Danny the Champion of the World

'Right!' he cried. 'Let her go!'

Slowly, majestically, and in absolute silence, our wonderful balloon began to rise up into the night sky.

'It flies!' I shouted, clapping my hands and jumping about. 'It flies! It flies!'

My father was nearly as excited as I was. 'It's a beauty,' he said. 'This one's a real beauty. You never know how they're going to turn out until you fly them. Each one is different.'

Up and up it went, rising very fast now in the cool night air. It was like a magic fire-ball in the sky.

'Will other people see it?' I asked.

'I'm sure they will, Danny. It's high enough now for them to see it for miles around.'

'What will they think it is, Dad?'

'A flying saucer,' my father said. 'They'll probably call the police.'

A small breeze had taken hold of the balloon and was carrying it away in the direction of the village.

'Let's follow it,' my father said. 'And with luck we'll find it when it comes down.'

We ran to the road. We ran along the road. We kept running. 'She's coming down!' my father shouted. 'The flame's nearly gone out!'

We lost sight of it when the flame went out, but we guessed roughly which field it would be landing in, and we climbed over a gate and ran towards the place. For half an hour we searched the field in the darkness, but we couldn't find our balloon.

The next morning I went back alone to search again. I searched four big fields before I found it. It was lying in the corner of a field that was full of black-and-white cows. The cows were all standing round it and staring at it with their huge wet eyes. But they hadn't harmed it one bit. So I carried it home and hung it up alongside the kite, against a wall in the workshop, for another day.

'You can fly the kite all by yourself any time you like,' my father said. 'But you must never fly the fire-balloon unless I'm with you. It's extremely dangerous.'

'All right,' I said.

'Promise me you'll never try to fly it alone, Danny'

'I promise,' I said.

Then there was the tree-house which we built high up in the top of the big oak at the bottom of our field.

And the bow and arrow, the bow a four-foot-long ash sapling, and the arrows flighted with the tail-feathers of partridge and pheasant.

And stilts that made me ten feet tall.

And a boomerang that came back and fell at my feet nearly every time I threw it.

And for my last birthday, there ha

d been something that was more fun, perhaps, than all the rest. For two days before my birthday, I'd been forbidden to enter the workshop because my father was in there working on a secret. And on the birthday morning, out came an amazing machine made from four bicycle wheels and several large soap-boxes. But this was no ordinary whizzer. It had a brake-pedal, a steering-wheel, a comfortable seat and a strong front bumper to take the shock of a crash. I called it Soapo and just about every day I would take it up to the top of the hill in the field behind the filling-station and come shooting down again at incredible speeds, riding it like a bronco over the bumps.

So you can see that being eight years old and living with my father was a lot of fun. But I was impatient to be nine. I reckoned that being nine would be even more fun than being eight.

As it turned out, I was not altogether right about this.

My ninth year was certainly more exciting than any of the others. But not all of it was exactly what you would call fun.

4

My Father's Deep Dark Secret

Here I am at the age of nine. This picture was made just before all the excitement started and I didn't have a worry in the world.