Matilda's superglue hat prank

Matilda's superglue hat prank turns a child's anger at being belittled into a carefully planned act of retaliation. Still not five, Matilda chooses her father's prized work hat and uses superglue to make it impossible for him to take off. The joke follows an evening in which she has silently endured a tense exchange about the television; its small, exacting mechanics give her a victory where an adult's authority would otherwise leave her powerless.

Background and decision

Matilda's anger has been building beneath her silence. When Mr. Wormwood asks what is wrong with the television in a suddenly soft, threatening voice, she fears that answering will make her lose control, so she says nothing. She is furious, and her reading has given her a sense of a wider life than the one her parents seem to value: books by Dickens and Kipling suggest possibilities beyond cheating people and watching television. She also resents repeatedly being told that she is stupid, knowing that the accusation is false.

That night, Matilda makes a decision: whenever either parent is mean to her, she will find some way to get even. She regards one or two small victories as a way to bear their behavior and keep from being driven mad by it. The narration stresses the imbalance behind the plan: she is not yet five and cannot match an all-powerful adult on equal terms. Nevertheless, she is determined to try, and after the evening's incident her father becomes her first target. The prank is thus not an isolated accident or an aimless trick; it is her chosen response to a household in which she feels ignored and insulted.

The hat and the glue

The next morning, just before Mr. Wormwood leaves for work, Matilda sneaks into the hall to take the hat he wears every day. She can barely reach it: standing on tiptoe, she stretches and uses a walking stick to lift it from its hook. It is a brown hat, flat on top, with a magpie feather in the band. Mr. Wormwood is proud of it and believes it makes him look stylish and daring, especially when he wears it cocked at an angle with his checked jacket and green tie. Its importance to his appearance makes it a particularly apt object for Matilda's retaliation.

With the hat in one hand and a small tube of superglue in the other, Matilda carefully squeezes a thin line of glue all the way around its inner rim, then uses the walking stick to put it back on the hook. Her method is precise and concealed: Mr. Wormwood notices nothing when he puts the hat on and heads to the garage. The prank depends not on confronting him openly but on letting his ordinary routine carry the trap into effect.

A day in the stuck hat

At the garage, Mr. Wormwood discovers that he cannot remove the hat. The glue is strong enough that pulling too hard would take skin with it, so he has to keep it on throughout the day. He wears it while putting sawdust into gearboxes and tampering with mileage counters using an electric drill. The hat that he normally treats as a flourish of style becomes an unavoidable burden during his work.

Mr. Wormwood tries to preserve appearances by acting nonchalant, hoping his staff will think he has deliberately decided to wear the hat all day for fun, like gangsters in films. The effort to disguise his predicament extends the joke beyond the physical discomfort: the more conspicuously he must keep the hat on, the more he has to pretend that he chose to do so. When he returns home, it is still stuck. Mrs. Wormwood tells him not to be silly and attempts to pull it off herself; he cries out and warns her that she will tear the skin from his forehead. Later, she tells him he will have to forgo a shower, and that night he has difficulty settling on his pillow in his purple-striped pyjamas with the hat still on.

Removal and aftermath

By the following morning, the hat has not loosened. Mrs. Wormwood cuts it away bit by bit, first removing the crown and then the brim. Where the inner rim has bonded to his hair at the back and sides, she has to cut the hair down to the scalp. The result is a white bald ring around Mr. Wormwood's head, compared in the narration to the tonsure of a monk. At the front, where the brim had stuck directly to his skin, brown leather-colored patches remain and cannot be washed off.

At breakfast, Matilda points out that the patches look like little brown creatures crawling over his face and suggests that people may think he has lice. Mr. Wormwood snaps at her to be quiet. For Matilda, the prank has been satisfying: the treasured hat is gone and its removal has left visible marks. But the ending sharply limits the victory. The episode gives her a temporary reprieve through retaliation, not a transformed relationship; the narration explicitly notes that there is no reason to expect her father to have learned his lesson. The hat prank establishes both the ingenuity with which Matilda answers adult cruelty and the narrow, provisional nature of the power she can exercise at home.