Arithmetic
Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable¹ and
intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with. It
was not easy to do so. But the new game she had invented of punishing one or both of them each
time they were beastly to her made her life more or less bearable.
Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was
brainpower. For sheer cleverness she could run rings around them all. But the fact remained that
any five-year-old girl in any family was always obliged to do as she was told, however asinine² the
orders might be. Thus she was always forced to eat her evening meals out of TV-dinner-trays in
front of the dreaded³ box. She always had to stay alone on weekday afternoons, and whenever she
was told to shut up, she had to shut up.
Her safety-valve, the thing that prevented her from going round the bend, was the fun of devising
and dishing out these splendid punishments, and the lovely thing was that they seemed to work, at
any rate for short periods. The father in particular became less cocky and unbearable⁴ for several
days after receiving a dose of Matilda's magic medicine.
The parrot-in-the-chimney affair quite definitely cooled both parents down a lot and for over a
week they were comparatively civil to their small daughter. But alas⁵, this couldn't last. The next
flare-up came one evening in the sitting-room⁶. Mr Wormwood had just returned from work.
Matilda and her brother were sitting quietly on the sofa waiting for their mother to bring in the TV
dinners on a tray. The television had not yet been switched on.
In came Mr Wormwood in a loud check suit and a yellow tie. The appalling⁷ broad orange-and-
green check of the jacket and trousers almost blinded the

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