'Dad!' I said. 'No!'
'But don't you realize, Danny, that even after we've given birds away to all our friends, to Charlie Kinch and the Reverend Clipstone and Doc Spencer and Enoch Samways and all the rest of them, there'll still be about fifty left for us. That is why we are going to need a deep freezer.'
'But it'll cost the earth!'
'And worth every penny of it!' he cried. 'Just imagine, Danny, my boy, any time we fancy a nice roasted pheasant for our supper, all we've got to do is open up the lid of the freezer and help ourselves! Kings and queens don't live any better than that!'
A barn-owl flew across the road in front of us, its great white wings waving slowly in the moonlight.
'Did your mum have an oven in the kitchen, Dad,' I asked, 'when you were a boy?'
'She had something better than an oven,' he said. 'It was called a cooker. It was a great big long black thing and we used to stoke it up with coal and keep it going for twenty-four hours a day. It never went out. And if we didn't have any coal, we used bits of wood.'
'Could you roast pheasants in it?'
'You could roast anything in it, Danny. It was a lovely thing, that old cooker. It used to keep the whole house warm in the winter.'
'But you never had a cooker of your own, did you, Dad, you and Mum, when you got married? Or an oven?'
'No,' he said. 'We couldn't afford things like that.'
'Then how did you roast your pheasants?'
'Ah,' he said. 'That was quite a trick. We used to build a fire outside the caravan and roast them on a spit, the way the gipsies do.'
'What's a spit?' I asked.
'It's just a long metal spike and you stick it through the pheasant and put it over the fire and keep
turning it round. What you do is you push two forked sticks into the ground, one on each side of the fire, and you rest the spit on the forks.'
'Did it roast them well?'
'Fairly well,' he said. 'But an oven would do it better. Listen Danny, Mr Wheeler has all sorts of marvellous ovens in his shop now. He's got one in there with so many dials and knobs on it, it looks like the cockpit of an airplane.'
'Is that the one you want to buy, Dad?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'We'll decide tomorrow.'
We kept walking and soon we saw the filling-station glimmering in the moonlight ahead of us.
'Will Mr Rabbetts be waiting for us, do you think, Dad?' I asked.
'If he is, you won't see him, Danny. They always hide and watch you from behind a hedge or a tree and they only come out if you are carrying a sack over your shoulder or if your pocket is bulging with something suspicious. We are carrying nothing at all. So don't worry about it.'
Whether or not Mr Rabbetts was watching us as we entered the filling-station and headed for the caravan, I don't know. We saw no sign of him. Inside the caravan, my father lit the paraffin lamp, and I lit the burner and put the kettle on to make us a cup of cocoa each.
'That', my father said as we sat sipping our hot cocoa a few minutes later, 'was the greatest time I've ever had in my whole life.'
19
Rockabye Baby
At eight-thirty the next morning my father went into the workshop and dialled Doc Spencer's number on the telephone.
'Now listen, Doctor,' he said. 'If you could be here at the filling-station in about half an hour, I think I might have a little surprise present for you.' The doctor said something in reply, and my father replaced the receiver.
At nine o'clock, Doc Spencer arrived in his car. My father went over to him and the two of them held a whispered conversation beside the pumps. Suddenly the tiny doctor clapped his hands together and sprang up high in the air, hooting with laughter.