in George's
Marvellous Medicine , which is an excellent
book by Roald Dahl. That meant getting
every kind of gloopy stuff from the bathroom
and kitchen and garage and mixing them
up together. The trouble with that plan
was that, even though it looked foul, it
ended up smelling quite nice. We didn't try
drinking any because then we'd either grow
enormous like in the book or, more likely,
die in agony of poison.
    That was Special Mixture Number One.
    Special Mixture Number Two involved us
all collecting ear wax, bogeys, sweat and
anything else not very nice that came out of
our bodies, except for wee and poo (because
we're not baboons or savages).

    Special Mixture Number
Two was a failure because
even after a week
we only had about a
teaspoonful altogether.
Noah calculated that to get
enough to ruin the Dockery
den would take twelve years, by which time
we'd all be grown up and have jobs, such as
postman (or lady), window cleaner, banker,
shop assistant, astronaut, lawyer, doctor (or
lady doctor), etc., etc., etc., and we would
be too busy to use it.
    Special Mixture Number Three was some
milk I'd left to go sour, mixed up with an egg
I'd left to go bad. It was in my milkshake
beaker, because it had a lid. The mixture
was coming along quite nicely when my
dad found it and drank it, thinking it was
a milkshake. He spent the rest of the day
in the toilet while Special Mixture Number
Three tried to escape out of both ends of
him at the same time.
    Special Mixture Number Four was made
of Marmite mixed with water. I thought it
smelled disgusting; so did Noah, but Jennifer
and The Moan actually liked it; and Jamie,
who would have got the deciding vote, had
a blocked nose and so couldn't smell it at
all.
    Special Mixture Number Five wasn't really
a special mixture at all. Jamie had the idea
of setting off a whole load of Smarties-tube
Fart Bombs (STFBs) inside the enemy den.
To begin with we all thought that was quite
a good idea, which was a surprise because
Jamie had only ever had one good idea in
all the time we'd known him. But then Noah
worked out that we'd need about a hundred
STFBs to properly stink out the den, and
the only way to set them off would be by
stamping on them actually inside the den. So
whoever did the stamping would be caught
in the stink blast, and probably stinked (or
stunk) to death.
    Special Mixture Number Six was good.
There was a duck pond in the park on
the other side of the town. The water in
it was a greeny-browny-slimy-stinky mess.
Sometimes you'd see tadpoles wriggling about
in the murk, but they always died before
they became frogs because the water was so
toxic. I think the main reason it was so rank
was because the ducks used it as their toilet.
We scooped up a bucketful of the water,
making sure we got some of the dead-tadpole-and-
duck-poo muck from the bottom of the
pond. I mixed it up with a stick. Already it
smelled like a tramp's underpants.

    'If we leave this to stew for a couple of
days, it'll be perfect,' I said.
    I kept it in our garage. Every chance
I got I went in to check on it. Each day
the smell got a little bit worse, but I was
still dissatisfied. I never once felt like being
sick when I smelled it. It lacked something.
So, on the third day, I did a wee in the
bucket. That was all it took. The addition
of wee turned Special Mixture Number Six
into Special Mixture Number Seven.
    And, OK, you might say that weeing in
the bucket was cheating, after I'd said that
weeing was for baboons and pigs, etc., etc.
However, I would argue that it was all
perfectly scientific, because we had other
things in the bucket as well, and mixing stuff
up together and