Danny the Champion of the World Read online

  'How many are there now in Hazell's Wood?'

  'Not too many,' he said. 'Not too many at all.'

  As the day wore on, I could see my father getting more and more impatient and excited. By five o'clock we had finished work on the Baby Austin and together we ran her up and down the road to test her out.

  At five-thirty we had an early supper of sausages and bacon, but my father hardly ate anything at all.

  At six o'clock precisely he kissed me goodbye and said, 'Promise not to wait up for me, Danny. Put yourself to bed at eight and go to sleep. Right?'

  He set off down the road and I stood on the platform of the caravan, watching him go. I loved the way he moved. He had that long loping stride all countrymen have who are used to covering great distances on foot. He was wearing an old navy-blue sweater and an even older cap on his head. He turned and waved to me. I waved back. Then he disappeared round a bend in the road.

  7

  The Baby Austin

  Inside the caravan I stood on a chair and lit the oil lamp in the ceiling. I had some weekend homework to do and this was as good a time as any to do it. I laid my books out on the table and sat down. But I found it impossible to keep my mind on my work.

  The clock said half-past seven. This was the twilight time. He would be there now. I pictured him in his old navy-blue sweater and peaked cap walking soft-footed up the track towards the wood. He told me he wore the sweater because navy-blue hardly showed up at all in the dark. Black was even better, he said. But he didn't have a black one and navy-blue was next best. The peaked cap was important too, he explained, because the peak cast a shadow over one's face. Just about now he would be wriggling through the hedge and entering the wood. Inside the wood I could see him treading carefully over the leafy ground, stopping, listening, going on again, and all the time searching and searching for the keeper who would somewhere be standing still as a post beside a big tree with a gun under his arm. Keepers hardly move at all when they are in a wood watching for poachers, he had told me. They stand dead still right up against the trunk of a tree and it's not easy to spot a motionless man in that position at twilight when the shadows are as dark as a wolf's mouth.

  I closed my books. It was no good trying to work. I decided to go to bed instead. I undressed and put on my pyjamas and climbed into my bunk. I left the lamp burning. Soon I fell asleep.

  When I opened my eyes again, the oil-lamp was still glowing and the clock on the wall said ten minutes past two.

  Ten minutes past two!

  I jumped out of my bunk and looked into the bunk above mine. It was empty.

  He had promised he would be home by ten-thirty at the latest, and he never broke promises.

  He was nearly four hours overdue!

  At that moment, a frightful sense of doom came over me. Something really had happened to him this time. I felt quite certain of it.

  Hold it, I told myself. Don't get panicky. Last week you got all panicky and you made a bit of a fool of yourself.

  Yes, but last week was a different thing altogether. He had made no promises to me last week. This time he had said, 'I promise I'll be back by ten-thirty.' Those were his exact words. And he never, absolutely never, broke a promise.

  I looked again at the clock. He had left the caravan at six, which meant he had been gone over eight hours!

  It took me two seconds to decide what I should do.

  Very quickly I stripped off my pyjamas and put on my shirt and my jeans. Perhaps the keepers had shot him up so badly he couldn't walk. I pulled my sweater over my head. It was neither navy-blue nor black. It was a sort of pale brown. It would have to do. Perhaps he was lying in the wood bleeding to death. My sneakers were the wrong colour too. They were white. But they were also dirty and that took a lot of the whiteness away. How long would it take me to get to the wood? An hour and a half. Less if I ran most of the way, but not much less. As I bent down to tie the laces, I noticed my hands were shaking. And my stomach had that awful prickly feeling as though it were full of small needles.

  I ran down the steps of the caravan and across to the workshop to get the torch. A torch is a good companion when you are alone outdoors at night and I wanted it with me. I grabbed the torch and went out of the workshop. I paused for a moment beside the pumps. The moon had long since disappeared but the sky was clear and a great mass of stars was wheeling above my head. There was no wind at all, no sound of any kind. To my right, going away into the blackness of the countryside, lay the lonely road that led to the dangerous wood.

  Six-and-a-half miles.

  Thank heavens I knew the way.

  But it was going to be a long hard slog. I must try to keep a good steady pace and not run myself to a standstill in the first mile.

  At that point a wild and marvellous idea came to me.

  Why shouldn't I go in the Baby Austin? I really did know how to drive. My father had always allowed me to move the cars around when they came in for repair. He let me drive them into the workshop and back them out again afterwards. And sometimes I drove one of them slowly around the pumps in first gear. I loved doing it. And I would get there much much quicker if I went by car. This was an emergency. If he was wounded and bleeding badly, then every minute counted. I had never driven on the road, but I would surely not meet any other cars at this time of night. I would go very slowly and keep close in to the hedge on the proper side.

  I went back to the workshop and switched on the light. I opened the double doors. I got into the driver's seat of the Baby Austin. I turned on the ignition key. I pulled out the choke. I found the starter-button and pressed it. The motor coughed once, then started.

  Now for the lights. There was a pointed switch on the dash-board and I turned it to S for side lights only. The sidelights came on. I felt for the clutch pedal with my toe. I was just able to reach it, but I had to point my toe if I wanted to press it all the way down. I pressed it down. Then I slipped the gear-lever into reverse. Slowly I backed the car out of the workshop.

  I left her ticking over and went back to switch off the workshop light. It was better to keep everything looking as normal as possible. The filling-station was in darkness now except for a dim light coming from the caravan where the little oil-lamp was still burning. I decided to leave that on.

  I got back into the car. I closed the door. The sidelights were so dim I hardly knew they were there. I switched on the headlamps. That was better. I searched for the dipper with my foot. I found it. I tried it and it worked. I put the headlamps on full. If I met another car, I must remember to dip them, although actually they weren't bright enough to dazzle a cockroach. They didn't give any more light than a couple of good torches.

  I pressed down the clutch pedal again and pushed the gear-lever into first. This was it. My heart was thumping away so fiercely I could hear it in my throat. Ten yards away lay the main road. It was as dark as doomsday. I released the clutch very slowly. At the same time, I pressed down just a fraction of an inch on the accelerator with my right toe, and stealthily, oh most wonderfully, the little car began to lean forward and steal into motion. I pressed a shade harder on the accelerator. We crept out of the filling-station on to the dark deserted road.

  I will not pretend I wasn't petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't. I sat very stiff and upright in my seat, gripping the steering-wheel tight with both hands. My eyes were about level with the top of the steering-wheel. I could have done with a cushion to raise me up higher, but it was too late for that.

  The road seemed awfully narrow in the dark. I knew there was room enough for two cars to pass each other. I had seen them from the filling-station doing it a million times. But it didn't look that way to me from where I was. At any moment something with blazing headlamps might come roaring towards me at sixty miles an hour, a heavy lorry or one of those big long-distance buse