Matilda

'Of course we read,' Mr Wormwood said. 'Don't be so daft. I read the Autocar and the Motor from cover to cover every week.'

'This child has already read an astonishing number of books,' Miss Honey said. 'I was simply trying to find out if she came from a family that loved good literature.'

'We don't hold with book-reading,' Mr Wormwood said. 'You can't make a living from sitting on your fanny and reading story-books. We don't keep them in the house.'

'I see,' Miss Honey said. 'Well, all I came to tell you was that Matilda has a brilliant mind. But I expect you knew that already.'

'Of course I knew she could read,' the mother said. 'She spends her life up in her room buried in some silly book.'

'But does it not intrigue you,' Miss Honey said, 'that a little five-year-old child is reading long adult novels by Dickens and Hemingway? Doesn't that make you jump up and down with excitement?'

'Not particularly,' the mother said. 'I'm not in favour of blue-stocking girls. A girl should think about making herself look attractive so she can get a good husband later on. Looks is more important than books, Miss Hunky ...'

'The name is Honey,' Miss Honey said.

'Now look at me,' Mrs Wormwood said. 'Then look at you. You chose books. I chose looks.'

Miss Honey looked at the plain plump person with the smug suet-pudding face who was sitting across the room. 'What did you say?' she asked.

'I said you chose books and I chose looks,' Mrs Wormwood said. 'And who's finished up the better off? Me, of course. I'm sitting pretty in a nice house with a successful businessman and you're left slaving away teaching a lot of nasty little children the ABC.'

'Quite right, sugar-plum,' Mr Wormwood said, casting a look of such simpering sloppiness at his wife it would have made a cat sick.

Miss Honey decided that if she was going to get anywhere with these people she must not lose her temper. 'I haven't told you all of it yet,' she said. 'Matilda, so far as I can gather at this early stage, is also a kind of mathematical genius. She can multiply complicated figures in her head like lightning.'

'What's the point of that when you can buy a calculator?' Mr Wormwood said.

'A girl doesn't get a man by being brainy,' Mrs Wormwood said. 'Look at that film-star for instance,' she added, pointing at the silent TV screen, where a bosomy female was being embraced by a craggy actor in the moonlight. 'You don't think she got him to do that by multiplying figures at him, do you? Not likely. And now he's going to marry her, you see if he doesn't, and she's going to live in a mansion with a butler and lots of maids.'

Miss Honey could hardly believe what she was hearing. She had heard that parents like this existed all over the place and that their children turned out to be delinquents and drop-outs, but it was still a shock to meet a pair of them in the flesh.

'Matilda's trouble,' she said, trying once again, 'is that she is so far ahead of everyone else around her that it might be worth thinking about some extra kind of private tuition. I seriously believe that she could be brought up to university standard in two or three years with the proper coaching.'

'University?' Mr Wormwood shouted, bouncing up in his chair. 'Who wants to go to university, for heaven's sake! All they learn there is bad habits!'

'That is not true,' Miss Honey said. 'If you had a heart attack this minute and had to call a doctor, that doctor would be a university graduate. If you got sued for selling someone a rotten second-hand car, you'd have to get a lawyer and he'd be a university graduate, too. Do not despise clever people, Mr Wormwood. But I can see we're not going to agree. I'm sorry I burst in on you like this.' Miss Honey rose from her chair and walked out of the room.

Mr Wormwood followed her to the front-door and said, 'Good of you to come, Miss Hawkes, or is it Miss Harris?'

'It's neither,' Miss Honey said, 'but let it go.' And away she went.

Throwing the Hammer

The nice thing about Matilda was that if you had met her casually and talked to her you would have thought she was a perfectly normal five-and-a-half-year-old child. 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.

It was therefore easy for Matilda to make friends with other children. All those in her class liked her. They knew of course that she was 'clever' because they had heard her being questioned by Miss Honey on the first day of term. And they knew also that she was allowed to sit quietly with a book during lessons and not pay attention to the teacher. But children of their age do not search deeply for reasons. They are far too wrapped up in their own small struggles to worry overmuch about what others are doing and why.

Among Matilda's new-found friends was the girl called Lavender. Right from the first day of term the two of them started wandering round together during the morning-break and in the lunch-hour. Lavender was exceptionally small for her age, a skinny little nymph with deep-brown eyes and with dark hair that was cut in a fringe across her forehead. Matilda liked her because she was gutsy and adventurous. She liked Matilda for exactly the same reasons.

Before the first week of term was up, awesome tales about the Headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, began to filter through to the newcomers. Matilda and Lavender, standing in a corner of the playground during morning-break on the third day, were approached by a rugged ten-year-old with a boil on her nose, called Hortensia. 'New scum, I suppose,' Hortensia said to them, looking down from her great height. She was eating from an extra large bag of potato crisps and digging the stuff out in handfuls. 'Welcome to borstal,' she added, spraying bits of crisp out of her mouth like snowflakes.

The two tiny ones, confronted by this giant, kept a watchful silence.

'Have you met the Trunchbull yet?' Hortensia asked.

'We've seen her at prayers,' Lavender said, 'but we haven't met her.'

'You've got a treat coming to you,' Hortensia said. 'She hates very small children. She therefore loathes the bottom class and everyone in it. She thinks five-year-olds are grubs that haven't yet hatched out.' In went another fistful of crisps and when she spoke again, out sprayed the crumbs. 'If you survive your first year you may just manage to live through the rest of your time here. But many don't survive. They get carried out on stretchers screaming. I've seen it often.' Hortensia paused to observe the effect these remarks were having on the two titchy ones. Not very much. They seemed pretty cool. So the large one decided to regale them with further information.