The Captive Reader

I reread Danny: The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl this afternoon for the first time in I don’t know how many years.  To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I read anything by Dahl and that upsets me a bit because when I was little, before I learned to read for myself, there was no author whose works were more familiar to me.  Before I came to know all the inhabitants of Avonlea intimately, before I had heard tell of the March sisters, even before I learned the directions to Neverland, I had half memorized (entirely memorized, in the case of Esio Trot) the works of Roald Dahl.

I don’t know why my father gravitated towards Dahl’s works.  Perhaps he had read James and the Giant Peach (published in 1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) in his childhood but our favourite books, the ones we went back to over and over and over again (like most children, I adored repetition), were books published when he was an adult and which we got to discover together: The BFG (1982), Esio Trot (1989), and Danny, the Champion of the World (1975).

Danny, for those who didn’t have the pleasure of meeting him either as children or adults, is a young boy who lives in a caravan with his father behind the filling station that his father owns and runs.  His mother died when he was only a few months old and so Danny’s entire life has revolved around his wonderful, amazing father.  He teaches Danny how to fix cars, showers him with love, and tells the best bedtime stories (including the story of the BFG).  Danny makes his feelings about his father quite clear from the beginning: “My father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had.”

When he is nine years old, Danny learns his father’s deep, dark secret: he is a poacher.  Or rather, he was before Danny was born – having been trained by his own father – but, now that Danny is older, is hoping to take it up again.  Especially since the local landowner Mr Hazell, an odious nouveau riche type who guards his pheasants and sneers at the locals, so thoroughly deserves to have his birds poached.  Danny, like any young boy, is intrigued.  When his father decides, on the eve of the big hunt, that Mr Hazell really deserves to be embarrassed in front of all his rich and important guests who hate their host but come for the excellent shooting, it is Danny who comes up with the cunning scheme which, when successfully carried out, makes him the Pheasant Poaching Champion of the World.

Dahl knew what he was doing when writing for children.  There is the stereotypical bad guy – Mr Hazell – but I think part of what makes this book so clever is how Danny slowly learns more about all of the adults in his life, whether it be his father, the village doctor, the local policeman, or even the vicar’s wife!  When you are little, these figures seem so distant and unapproachable and Dahl captures the moment of transition perfectly, when the child awakens to the fact that adults are people too and surprisingly complex ones at that.

But really, this book is entirely about Danny and his father.  Danny’s father is the parent all children wish for at one time or another.  All his attention and all his love belongs to Danny.  He makes a wonderful cosy home for them, shares all he knows about the natural world with his inquisitive son, and, most of all, he is fun to be with.  He lets Danny drive cars around the filling station, lays out midnight feasts when they can’t sleep at night, and just enjoys himself to the fullest.  He is daring and enthusiastic – without being reckless – and never happier than when sharing an adventure with his son.

It is suiting then that my memories of this book are mostly of my father.  The story had faded in my mind – though I did remember Danny’s ingenious poaching plan in stunning detail – but I have never forgotten being tucked into bed and listening to my father read this to me.  And every time he read it, because my father is not the kind of man who can tell a story once if he can tell it a dozen times, he would tell me about his grandfather, who, before coming to Canada, was a gamekeeper on an estate in Berkshire, responsible for keeping poachers like Danny and his father away from the pheasants.  And then he would tell me about his own childhood summers spent staying on his grandfather’s farm and so my bedtime stories turned into tales worthy of Danny’s father and, like Danny, I hung on every word.