Roald Dahl by Danny the Champion of the World (illustrated)

Author:Danny the Champion of the World (illustrated)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-10-05T14:02:07+00:00

Chapter 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.

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