thunderbox

Much like deaf writer Genevieve Barr's unflinching story, Thunderbox.

Young men, about to go to war, had written their names in pencil on the whitewashed walls of the Thunderbox Room; there was a pets’ graveyard, a pioneering kiwi-fruit vine, a head gardener’s tea kettle, and a pineapple pit, heated with fresh manure.

Only PG Wodehouse and the joyous "thunderbox" moment in Evelyn Waugh's Sword Of Honour have made me laugh more.

He will murder me; and break, burn, and destroy my precious and invaluable thunderbox; and then you will have no more thunder-showers in the land.

And he rattled, thumped, brandished his thunder-box, yelled, shouted, raved, roared, stamped, and danced corrobory like any black fellow; and then he touched a spring in the thunderbox, and out popped turnip-ghosts and magic-lanthorns and pasteboard bogies and spring-heeled Jacks, and sallaballas, with such a horrid din, clatter, clank, roll, rattle, and roar, that the little boy turned up the whites of his eyes, and fainted right away.