What Happens To Grandma After Taking 'George'S Marvellous Medicine'?

Reading Roald Dahl's 'George's Marvellous Medicine' as a kid left me equal parts horrified and delighted when Grandma gets her comeuppance. That cranky old woman spends the whole story berating George, demanding her medicine like a tyrant, and generally being a nightmare to live with. So when George concocts his chaotic brew—mixing everything from shampoo to brown paint—the results are explosively satisfying. After gulping down the 'medicine,' Grandma doesn’t just grow a little; she shoots up like a human skyscraper, bursting through the roof of the farmhouse. The image of her towering over the countryside, screeching about her shriveled legs, is pure Dahl madness. But the chaos doesn’t stop there. She eventually shrinks down, not to her original size, but to something impossibly tiny—smaller than a mouse. The last we see of her, she’s stuck in a chicken coop, her once thunderous voice now a squeak. It’s a grotesque, hilarious end for a character who thrived on being monstrous.

The beauty of Dahl’s storytelling is how he turns revenge into a carnival of absurdity. Grandma’s fate isn’t just punishment; it’s a metamorphosis. She goes from a human terror to a literal giant, then to a speck—almost as if her cruelty evaporates along with her size. The book never moralizes, though. There’s no 'lesson' about respecting elders; instead, it revels in the anarchy of childhood imagination. George’s experiment isn’t framed as wicked—it’s inventive, a rebellion against boredom and oppression. And Grandma? She becomes folklore. You can picture farmers years later whispering about the day a woman pierced the clouds, or kids poking at the coop wondering if that faint squeak is really her. Dahl leaves her fate open-ended, but the implication is clear: some bullies shrink under their own weight. The fact that George’s parents barely react to her disappearance says everything. She wasn’t just diminished physically; she’d already shrunk in their hearts.