This was the greatest compliment he had ever paid me. I was enormously pleased.
'You like this work, don't you?' he said. 'All this messing about with engines.'
'I absolutely love it,' I said.
He turned and faced me and laid a hand gently on my shoulder. 'I want to teach you to be a great mechanic,' he said. 'And when you grow up, I hope you will become a famous designing engineer, a man who designs new and better engines for cars and aeroplanes. For that', he added, 'you will need a really good education. But I don't want to send you to school quite yet. In another two years you will have learned enough here with me to be able to take a small engine completely to pieces and put it together again all by yourself. After that, you can go to school.'
You probably think my father was crazy trying to teach a young child to be an expert mechanic, but as a matter of fact he wasn't crazy at all. I learned fast and I adored every moment of it. And luckily for us, nobody came knocking on the door to ask why I wasn't attending school.
So two more years went by, and at the age of seven, believe it or not, I really could take a small engine to pieces and put it together again. I mean properly to pieces, pistons and crankshaft and all. The time had come to start school.
My school was in the nearest village, two miles away. We didn't have a car of our own. We couldn't afford one. But the walk took only half an hour and I didn't mind that in the least. My father came with me. He insisted on coming. And when school ended at four in the afternoon, he was always there waiting to walk me home.
And so life went on. The world I lived in consisted only of the filling-station, the workshop, the caravan, the school, and of course the woods and fields and streams in the countryside around. But I was never bored. It was impossible to be bored in my father's company. He was too sparky a man for that. Plots and plans and new ideas came flying off him like sparks from a grindstone.
'There's a good wind today,' he said one Saturday morning. 'Just right for flying a kite. Let's make a kite, Danny.'
So we made a kite. He showed me how to splice four thin sticks together in the shape of a star, with two more sticks across the middle to brace it. Then we cut up an old blue shirt of his and stretched the material across the frame-work of the kite. We added a long tail made of thread, with little leftover pieces of the shirt tied at intervals along it. We found a ball of string in the workshop and he showed me how to attach the string to the frame-work so that the kite would be properly balanced in flight.
Together we walked to the top of the hill behind the filling-station to release the kite. I found it hard to believe that this object, made only from a few sticks and a piece of old shirt, would actually fly. I held the string while my father held the kite, and the moment he let it go, it caught the wind and soared upward like a huge blue bird.
'Let out some more, Danny!' he cried. 'Go on! As much as you like!'
Higher and higher soared the kite. Soon it was just a small blue dot dancing in the sky miles above my head, and it was thrilling to stand there holding on to something that was so far away and so very much alive. This faraway thing was tugging and struggling on the end of the line like a big fish.
'Let's walk it back to the caravan,' my father said.
So we walked down the hill again with me holding the string and the kite still pulling fiercely on the other end. When we came to the caravan we were careful not to get the string tangled in the apple tree and we brought it all the way round to the front steps.
'Tie it to the steps,' my father said.
'Will it still stay up?' I asked.
'It will if the wind doesn't drop,' he said.
The wind didn't drop. And I will tell you something amazing. That kite stayed up there all through the night, and at breakfast time next morning the small blue dot was still dancing and swooping in the sky. After breakfast I hauled it down and hung it carefully against a wall in the workshop for another day.
Not long after that, on a lovely still evening when there was no breath of wind anywhere, my father said to me, 'This is just the right weather for a fire-balloon. Let's make a fire-balloon.'
He must have planned this one beforehand because he had already bought the four big sheets of tissue-paper and the pot of glue from Mr Witton's bookshop in the village. And now, using only the paper, the glue, a pair of scissors and a piece of thin wire, he made me a huge magnificent fire-balloon in less than fifteen minutes. In the opening at the bottom, he tied a ball of cottonwool, and we were ready to go.
It was getting dark when we carried it outside into the field behind the caravan. We had with us a bottle of methylated spirit and some matches. I held the balloon upright while my father crouched underneath it and carefully poured a little meths on to the ball of cottonwool.
'Here goes,' he said, putting a match to the cottonwool. 'Hold the sides out as much as you can, Danny!'
A tall yellow flame leaped up from the ball of cottonwool and went right inside the balloon.
'It'll catch on fire!' I cried.
'No it won't,' he said. 'Watch!'
Between us, we held the sides of the balloon out as much as possible to keep them away from the flame in the early stages. But soon the hot air filled the balloon and the danger was over.
'She's nearly ready!' my father said. 'Can you feel her floating?'
'Yes!' I said. 'Yes! Shall we let go?'
'Not yet!... Wait a bit longer!... Wait until she's tugging to fly away!'
'She's tugging now!' I said.
'Right!' he cried. 'Let her go!'
Slowly, majestically, and in absolute silence, our wonderful balloon began to rise up into the night sky.
'It flies!' I shouted, clapping my hands and jumping about. 'It flies! It flies!'
My father was nearly as excited as I was. 'It's a beauty,' he said. 'This one's a real beauty. You never know how they're going to turn out until you fly them. Each one is different.'
Up and up it went, rising very fast now in the cool night air. It was like a magic fire-ball in the sky.
'Will other people see it?' I asked.
'I'm sure they will, Danny. It's high enough now for them to see it for miles around.'
'What will they think it is, Dad?'
'A flying saucer,' my father said. 'They'll probably call the police.'
A small breeze had taken hold of the balloon and was carrying it away in the direction of the village.
'Let's follow it,' my father said. 'And with luck we'll find it when it comes down.'
We ran to the road. We ran along the road. We kept running. 'She's coming down!' my father shouted. 'The flame's nearly gone out!'
We lost sight of it when the flame went out, but we guessed roughly which field it would be landing in, and we climbed over a gate and ran towards the place. For half an hour we searched the field in the darkness, but we couldn't find our balloon.
The next morning I went back alone to search again. I searched four big fields before I found it. It was lying in the corner of a field that was full of black-and-white cows. The cows were all standing round it and staring at it with their huge wet eyes. But they hadn't harmed it one bit. So I carried it home and hung it up alongside the kite, against a wall in the workshop, for another day.
'You can fly the kite all by yourself any time you like,' my father said. 'But you must never fly the fire-balloon unless I'm with you. It's extremely dangerous.'
'All right,' I said.
'Promise me you'll never try to fly it alone, Danny'
'I promise,' I said.
Then there was the tree-house which we built high up in the top of the big oak at the bottom of our field.
And the bow and arrow, the bow a four-foot-long ash sapling, and the arrows flighted with the tail-feathers of partridge and pheasant.
And stilts that made me ten feet tall.
And a boomerang that came back and fell at my feet nearly every time I threw it.
And for my last birthday, there ha
d been something that was more fun, perhaps, than all the rest. For two days before my birthday, I'd been forbidden to enter the workshop because my father was in there working on a secret. And on the birthday morning, out came an amazing machine made from four bicycle wheels and several large soap-boxes. But this was no ordinary whizzer. It had a brake-pedal, a steering-wheel, a comfortable seat and a strong front bumper to take the shock of a crash. I called it Soapo and just about every day I would take it up to the top of the hill in the field behind the filling-station and come shooting down again at incredible speeds, riding it like a bronco over the bumps.
So you can see that being eight years old and living with my father was a lot of fun. But I was impatient to be nine. I reckoned that being nine would be even more fun than being eight.
As it turned out, I was not altogether right about this.
My ninth year was certainly more exciting than any of the others. But not all of it was exactly what you would call fun.
4
My Father's Deep Dark Secret
Here I am at the age of nine. This picture was made just before all the excitement started and I didn't have a worry in the world.
You will learn as you get older, just as I learned that autumn, that no father is perfect. Grown-ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets. Some have quirkier quirks and deeper secrets than others, but all of them, including one's own parents, have two or three private habits hidden up their sleeves that would probably make you gasp if you knew about them.
The rest of this book is about a most private and secret habit my father had, and about the strange adventures it led us both into.
It all started on a Saturday evening. It was the first Saturday of September. Around six o'clock my father and I had supper together in the caravan as usual. Then I went to bed. My father told me a fine story and kissed me good-night. I fell asleep.
For some reason I woke up again during the night. I lay still, listening for the sound of my father's breathing in the bunk above mine. I could hear nothing. He wasn't there, I was certain of that. This meant that he had gone back to the workshop to finish a job. He often did that after he had tucked me in.
I listened for the usual workshop sounds, the little clinking noises of metal against metal or the tap of a hammer. They always comforted me tremendously, those noises in the night, because they told me my father was close at hand.
But on this night, no sound came from the workshop. The filling-station was silent.
I got out of my bunk and found a box of matches by the sink. I struck one and held it up to the funny old clock that hung on the wall above the kettle. It said ten past eleven.
I went to the door of the caravan. 'Dad,' I said softly. 'Dad, are you there?'
No answer.
There was a small wooden platform outside the caravan door, about four feet above the ground. I stood on the platform and gazed around me. 'Dad!' I called out. 'Where are you?'
Still no answer.
In pyjamas and bare feet, I went down the caravan steps and crossed over to the workshop. I switched on the light. The old car we had been working on through the day was still there, but not my father.
I have already told you he did not have a car of his own, so there was no question of his having gone for a drive. He wouldn't have done that anyway. I was sure he would never willingly have left me alone in the filling-station at night.
In which case, I thought, he must have fainted suddenly from some awful illness or fallen down and banged his head.
I would need a light if I was going to find him. I took the torch from the bench in the workshop.
I looked in the office. I went around and searched behind the office and behind the workshop.
I ran down the field to the lavatory. It was empty.
'Dad!' I shouted into the darkness. 'Dad! Where are you?'
I ran back to the caravan. I shone the light into his bunk to make absolutely sure he wasn't there.
He wasn't in his bunk.
I stood in the dark caravan and for the first time in my life I felt a touch of panic. The filling-station was a long way from the nearest farmhouse. I took the blanket from my bunk and put it round my shoulders. Then I went out the caravan door and sat on the platform with my feet on the top step of the ladder. There was a new moon in the sky and across the road the big field lay pale and deserted in the moonlight. The silence was deathly.
I don't know how long I sat there. It may have been one hour. It could have been two. But I never dozed off. I wanted to keep listening all the time. If I listened very carefully I might hear something that would tell me where he was.
Then, at last, from far away, I heard the faint tap-tap of footsteps on the road.
The footsteps were coming closer and closer.
Tap... tap... tap... tap...
Was it him? Or was it somebody else?
I sat still, watching the road. I couldn't see very far along it. It faded away into a misty moonlit darkness.
Tap... tap... tap... tap... came the footsteps.
Then out of the mist a figure appeared.
It was him!
I jumped down the steps and ran on to the road to meet him.
'Danny!' he cried. 'What on earth's the matter?'
'I thought something awful had happened to you,' I said.
He took my hand in his and walked me back to the caravan in silence. Then he tucked me into my bunk. 'I'm so sorry,' he said. 'I should never have done it. But you don't usually wake up, do you?'
'Where did you go, Dad?'
'You must be tired out,' he said.
'I'm not a bit tired. Couldn't we light the lamp for a little while?'
My father put a match to the wick of the lamp hanging from the ceiling and the little yellow flame sprang up and filled the inside of the caravan with pale light. 'How about a hot drink?' he said.
'Yes, please.'
He lit the paraffin burner and put the kettle on to boil.
'I have decided something,' he said. 'I am going to let you in on the deepest darkest secret of my whole life.'
I was sitting up in my bunk watching my father.
'You asked me where I had been,' he said. 'The truth is I was up in Hazell's Wood.'
'Hazell's Wood!' I cried. 'That's miles away!'
'Six miles and a half,' my father said. 'I know I shouldn't have gone and I'm very, very sorry about it, but I had such a powerful yearning...' His voice trailed away into nothingness.
'But why would you want to go all the way up to Hazell's Wood?' I asked.
He spooned cocoa powder and sugar into two mugs, doing it very slowly and levelling each spoonful as though he were measuring medicine.
'Do you know what is meant by poaching?' he asked.
'Poaching? Not really, no.'
'It means going up into the woods in the dead of night and coming back with something for the pot. Poachers in other places poach all sorts of different things, but around here it's always pheasants.'
'You mean stealing them?' I said, aghast.
'We don't look at it that way,' my father said. 'Poaching is an art. A great poacher is a great artist.'
'Is that actually what you were doing in Hazell's Wood, Dad? Poaching pheasants?'
'I was practising the art,' he said. 'The art of poaching.'
I was shocked. My own father a thief! This gentle lovely man! I couldn't believe he would go creeping into the woods at night to pinch valuable birds belonging to somebody else. 'The kettle's boiling,' I said.
'Ah, so it is.' He poured the water into the mugs and brought mine over to me. Then he fetched his own and sat with it at the end of my bunk.
'Your grandad,' he said, 'my own dad, was a magnificent and splendiferous poacher. It was he who taught me all about it. I caught the poaching fever from him when I was ten years old and I've never lost it since. Mind you, in those days just about every man in our village was out in the woods at night poaching pheasants. And they
did it not only because they loved the sport but because they needed food for their families. When I was a boy, times were bad for a lot of people in England. There was very little work to be had anywhere, and some families were literally starving. Yet a few miles away in the rich man's wood, thousands of pheasants were being fed like kings twice a day. So can you blame my dad for going out occasionally and coming home with a bird or two for the family to eat?'
'No,' I said. 'Of course not. But we're not starving here, Dad.'
'You've missed the point, Danny boy! You've missed the whole point! Poaching is such a fabulous and exciting sport that once you start doing it, it gets into your blood and you can't give it up! Just imagine,' he said, leaping off the bunk and waving his mug in the air, 'just imagine for a minute that you are all alone up there in the dark wood, and the wood is full of keepers hiding behind the trees and the keepers have guns...'
'Guns!' I gasped. 'They don't have guns!'
'All keepers have guns, Danny. It's for the vermin mostly, the foxes and stoats and weasels who go after the pheasants. But they'll always take a pot at a poacher, too, if they spot him.'
'Dad, you're joking.'
'Not at all. But they only do it from behind. Only when you're trying to escape. They like to pepper you in the legs at about fifty yards.'
'They can't do that!' I cried. 'They could go to prison for shooting someone!'
'You could go to prison for poaching,' my father said. There was a glint and a sparkle in his eyes now that I had never seen before. 'Many's the night when I was a boy, Danny, I've gone into the kitchen and seen my old dad lying face down on the table and Mum standing over him digging the gunshot pellets out of his backside with a potato-knife.'
'It's not true,' I said, starting to laugh.
'You don't believe me?'
'Yes, I believe you.'
'Towards the end, he was so covered in tiny little white scars he looked exactly like it was snowing.'
'I don't know why I'm laughing,' I said. 'It's not funny, it's horrible.'
' "Poacher's bottom" they used to call it,' my father said. 'And there wasn't a man in the whole village who didn't have a bit of it one way or another. But my dad was the champion. How's the cocoa?'