Danny The Champion Of The World Part 9

'Yes.'

'Often,' he said. 'At least twice a week.'

'Didn't she mind?'

'Mind? Of course she didn't mind. She came with me.'

'She didn't!'

'She certainly did. She came with me every single time until just before you were born. She had to stop then. She said she couldn't run fast enough.'

I thought about this extraordinary piece of news for a little while. Then I said, 'Was the only reason she went because she loved you, Dad, and because she wanted to be with you? Or did she go because she loved poaching?'

'Both,' my father said. 'She did it for both the reasons you mentioned.'

I was beginning to realize what an immense sorrow it must have been to him when she died.

'Weren't you afraid she might get shot up?' I asked.

'Yes, Danny, I was. But it was marvellous to have her along. She was a great sport, your mother.'

By midday we had prepared one hundred and thirty-six raisins. 'We're in good shape,' my father said. 'Let's break for lunch.'

He opened a tin of baked beans and heated them up in a saucepan over the paraffin burner. I cut two slices of brown bread and put them on plates. My father spooned the hot baked beans over the bread and we carried our plates outside and sat down with our legs dangling over the platform of the caravan.

Usually I love baked beans on bread, but today I couldn't eat a thing. 'What's the matter?' my father asked.

'I'm not hungry.'

'Don't worry,' he said. 'The same thing happened to me the first time I went out. I was about your age then, maybe a little older, and in those days we always had a hot tea in the kitchen at five o'clock. I can remember exactly what was on the table that evening. It was my favourite thing of all, toad-in-the-hole, and my mum could make toad-in-the-hole like n.o.body else in the world. She did it in an enormous pan with the Yorks.h.i.+re pudding very brown and crisp on top and raised up in huge bubbly mountains. In between the mountains you could see the sausages half-buried in the batter. Fantastic it was. But on that day my stomach was so jumpy I couldn't eat one mouthful. I expect yours feels like that now.'

'Mine's full of snakes,' I said. 'They won't stop wiggling about.'

'Mine doesn't feel exactly normal either,' my father said. 'But then this isn't a normal operation, is it?'

'No, Dad, it's not.'

'Do you know what this is, Danny? This is the most colossal and extraordinary poaching job anyone has ever been on in the history of the world!'

'Don't go on about it, Dad. It only makes me more jumpy. What time do we leave here?'

'I've worked that out,' he said. 'We must enter the wood about fifteen minutes before sunset. If we arrive after sunset all the pheasants will have flown up to roost and it'll be too late.'

'When is sunset?' I asked.

'Right now it's about seven-thirty,' he said. 'So we must arrive at seven-fifteen exactly. It's an hour and a half's walk to the wood so we must leave here at a quarter to six.'

'Then we'd better finish those raisins,' I said. 'We've still got more than sixty to do.'

We finished the raisins with about two hours to spare. They lay in a pile on a white plate in the middle of the table. 'Don't they look marvellous?' my father said, rubbing his hands together hard. 'Those pheasants are going to absolutely love them.'

After that, we messed round in the workshop until half-past five. Then my father said, 'That's it! It's time to get ready! We leave in fifteen minutes!'

As we walked towards the caravan, a station-wagon pulled up to the pumps with a woman at the wheel and about eight children in the back all eating ice-creams.

'Oh, I know you're closed,' the woman called out through her window. 'But couldn't you please let me have a few gallons? I'm just about empty' She was a good-looking woman with dark hair.

'Give it to her,' my father said. 'But be quick.'

I fetched the key from the office and unlocked one of the pumps. I filled up her tank and took the money and gave her the change. 'You don't usually close as early as this,' she said.

'We have to go out,' I told her, hopping from one foot to the other. 'I have to go somewhere with my father.'

'You look jumpy as a jack-rabbit,' she said. 'Is it the dentist?'

'No, ma'am,' I said. 'It's not the dentist. But please excuse me. I have to go now.'

14.

Into the Wood My father came out of the caravan wearing the old navy-blue sweater and the brown cloth-cap with the peak pulled down low over his eyes.

'What's under there, Dad?' I asked, seeing the bulge at his waistline.

He pulled up his sweater and showed me two thin but very large white cotton sacks. They were bound neat and tidy round his belly. 'To carry the stuff,' he said darkly.

'Ah-ha.'

'Go and put on your sweater,' he said. 'It's brown, isn't it?'

'Yes,' I said.

'That'll do. But take off those white sneakers and wear your black shoes instead.'

I went into the caravan and changed my shoes and put on my sweater. When I came out again, my father was standing by the pumps squinting anxiously up at the sun which was now only the width of a man's hand above the line of trees along the crest of the ridge on the far side of the valley.

'I'm ready, Dad.'

'Good boy. Off we go!'

'Have you got the raisins?' I asked.

'In here,' he said, tapping his trouser pocket where yet another bulge was showing. 'I've put them all in one bag.'

It was a calm sunny evening with little wisps of brilliant white cloud hanging motionless in the sky, and the valley was cool and very quiet as the two of us began walking together along the road that ran between the hills towards Wendover. The iron thing underneath my father's foot made a noise like a hammer striking a nail each time it hit the road.

'This is it, Danny. We're on our way now,' he said. 'By golly, I wish my old dad were coming with us on this one. He'd have given his right teeth to be here at this moment.'

'Mum, too,' I said.

'Ah, yes,' he said, giving a little sigh. 'Your mother would have loved loved this one.' this one.'

Then he said, 'Your mother was a great one for walking, Danny. And she would always bring something home with her to brighten up the caravan. In summer it was wild flowers or gra.s.ses. When the gra.s.s was in seed she could make it look absolutely beautiful in a jug of water, especially with some stalks of wheat or barley in between. In the autumn she would pick branches of leaves, and in the winter it was berries or old man's beard.'

We kept going. Then he said, 'How do you feel, Danny?'

'Terrific,' I said. And I meant it. For although the snakes were still wiggling in my stomach, I wouldn't have swopped places with the King of Arabia at that moment.

'Do you think they might have dug any more of those pits for us to fall into?' I asked.

'Don't you go worrying about pits, Danny,' my father said, 'I'll be on the lookout for them this time. We shall go very carefully and very slowly once we're in the wood.'

'How dark will it be in there when we arrive?'

'Not too dark,' he said. 'Quite light in fact.'

'Then how do we stop the keepers from seeing us?'

'Ah,' he said. 'That's the fun of the whole thing. That's what it's all about. It's hide-and-seek. It's the greatest game of hide-and-seek in the world.'

'You mean because they've got guns?'

'Well,' he said, 'that does add a bit of a flavour to it, yes.'

We didn't talk much after that. But as we got closer and closer to the wood, I could see my father becoming more and more twitchy as the excitement began to build up in him. He would get hold of some awful old tune and instead of using the words, he would go 'Tum-tiddely-um-tum-tum-tum-tum' over and over again. Then he would get hold of another tune and go 'Pom-piddely-om-pom-pom-pom-pom, pom-piddely-om, pom-piddely-om'. As he sang, he tried to keep time with the tap-tap of his iron foot on the roadway.

When he got tired of that, he said to me, 'I'll tell you something interesting about pheasants, Danny. The law says they're wild birds, so they only belong to you when they're on your own land, did you know that?'

'I didn't know that, Dad.'

'So if one of Mr Hazell's pheasants flew over and perched on our filling-station', he said, 'it would belong to us. No one else would be allowed to touch it.'

'You mean even if Mr Hazell had bought it himself as a chick?' I said. 'Even if he had bought it and reared it in his own wood?'

'Absolutely,' my father said. 'Once it flies off his own land, he's lost it. Unless, of course, it flies back again. It's the same with fish. Once a trout or a salmon has swum out of your stretch of the river into somebody else's, you can't very well say, "Hey, that's mine. I want it back," can you?'

'Of course not,' I said. 'But I didn't know it was like that with pheasants.'

'It's the same with all game,' my father said. 'Hare, deer, partridge, grouse. You name it.'

We had been walking steadily for about an hour and a quarter and we were coming to the gap in the hedge where the cart-track led up the hill to the big wood where the pheasants lived. We crossed over the road and went through the gap.

We walked on up the cart-track and when we reached the crest of the hill we could see the wood ahead of us, huge and dark with the sun going down behind the trees and little sparks of gold s.h.i.+ning through.

'No talking, Danny, once we're inside,' my father said. 'Keep very close to me, and try not to go snapping any branches.'

Five minutes later we were there. The wood skirted the edge of the track on the right-hand side with only the hedge between it and us. 'Come on,' my father said. 'In we go.' He slipped through the hedge on all fours and I followed.

It was cool and murky inside the wood. No sunlight came in at all. My father took me by the hand, and together we started walking forward between the trees. I was very grateful to him for holding my hand. I had wanted to take hold of his the moment we entered the wood, but I thought he might disapprove.

My father was very tense. He was picking his feet up high and putting them down gently on the brown leaves. He kept his head moving all the time, the eyes sweeping slowly from side to side, searching for danger. I tried doing the same, but soon I began to see a keeper behind every tree, so I gave it up.

We went on like this for maybe four or five minutes, going slowly deeper and deeper into the wood.

Then a large patch of sky appeared ahead of us in the roof of the forest, and I knew that this must be the clearing. My father had told me that the clearing was the place where the young birds were introduced into the wood in early July, where they were fed and watered and guarded by the keepers, and where many of them stayed from force of habit until the shooting began. 'There's always plenty of pheasants in the clearing,' my father had said.

'And keepers, Dad?'

'Yes,' he had said. 'But there's thick bushes all around and that helps.'

The clearing was about a hundred yards ahead of us. We stopped behind a big tree while my father let his eyes travel very slowly all round. He was checking each little shadow and every part of the wood within sight.

'We're going to have to crawl the next bit,' he whispered, letting go of my hand. 'Keep close behind me all the time, Danny, and do exactly as I do. If you see me lie flat on my face, you do the same. Right?'

'Right,' I whispered back.

'Off we go then. This is it!'

My father got down on his hands and knees and started crawling. I followed. He moved surprisingly fast on all fours and I had quite a job to keep up with him. Every few seconds he would glance back at me to see if I was all right, and each time he did so, I gave him a nod and a smile.

We crawled on and on, and then at last we were kneeling safely behind a big clump of bushes right on the edge of the clearing. My father was nudging me with his elbow and pointing through the branches at the pheasants.

The place was absolutely stiff with them. There must have been at least two hundred huge birds strutting around among the tree-stumps.

'You see what I mean?' he whispered.

It was a fantastic sight, a poacher's dream come true. And how close they were! Some of them were not ten paces from where we knelt. The hens were plump and creamy-brown. They were so fat their breast-feathers almost brushed the ground as they walked. The c.o.c.ks were slim and elegant, with long tails and brilliant red patches round the eyes, like scarlet spectacles. I glanced at my father. His face was transfixed in ecstasy. The mouth was slightly open and the eyes were sparkling bright as they stared at the pheasants.

'There's a keeper,' he said softly.

I froze. At first I didn't even dare to look.

'Over there,' my father whispered.

I mustn't move, I told myself. Not even my head.

'Look carefully,' my father whispered. 'Over the other side, by that big tree.'

Slowly, I swivelled my eyeb.a.l.l.s in the direction he indicated. Then I saw him.

'Dad!' I whispered.

'Don't move now, Danny. Stay well down.'