After r. Dahl

Mr Victor Hazell was rich beyond words, and his property stretched for miles along either side of the valley. All the land around us belonged to him, everything on either side of the road, everything except the small patch of ground on which the filling station stood. That patch belonged to my father. It was a little island in the middle of the vast ocean of Mr Hazell's property. Mr Victor Hazell was a snob and he tried desperately to get on with what he believed were the right kind of folk. He hunted with the hounds and gave shooting parties. And every weekend he drove his enormous silver Rolls-Royce past our filling station on his way to the factory.

"No," my father used to say, "I do not like Mr Victor Hazell one little bit. I haven't forgotten the way he spoke to you last year when he came in for a fill-up."

I haven't forgotten it either. Mr Hazell had arrived in his expensive Rolls-Royce and had said to me, "Fill her up and look sharp about it." I was eight years old at the time. He didn't get out of the car, he just handed me the key to the cap of the gasoline tank and as he did so, he barked out, "And keep your filthy little hands to yourself, you understand?" I didn't understand at all, so I said, "What do you mean, sir?"

There was a walking stick on the seat. He picked it up and pointed it at me like a pistol. "If you spoil my car, I'll beat you up," he shouted.

My father was out of the workshop almost before Mr Hazell had finished speaking. He came up to the window of the car and placed his hands on it. "I don't like you speaking to my son like that," he said. His voice was danger­ously soft. "You had no reason to threaten him," my father went on. "He had done nothing wrong. Next time you threaten someone why don't you pick on a person your own size," my father said. "Like me, for instance."

Mr Hazell did not look at him. He sat quite still in the seat of his Rolls-Royce, his tiny piggy eyes staring straight ahead.

"Now go away, please," my father said. "We do not wish to serve you." He took the key from my hand and threw it through the window. The Rolls-Royce drove away fast in a cloud of dust. A silence fell between us. "I'll 'tell you something interesting," my father said at last. "The shooting season starts on Saturday. It always starts on the first of October," he said. "And every year Mr Hazell celebrates the day by giving a big shooting party. It is a very famous event, Danny, that shooting party of Mr Hazell's."

"Do lots of people come?" I asked.

"Hundreds," he said. "They come from miles around. Dukes and lords, bar­ons and baronets, rich businessmen, and all important folk in the country. They come with their guns and their dogs and their wives, and all day long the noise of shooting is heard across the valley. But they don't come because they like Mr Hazell. Secretly they all despise him."

"Then why do they come, dad?"

"Because it's the best pheasant shoot in the South of England, that's why they come. But to Mr Hazell it's the greatest day in the year because it makes him feel important. For one day in the year he becomes a big cheese in a little world and even the Duke of so-and-so tries to remember his first name when he says goodbye. So he is willing to pay almost anything to make it a success. He spends a fortune on those pheasants. Each summer he buys hundreds of young birds from the pheasant farm and puts them in the wood where the keepers feed them, and it's a deadly secret, Danny." My father looked carefully all around him.

"I would like," he whispered, "to find a way of getting so many pheasants from Hazell's wood that there would not be any left for the big opening-day shoot on October the first."

"Dad!" I cried. "No!"

"Ssshh," he said. "Listen. Just imagine, Danny," he went on, "what a triumph, what a glorious victory that would be! All the dukes and lords and famous men would arrive in their big cars and then out they would all go with their guns under their arms — and they would take up their positions in the famous wood — and there wouldn't be a single pheasant to be found anywhere! And Mr Victor Hazell's face would be redder (than a boiled beetroot! Now wouldn't that be the most amazing and beautiful things if we could pull it off, Danny!"

COME AWAY, COME AWAY!