Danny the Champion of the World

As I stepped out from my desk and began walking up towards the front of the class, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I had seen it happen to others many times, to both boys and girls. But up until now, it had never happened to me. Each time I had seen it, it had made me feel quite sick inside.

Captain Lancaster was standing up and crossing over to the tall bookcase that stood against the left-hand wall of the classroom. He reached up to the top-most shelf of the bookcase and brought down the dreaded cane. It was white, this cane, as white as bone, and very long and very thin, with one end bent over into a handle, like a walking-stick.

'You first,' he said, pointing at me with the cane. 'Hold out your left hand.'

It was almost impossible to believe that this man was about to injure me physically and in cold blood. As I lifted my left-hand palm upwards and held it there, I looked at the palm itself and the pink skin and the fortune-teller's lines running over it, and I still could not bring myself to imagine that anything was going to happen to it.

The long white cane went up high in the air and came down on my hand with a crack like a rifle going off. I heard the crack first and about two seconds later I felt the pain. Never had I felt a pain such as that in my whole life. It was as though someone were pressing a red-hot poker against my palm and holding it there. I remember grabbing my injured left hand with my right hand and ramming it between my legs and squeezing my legs together against it. I squeezed and squeezed as hard as I could as if I were trying to stop the hand from falling to pieces. I managed not to cry out loud but I couldn't keep the tears from pouring down my cheeks.

From somewhere nearby I heard another fearful swish-crack! and I knew that poor Sidney had just got it as well.

But, oh, that fearful searing burning pain across my hand! Why didn't it go away? I glanced at Sidney. He was doing just the same as me, squeezing his hand between his legs and making the most awful face.

'Go and sit down, both of you!' Captain Lancaster ordered.

We stumbled back to our desks and sat down.

'Now get on with your work!' the dreaded voice said. 'And let us have no more cheating! No more insolence, either!'

The class bent their heads over their books like people in church saying their prayers.

I looked at my hand. There was a long ugly mark about half an inch wide running right across the palm just where the fingers joined the hand. It was raised up in the middle and the raised part was pure white, with red on both sides. I moved the fingers. They moved all right, but it hurt to move them. I looked at Sidney. He gave me a quick apologetic glance under his eyelids, then went back to his sums.

When I got home from school that afternoon, my father was in the workshop. 'I've bought the raisins,' he said. 'We will now put them in to soak. Fetch me a bowl of water, Danny.'

I went over to the caravan and got a bowl and half-filled it with water. I carried it to the workshop and put it on the bench.

'Open up the packets and tip them all in,' my father said. This was one of the really nice things about my father. He didn't take over and want to do everything himself. Whether it was a difficult job like adjusting a carburettor in a big engine, or whether it was simply tipping some raisins into a basin, he always let me go ahead and do it myself while he watched and stood ready to help. He was watching me now as I opened the first packet of raisins.

'Hey!' he cried, grabbing my left wrist. 'What's happened to your hand?'

'It's nothing,' I said, clenching the fist.

He made me open it up. The long scarlet mark lay across my palm like a burn.

'Who did it?' he shouted. 'Was it Captain Lancaster?'

'Yes, Dad, but it's nothing.'

'What happened?' He was gripping my wrist so hard it almost hurt. 'Tell me exactly what happened!'

I told him everything. He stood there holding my wrist, his face going whiter and whiter, and I could see the fury beginning to boil up dangerously inside him.

'I'll kill him! he softly whispered when I had finished. 'I swear I'll kill him!" His eyes were blazing, and all the colour had gone from his face. I had never seen him look like that before.

'Forget it, Dad.'

'I will not forget it!' he said. 'You did nothing wrong and he had absolutely no right to do this to you. So he called you a cheat, did he?'

I nodded.

He had taken his jacket from the peg on the wall and was putting it on.

'Where are you going?' I asked.

'I am going straight to Captain Lancaster's house and I'm going to beat the daylights out of him.'

'No!' I cried, catching hold of his arm. 'Don't do it, Dad, please! It won't do any good! Please don't do it!'