Staying for the weekend with some friends, I picked this book off the (children’s) shelf for something to read – then promptly dropped from social intercourse for the next three hours. Where, I thought when reading this, was Matilda when I was growing up? Were my parents – decent and loving though they are – guilty of the same sort of neglect as Matilda’s by failing to provide me with books like this when growing up.

Then I saw when the book was published. 1988. Ah. Just a tad past my childhood.

That explains things. Roald Dahl seems to have been around forever, but I don’t remember anything by him in the libraries when I was growing up – apart from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, maybe. But, being a child who found eating a chore (it took away valuable reading time as I wasn’t allowed to read at the table), the premise of the book never attracted me and nor did its follow up, James and the Giant Peach (see the consistent theme?). What I do remember is the tarot cards and the sub-James Bond dancing woman, and the music, of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected on TV.

For a child who was somewhat wary of the adult world, the Tales of the Unexpected suggested that I might find some unexpected adult things in Roald Dahl’s books, so that was another reason to avoid them. As it turns out, I need not have worried – but I do think that modern-day writers for children, always so keen to expose their readers to the ‘real world’, might bear in mind my trepidation: children know perfectly well there’s all sorts of strange and icky things in the adult world and, really, they’d rather not read about them in their own books. And Roald Dahl had the good sense not to put them in – while still viewing the adult world with all the innocent scorn and righteous indignation of the child.

Matilda is a great book. I am glad to have read it.