Matilda

by Roald Dahl

Occasionally one comes across parents who take the opposite line, who show no interest at all in their children, and these of course are far worse than the doting ones.

Over the next six months, under Mrs Phelps’s watchful and compassionate eye, Matilda read the following books: Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Gone to Earth by Mary Webb Kim by Rudyard Kipling The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Animal Farm by George Orwell

“And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.

The only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter-attack.

Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with.

Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brain-power.

Miss Trunchbull, the Headmistress, was something else altogether. She was a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of the pupils and teachers alike.

There was an aura of menace about her even at a distance, and when she came up close you could almost feel the dangerous heat radiating from her as from a red-hot rod of metal. When she marched—Miss Trunchbull never walked, she always marched like a stormtrooper with long strides and arms aswinging—when she marched along a corridor you could actually hear her snorting as she went, and if a group of children happened to be in her path, she ploughed right on through them like a tank, with small people bouncing off her to left and right.

And that is the Trunchbull’s great secret.” “What is?” Lavender asked. Matilda said, “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable. No parent is going to believe this pigtail story, not in a million years. Mine wouldn’t. They’d call me a liar.”

“Never and never, my girl riding far and near Fear or believe that the wolf in the sheepwhite hood Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap, my dear, my dear, Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.”