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Contents
The Reader of Books Mr Wormwood, the Great Car Dealer
The Hat and the Superglue
The Ghost Arithmetic The Platinum-Blond Man Miss Honey
The Trunchbull The Parents Throwing the Hammer
Bruce Bogtrotter and the Cake
Lavender The Weekly Test
The First Miracle The Second Miracle Miss Honey’s Cottage
Miss Honey’s Story
The Names The Practice
The Third Miracle A New HomeThe Reader of Books
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.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they
manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It’s the way of the
world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance
of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, "Bring us a
basin! We’re going to be sick!"
School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort
of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their
own back when the time comes to write the end-of-term reports. If I
were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of
doting parents. "Your son Maximilian", I would write, "is a
total wash- out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into
when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere
else." Or if I were feeling lyrical that day, I might write, "It
is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing-organs in the
sides of the abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt
this term, has no hearing-organs at all."
I might even delve deeper into natural history and say, "The
periodical cicada spends six years as a grub underground, and no more than
six days as a free creature of
sunlight and air. Your son Wilfred has spent six years as a grub in
this school and we are still waiting for him to emerge from the
chrysalis." A particularly poisonous little girl might sting me into
saying, "Fiona has the same glacial beauty as an iceberg, but unlike
the iceberg she has absolutely nothing below the surface." I
think I might enjoy writing end-of-term reports for the stinkers in my
class. But enough of that. We have to get on.
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. Mr and Mrs Wormwood were two such parents.
They had a son called Michael and a daughter called Matilda, and the
parents
looked upon Matilda in particular as nothing more than a scab. A scab
is something you have to put up with until the time comes when you can
pick it off and flick it away. Mr and Mrs Wormwood looked forward
enormously to the time when they could pick their little daughter off and
flick her away, preferably into the next county or even further than that.
It is bad enough when parents treat ordinary children as though they
were scabs and bunions, but it becomes somehow a lot worse when the child
in question is extraordinary, and by that I mean sensitive and brilliant.
Matilda was both of these things, but above all she was brilliant. Her
mind was so nimble and she was so quick to learn that her ability should
have been obvious even to the most half-witted of
parents. But Mr and Mrs Wormwood were both so gormless and so
wrapped up in their own silly little lives that they failed to notice
anything unusual about their daughter.