Danny the Champion of the World

'No,' I said.

'Good-night, Danny. Go to sleep now.'

'Good-night, Dad.'

6

Mr Victor Hazell

The following Friday, while we were having supper in the caravan, my father said, 'If it's all right with you, Danny, I'll be going out again tomorrow night.'

'You mean poaching?'

'Yes.'

'Will it be Hazell's Wood again?'

'It'll always be Hazell's Wood,' he said. 'First because that's where all the pheasants are. And second because I don't like Mr Hazell one little bit and it's a pleasure to poach his birds.'

I must pause here to tell you something about Mr Victor Hazell. He was a brewer of beer and he owned a huge brewery. He was rich beyond words, and his property stretched for miles along either side of the valley. All the land around us belonged to him, everything on both sides of the road, everything except the small patch of ground on which our filling-station stood. That patch belonged to my father. It was a little island in the middle of the vast ocean of Mr Hazell's estate.

Mr Victor Hazell was a roaring snob and he tried desperately to get in with what he believed were the right kind of people. He hunted with the hounds and gave shooting parties and wore fancy waistcoats. Every week-day he drove his enormous silver Rolls-Royce past our filling-station on his way to the brewery. As he flashed by we would sometimes catch a glimpse of the great glistening beery face above the wheel, pink as a ham, all soft and inflamed from drinking too much beer.

'No,' my father said, 'I do not like Mr Victor Hazell one little bit. I haven't forgotten the way he spoke to you last year when he came in for a fill-up.'

I hadn't forgotten it either. Mr Hazell had pulled up alongside the pumps in his glistening gleaming Rolls-Royce and had said to me, 'Fill her up and look sharp about it.' I was eight years old at the time. He didn't get out of the car, he just handed me the key to the cap of the petrol tank and as he did so, he barked out, 'And keep your filthy little hands to yourself, d'you understand?'

I didn't understand at all, so I said, 'What do you mean, sir?'

There was a leather riding-crop on the seat beside him. He picked it up and pointed it at me like a pistol. 'If you make any dirty finger-marks on my paint-work,' he said, 'I'll step right out of this car and give you a good hiding.'

My father was out of the workshop almost before Mr Hazell had finished speaking. He strode up to the window of the car and placed his hands on the sill and leaned in. 'I don't like you speaking to my son like that,' he said. His voice was dangerously soft.

Mr Hazell did not look at him. He sat quite still in the seat of his Rolls-Royce, his tiny piggy eyes staring straight ahead. There was a smug superior little smile around the corners of his mouth.

'You had no reason to threaten him,' my father went on. 'He had done nothing wrong'

Mr Hazell continued to act as though my father wasn't there.

'Next time you threaten someone with a good hiding I suggest you pick on a person your own size,' my father said. 'Like me, for instance.'

Mr Hazell still did not move.

'Now go away, please,' my father said. 'We do not wish to serve you.' He took the key from my hand and tossed it through the window. The Rolls-Royce drove away fast in a cloud of dust.

The very next day, an inspector from the local Department of Health arrived and said he had come to inspect our caravan. 'What do you want to inspect our caravan for?' my father asked.

'To see if it's a fit place for humans to live in,' the man said. 'We don't allow people to live in dirty broken-down shacks these days.'

My father showed him the inside of the caravan which was spotlessly clean as always and as cosy as could be, and in the end the man had to admit there was nothing wrong with it.

Soon after that, another inspector turned up and took a sample of petrol from one of our underground storage tanks. My father explained to me they were checking up to see if we were mixing some of our second-grade petrol in with the first-grade stuff, which is an old dodge practised by crooked filling-station owners. Of course we were not doing this.

Hardly a week went by without some local official dropping in to check up on one thing or another, and there was little doubt, my father said, that the long and powerful arm of Mr Hazell was reaching out behind the scenes and trying to run us off our land.

So, all in all, you can see why it gave my father a certain pleasure to poach Mr Victor Hazell's pheasants.

That night we put the raisins in to soak.