Danny the Champion of the World

'You like this work, don't you?' he said. 'All this messing about with engines.'

'I absolutely love it,' I said.

He turned and faced me and laid a hand gently on my shoulder. 'I want to teach you to be a great mechanic,' he said. 'And when you grow up, I hope you will become a famous designing engineer, a man who designs new and better engines for cars and aeroplanes. For that', he added, 'you will need a really good education. But I don't want to send you to school quite yet. In another two years you will have learned enough here with me to be able to take a small engine completely to pieces and put it together again all by yourself. After that, you can go to school.'

You probably think my father was crazy trying to teach a young child to be an expert mechanic, but as a matter of fact he wasn't crazy at all. I learned fast and I adored every moment of it. And luckily for us, nobody came knocking on the door to ask why I wasn't attending school.

So two more years went by, and at the age of seven, believe it or not, I really could take a small engine to pieces and put it together again. I mean properly to pieces, pistons and crankshaft and all. The time had come to start school.

My school was in the nearest village, two miles away. We didn't have a car of our own. We couldn't afford one. But the walk took only half an hour and I didn't mind that in the least. My father came with me. He insisted on coming. And when school ended at four in the afternoon, he was always there waiting to walk me home.

And so life went on. The world I lived in consisted only of the filling-station, the workshop, the caravan, the school, and of course the woods and fields and streams in the countryside around. But I was never bored. It was impossible to be bored in my father's company. He was too sparky a man for that. Plots and plans and new ideas came flying off him like sparks from a grindstone.

'There's a good wind today,' he said one Saturday morning. 'Just right for flying a kite. Let's make a kite, Danny.'

So we made a kite. He showed me how to splice four thin sticks together in the shape of a star, with two more sticks across the middle to brace it. Then we cut up an old blue shirt of his and stretched the material across the frame-work of the kite. We added a long tail made of thread, with little leftover pieces of the shirt tied at intervals along it. We found a ball of string in the workshop and he showed me how to attach the string to the frame-work so that the kite would be properly balanced in flight.

Together we walked to the top of the hill behind the filling-station to release the kite. I found it hard to believe that this object, made only from a few sticks and a piece of old shirt, would actually fly. I held the string while my father held the kite, and the moment he let it go, it caught the wind and soared upward like a huge blue bird.

'Let out some more, Danny!' he cried. 'Go on! As much as you like!'

Higher and higher soared the kite. Soon it was just a small blue dot dancing in the sky miles above my head, and it was thrilling to stand there holding on to something that was so far away and so very much alive. This faraway thing was tugging and struggling on the end of the line like a big fish.

'Let's walk it back to the caravan,' my father said.

So we walked down the hill again with me holding the string and the kite still pulling fiercely on the other end. When we came to the caravan we were careful not to get the string tangled in the apple tree and we brought it all the way round to the front steps.

'Tie it to the steps,' my father said.

'Will it still stay up?' I asked.

'It will if the wind doesn't drop,' he said.

The wind didn't drop. And I will tell you something amazing. That kite stayed up there all through the night, and at breakfast time next morning the small blue dot was still dancing and swooping in the sky. After breakfast I hauled it down and hung it carefully against a wall in the workshop for another day.

Not long after that, on a lovely still evening when there was no breath of wind anywhere, my father said to me, 'This is just the right weather for a fire-balloon. Let's make a fire-balloon.'

He must have planned this one beforehand because he had already bought the four big sheets of tissue-paper and the pot of glue from Mr Witton's bookshop in the village. And now, using only the paper, the glue, a pair of scissors and a piece of thin wire, he made me a huge magnificent fire-balloon in less than fifteen minutes. In the opening at the bottom, he tied a ball of cottonwool, and we were ready to go.

It was getting dark when we carried it outside into the field behind the caravan. We had with us a bottle of methylated spirit and some matches. I held the balloon upright while my father crouched underneath it and carefully poured a little meths on to the ball of cottonwool.

'Here goes,' he said, putting a match to the cottonwool. 'Hold the sides out as much as you can, Danny!'

A tall yellow flame leaped up from the ball of cottonwool and went right inside the balloon.

'It'll catch on fire!' I cried.

'No it won't,' he said. 'Watch!'

Between us, we held the sides of the balloon out as much as possible to keep them away from the flame in the early stages. But soon the hot air filled the balloon and the danger was over.

'She's nearly ready!' my father said. 'Can you feel her floating?'

'Yes!' I said. 'Yes! Shall we let go?'

'Not yet!... Wait a bit longer!... Wait until she's tugging to fly away!'

'She's tugging now!' I said.