Danny the Champion of the World Read online

  'And you promise I can come with you?'

  'Absolutely' he said. 'And we shall call this method The Sleeping Beauty. It will be a landmark in the history of poaching!'

  I sat very still in my bunk, watching my father as he put each capsule back into the bottle. I could hardly believe what was happening, that we were really going to do it, that he and I alone were going to try to swipe practically the entire flock of Mr Victor Hazell's prize pheasants. Just thinking about it sent little shivers of electricity running all over my skin.

  'Exciting, isn't it?' my father said.

  'I don't dare think about it, Dad. It makes me shiver all over.'

  'Me too,' he said. 'But we must keep very calm from now on. We must make our plans very very carefully. Today is Wednesday. The shooting party is next Saturday'

  'Cripes!' I said. 'That's in three days' time! When do you and I go up to the wood and do the job?'

  'The night before,' my father said. 'On the Friday. In that way they won't discover that all the pheasants have disappeared until it's too late and the party has begun.'

  'Friday's the day after tomorrow! My goodness, Dad, we'll have to hurry if we're going to get two hundred raisins ready before then!'

  My father stood up and began pacing the floor of the caravan. 'Here's the plan of action,' he said. 'Listen carefully...

  'Tomorrow is Thursday. When I walk you to school, I shall go into Cooper's Stores in the village and buy two packets of seedless raisins. And in the evening we will put the raisins in to soak for the night.'

  'But that only gives us Friday to get ready two hundred raisins,' I said. 'Each one will have to be cut open and filled with powder and sewed up again, and I'll be at school all day...'

  'No, you won't,' my father said. 'You will be suffering from a very nasty cold on Friday and I shall be forced to keep you home from school.'

  'Hooray!' I said.

  'We will not open the filling-station at all on Friday,' he went on. 'Instead we will shut ourselves in here and prepare the raisins. We'll easily get them done between us in one day. And that evening, off we'll go up the road towards the wood to do the job. Is that all clear?'

  He was like a general announcing the plan of battle to his staff.

  'All clear,' I said.

  'And Danny, not a whisper of this to any of your friends at school.'

  'Dad, you know I wouldn't!'

  He kissed me good-night and turned the oil-lamp down low, but it was a long time before I went to sleep.

  12

  Thursday and School

  The next day was Thursday, and before we set out for the walk to my school that morning I went around behind the caravan and picked two apples from our tree, one for my father and one for me.

  It is a most marvellous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples whenever you feel like it. You can do this only in the autumn of course, when the fruit is ripe, but all the same, how many families are so lucky? Not one in a thousand, I would guess. Our apples were called Cox's Orange Pippins, and I liked the sound of the name almost as much as I liked the apples.

  At eight o'clock we started walking down the road towards my school in the pale autumn sunshine, munching our apples as we strode along.

  Clink went my father's iron foot each time he put it down on the hard road. Clink... clink... clink.

  'Have you brought money to buy the raisins?' I asked.

  He put a hand in his trouser pocket and made the coins jingle.

  'Will Cooper's be open so early?'

  'Yes,' he said. 'They open at eight-thirty'

  I really loved those morning walks to school with my father. We talked practically the whole time. Mostly it was he who talked and I who listened, and just about everything he said was fascinating. He was a true countryman. The fields, the streams, the woods and all the creatures who lived in these places were a part of his life. Although he was a mechanic by trade and a very fine one, I believe he could have become a great naturalist if only he had had a good schooling.

  Long ago he had taught me the names of all the trees and the wild flowers and the different grasses that grow in the fields. All the birds, too, I could name, not only by sighting them but by listening to their calls and their songs.

  In springtime we would hunt for birds' nests along the way, and when we found one he would lift me up on to his shoulders so I could peer into it and see the eggs. But I was never allowed to touch them.

  My father told me a nest with eggs in it was one of the most beautiful things in the world. I thought so too. The nest of a song-thrush, for instance, lined inside with dry mud as smooth as polished wood, and with five eggs of the purest blue speckled with black dots. And the skylark, whose nest we once found right in the middle of a field, in a grassy clump on the ground. It was hardly a nest at all, just a little hollow place in the grass, and in it were six small eggs, deep brown and white.

  'Why does the skylark make its nest on the ground where the cows can trample it?' I asked.

  'Nobody knows why,' my father said. 'But they always do it. Nightingales nest on the ground too. So do pheasants and partridges and grouse.'

  On one of our walks a weasel flashed out of the hedge in front of us, and in the next few minutes I learned a lot of things about that marvellous little creature. The bit I liked best was when my father said, 'The weasel is the bravest of all animals. The mother will fight to the death to defend her own children. She will never run away, not even from a fox which is one hundred times bigger than her. She will stay beside her nest and fight the fox until she is killed.'

  Another time, when I said, 'Just listen to that grasshopper, Dad,' he said, 'No, that's not a grasshopper, my love. It's a cricket. And did you know that crickets have their ears in their legs?'

  'It's not true.'

  'It's absolutely true. And grasshoppers have theirs in the sides of their tummies. They are lucky to be able to hear at all because nearly all the vast hordes of insects on this earth are deaf as well as dumb and live in a silent world.'

  On this Thursday, on this particular walk to school, there was an old frog croaking in the stream behind the hedge as we went by.

  'Can you hear him, Danny?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'That is a bullfrog calling to his wife. He does it by blowing out his dewlap and letting it go with a burp.'

  'What is a dewlap?' I asked.

  'It's the loose skin on his throat. He can blow it up just like a little balloon.'

  'What happens when his wife hears him?'

  'She goes hopping over to him. She is very happy to have been invited. But I'll tell you something very funny about the old bullfrog. He often becomes so pleased with the sound of his own voice that his wife has to nudge him several times before he'll stop his burping and turn round to hug her.'

  That made me laugh.

  'Don't laugh too loud,' he said, twinkling at me with his eyes. 'We men are not so very different from the bullfrog.'

  We parted at the school gates and my father went off to buy the raisins. Other children were streaming in through the gates and heading up the path to the front door of the school. I joined them but kept silent. I was the keeper of a deep secret and a careless word from me could blow the lid off the greatest poaching expedition the world would ever see.

  Ours was just a small village school, a squat ugly red-brick building with no upstairs rooms at all. Above the front door was a big grey block of stone cemented into the brickwork, and on the stone it said, THIS SCHOOL WAS ERECTED IN 1902 TO COMMEMORATE THE CORONATION OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS KING EDWARD VII. I must have read that thing a thousand times. Every time I went in the door it hit me in the eye. I suppose that's what it was there for. But it's pretty boring to read the same old words over and over again, and I often thought how nice it would be if they put something different up there every day, something really interesting. My father would have done it for them beautifully. He could have written it with a bit of chal