More About Boy(27)
‘Get on the bed and lower your trousers,’ she ordered.
I lay on the bed and she began prodding my tummy violently with her fingers. I was watching her carefully, and when she hit what I guessed was the appendix place, I let out a yelp that rattled the window-panes. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!’ I cried out. ‘Don’t, Matron, don’t!’ Then I slipped in the clincher. ‘I’ve been sick all morning,’ I moaned, ‘and now there’s nothing left to be sick with, but I still feel sick!’
* * *
‘When Bruce Bogtrotter had eaten his way through half of the entire enormous cake, he paused for just a couple of seconds and took several deep breaths.
The Trunchbull stood with hands on hips, glaring at him. ‘Get on with it!’ she shouted. ‘Eat it up!’
Suddenly the boy let out a gigantic belch.’
(Matilda)
* * *
This was the right move. I saw her hesitate. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said and she walked quickly from the room. She may have been a foul and beastly woman, but she had had a nurse’s training and she didn’t want a ruptured appendix on her hands.
Within an hour, the doctor arrived and he went through the same prodding and poking and I did my yelping at what I thought were the proper times. Then he put a thermometer in my mouth.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It reads normal. Let me feel your stomach once more.’
‘Owch!’ I screamed when he touched the vital spot.
The doctor went away with the Matron. The Matron returned half an hour later and said, ‘The Headmaster has telephoned your mother and she’s coming to fetch you this afternoon.’
I didn’t answer her. I just lay there trying to look very ill, but my heart was singing out with all sorts of wonderful songs of praise and joy.
I was taken home across the Bristol Channel on the paddle-steamer and I felt so wonderful at being away from that dreaded school building that I very nearly forgot I was meant to be ill. That afternoon I had a session with Dr Dunbar at his surgery in Cathedral Road, Cardiff, and I tried the same tricks all over again. But Dr Dunbar was far wiser and more skilful than either the Matron or the school doctor. After he had prodded my stomach and I had done my yelping routine, he said to me, ‘Now you can get dressed again and seat yourself on that chair.’
He himself sat down behind his desk and fixed me with a penetrating but not unkindly eye. ‘You’re faking, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘How do you know?’ I blurted out.
‘Because your stomach is soft and perfectly normal,’ he answered. ‘If you had had an inflammation down there, the stomach would have been hard and rigid. It’s quite easy to tell.’
I kept silent.
‘I expect you’re homesick,’ he said.
I nodded miserably.
‘Everyone is at first,’ he said. ‘You have to stick it out. And don’t blame your mother for sending you away to boarding-school. She insisted you were too young to go, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it the better for you.’
‘What will you tell the school?’ I asked him, trembling.
‘I’ll say you had a very severe infection of the stomach which I am curing with pills,’ he answered smiling. ‘It will mean that you must stay home for three more days. But promise me you won’t try anything like this again. Your mother has enough on her hands without having to rush over to fetch you out of school.’
‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ll never do it again.’
* * *
Homesickness is no joke. Symptoms include difficulty sleeping, sadness and depression. Even though there is nothing medically wrong with them, sufferers often complain of stomach ache, sore throat, headache and feeling sick.
* * *
A drive in the motor-car
Somehow or other I got through the first term at St Peter’s, and towards the end of December my mother came over on the paddle-boat to take me and my trunk home for the Christmas holidays.
* * *
You can see how desperate Roald Dahl was to get home from this anxious letter he sent before the end of term.
* * *
Oh the bliss and the wonder of being with the family once again after all those weeks of fierce discipline! Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home. It is almost worth going away because it’s so lovely coming back. I could hardly believe that I didn’t have to wash in cold water in the mornings or keep silent in the corridors, or say ‘Sir’ to every grown-up man I met, or use a chamber-pot in the bedroom, or get flicked with wet towels while naked in the changing-room, or eat porridge for breakfast that seemed to be full of little round lumpy grey sheep’s-droppings, or walk all day long in perpetual fear of the long yellow cane that lay on top of the corner-cupboard in the Headmaster’s study.