Matilda glues her father’s hat to his head

Matilda glues her father’s hat to his head in her first calculated act of revenge against a parent who belittles and mistreats her. The prank turns an ordinary object of Mr. Wormwood’s vanity into a day-long humiliation, and then into a physical mark he cannot immediately remove. For Matilda, its success is a small, deliberate victory against an adult whose power she cannot otherwise match; for her father, it is an ordeal that brings no lasting change in his conduct.

Background and decision

The prank follows Matilda’s anger at home. Her father has just asked about the television in a suddenly soft, threatening voice, and she fears she will lose control if she answers. She stays silent, but her anger keeps building. The books she has read have shown her possibilities her parents seem not to know: in her view, life can offer more than cheating people and watching television. She is also tired of being told she is stupid, when she knows she is not.

That evening, still not yet five years old, Matilda decides to retaliate whenever either parent is unkind to her. She sees small acts of revenge as victories that might help her endure their behavior. The decision is both a response to a particular insult and a wider strategy for coping with the imbalance between a very young child and an all-powerful adult. After the argument about the television, Mr. Wormwood becomes the first target on her list.

Preparation and execution

The next morning, shortly before Mr. Wormwood leaves for work at his second-hand car business, Matilda slips into the hallway. His hat hangs beyond her reach, so she stands on tiptoe and stretches up with a walking stick to lift it from its hook. Even then, she only just manages to get it down. The hat is brown, flat-topped, and decorated with a magpie feather in the brim. Mr. Wormwood is proud of it: he thinks it makes him look smart and daring, especially tilted at an angle with his checked jacket and green tie.

Matilda holds the hat in one hand and a small tube of superglue in the other. She carefully squeezes a thin line of glue all the way around the inside of the brim, then uses the walking stick to hang the hat back on its hook. Mr. Wormwood notices nothing when he puts it on. Only later, at the garage, does he discover that he cannot take it off. The glue is strong enough to tear skin if pulled too hard, so he keeps the hat on rather than risk being scalped.

He wears it throughout the working day, including while putting sawdust into gearboxes and tampering with odometers using an electric drill. To protect his dignity in front of his employees, he tries to behave as though wearing a hat indoors all day is entirely intentional, like a gangster in a film. The joke depends on the contrast between his carefully cultivated image and the increasingly absurd situation he cannot explain.

Exposure and consequences

When Mr. Wormwood comes home, the hat is still stuck. Mrs. Wormwood tries to pull it off, but her forceful tug makes him cry out that the skin on his forehead is being pulled with it. Matilda, settled in her usual chair with a book, watches the scene over its edge. Her apparently innocent question about whether his head has suddenly swollen lets her take part in the moment without admitting what she has done.

Mr. Wormwood looks at his daughter suspiciously but says nothing. Mrs. Wormwood concludes that the glue must be responsible and blames him for handling it carelessly, suggesting that he may have tried to attach another feather to the hat. He denies having touched the glue and turns to stare at Matilda, who meets his look with wide, innocent brown eyes. The scene leaves him with suspicion but no proof, while his wife’s mistaken explanation gives Matilda’s concealment room to hold.

The hat cannot be removed that night, and Mr. Wormwood has to sleep in it. He cannot lie comfortably on his pillow and keeps turning; Mrs. Wormwood tells him to stop and expects the hat to loosen by morning. It does not. She takes scissors and cuts it away bit by bit, first the crown and then the brim. Where the inner edge has stuck to the hair at the back and sides, she has to cut the hair down to the skin. The result is a bare white ring around his head, compared in appearance to a monk’s tonsure. At the front, where the brim has been glued directly to the skin, brown patches remain that cannot be washed off.

At breakfast, Matilda points out that the marks look like little brown insects crawling over his face and says people might think he has lice. Mr. Wormwood snaps at her to be quiet. The aftermath completes the prank’s physical transformation of the hat: first it is inseparable from his head, then its removal costs him his hair and leaves visible stains. His anger is plain, but the episode offers no sign that he has understood Matilda’s grievance.

A small victory without reform

The narration presents the prank as satisfying for Matilda, while immediately undercutting any idea that it has taught her father a lesson. That qualification matters: she has achieved a local triumph, not changed the conditions that prompted it. Her action gives a child an ingenious means of answering adult cruelty, but it remains secret retaliation rather than an open challenge. Mr. Wormwood is left embarrassed and physically altered; Matilda is left with the satisfaction of having made him endure the consequences of an act he cannot readily control.