Danny the Champion of the World

Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World is a warm father and son story for 8 year olds about the night Danny finds out what his dad does after dark.

What happens

Danny and his father live in an old gipsy caravan behind a two-pump filling station. One room. Two bunks. A wood stove, a paraffin lamp and no electricity, because the electricity people said the caravan was far too rickety for wires.

The lavatory is a wooden hut out in the field. In winter, Danny says, it is like sitting in a fridge.

His father is a mechanic, and by Danny's account the most marvellous man who ever lived. He smiles with his eyes rather than his mouth, which Danny reckons is the only kind of smile nobody can fake.

The first stretch of the book is just the two of them being happy, and it is lovely. They build a kite from an old blue shirt and leave it flying all night. They make a fire balloon from tissue paper and chase it across the fields in the dark. There is a tree house, a boomerang, and a soap box cart called Soapo with a proper brake pedal.

Danny does not start school until he is seven, because his father wants him to be able to strip an engine first. By then he can.

Then he turns nine. One night he wakes at ten past eleven and his father is not in the bunk above him.

That stretch is properly tense. A small boy in pyjamas with a torch, checking the workshop, the office, the lavatory. Then sitting on the caravan steps with a blanket round him for hours in the dark, listening.

His father comes back and tells him the secret. He has been six and a half miles away in Hazell's Wood, poaching pheasants, and he has been at it since he was ten, and his own father before him.

What Danny feels first is shock. My own father a thief. What he feels ten minutes later, over cocoa and a jam sandwich at midnight, is a great deal closer to thrilled.

A few things are worth flagging at this age. The very first line says Danny's mother died when he was four months old, which is stated plainly and then left alone. The poaching talk takes in keepers with shotguns who will pepper a running man in the legs, and a grandfather having the pellets dug out of his backside with a potato knife. It is all played for laughs and Danny does laugh, but it is guns.

The pleasure is the talk between the two of them, and talk needs patience.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who enjoys watching a clever thief at work, Fantastic Mr Fox is shorter and much faster, with three horrible farmers camped in the dark with their guns trained on a hole in a hill.