It’s going to be the 30th anniversary of Matilda in October 2018 and Quentin Blake imagining Matilda today as the Chief Executive of the British Library, an astrophysicist, and (not shown here) a world traveller is ❤
“She looked at the bottled fruits, sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.“
mysong5 