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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage carries a small but important observation about how children come to know things their elders deny. Watch how Dahl moves through the paragraph: he names the phrase, explains its meaning, traces how Sophie learned it, and then closes with a sentence that gently identifies the asymmetry between adult denial and childhood knowledge. The closing observation is the deepest part of the passage — it suggests that some kinds of truth are most reliably preserved by the people we usually consider least reliable. This is an old idea (children often see what adults have forgotten how to see) and Dahl is delivering it through the texture of Sophie's specific memory rather than as an abstract claim.
It was the witching hour, Sophie knew. The witching hour was that special time of night when every grownup and every child was in deep deep sleep, and dark things came out of hiding and had the world ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use to create that effect?
Discussion Questions
- Dahl's narrator says some things are 'true in a way that grownups would never admit and children always knew.' Is there a real category of knowledge that children have access to and adults have lost, or is this a romantic claim about children that does not survive examination? What kinds of things might count as childhood-knowledge that adults forget?
- Sophie is shown as curious, observant, and willing to break a rule when curiosity calls her. Are these the traits of a good child, a difficult child, or both at once? What does Dahl suggest about how parents and teachers should handle children who have these traits?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A traditional name for the middle of the night, drawn from old beliefs about when supernatural activity was thought to be at its peak
Item 2
The condition of growing up in a large run-by-rules setting (orphanage, boarding school, hospital) rather than in a private family home
Item 3
The condition in which different observers see different parts of the same situation, with the differences sometimes reflecting capacities one observer has and the other has lost
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Critical Thinking
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