Danny the Champion of the World

Then he said, 'Your mother was a great one for walking, Danny. And she would always bring something home with her to brighten up the caravan. In summer it was wild flowers or grasses. When the grass was in seed she could make it look absolutely beautiful in a jug of water, especially with some stalks of wheat or barley in between. In the autumn she would pick branches of leaves, and in the winter it was berries or old man's beard.'

We kept going. Then he said, 'How do you feel, Danny?'

'Terrific,' I said. And I meant it. For although the snakes were still wiggling in my stomach, I wouldn't have swopped places with the King of Arabia at that moment.

'Do you think they might have dug any more of those pits for us to fall into?' I asked.

'Don't you go worrying about pits, Danny,' my father said, 'I'll be on the lookout for them this time. We shall go very carefully and very slowly once we're in the wood.'

'How dark will it be in there when we arrive?'

'Not too dark,' he said. 'Quite light in fact.'

'Then how do we stop the keepers from seeing us?'

'Ah,' he said. 'That's the fun of the whole thing. That's what it's all about. It's hide-and-seek. It's the greatest game of hide-and-seek in the world.'

'You mean because they've got guns?'

'Well,' he said, 'that does add a bit of a flavour to it, yes.'

We didn't talk much after that. But as we got closer and closer to the wood, I could see my father becoming more and more twitchy as the excitement began to build up in him. He would get hold of some awful old tune and instead of using the words, he would go 'Tum-tiddely-um-tum-tum-tum-tum' over and over again. Then he would get hold of another tune and go 'Pom-piddely-om-pom-pom-pom-pom, pom-piddely-om, pom-piddely-om'. As he sang, he tried to keep time with the tap-tap of his iron foot on the roadway.

When he got tired of that, he said to me, 'I'll tell you something interesting about pheasants, Danny. The law says they're wild birds, so they only belong to you when they're on your own land, did you know that?'

'I didn't know that, Dad.'

'So if one of Mr Hazell's pheasants flew over and perched on our filling-station', he said, 'it would belong to us. No one else would be allowed to touch it.'

'You mean even if Mr Hazell had bought it himself as a chick?' I said. 'Even if he had bought it and reared it in his own wood?'

'Absolutely,' my father said. 'Once it flies off his own l

and, he's lost it. Unless, of course, it flies back again. It's the same with fish. Once a trout or a salmon has swum out of your stretch of the river into somebody else's, you can't very well say, "Hey, that's mine. I want it back," can you?'

'Of course not,' I said. 'But I didn't know it was like that with pheasants.'

'It's the same with all game,' my father said. 'Hare, deer, partridge, grouse. You name it.'

We had been walking steadily for about an hour and a quarter and we were coming to the gap in the hedge where the cart-track led up the hill to the big wood where the pheasants lived. We crossed over the road and went through the gap.

We walked on up the cart-track and when we reached the crest of the hill we could see the wood ahead of us, huge and dark with the sun going down behind the trees and little sparks of gold shining through.

'No talking, Danny, once we're inside,' my father said. 'Keep very close to me, and try not to go snapping any branches.'

Five minutes later we were there. The wood skirted the edge of the track on the right-hand side with only the hedge between it and us. 'Come on,' my father said. 'In we go.' He slipped through the hedge on all fours and I followed.

It was cool and murky inside the wood. No sunlight came in at all. My father took me by the hand, and together we started walking forward between the trees. I was very grateful to him for holding my hand. I had wanted to take hold of his the moment we entered the wood, but I thought he might disapprove.

My father was very tense. He was picking his feet up high and putting them down gently on the brown leaves. He kept his head moving all the time, the eyes sweeping slowly from side to side, searching for danger. I tried doing the same, but soon I began to see a keeper behind every tree, so I gave it up.

We went on like this for maybe four or five minutes, going slowly deeper and deeper into the wood.

Then a large patch of sky appeared ahead of us in the roof of the forest, and I knew that this must be the clearing. My father had told me that the clearing was the place where the young birds were introduced into the wood in early July, where they were fed and watered and guarded by the keepers, and where many of them stayed from force of habit until the shooting began. 'There's always plenty of pheasants in the clearing,' my father had said.

'And keepers, Dad?'

'Yes,' he had said. 'But there's thick bushes all around and that helps.'