Bunk beds and beech woods
This post is part of a series revisiting my favourite childhood reads.
It’s early summer in Ennerdale, the Lake District’s most remote valley. In the Field Centre a group of excited primary school children are being settled for bed. The teacher sets up a chair in the corridor within sight of both the girls’ and boys’ dorms. They open the book that back at school they’ve been reading at the end of each day and begin…
*****
The book was Roald Dahl’s ‘Danny the Champion of the World’ and it’s the thing I remember with most clarity about my primary school residential. We were less than ten miles away from home, a small village between the sea and the lake. The Field Centre website describes Ennerdale as ‘England's remotest, quietest and least inhabited valley’. Ennerdale Water and the River Liza sit in a wooded landscape that has, since 2003, been home to Wild Ennerdale, a large scale rewilding project with a vision to “Allow the evolution of Ennerdale as a wild valley for the benefit of people, relying more on natural processes to shape its landscape and ecology.”
Today Ennerdale is home to red squirrels, England’s only migratory population of Arctic Char, an expanding population of Marsh Fritillary butterflies and birds like snipe and wheatears. It’s also an accredited Dark Sky Discovery site, with some of the clearest night skies in the country. The valley floor has provided some of the best Bronze Age and domestic medieval archaeology in the Lake District. Back in the late 1980s, at the time of the residential, the rewilding project had yet to begin but the sense of a place set apart was already there.
As a writer I’m slightly frustrated that I can’t remember the details of being immersed in nature. I wish I could say I remember what we scooped out of the water, whether the nets were full of boatmen or beetles; if the damp shingle glistened at the river’s edge, whether the sunlit air was full of pine or hay. I wish I could say I remember dippers or woodpeckers, the gauzy wings of darters and damselflies, the dot to dot of the plough in the ink black sky, whether the shoreline’s lapping scored our dreams. But I can’t. Not really. The tug comes from bunk beds and being told a story, so I remember the pheasants and the wood, raisins stuffed and stitched, kites and caravans, and rivers filled with trout. I’m certain we went pond dipping, pretty sure we did some orienteering in the woods. There was a smell to the Field Centre that I can still conjure up but I can’t put my finger on what it was or find a way to describe it that makes sense.
So I go back to Danny.
Roald Dahl is an author whose reputation has taken something of battering in recent years, deservedly criticised for anti-Semitism and the misogyny and stereotypes in some of his writing. He’s also often described as a cruel writer, something that I suspect has probably bothered his young readers less than his adult ones. Dahl was born in Wales to Norwegian parents, he served in the RAF during the Second World War and lived in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire from 1960 until his death in 1990. The landscape of the Chilterns around his adopted home plays a major role in ‘Danny the Champion of the World’, with its rolling hills, farmland, chalk streams and ancient beech woods. It’s a gentler landscape than the one of Cumbrian fells that I knew at Danny’s age (he’s nine for most of the book, and I was nine or thereabouts at the time of the residential) but Danny reaches out from the pages and talks to the young reader or listener directly, guiding them and me into this new world.
The plot is relatively straightforward. Danny and his dad live in a caravan next to their filling station. Danny discovers his dad has a secret, he (and apparently most of the village) poaches pheasants from the woods belonging to the rich and unpleasant Mr Hazell. They hatch a plot to steal as many pheasants as possible from the wood on the eve of the biggest shoot of the year using a cunning plan devised by Danny. They stuff raisins with sleeping pills, the pheasants eat them, fall to the ground and are collected up. The astute reader (of which I don’t think I was one) may notice the flaw in the plan, and sure enough most of the birds wake up the following day but Mr Hazell is still left fuming as they happily fly off in the opposite direction to the woods, thus living to fight another day. Six birds are left to be shared among the key players in the adventure.
Rereading it recently, it seems to me to be one of Dahl’s warmer books. Danny and his dad have a loving relationship, his dad talks to Danny about Danny’s mother fondly (she died when Danny was a baby) and Danny’s desire to share their pheasant supper with the Doctor and his wife show a generous nature. So far so good. It’s not a book without critics though. It is dated, corporal punishments, village policemen and children messing about with engines when they should be at school may baffle young readers today, but probably not for long. Women are relegated to doctor’s and vicar’s wives or barely mentioned school teachers. However, the two biggest criticisms tend to be that it teaches children that theft is OK and that it glamourises hunting. These are worth delving into. Danny himself is initially appalled.
I was shocked. My own father a thief! This gentle lovely man! I couldn’t believe he would go creeping into the woods at night to pinch valuable birds belonging to somebody else.
The defence is that previous generations needed food to feed their families. Danny rightly points out that this doesn’t apply to them. There’s a critique of the cost of rearing birds for shooting and the shooting parties held by Hazell, but ultimately his dad has to confess to a love of the sport, the thrill of the adventure, which is a risky business. The astute reader might here pause and ask whether the risk to a single father of being shot and / or arrested was really worth taking but Dahl moves us quickly on. The plan for the pheasants, if all 120 had stayed drugged, was to distribute them amongst the villagers, sharing the loot, and I think the echoes of Robin Hood narratives are deliberate here. Where you stand on the moral question of stealing from the rich to feed the poor(er) will determine how you read the book. Glamourising hunting is an odder criticism, shooting parties are roundly critiqued, as are the pretensions of Hazell to enter the county set. There’s a delight in the spectacle of most of the birds escaping and flying away to safety, and a sense that it’s fair that they finish with just enough birds for their own pots. It’s probably never going to appeal to hard core vegetarians (there’s too much about the joys of roasted pheasant for one thing) but it is honest about how game gets to the plate.
In between the praise for Dahl’s portrayal of the father / son relationship and criticisms of the portrayal of poaching, his writing about the countryside and nature seems to get overlooked. As his dad walks him to school, Danny learns about the world around him. “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.” He is taught to look but not touch. Possibly a more important lesson for children than any they might absorb about poaching. There are wildflowers, trees, grasses, weasels, crickets, skylarks, bullfrogs and butterflies. Danny describes watching a sparrowhawk:
It seemed to be suspended by some invisible thread, like a toy bird hanging from the ceiling. Then suddenly it folded its wings and plummeted towards the earth at an incredible speed.
The pheasants too are beautifully described: “The cocks were slim and elegant, with long tails and brilliant red patches round the eyes like scarlet spectacles.”
The landscape of the filling station is concisely delineated as ‘a small country road surrounded by fields and woody hills.’ We know where we are and what there is to see if we look.
In a twist that I wouldn’t have seen coming at the age of nine, I now live in Bedfordshire which is home to the northernmost tip of the Chilterns. Its chalk landscape is something I write about from time to time at work, encouraging readers to get out and explore its hills, beech woods, meadows, ancient hill forts and barrows. Reading it now, I can put flesh on the descriptions that Dahl offers, but for me ‘Danny the Champion of the World’ will forever be associated with the Field Centre and a remote Cumbrian valley. If that’s not testament to the power of reading aloud, I don’t know what is.
*****
“The three-quarter moon was well above the hills now, and the sky was filled with stars as we climbed back over the gate and began walking up the track towards the wood.” ‘But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happens next...’
As a former primary school teacher, I love to hear the impact that your residential and read aloud had on you, even after all these years! Working through storybooks with my classes was one of my most favourite parts of teaching - seeing how they’d be captivated by the worlds we would escape to each day…! And Roald Dahl was always, always always, the first book we would read (Esio Trot) at the start of the year 🥰