Danny the Champion of the World

I jumped down the steps and ran on to the road to meet him.

'Danny!' he cried. 'What on earth's the matter?'

'I thought something awful had happened to you,' I said.

He took my hand in his and walked me back to the caravan in silence. Then he tucked me into my bunk. 'I'm so sorry,' he said. 'I should never have done it. But you don't usually wake up, do you?'

'Where did you go, Dad?'

'You must be tired out,' he said.

'I'm not a bit tired. Couldn't we light the lamp for a little while?'

My father put a match to the wick of the lamp hanging from the ceiling and the little yellow flame sprang up and filled the inside of the caravan with pale light. 'How about a hot drink?' he said.

'Yes, please.'

He lit the paraffin burner and put the kettle on to boil.

'I have decided something,' he said. 'I am going to let you in on the deepest darkest secret of my whole life.'

I was sitting up in my bunk watching my father.

'You asked me where I had been,' he said. 'The truth is I was up in Hazell's Wood.'

'Hazell's Wood!' I cried. 'That's miles away!'

'Six miles and a half,' my father said. 'I know I shouldn't have gone and I'm very, very sorry about it, but I had such a powerful yearning...' His voice trailed away into nothingness.

'But why would you want to go all the way up to Hazell's Wood?' I asked.

He spooned cocoa powder and sugar into two mugs, doing it very slowly and levelling each spoonful as though he were measuring medicine.

'Do you know what is meant by poaching?' he asked.

'Poaching? Not really, no.'

'It means going up into the woods in the dead of night and coming back with something for the pot. Poachers in other places poach all sorts of different things, but around here it's always pheasants.'

'You mean stealing them?' I said, aghast.

'We don't look at it that way,' my father said. 'Poaching is an art. A great poacher is a great artist.'

'Is that actually what you were doing in Hazell's Wood, Dad? Poaching pheasants?'

'I was practising the art,' he said. 'The art of poaching.'

I was shocked. My own father a thief! This gentle lovely man! I couldn't believe he would go creeping into the woods at night to pinch valuable birds belonging to somebody else. 'The kettle's boiling,' I said.

'Ah, so it is.' He poured the water into the mugs and brought mine over to me. Then he fetched his own and sat with it at the end of my bunk.

'Your grandad,' he said, 'my own dad, was a magnificent and splendiferous poacher. It was he who taught me all about it. I caught the poaching fever from him when I was ten years old and I've never lost it since. Mind you, in those days just about every man in our village was out in the woods at night poaching pheasants. And they

did it not only because they loved the sport but because they needed food for their families. When I was a boy, times were bad for a lot of people in England. There was very little work to be had anywhere, and some families were literally starving. Yet a few miles away in the rich man's wood, thousands of pheasants were being fed like kings twice a day. So can you blame my dad for going out occasionally and coming home with a bird or two for the family to eat?'

'No,' I said. 'Of course not. But we're not starving here, Dad.'

'You've missed the point, Danny boy! You've missed the whole point! Poaching is such a fabulous and exciting sport that once you start doing it, it gets into your blood and you can't give it up! Just imagine,' he said, leaping off the bunk and waving his mug in the air, 'just imagine for a minute that you are all alone up there in the dark wood, and the wood is full of keepers hiding behind the trees and the keepers have guns...'