Matilda’s visit to Juffrouw Engel’s cottage becomes both an intimate encounter with her teacher’s present poverty and the occasion for a painful account of how she came to live there. The journey begins with Matilda describing the reach of her newly discovered power; it ends with her hearing how, after losing both parents, Juffrouw Engel was left under the control of an aunt who took the family home. The small cottage is not merely a striking setting: its bare rooms make visible the deprivation that Juffrouw Engel has found difficult to explain, while the conversation turns Matilda’s curiosity into an act of attentive friendship.

The Walk to the Cottage

Matilda and Juffrouw Engel meet at the school gate and walk together through the village. Their route passes the greengrocer, with apples and oranges displayed in its window, the butcher’s shop, the bank branch, the grocer and the electrical shop. Once they leave the village for a narrow country lane, the traffic and other people dwindle. Away from the school and the village streets, Matilda becomes suddenly animated: she bounds along beside Juffrouw Engel, gestures with her fingers and speaks in an excited rush.

She tells her teacher that she feels able to move far more than the glass she has already tipped over. Tables and chairs, she thinks, might be within her reach, even with people sitting on them; she imagines that greater objects could be moved too. She describes the effort as something concentrated behind her eyes: staring intensely makes the power gather there and her eyes feel hot. This account places Matilda’s extraordinary ability within the ordinary walk to the cottage. Her confidence is expansive, but she is also still investigating what the power can do, including how large an object it can move and whether she must be close to it.

A Cottage and Its Bare Rooms

Juffrouw Engel cautions Matilda not to expect much from the place, describing it as a workers’ cottage. They reach a small green gate, half buried in the hedge, and a narrow path through nettles, brambles and long brown grass. At its end stands a tiny, weathered brick house with a slate roof, a small chimney, two very small front windows and no upper floor. A huge oak spreads over it, its branches seeming to shelter the little building from the surrounding world. Juffrouw Engel pauses at the gate and identifies the cottage as her home.

Inside, the material contrast between Juffrouw Engel’s neat appearance and her circumstances becomes impossible for Matilda to miss. The living room is small and square, lit by a single tiny window without curtains. Two overturned wooden crates serve as chairs, and a third is the table; there are no pictures or rugs, and the rough floorboards have cracks filled with dust and dirt. The low ceiling is nearly within Matilda’s reach when she jumps. The walls are coated not with paint but with cheap whitewash that leaves powder on her hand when she rubs it.

Tea is served with two cups, a teapot, a half-full bottle of milk and two slices of bread. There is no sugar. Matilda understands that the room is not an eccentric choice or a simple preference: this is all her friend has to come home to after work. Yet she initially tries to account for the bareness as a deliberate, practical way of living, suggesting that fewer possessions mean less cleaning and that not owning a refrigerator avoids unnecessary shopping. The attempt to be tactful does not conceal the poverty; instead, it brings the unspoken cause of it into the room.

From Questions to Confidence

At Matilda’s suggestions, Juffrouw Engel stiffens. Her shoulders rise, her lips press together, and she grips her cup while staring into it. The change is immediate: what had been a quiet tea becomes a strained pause charged with embarrassment and secrets. Matilda recognizes that she has crossed into something private and apologizes, saying that the questions are none of her business. Her restraint matters. Juffrouw Engel had not previously found the courage to tell anyone about her problems, but, seeing Matilda’s unusual mind and having witnessed her power, she now feels an urgent desire to speak.

Juffrouw Engel calls Matilda far wiser than other children her age and describes her mind as seeming fully grown despite her childish appearance. The scene thus establishes the basis of their unusual confidence: Matilda is still a child, but Juffrouw Engel trusts her with a history she has kept hidden. Matilda does not interrupt the disclosure with another explanation of the cottage. She listens, waits, and encourages Juffrouw Engel to continue when the story falters.

Loss, Guardianship and the Family Home

Juffrouw Engel is twenty-three. She was born in the village, where her father worked as a doctor, and her parents’ home was an old red-brick house hidden in the woods beyond the hills. Her mother died when Juffrouw Engel was two. Because her father had a busy practice, he asked the mother’s unmarried sister to move in and manage the household and care for the child. Juffrouw Engel missed her mother and disliked her aunt from the start, but her father was seldom home and did not see the aunt’s private conduct; in his presence, the aunt behaved differently.

When Juffrouw Engel was five, her father died suddenly. The aunt was then left in charge as her legal guardian, with full parental authority, and somehow became owner of the house. Juffrouw Engel later learned that the circumstances of her father’s death were surrounded by mystery. Matilda voices the suspicion that the aunt might have killed him and made his death appear self-inflicted, but Juffrouw Engel refuses to treat suspicion as proof. Her account preserves that uncertainty: it reveals the shadow over the death without establishing what happened.

After her father’s death, Juffrouw Engel says, her aunt became a terror and her life a nightmare. The account in this conversation does not detail every act of mistreatment, but it makes the effect clear: by the time Juffrouw Engel was eighteen and at teacher-training college, she felt so completely dominated that she could not imagine simply packing her belongings and leaving. She needed a job before she could go, and even then the aunt’s power over her made escape seem beyond her courage.

Escape and the Meaning of the Visit

Juffrouw Engel eventually found a cottage to rent. The rent was ten pence a week; she paid a month in advance, forty pence. Having arranged a place of her own, she packed her few possessions in a cardboard box one evening after preparing dinner and told her aunt she was leaving. The aunt erupted in anger and challenged how Juffrouw Engel, earning only one pound a week, could afford a house. Juffrouw Engel left anyway. She remembers her freedom as a profound relief, and says she has lived in the cottage for the last two years.

That freedom has not meant comfort. Of her weekly pound, ten pence goes to rent; the remainder must cover paraffin for her stove and lamp, as well as milk, tea, bread and margarine. She relies on eating extra at school lunch. The sparse tea and bare room that first disconcert Matilda are therefore consequences of a specific, narrow income, not decorative signs of simplicity.

The family home remains unresolved. Juffrouw Engel believes she should inherit it as her father’s nearest relative, but her aunt produced a document said to bear her father’s signature, leaving the house to his sister-in-law in return for caring for Juffrouw Engel. Juffrouw Engel is certain the document was forged, yet says that no one can prove it. Matilda’s questions have led from the visible lack of furniture to the legal and personal dispossession behind it. The visit changes what Matilda knows about her teacher: the cottage is both the home Juffrouw Engel secured for herself and a reminder of the childhood home and inheritance she lost. Her willingness to tell the story makes their relationship more than that of teacher and pupil; Matilda becomes a trusted listener to a history Juffrouw Engel had been unable to share.