Outside of a Dog (23 page)

I did.

13

The winner of the Booker Prize in 1988 was Peter Carey’s
Oscar and Lucinda
. A great romp of a story about an unlikely couple of émigrés from
Victorian England to Australia, the novel has epic proportions, is crazily engaging, perfectly wrought, felt, and visualized. But
Oscar and Lucinda
, much as I love it, was not the best novel
published in 1988. That honour should have gone to Roald Dahl’s
Matilda
, which is more likely to be read in a hundred years’ time, even, than Peter Carey’s great novel.
Matilda
is Roald Dahl’s masterpiece, and loved by everyone who reads it: by children, by parents who read it to their children, and by adults themselves, all on their own.

That is how I first read it, anyway, when I bought a copy in December of 1988. It was intended as a Christmas present for Anna and Bertie (then fourteen and eight), and I duly inscribed it,
wrapped it up clumsily, and added it proudly to the vast mound of other presents Barbara was stashing away under our Christmas tree – a ghostly glittering object teetering uneasily in a
bucket of dirt in the kitchen, having been thoroughly ‘vulgarized’ by Bertie, who thought it essential that no bit of green emerge from the decorated object. The finished tree was
submerged in tinsel, chocolates covered in gold and red foil were attached to every branch, baubles and hanging glass balls, both clear and coloured, balanced precariously and, at the top, a
painted angel panned its unconvincing eyes spookily over the proceedings.

On Christmas morning the kids tore through the wrapping paper with scant regard for the enclosed contents, so anxious were they to get on to the next present. ‘A football? Oh,
thanks.’ Tear, tear. ‘Nice blouse, mum, thanks.’ What else, what more? ‘Oh, is this the new Roald Dahl? Cool!’ The book, with the winsome Matilda staring out from the
dust wrapper, was cast aside like an abandoned child.

As the gluttonous procedure went on, I was hardly able to suppress my usual spasm of distaste. I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, and the sheer excess of it has always disturbed me. I
was in constant conflict with Barbara about this, me trying to rein her in, she trying to get me to unbend a little and curb my rampant scepticism about the holiday. She was, after all, right.
Christmas is what one does, everyone does it: it’s not for enjoying, it’s for getting on with. I consoled myself, on this particular Christmas morning, by picking up
Matilda
, and
coiled in a chair next to the fire, still half-asleep, looking up occasionally in what I hoped was a benign manner, sipping coffee and reading. The book was wonderful, utterly engrossing from the
first page.

The presents were soon opened. We stuffed the fire with the wrapping paper –
hours
of wrapping paper – and started making pancakes for Christmas breakfast.

‘Will you play Cluedo with me, dad?’ asked Bertie, tearing the cellophane off his new game.

‘Sure,’ I said, with a lack of enthusiasm that Barbara and Anna both noted, but which Bertie was too young to register.

‘Great!’ he said. ‘Teach me how to play.’

‘You want to play too, Anna?’ I asked.

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll help mum with the dinner after I get dressed.’

Lunch was served at two. The Cluedo game was put away, the presents stashed in a sad and still unregarded pile in the corner, Grandpa Freddie and Grandma Catherine tucked in to the mounds of
food, Barbara hunched wearily but benignly in her chair, the kids and I wolfed our portions and came back for more. Glasses were refilled, the wine flowed more freely than the conversation.
Afterwards they would eat their sweets – I
hate
mince pies and Christmas pudding, if I had my way they would be banned, or executed – and then waddle across the room to watch the
Queen’s Speech on the telly.

‘Excuse me for a second,’ I said, drawing my chair from the table. I went over to the pile of presents, picked up
Matilda
, and headed upstairs to the loo.

I knew I’d have twenty minutes before the alarm bells started even to tinkle. By that time I was already on page 45, and had not the slightest desire to go back to the festivities.

Ten minutes later – page 63 – there was a knock at the door.

‘Dad,’ came Bertie’s voice. ‘I need the loo.’

There was little urgency in his tone. I suspected somebody had sent him.

‘Use the downstairs one,’ I said grumpily. ‘I may be some time.’

‘Grandma’s using it,’ he said.

‘Piss in the garden then,’ I said stiffly, turning to page 64, ‘because I’m not coming out, not soon. Then go and watch telly.’

‘I’m bored,’ he said grumpily.

‘Well, I’m not.’ I said. ‘I’m having a great time.’

‘You’re not pooing, you’re reading!’ he said.

‘They go together. Now go away.’

He went downstairs to report this to the waiting crowd.

A few minutes later – page 87 – there was a further knock on the door.

‘Dad,’ said Anna in her strictest voice, ‘I know what you are doing! You’ve got
Matilda
in there! I looked on the presents pile and it’s gone! And it’s
mine and Bert’s and I want to read it right now.’

‘
I
am reading it right now,’ I said. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law. You get it next. Bad luck. You’ll just have to wait.’

And she did, on the carpet right outside the loo. After a few minutes – page ninety-nine – she was joined by her brother.

‘Dad!’ they’d expostulate together, knocking ferociously on the door. ‘Mum says you’re to come out right now!’

‘Bugger off!’

‘It’s our book!’ they’d shout, knocking recurrently.

And it was, and they got it, but not until I had skimmed my way to the end some half an hour later, deposited it in their greedy little hands, and made my way to the kitchen. The old folks were
asleep in front of the TV, and Barbara was furious.

‘I hope you’re thoroughly satisfied,’ she said icily.

And I was. It was a wonderful book. ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Anna and Bertie must read it as soon as possible.’

A ‘tiny girl, with dark hair and a round serious face’, loveable, independent and preternaturally precocious – illustrated with heartrending sympathy by Quentin Blake –
Matilda has been catastrophically born into the wrong family. Her father is a flagrantly dishonest second-hand car dealer, her mother a bingo addict, her brother a cowed daddy’s boy.
Thoroughly ignored when she isn’t being derided, Matilda quietly teaches herself to read, and before she is five has read virtually the entire stock of the local library. Books have
‘transported’ her into new worlds; if only, she wished, her parents would read rather than watch the telly, for literature could give ‘a view of life that they had never
seen’. She reads most of the classics of adult fiction, though, she admits, she doesn’t entirely understand Hemingway’s stuff about men and women. (Neither do I.)

Books are soon banned from the house, and Matilda’s cleverness – she can also do huge mathematical calculations in her head – is mocked, when it is noticed at all. Her response
to this abuse, fortunately, is not withdrawal, but anger. She counter-attacks: puts superglue on her father’s porkpie hat, stuffs a parrot up the chimney so that it seems there is a ghost in
the sitting room, pours peroxide in her father’s hair tonic: ‘her safety valve, the thing that prevented her from going round the bend, was the fun of devising and dishing out these
splendid punishments.’ The phrase ‘going round the bend’, while lightly stated is nevertheless fully considered. It is only Matilda’s remarkable capacity to marshal anger
that can save her, as she is to find when she begins a primary school experience that consists not of neglect and belittlement, but of outright sadistic abuse. The headmistress of Crunchem Hall
primary school, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, loathes children, particularly the littlest ones. (She denies having been one herself.) An Amazonian ex-athlete, now much given to the throwing of children
instead of hammers, she is universally feared and detested.

It is only the presence of the young teacher Miss Honey that makes Matilda’s ordeal tolerable. Astonished by the child’s brilliance and maturity, she takes the little girl to her
heart, but (being herself under the control of the headmistress, who turns out to be her aunt) she cannot offer much protection. But a child of Matilda’s resourcefulness, having found such a
mentor, is more able to cope for herself. She has, she soon finds, remarkable telekinetic powers: she can make objects move just by concentrating hard on them. She topples a glass of water (with a
newt in it) right on to Miss Trunchbull’s lap.

The parallels with Harry Potter’s uncongenial family situation and gradual discovery of his true nature have been remarked. Like the boy wizard, Matilda’s magical powers are most
useful when she is angry, as a means of self-protection. The results are astonishing and gratifying. When she performs the ‘miracle’ of the tipping of the glass, Matilda is freed from
fear, and the experience is little short of transcendent: her ‘whole face was transfigured . . . quite beautiful in a blaze of silence’. When she recovers, her face registers a
‘seraphic’ calm: ‘I was flying,’ she reports, ‘past the stars on silver wings.’ She has become an angel, but not a soppy one. She is an angel of vengeance.

Soon enough Miss Trunchbull is defeated and banished, and Matilda’s parents embark for Australia in a
great
hurry, abandoning her to the loving care of Miss Honey, now reinstated in
the family home that had been usurped by her wicked aunt. Matilda’s magical powers, no longer necessary, have faded, though her emotional and intellectual ones are now free to flower. We end,
as fairy tales should, with a happy child, loved and loving, free to be herself, as all children ought to be, and so often are not.

One can easily imagine a real life Matilda, lacking only the spunk, precocity and anger, who instead withdrew into herself, festered and shrank, ending up not in a Miss Honey’s happy home,
reclaimed by love, but on a therapist’s couch. I love Roald Dahl’s works about children because he is entirely on their side, remarkably able to understand their point of view. To do
so, he once said, you need to get down on your hands and knees to observe the adults towering above, issuing demands. Thus we have his first description of the kindly Miss Honey, who
‘possessed that rare gift . . . to understand totally the bewilderment and fear that so often overwhelm young children who for the first time in their lives are herded into a classroom and
told to obey orders’.

The language reminds me of Alice Miller, the Swiss psychotherapist, known for her advocacy of what she called ‘the inner child’, who has written at length of the ‘fear,
despair, and utter loneliness’ of her own early childhood and schooling. It was Miller’s experience – a common one in her view – that the pressure of expectation imposed on
her caused her to shut down emotionally and creatively, withdraw into herself, and develop a persona that suppressed all memory of the ‘psychic terror’ of childhood. And as an exemplar
of that psychic terror there can be no bettering Agatha Trunchbull, the incarnation of everything uncontrollable, arbitrary and overpowering about adults, seen from a child’s point of
view.

If there appears something farfetched in this leap from Roald Dahl to Alice Miller, it seems natural enough to me, but then again I was (at the time I gave
Matilda
to Anna and Bertie) in
therapy with a Hampstead therapist trained in the Alice Miller school. And, funnily enough, I never made any connection between my love of Matilda, and my admiration for Alice. Sometimes I
can’t see what is in front of my face, but in any case it has been a recurrent fact about my adult personality that I have continued to love children’s books and films.

Not in some nostalgic way, as elderly men often go gooey when they read
Winnie the Pooh
to their grandchildren. No, I have read all of the classics of children’s literature, but I
keep up with a lot of the new things too: have queued at midnight with Anna to get each new Harry Potter, and finished all of them within a week; read all of Philip Pullman with surpassing
admiration, including the insufficiently admired Sally Lockhart mysteries; loved
The Wind on Fire
trilogy of William Nicholson. And films like
The Jungle Book, Short Circuit, Back to the
Future
, and especially
E.T
. are more likely to give me pleasure, on re-viewing, than are the films of Jean Renoir or Ingmar Bergman.

So going into therapy to get into closer connection with some inner and largely forgotten ‘little Rick’ should have been easier for me than many people. I am, in most respects,
thoroughly childish (or, as I prefer, child-like). I’m fidgety, noisy and attention-seeking, love watching cartoons and reading comics, am greedy, over-anxious to please and easily hurt,
competitive and self-referring, have a short attention span and hate doing chores, am likely to blurt out inappropriate things about myself or others, and am guided almost entirely by the pleasure
principle. If I have problems with my inner child, it is in keeping him in, rather than letting him out. He doesn’t need an advocate, he needs a keeper. What I need to discover is my inner
adult
. I said this repeatedly to my therapist, but he wasn’t having any of it. Continuing to act out little Rick’s anxieties, he observed, was hardly the same thing as going
back, re-experiencing them, and allowing their resolution through new understanding and empathy.

It’s generally a bad idea, when in therapy, to read the relevant texts. It is regarded as intellectualization, and hence some form of defence: one ought to concentrate on feeling, not on
obtaining some mastery of the theory on which the analysis is based. But you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not, so I consulted the relevant Alice Miller books anyway, finding
pretty quickly that I didn’t actually need to
read
them. I flicked through
The Body Never Lies, For Your Own Good, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Banished Knowledge
, and
Breaking
Down the Wall of Silence
. The titles are remarkably similar, in that they all point to the same phenomenon. As a theorist, Alice Miller is a one trick pony. But it’s a good trick, and it
takes some learning, which is presumably why she keeps repeating herself, like some evangelist intent on saving souls.