Whizz-Away Ointment

Whizz-Away Ointment is a pink flying preparation whose importance lies in its ability to convert familiar household objects into vehicles of escape. Bought as a tiny quantity in the Land of Spells, it carries the children out of immediate danger, unexpectedly animates a table, bench, and bed, and finally runs almost completely dry. Its magic is therefore practical rather than merely decorative: every dab changes what the children can do, but every use also makes their freedom more precarious.

Definition and First Appearance

Whizz-Away Ointment is sold by a witch as a spell for making ordinary broomsticks fly through the air. The witch demonstrates it by rubbing a pink ointment onto an elf’s broomstick and instructing the rider to say, “Whizz away!” The broomstick immediately rises, with the elf clinging to it, establishing both the ointment’s visible effect and its connection with spoken command.

Jo wants to buy the spell, but he has no silver pieces. Moon-Face pays the witch three silver pieces, and the children admit that they have no broomstick with them. Instead of refusing them, the witch gives Jo only a little of the substance in a tiny pink jar. The smallness of the container matters: the ointment is valuable, portable, and limited from the moment it enters the children’s possession. Jo takes it homeward with the thought that his mother’s broomstick might be made to fly, turning a fantastic market discovery into an object connected with ordinary domestic life.

From Curiosity to Emergency Use

The ointment first appears to be a playful experiment. When the children later search their pockets for food, Jo finds the small, heavy pink jar among string, paper, a pencil, and marbles. He explains that he bought it because it would be amusing to rub some onto his mother’s broomstick. The jar’s sudden reappearance transforms an almost forgotten purchase into the center of the group’s predicament.

Moon-Face immediately recognizes a more urgent possibility: if they can find a broomstick, the children might rub on the ointment and fly away. Their difficulty is that no broomstick is available. Jo therefore proposes trying the substance on a table and a bench, although Moon-Face doubts that a spell intended for broomsticks will work on anything else. This disagreement marks the ointment’s movement from a defined magical product to an uncertain force whose limits must be tested.

Jo rubs the pink ointment across the top of the wooden bench and across the underside of the overturned table. The timing makes the experiment an emergency: horses’ hoofs announce the return of the enchanter and Wizard Wily, and the children hurriedly take their places. Jo then gives the command “WHIZZ-AWAY HOME!” The furniture begins to move, slowly at first, before the table rises toward the window.

Furniture as a Means of Escape

The table does not behave like a passive tool. It tries to leave through the window, becomes stuck, and then tips itself so that it can squeeze through the opening. The children cling to its legs as it sails away upside down, carrying them safely over the Land of Spells. The episode gives the ointment a striking material agency: its effect is not confined to transporting a person on a conventional broomstick, but helps turn a large, awkward household object into an active participant in flight.

The escape also shows that the ointment does not solve every danger automatically. The table must find a way through the window, and the bench is delayed behind it. The enchanter and Wizard Wily rush into the room before the bench can depart. The children survive because the Saucepan Man throws a kettle at their pursuers, releasing Mr. Change-About, whose enlarged form obstructs and attacks the enchanter. The ointment creates the possibility of escape, but the outcome depends on cooperation among the children and their friends, on the furniture’s movement, and on a last-second intervention by the Saucepan Man.

The Last Dab in the Land of Dreams

The ointment is used again when Silky finds the children and their companions asleep on a large bed in the Land of Dreams. They cannot be awakened, and the bed cannot simply be carried down the hole. Silky searches Jo’s pockets and discovers that the jar contains only the tiniest dab. The depleted supply makes the scene a direct contrast with the earlier furniture escape: what was once enough to cover a bench and a table is now nearly gone.

Silky rubs the remaining ointment onto the head of the bed and says, “Whizz-Away Home, bed!” The big white bed immediately flies away so fast that Silky nearly falls off. It rushes through the air, frightening the birds, passes through a cloud at the edge of the Land of Dreams, and eventually turns back toward the Faraway Tree. On reaching the tree, it catches on a branch and slides sideways, causing everyone to begin sliding off. Even at the end of its useful life, the ointment produces motion rather than perfect control; rescue remains exhilarating and unstable.

The return depends on more than the bed’s flight. The rescuers wet the Sandman’s sand so that he cannot throw it into their eyes, while Watzisname cuts open the bottom of the sack, finds dry sand, and throws it at the Sandman himself, putting him to sleep. Once everyone is safe inside Silky’s room, Silky explains that the bed carried them back using the very last bit of Whizz-Away Ointment. The jar’s final use thus closes the sequence begun in the Land of Spells: the same magical substance first enables an improvised escape from an enchanter and later brings sleeping companions home from a dreamland.

Domestic Magic and Narrative Significance

Whizz-Away Ointment gains much of its force from the contrast between magical adventure and household responsibility. Before the children receive permission for a holiday, Jo is expected to dig up potatoes with Dick, while Bessie and Fanny must finish their mother’s ironing. Their mother promises a day away only after the children complete their jobs. The ointment therefore belongs to a world in which adventure is permitted only around the demands of family labor, and its most memorable uses transform domestic furniture rather than exotic machinery.

The same contrast returns when the children’s mother becomes ill. The doctor advises warmth, rest, food, and freedom from worry; Silky offers to have Dame Washalot do the washing, describing washing as her joy and even saying that she cleans the leaves of the Faraway Tree when nothing else is dirty. Here magical friendship temporarily reorganizes the work of care, but Whizz-Away Ointment itself is not used to cure the illness. Instead, the children later obtain Get-Well Medicine, which restores their mother so quickly that she is soon sitting up, eating a huge breakfast, laughing, and eventually washing and ironing again.

This separation between flying ointment and healing medicine clarifies the ointment’s narrative function. It is not a universal remedy. It addresses confinement, distance, and pursuit, allowing bodies and objects to cross spaces that would otherwise hold them. Its power is also governed by scarcity: the children improvise when the proper broomstick is absent, stretch the substance across several objects, and finally expend the last dab to rescue sleeping friends. The ointment makes ordinary things strange and newly capable, but its disappearance restores limits to the children’s future movement.

In this way, Whizz-Away Ointment is both an object and a compact adventure structure. It begins as a souvenir of a magical marketplace, becomes a contested experiment, produces a spectacular escape, reappears as a dwindling resource, and ends in a dangerous return home. Its pink jar exposes the material dependence of fantasy: daring, friendship, and quick thinking matter, but so does the quantity of a substance held in a pocket.