The parrot in the chimney

The parrot in the chimney is Matilda Wormwood’s carefully staged revenge on Mr. Wormwood after he destroys a library book she has borrowed. By hiding Fred’s talking parrot in the dining-room chimney and encouraging her family to interpret its unseen voice as a ghost, Matilda turns her father’s attack on her reading into a comic household panic. The prank’s force comes from its simple arrangement: an absent bird, a voice without a visible speaker, and a family ready to believe the worst.

Background and Motive

The prank follows Mr. Wormwood’s contempt for Matilda’s reading. He dismisses the book as worthless because an American wrote it, refuses to hear what it is about, and tells her to do something useful instead. He then tears out handfuls of its pages and throws them into the wastebasket. Matilda points out that it belongs to the library and must be returned, but her father answers that she will have to save her allowance to replace it. He leaves the empty cover behind and the television blaring. Matilda is appalled, but she does not burst into tears. She sits pale and silent, thinking that crying and sulking will not improve matters. The narration presents her response as a deliberate counterattack: she is already devising a fitting punishment for her father, and whether it will work depends on the truth of Fred’s boast that his parrot can talk. The sequence makes the prank an answer to a specific act of destruction, rather than a mischief unrelated to the family’s earlier conflict.

Borrowing the Parrot

Fred, a six-year-old boy who lives around the corner, has spent days boasting about the talking bird his father gave him. The morning after the book is destroyed, once Mrs. Wormwood has driven away to her bingo club, Matilda goes to Fred’s house to investigate. He shows her a striking blue-and-yellow parrot named Hakker, kept in a tall cage. Matilda asks to hear it speak; when Fred will not lend it to her, she offers him all her allowance for the following week. He agrees on condition that she return the bird the next day. The bargain gives the trick its temporary, borrowed character. Matilda does not claim the parrot or keep it as a permanent possession: she needs it for one night and accepts a clear deadline for returning it. She carries the cage back to her own empty house in both hands. In the dining room, she pushes it up into the large open fireplace until the cage can no longer be seen. Getting it into place takes effort, but the hidden bird soon calls out from the chimney. Matilda washes the soot from her hands, leaving the voice to travel through the house without an obvious source.

The Apparition in the House

That evening, Matilda, her parents, and her brother are eating in the sitting room in front of the television when the parrot calls from the dining room across the hall. Mrs. Wormwood turns pale and says she has heard someone in the house; Matilda’s brother confirms that he heard the voice too. The source remains out of sight, allowing the sound to unsettle the family before anyone can identify it. The parrot calls again, this time with a softer, more ghostly sound. The family startles, and Matilda joins their alarm despite knowing where the voice comes from. She looks around with them, then declares that it is a ghost. When the voice is heard once more, she reinforces the explanation by claiming that she has heard it there before and that the room is haunted. Her performance does not require the bird to do anything beyond speak from its hiding place; Matilda supplies the interpretation that turns a pet’s call into a supernatural threat.

Flight and Aftermath

Mr. Wormwood, Mrs. Wormwood, their son, and Matilda all flee, slamming the door behind them. The father who had just made Matilda pay for the ruined book with the threat of sacrificing her allowance is now driven out of the house by the invisible voice she arranged. The reversal is the prank’s immediate consequence: the family’s fear, not any physical danger, completes Matilda’s retaliation. The following morning, Matilda gets the parrot out of the chimney and out of the house without being seen. It is soot-covered and grumpy. She carries it through the back door and runs all the way to Fred’s home, where she returns it within the agreed time. Asked whether it behaved itself, she tells Fred that they had great fun with it and that her parents could not get enough of it. The dry understatement contrasts with the family’s flight and closes the episode on Matilda’s control of the story: she has used the bird, restored it to its owner, and left Fred with a description that conceals what the prank actually did.