"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 cla.s.s 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 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!" 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 cla.s.s sitting absolutely rigid, watching Captain Lancaster. n.o.body 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.sroom. 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.
From somewhere nearby I heard another fearful swish-crack! swish-crack! and I knew that poor Sidney had just got it as well. and I knew that poor Sidney had just got it as well.
But, oh, that fearful searing burning pain across my hand! Why didn"t it go away? I glanced at Sidney. He was doing just the same as me, squeezing his hand between his legs and making the most awful face.
"Go and sit down, both of you!" Captain Lancaster ordered.
We stumbled back to our desks and sat down.
"Now get on with your work!" the dreaded voice said. "And let us have no more cheating! No more insolence, either!"
The cla.s.s bent their heads over their books like people in church saying their prayers.
I looked at my hand. There was a long ugly mark about half an inch wide running right across the palm just where the fingers joined the hand. It was raised up in the middle and the raised part was pure white, with red on both sides. I moved the fingers. They moved all right, but it hurt to move them. I looked at Sidney. He gave me a quick apologetic glance under his eyelids, then went back to his sums.
When I got home from school that afternoon, my father was in the workshop. "I"ve bought the raisins," he said. "We will now put them in to soak. Fetch me a bowl of water, Danny."
I went over to the caravan and got a bowl and half-filled it with water. I carried it to the workshop and put it on the bench.
"Open up the packets and tip them all in," my father said. This was one of the really nice things about my father. He didn"t take over and want to do everything himself. Whether it was a difficult job like adjusting a carburettor in a big engine, or whether it was simply tipping some raisins into a basin, he always let me go ahead and do it myself while he watched and stood ready to help. He was watching me now as I opened the first packet of raisins.
"Hey!" he cried, grabbing my left wrist. "What"s happened to your hand?"
"It"s nothing," I said, clenching the fist.
He made me open it up. The long scarlet mark lay across my palm like a burn.
"Who did it?" he shouted. "Was it Captain Lancaster?"
"Yes, Dad, but it"s nothing."
"What happened?" He was gripping my wrist so hard it almost hurt. "Tell me exactly what happened!"
I told him everything. He stood there holding my wrist, his face going whiter and whiter, and I could see the fury beginning to boil up dangerously inside him.
"I"ll kill him! he softly whispered when I had finished. he softly whispered when I had finished. "I swear I"ll kill him!" "I swear I"ll kill him!" His eyes were blazing, and all the colour had gone from his face. I had never seen him look like that before. His eyes were blazing, and all the colour had gone from his face. I had never seen him look like that before.
"Forget it, Dad."
"I will not forget it!" he said. "You did nothing wrong and he had absolutely no right to do this to you. So he called you a cheat, did he?"
I nodded.
He had taken his jacket from the peg on the wall and was putting it on.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"I am going straight to Captain Lancaster"s house and I"m going to beat the daylights out of him."
"No!" I cried, catching hold of his arm. "Don"t do it, Dad, please! It won"t do any good! Please don"t do it!"
"I"ve got to," he said.
"No!" I cried, tugging at his arm. "It"ll ruin everything! It"ll only make it worse! Please forget it!"
He hesitated then. I held on to his arm. He was silent, and I could see the rush of anger slowly draining out of his face.
"It"s revolting," he said.
"I"ll bet they did it to you when you were at school," I said.
"Of course they did."
"And I"ll bet your dad didn"t go rushing off to beat the daylights out of the teacher who did it."
He looked at me but kept quiet.
"He didn"t, did he, Dad?"
"No, Danny, he didn"t," he answered softly.
I let go of his arm and helped him off with his jacket and hung it back on the peg.
"I"m going to put the raisins in now," I said. "And don"t forget that tomorrow I have a nasty cold and I won"t be going to school."
"Yes," he said. "That"s right."
"We"ve got two hundred raisins to fill," I said.
Ah," he said. "So we have."
"I hope we"ll get them done in time," I said.
"Does it still hurt?" he asked. "That hand."
"No," I said. "Not one bit."
I think that satisfied him. And although I saw him glancing occasionally at my palm during the rest of the afternoon and evening, he never mentioned the subject again.
That night he didn"t tell me a story. He sat on the edge of my bunk and we talked about what was going to happen the next day up in Hazell"s Wood. He got me so steamed up and excited about it, I couldn"t get to sleep. I think he must have got himself steamed up almost as much because after he had undressed and climbed into his own bunk, I heard him twisting and turning all over the place. He couldn"t get to sleep either.
At about ten-thirty, he climbed out of his bunk and put the kettle on.
"What"s the matter, Dad?"
"Nothing," he said. "Shall we have a midnight feast?"
"Yes, let"s do that."
He lit the lamp in the ceiling and opened a tin of tuna and made a delicious sandwich for each of us. Also hot chocolate for me, and tea for him. Then we started talking about the pheasants and about Hazell"s Wood all over again.
It was pretty late before we got to sleep.
13.
Friday When my father woke me at six o"clock next morning, I knew at once that this was the day of days. It was the day I longed for and the day I dreaded. It was also the day of b.u.t.terflies in the stomach except that they were worse than b.u.t.terflies. They were snakes. I had snakes in the stomach the moment I opened my eyes on that Friday morning.
The first thing I did after I had got dressed was to hang the SORRY CLOSED notice on one of the pumps. We had a quick breakfast, then the two of us sat down together at the table in the caravan to prepare the raisins. They were plump and soft and swollen from being soaked in water, and when you nicked them with a razor-blade the skin sprang open and the jelly stuff inside squeezed out as easily as you could wish.
I slit the raisins while my father opened the capsules. He opened only one at a time and poured the white powder on to a piece of paper. Then he divided it into four tiny piles with the blade of a knife. Each pile was carefully scooped up and put into a single raisin. A needle and black cotton finished the job. The sewing up was the hardest part, and my father did most of that. It took about two minutes to do one raisin from start to finish. I enjoyed it. It was fun.
"Your mother was wonderful at sewing things," my father said. "She"d have had these raisins done in no time."
I didn"t say anything. I never knew quite what to say when he talked about my mother.
"Did you know she used to make all my clothes herself, Danny? Everything I wore."
"Even socks and sweaters?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "But those were knitted. And so quickly! When she was knitting, the needles flew so fast in her fingers you couldn"t see them. They were just a blur. I would sit here in the evening watching her and she used to talk about the children she was going to have. "I shall have three children," she used to say. "A boy for you, a girl for me and one for good measure." "
There was a short silence after that. Then I said, "When Mum was here, Dad, did you go out very often at night or was it only now and then?"
"You mean poaching?"