'And you promise I can come with you?'
'Absolutely' he said. 'And we shall call this method The Sleeping Beauty. It will be a landmark in the history of poaching!'
I sat very still in my bunk, watching my father as he put each capsule back into the bottle. I could hardly believe what was happening, that we were really going to do it, that he and I alone were going to try to swipe practically the entire flock of Mr Victor Hazell's prize pheasants. Just thinking about it sent little shivers of electricity running all over my skin.
'Exciting, isn't it?' my father said.
'I don't dare think about it, Dad. It makes me shiver all over.'
'Me too,' he said. 'But we must keep very calm from now on. We must make our plans very very carefully. Today is Wednesday. The shooting party is next Saturday'
'Cripes!' I said. 'That's in three days' time! When do you and I go up to the wood and do the job?'
'The night before,' my father said. 'On the Friday. In that way they won't discover that all the pheasants have disappeared until it's too late and the party has begun.'
'Friday's the day after tomorrow! My goodness, Dad, we'll have to hurry if we're going to get two hundred raisins ready before then!'
My father stood up and began pacing the floor of the caravan. 'Here's the plan of action,' he said. 'Listen carefully...
'Tomorrow is Thursday. When I walk you to school, I shall go into Cooper's Stores in the village and buy two packets of seedless raisins. And in the evening we will put the raisins in to soak for the night.'
'But that only gives us Friday to get ready two hundred raisins,' I said. 'Each one will have to be cut open and filled with powder and sewed up again, and I'll be at school all day...'
'No, you won't,' my father said. 'You will be suffering from a very nasty cold on Friday and I shall be forced to keep you home from school.'
'Hooray!' I said.
'We will not open the filling-station at all on Friday,' he went on. 'Instead we will shut ourselves in here and prepare the raisins. We'll easily get them done between us in one day. And that evening, off we'll go up the road towards the wood to do the job. Is that all clear?'
He was like a general announcing the plan of battle to his staff.
'All clear,' I said.
'And Danny, not a whisper of this to any of your friends at school.'
'Dad, you know I wouldn't!'
He kissed me good-night and turned the oil-lamp down low, but it was a long time before I went to sleep.
12
Thursday and School
The next day was Thursday, and before we set out for the walk to my school that morning I went around behind the caravan and picked two apples from our tree, one for my father and one for me.
It is a most marvellous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples whenever you feel like it. You can do this only in the autumn of course, when the fruit is ripe, but all the same, how many families are so lucky? Not one in a thousand, I would guess. Our apples were called Cox's Orange Pippins, and I liked the sound of the name almost as much as I liked the apples.
At eight o'clock we started walking down the road towards my school in the pale autumn sunshine, munching our apples as we strode along.
Clink went my father's iron foot each time he put it down on the hard road. Clink... clink... clink.
'Have you brought money to buy the raisins?' I asked.
He put a hand in his trouser pocket and made the coins jingle.
'Will Cooper's be open so early?'
'Yes,' he said. 'They open at eight-thirty'
I really loved those morning walks to school with my father. We talked practically the whole time. Mostly it was he who talked and I who listened, and just about everything he said was fascinating. He was a true countryman. The fields, the streams, the woods and all the creatures who lived in these places were a part of his life. Although he was a mechanic by trade and a very fine one, I believe he could have become a great naturalist if only he had had a good schooling.
Long ago he had taught me the names of all the trees and the wild flowers and the different grasses that grow in the fields. All the birds, too, I could name, not only by sighting them but by listening to their calls and their songs.
In springtime we would hunt for birds' nests along the way, and when we found one he would lift me up on to his shoulders so I could peer into it and see the eggs. But I was never allowed to touch them.
My father told me a nest with eggs in it was one of the most beautiful things in the world. I thought so too. The nest of a song-thrush, for instance, lined inside with dry mud as smooth as polished wood, and with five eggs of the purest blue speckled with black dots. And the skylark, whose nest we once found right in the middle of a field, in a grassy clump on the ground. It was hardly a nest at all, just a little hollow place in the grass, and in it were six small eggs, deep brown and white.
'Why does the skylark make its nest on the ground where the cows can trample it?' I asked.
'Nobody knows why,' my father said. 'But they always do it. Nightingales nest on the ground too. So do pheasants and partridges and grouse.'
On one of our walks a weasel flashed out of the hedge in front of us, and in the next few minutes I learned a lot of things about that marvellous little creature. The bit I liked best was when my father said, 'The weasel is the bravest of all animals. The mother will fight to the death to defend her own children. She will never run away, not even from a fox which is one hundred times bigger than her. She will stay beside her nest and fight the fox until she is killed.'
Another time, when I said, 'Just listen to that grasshopper, Dad,' he said, 'No, that's not a grasshopper, my love. It's a cricket. And did you know that crickets have their ears in their legs?'
'It's not true.'
'It's absolutely true. And grasshoppers have theirs in the sides of their tummies. They are lucky to be able to hear at all because nearly all the vast hordes of insects on this earth are deaf as well as dumb and live in a silent world.'
On this Thursday, on this particular walk to school, there was an old frog croaking in the stream behind the hedge as we went by.
'Can you hear him, Danny?'
'Yes,' I said.
'That is a bullfrog calling to his wife. He does it by blowing out his dewlap and letting it go with a burp.'
'What is a dewlap?' I asked.
'It's the loose skin on his throat. He can blow it up just like a little balloon.'
'What happens when his wife hears him?'
'She goes hopping over to him. She is very happy to have been invited. But I'll tell you something very funny about the old bullfrog. He often becomes so pleased with the sound of his own voice that his wife has to nudge him several times before he'll stop his burping and turn round to hug her.'
That made me laugh.
'Don't laugh too loud,' he said, twinkling at me with his eyes. 'We men are not so very different from the bullfrog.'
We parted at the school gates and my father went off to buy the raisins. Other children were streaming in through the gates and heading up the path to the front door of the school. I joined them but kept silent. I was the keeper of a deep secret and a careless word from me could blow the lid off the greatest poaching expedition the world would ever see.
Ours was just a small village school, a squat ugly red-brick building with no upstairs rooms at all. Above the front door was a big grey block of stone cemented into the brickwork, and on the stone it said, THIS SCHOOL WAS ERECTED IN 1902 TO COMMEMORATE THE CORONATION OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS KING EDWARD VII. I must have read that thing a thousand times. Every time I went in the door it hit me in the eye. I suppose that's what it was there for. But it's pretty boring to read the same old words over and over again, and I often thought how nice it would be if they put something different up there every day, something really interesting. My father would have done it for them beautifully. He could have written it with a bit of chal
k on the smooth grey stone and each morning it would have been something new. He would have said things like, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE LITTLE YELLOW CLOVER BUTTERFLY OFTEN CARRIES HIS WIFE AROUND ON HIS BACK? Another time he might have said, THE GUPPY HAS FUNNY HABITS. WHEN HE FALLS IN LOVE WITH ANOTHER GUPPY, HE BITES HER ON THE BOTTOM. And another time, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE DEATH'S-HEAD MOTH CAN SQUEAK? And then again, BIRDS HAVE ALMOST NO SENSE OF SMELL. BUT THEY HAVE GOOD EYESIGHT AND THEY LOVE RED COLOURS. THE FLOWERS THEY LIKE ARE RED AND YELLOW, BUT NEVER BLUE. And perhaps another time he would get out his chalk and write, SOME BEES HAVE TONGUES WHICH THEY CAN UNROLL UNTIL THEY ARE NEARLY TWICE AS LONG AS THE BEE ITSELF. THIS IS TO ALLOW THEM TO GATHER NECTAR FROM FLOWERS THAT HAVE VERY LONG NARROW OPENINGS. Or he might have written, I'LL BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT IN SOME BIG ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSES, THE BUTLER STILL HAS TO IRON THE MORNING NEWSPAPER BEFORE PUTTING IT ON HIS MASTER'S BREAKFAST-TABLE.
There were about sixty boys and girls in our school and their ages went from five to eleven. We had four classrooms and four teachers.
Miss Birdseye taught the kindergarten, the five-year-olds and six-year-olds, and she was a really nice person. She used to keep a bag of aniseed balls in the drawer of her desk, and anyone who did good work would be given one aniseed ball to suck right there and then during the lesson. The trick with aniseed balls is never to bite them. If you keep rolling them round your mouth, they will dissolve slowly of their own accord, and then, right in the very centre, you will find a tiny little brown seed. This is the aniseed itself, and when you crush it between your teeth it has a fabulous taste. My father told me that dogs go crazy about it. When there aren't any foxes around, the huntsman will drag a bag of aniseed for miles and miles over the countryside, and the foxhounds will follow the scent because they love it so. This is known as a drag hunt.
The seven-and eight-year-olds were taught by Mr Corrado and he was also a decent person. He was a very old teacher, probably sixty or more, but that didn't seem to stop him being in love with Miss Birdseye. We knew he was in love with her because he always gave her the best bits of meat at lunch when it was his turn to do the serving. And when she smiled at him he would smile back at her in the soppiest way you can imagine, showing all his front teeth, top and bottom, and most of the others as well.
A teacher called Captain Lancaster took the nine-and ten-year-olds and this year that included me. Captain Lancaster, known sometimes as Lankers, was a horrid man. He had fiery carrot-coloured hair and a little clipped carrotty moustache and a fiery temper. Carrotty-coloured hairs were also sprouting out of his nostrils and his earholes. He had been a captain in the army during the war against Hitler and that was why he still called himself Captain Lancaster instead of just plain Mister. My father said it was an idiotic thing to do. There were millions of people still alive, he said, who had fought in that war, but most of them wanted to forget the whole beastly thing, especially those crummy military titles. Captain Lancaster was a violent man, and we were all terrified of him. He used to sit at his desk stroking his carrotty moustache and watching us with pale watery-blue eyes, searching for trouble. And as he sat there, he would make queer snuffling grunts through his nose, like some dog sniffing round a rabbit hole.
Mr Snoddy, our headmaster, took the top form, the eleven-year-olds, and everybody liked him. He was a small round man with a huge scarlet nose. I felt sorry for him having a nose like that. It was so big and inflamed it looked as though it might explode at any moment and blow him up.
A funny thing about Mr Snoddy was that he always brought a glass of water with him into class, and this he kept sipping right through the lesson. At least everyone thought it was a glass of water. Everyone, that is, except me and my best friend, Sidney Morgan. We knew differently, and this is how we found out. My father looked after Mr Snoddy's car and I always took his repair bills with me to school to save postage. One day during break I went to Mr Snoddy's study to give him a bill and Sidney Morgan came along with me. He didn't come for any special reason. We just happened to be together at the time. And as we went in, we saw Mr Snoddy standing by his desk refilling his famous glass of water from a bottle labelled Gordon's Gin. He jumped a mile when he saw us.
'You should have knocked,' he said, sliding the bottle behind a pile of books.
'I'm sorry, sir,' I said. 'I brought my father's bill.'
'Ah,' he said. 'Yes. Very well. And what do you want, Sidney?'
'Nothing, sir,' Sidney Morgan said. 'Nothing at all.'
'Off you go, then, both of you,' Mr Snoddy said, keeping his hand on the bottle behind the books. 'Run along.'
Outside in the corridor, we made a pact that we wouldn't tell any of the other children about what we had seen. Mr Snoddy had always been kind to us and we wanted to repay him by keeping his deep dark secret to ourselves.
The only person I told was my father, and when he heard it, he said, 'I don't blame him one bit. If I was unlucky enough to be married to Mrs Snoddy, I would drink something a bit stronger than gin.'
'What would you drink, Dad?'
'Poison,' he said. 'She's a frightful woman.'
'Why is she frightful?' I asked.
'She's a sort of witch,' he said. 'And to prove it, she has seven toes on each foot.'
'How do you know that?' I asked.
'Doc Spencer told me,' my father answered. And then to change the subject, he said, 'Why don't you ever ask Sidney Morgan over here to play?'
Ever since I started going to school, my father had tried to encourage me to bring my friends back to the filling-station for tea or supper. And every year, about a week before my birthday, he would say, 'Let's have a party this time, Danny. We can write out invitations and I'll go into the village and buy chocolate eclairs and doughnuts and a huge birthday cake with candles on it.'
But I always said no to these suggestions and I never invited any other children to come to my home after school or at weekends. That wasn't because I didn't have good friends. I had lots of them. Some of them were super friends, especially Sidney Morgan. Perhaps if I had lived in the same street as some of them instead of way out in the country, things would have been different. But then again, perhaps they wouldn't. You see, the real reason I didn't want anyone else to come back and play with me was because I had such a good time being alone with my father.
By the way, something horrible happened on that Thursday morning after my father had left me at the school gate and gone off to buy the raisins. We were having our first lesson of the day with Captain Lancaster, and he had set us a whole bunch of multiplication sums to work out in our exercise books. I was sitting next to Sidney Morgan in the back row, and we were both slogging away. Captain Lancaster sat up front at his desk, gazing suspiciously round the class with his watery-blue eyes. And even from the back row I could hear him snorting and snuffling through his nose like a dog outside a rabbit hole.
Sidney Morgan covered his mouth with his hand and whispered very softly to me, 'What are eight nines?'
'Seventy-two,' I whispered back.
Captain Lancaster's ringer shot out like a bullet and pointed straight at my face. 'You!' he shouted. 'Stand up!'
'Me, sir?' I said.
'Yes, you, you blithering little idiot!'
I stood up.
'You were talking!' he barked. 'What were you saying?' He was shouting at me as though I was a platoon of soldiers on the parade ground. 'Come on, boy! Out with it!'
I stood still and said nothing.
'Are you refusing to answer me?' he shouted.
'Please, sir,' Sidney said. 'It was my fault. I asked him a question.'
'Oh, you did, did you? Stand up!'
Sidney stood up beside me.
'And what exactly did you ask him?' Captain Lancaster said, speaking more quietly now and far more dangerously.
'I asked him what are eight nines,' Sidney said.
And I suppose you answered him?' Captain Lancaster said, pointing at me again. He never called any of us by
our names. It was always 'you' or 'boy' or 'girl' or something like that. 'Did you answer him or didn't you? Speak up, boy!'
'Yes, sir,' I said.
'So you were cheating!' he said. 'Both of you were cheating!'
We kept silent.
'Cheating is a repulsive habit practised by guttersnipes and dandiprats!' he said.
From where I was standing I could see the whole class sitting absolutely rigid, watching Captain Lancaster. Nobody dared move.
'You may be permitted to cheat and lie and swindle in your own homes,' he went on, 'but I will not put up with it here!'
At this point, a sort of blind fury took hold of me and I shouted back at him, 'I am not a cheat!'
There was a fearful silence in the room. Captain Lancaster raised his chin and fixed me with his watery eyes. 'You are not only a cheat but you are insolent,' he said quietly. 'You are a very insolent boy. Come up here. Both of you, come up here.'
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.