Form 8. Reading comprehention test. Danny's story (after Roald Dahl)

Danny’s story (after Roald Dahl)

When I was four months old, my mother died.

I had no brothers or sisters.

So all my boyhood, from the age of four months, there were just two of us, my father and me.

We lived in an old gypsy caravan.

My father owned the filling station and the caravan, that was about all he owned in the world.

It was a very small filling station on a small country road with fields and woody hills around it.

While I was still a baby, my father washed me and fed me, pushed me in my pram to the doctor and did all the millions of other things a mother normally does for her child.

That is not an easy task for a man, especially when he has to earn his living at the same time.

But my father was a cheerful man.

I thinks that he gave me all the live he had felt for my mother when she was alive.

We were very close.

During my early years, I never had a moments unhappiness, and here I am on my fifth birthday.

I was a little boy as you can see, with dirt and oil all over me, but that was because I spent all day in the workshop helping my father with the cars.

The workshop was stone building.

My father built that himself with loving care.

We are engineers, you and I, he said to me.

We earn our living by repairing engines and we can't do good work in a bad workshop.

It was a fine workshop, big enough to take one car comfortably.

The caravan was our house and our home.

My father said it was at least one hundred and fifty years old.

Many gipsy children, he said, he been born in it and had grown up within its wooden walls.

Different people had knocked at its doors, different people had lived in it.

But now its best years were over.

There was only one room in the caravan, and it wasn't much bigger than a modern bathroom.

Although we had electric lights in the workshop, we were not allowed to have them in the caravan as it was dangerous.

So we got our heat and light in the same way as the gypsies had done years ago.

There was a wood-burning stove that kept us warm in winter and there were candles in candlesticks.

I think that the stew cooked by my father is the best thing I've ever tasted.

One plate was never enough.

For furniture, we had two narrow beds, two chairs and a small table covered with a tablecloth and some bowls, plates, cups, forks and spoons on it.

Those were all the home comforts we had.

They were all we needed.

I really lived living in that gypsy caravan.

I lived the evenings when I was in my bed and my father was telling stories.

I was happy because I was sure that when I went to sleep my father would still be there, very close to me, sitting in his chair by the fire.

My father, without any doubt, was the most wonderful and exciting father any boy ever had.

Here is a picture of him.

You may think, if you don't know him well, that he was a serous man.

He wasn't.

He was actually full of fun.

What made him look so serious and sometimes sad was the fact that he never smiled with his mouth.

He did it all with his eyes.

He had bright blue eyes and when he thought of something funny, you could see a golden light dancing in the middle of each eye.

But the mouth never moved.

My father was not what you would call an educated man.

I doubt he had read many books in his life.

But he was an excellent storyteller.

He promised to make up a bedtime story for me every time I asked him.

He always kept his promise.

The best stories were turned into serials and went on many nights running.