Summary
Narrated in the past tense by Danny, the novel’s first-person narrator and protagonist, Danny the Champion of the World opens with Danny commenting that his mother died when he was four months old. He is an only child, raised by his father. They live in a caravan behind a filling station where Danny’s father repairs cars and fills them with petrol (gasoline). Danny is never unhappy, and his father treats him with love. The filling-station workshop is modest, big enough for one car.
Danny spends all day helping his father fix things. The caravan they live in is over a hundred and fifty years old. Danny’s father tells him that many gipsy children were born and raised in it. It was pulled by a horse all over England. Now its wooden wheels are rotten and Danny’s father props it up on bricks. It has no electricity, and they go to the toilet in a freezing cold outhouse. Danny loves the caravan, and the cozy feeling of going to sleep while his father tells stories to him from a chair.
Danny explains that his father is marvelous and exciting. He is wildly funny. His eyes twinkle when he smiles. His smiles can’t be faked like mouth smiles. Although he is uneducated and not a reader, Danny’s father is a talented storyteller. One story Danny recalls is about the Big Friendly Giant, who “makes his magic powders out of the dreams that children dream when they are asleep.”
When Danny is five, his father decides not to send him to school yet. He wants to train Danny to become an engineer, and before sending him to school he wants to keep showing Danny mechanics for two years. By seven, Danny can take apart a small engine on his own. Danny begins school nearby, and his father insists on walking him there and back. Together they make a kite out of old shirts and string. They watch it soar from the hill behind the filling station. They tie it to an apple tree and it stays aloft all night. Danny has fun being eight, but expects nine will be more fun. He says his ninth year is more exciting, “but not all of it was exactly what you would call fun.”
At nine, Danny learns his father is not perfect. He is complicated and has secrets, like all grownups. Danny discovers his father’s secret on a Saturday evening in September. He wakes up to find his father isn’t in the caravan, so Danny panics and goes searching the moonlit fields. He sits and tries to listen. Eventually, he hears footsteps. His father appears, then takes him back to the caravan to confess that he routinely travels six and a half miles to Hazell’s Wood to poach pheasants. Danny says he means stealing. His father says, “Poaching is an art. A great poacher is a great artist.”
Danny is shocked. He learns his grandfather was a great poacher both for sport and out of the need to put food on the table. Danny’s father describes the excitement of poaching, when you know the woods are full of keepers who might shoot at you. His grandfather used to pick bullets out of his bottom at night. Danny’s father explains that the rich hunt pheasants in their woods for sport, and hire keepers to monitor the grounds for poachers. He says poachers don’t use guns because it would attract the keepers. Danny’s grandfather developed secret methods, such as soaking raisins, threading a horse hair in them, and then simply picking up the pheasants when the raisins get stuck in their throats. The Sticky Hat involves putting glue and raisins in a paper cone so the pheasant unwittingly gets its eyes covered when it stands up from eating. Having no vision, for some reason, immobilizes the bird.
Danny’s father says tonight is the first time he went out in nine years. He wanted to make sure Danny was old enough to be left alone. He promises Danny that he will tell him before he goes poaching again. Danny asks that he be taken along when he is old enough.
Danny explains that Mr. Hazell owns a brewery. All the surrounding land, aside from the patch on which their filling station stands, is Hazell’s property. Hazell is pink as a ham from drinking too much beer. He drives a Rolls-Royce around the estate. He once came for petrol and threatened Danny with a riding crop if he got his grimy hands on the car. Danny’s father suggested he pick on someone his own size, then sent Hazell away without serving him. For weeks after, various inspectors arrived to check on their living conditions, the quality of their petrol, and other things to harass them. Danny understands the pleasure his father gets from poaching from such a person.
Analysis
The opening chapters of Danny, the Champion of the World introduce the novel’s protagonist and narrator, Danny, and his father, William. Simultaneously, Dahl establishes the book’s major themes of father-son bonding, social status, contentment, deception, defiance, and ingenuity.
Living in a disused caravan instead of an actual house, Danny and his father come from an impoverished working-class background. Their lives are also marked by tragedy, with Danny revealing immediately that his mother died suddenly when he was only four months old. Despite this tragedy, and despite their poverty, Danny’s life with his father is full of contentment. While the absence of Danny’s mother is liable to make Danny’s father preoccupied with grief, instead Danny’s father “lavishes” Danny with all the love that otherwise would have gone to Danny’s mother.
The theme of ingenuity—the quality of being inventive and clever—enters the story when Danny comments on how he learns to fix cars from the beginning of his life. By five years old, Danny is likely the most highly skilled pre-school-age child mechanic in the world. When not tinkering with engines, Danny and his father craft things like kites and fire-balloons from the cheap materials available to them. Lacking the financial means to buy very much, they use their ingenuity to stay entertained.
The humble, quotidian story of father-son bonding takes a turn when Danny is nine years old and learns that his father has a long history of poaching pheasants from the wealthy, villainous Mr. Hazell. Having learned this secret, Danny understands that his father, like all adults, has his secrets and imperfections. However, Danny’s moral reaction—that poaching is no different than stealing, and that stealing is wrong—changes as his father explains their family and community tradition of poaching kept animals from wealthy landowners.
Danny’s own grandfather was a master poacher who discovered he could exploit pheasants’ natural affinity for raisins. With this folk knowledge, Danny’s grandfather developed ingenious methods for undermining the authority of local landowners. It shocks Danny to learn his own grandfather was a master deceiver, yet he is excited to be initiated into the world of poaching himself. In the fifth chapter, Dahl digresses to establish the villainous figure of Mr. Hazell, the landowner from whom Danny and his father will steal. Describing Hazell in unflattering terms, Dahl ensures the reader will be on Danny’s and his father’s side when they execute their master deception.
