Danny the Champion of the World

'Two...

'Three...

'Four...'

He began counting them very carefully, picking up each bird in turn and laying it carefully to one side. The moon was directly overhead now, and the whole clearing was brilliantly lit up. I felt as though I was standing in the glare of powerful headlamps.

'A hundred and seventeen... a hundred and eighteen... a hundred and nineteen ... one hundred and twenty!' he cried. 'It's an all-time record!' He looked happier than I had ever seen him in his life. 'The most my dad ever got was fifteen and he was drunk for a week afterwards!' he said. 'But this... this, my dear boy, is an all-time world record!'

'I expect it is,' I said.

'And you did it, Danny! The whole thing was your idea in the first place!'

'I didn't do it, Dad.'

'Oh yes you did! And you know what that makes you, my dear boy? It makes you the champion of the world!' He pulled up his sweater and unwound the two big cotton sacks from round his belly. 'Here's yours,' he said, handing one of them to me. 'Fill it up quick!'

The light of the moon was so strong I could read the print across the front of the sack, J. W. CRUMP, it said, KESTON FLOUR MILLS, LONDON S.W. 17.

'You don't think that keeper with the brown teeth is watching us this very moment from behind a tree?' I said.

'No chance,' my father said. 'If he's anywhere he'll be down at the filling-station waiting to catch us coming home with the loot.'

We started loading the pheasants into the sacks. They were soft and floppy-necked and the skin underneath the feathers was still warm.

'We can't possibly carry this lot all the way home,' I said.

'Of course not. There'll be a taxi waiting for us on the track outside the wood.'

'A taxi! I said.

'My dad always made use of a taxi on a big job,' he said.

'Why a taxi, for heaven's sake?'

'It's more secret, Danny. Nobody knows who's inside a taxi except the driver.'

'Which driver?' I asked.

'Charlie Kinch. He's only too glad to oblige.'

'Does he know about poaching, too?'

'Old Charlie Kinch? Of course he does. He's poached more pheasants in his time than we've sold gallons of petrol.'

We finished loading the sacks and my father humped his on to his shoulders. I couldn't do that with mine. It was too heavy for me. 'Drag it,' my father said. 'Just drag it along the ground.' My sack had sixty birds inside it and it weighed a ton. But it slid quite easily over the dry leaves with me walking backwards and pulling it with both hands.

We came to the edge of the wood and peered through the hedge on to the track. My father said 'Charlie boy' very softly, and the old man behind the wheel of the taxi poked his head out into the moonlight and gave us a sly toothless grin. We slid through the hedge, dragging the sacks after us along the ground.

'Hello-hello-hello,' Charlie Kinch said. 'What's all this then?'

17

The Taxi

Two minutes later we were safely inside the taxi and cruising slowly down the bumpy track towards the road.

My father was bursting with pride and excitement. He kept leaning forward and tapping Charlie Kinch on the shoulder and saying, 'How about it, Charlie? How about this for a haul?' And Charlie kept glancing back pop-eyed at the huge bulging sacks. 'Cripes, man!' he kept saying. 'How did you do it?'