Matilda

by Roald Dahl

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

She could feel the anger boiling up inside her. She knew it was wrong to hate her parents like this, but she was finding it very hard not to do so.

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

during my long career as a teacher that a bad girl is a far more dangerous creature than a bad boy.

She displayed almost no outward signs of her brilliance and she never showed off. “This is a very sensible and quiet little girl,” you would have said to yourself. And unless for some reason you had started a discussion with her about literature or mathematics, you would never have known the extent of her brain-power.

“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.

“A precocious child”, Miss Honey said, “is one that shows amazing intelligence early on. You are an unbelievably precocious child.”

You can’t imagine what it’s like to be completely controlled like that by a very strong personality. It turns you to jelly.

I owed her a lot of money. I asked her why. She said, ‘Because I’ve been feeding you for all these years and buying your shoes and your clothes!’ She told me it added up to thousands and I had to pay her back