The monumental bosom. The smock belted at the waist with a sharp-toothed buckle. The topknot perched above a scowl. Miss Trunchbull, the headmistress who wallops students over the head with kitchenware and hurls them by their pigtails into the air, is one of Roald Dahl's most recognisable and fearsome creations.
However, she might have looked quite different.
When Dahl's long-time illustrator, Quentin Blake, started work on the drawings that would be sprinkled through Matilda, he carefully followed Dahl's initial description: shirt, collar, tie, belt and boots.
His early drawings, Blake wrote in his book Words and Pictures, "would scarcely have been a flattering portrait of a South American general. It was too much".
Years of collaboration had given the illustrator and the author a routine: with each book, Blake would visit Dahl at his home in Great Missenden to discuss how the characters should look.
"Roald had a photo of an impressive lady gardener dressed as Miss Trunchbull now [appears] in the book, though I added the belt buckle with teeth," Blake says.
Almost 30 years on, the 82-year-old illustrator has revisited the character for Spectrum.
"What could be more awesome," he says of his new drawing, "than the sight of this monstrous creature not merely existing before our eyes in three dimensions but actually airborne?"
In Matilda the Musical, opening in Sydney in July, Miss Trunchbull is played by a man but, with her leather belt and scraped-back hair, she owes a debt to those discussions between Dahl and Blake in Great Missenden.
When the musical opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2010, Blake designed the poster and the school badge that appeared on Matilda's uniform.
"At least," he says, "I suppose it was there, but invisible to me from my seat in the dress circle."
The musical's composer, Tim Minchin, once told Blake that he had written "Blakean" music rather than "Dahlian", or at least that he could not separate the two.
"I sat down initially to kind of figure out what my 'palette' was going to be," Minchin told the Herald in 2012. "I realised what I was drawing from was actually Blake, because the aesthetic of Dahl and the sense of Dahl is inexorably connected to that . . . inkiness."
Blake's scratchy, wiggly, deceptively simple lines; Dahl's magic and mayhem, his whizzpoppers and natterboxes and nincompoops. The two are inextricable for generations of readers.
Matilda's story, like Blake's illustrations, might have taken very different shape.
In Dahl's earliest drafts – always written in pencil on lined yellow paper – Matilda was a brat, rather than a precocious-but-nice five-year-old. She was "born wicked", used her telekinetic powers to cheat at the races and eventually met a grisly death.
Dahl's friend and editor, Stephen Roxburgh, thought it was so hopeless he hesitated to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript.
Dahl rewrote the whole thing but his relationship with Roxburgh never recovered. After a long editing process, Dahl gave the book to another publisher. This was nothing unusual as his temper was notorious.
Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock, remembers how the author loved to provoke.
"Over dinner, he would innocently ask about your sex life in front of 10 other people," Sturrock says. "I remember a Conservative MP who got incandescent with rage because Roald asked what he earned. All the taboo areas – money, religion, politics, sex – he loved talking about that."
Dahl's subversive streak is there in his books. Children hoodwink their parents. Orphan girls break into the Queen's bedroom in the dead of night. Giants fart with joyful abandon.
The darkness is deeper in his stories for adults, full of disembodied brains and cyanide-spiked tea.
To write his stories, Dahl shut himself in a hut at the end of a stone path on his property.
Sturrock remembers windows blocked with plastic curtains and a carpet of dust, pencil shavings and cigarette butts. A cabinet of treasures held a model aeroplane, a metal ball Dahl claimed was made from hundreds of chocolate wrappers, and a vial of alcohol in which floated segments of Dahl's spine, damaged in a wartime plane crash.
The crash left him with lifelong injuries, but it also made him a writer, or so Dahl thought.
"Dramatic changes have taken place in many people who have received blows on the head," he once wrote. "Deaf people have regained their hearing and dumb people have started to speak again. So there is no knowing what this particular bash on the head did to a very ordinary young man whose only writing up to then had been dull letters to his mother and whose only ambition was to be a businessman in the Shell Company."
Anything Dahl wrote about his life should be read with scepticism. He liked to claim his plane was shot down in the Libyan Desert. In truth, he crashed making a forced landing in the dark; a humiliating start to his flying career with the RAF.
Such fantasies are rife in Dahl's memoirs, Boy and Going Solo. He tells of encounters with wild lions, deadly snakes and murderous Germans during his time working for Shell in Africa; all fibs, but entertaining ones.
"He had such a natural urge to tell stories that he wasn't concerned with the truth a lot of the time," Sturrock says. "He was a writer who relied totally on his imagination.
"In that funny little hut, he saw the world through the eyes of a child. Most adults have forgotten how that is, but he was super confident about it. That feeling – he trusted it completely. He didn't need to bolster it with fact."
For more information on Roald Dahl's stories and characters, visit the official website.
