by John Pearson
Since his brother left, Biggles had no European friends of his own age. After the disappearance of his mother, he must have felt that all the Europeans were inquisitive or pitying, so he avoided them and kept his secrets to himself. The few friends he had, he found among the local Indian boys; his favourite was a boy called Sula Dowla, son of an assistant overseer at a nearby tea estate. He was a bright boy, who spoke perfect English and who was flattered when the son of Biggles Sahib became his friend.
For Biggles, this was an important friendship, for Sula Dowla led a gang of other small Indian boys, a raggle-taggle lot, who used to haunt the bazaars, stealing what they could, and waging war on gangs from other districts. Biggles became an honorary member. He spoke Hindi perfectly, was up to any mischief going and, though undersized, could out-wrestle and outrun every member of the gang. He also soon began to organise them. He explained to Sula Dowla that as the son of Biggles Sahib, he could not countenance their criminal activities. Sula Dowla pulled a rueful face and said that his members did it merely for fun. Biggles replied that it would simply lead to trouble and was stupid. It would be far more fun to organise the gang on a proper basis, impose strict discipline on all its members, and plan their forays on the other gangs on sound military principles.
This was Biggles’ first experience of warfare, and from the start he showed a sort of genius for it. He was a daring leader who carefully rehearsed his followers before each campaign. One of their earliest successes was a night-time raid on the headquarters of their deadliest enemies, the much stronger ‘Buffalo Gang’, who had set up camp in a deserted warehouse on the outskirts of the town. Biggles planned the whole attack meticulously, spending several days on what he called ‘intelligence’, sending out members of his gang to watch the warehouse, trailing the leading ‘Buffaloes’ around the town, and finding out which nights the warehouse was inhabited. He and Sula Dowla also spent much time on ‘tactics’, planning the line of their attack, choosing their weapons, and also planning how to meet the enemy when they retaliated — as they surely would.
Biggles would long remember that first ‘battle’ of his life — assembling his ‘troops’, giving each of them his final orders, and then the excitement of the surprise attack. Biggles knew that they had little chance of beating the ‘Buffaloes’ by sheer brute force — they were too big and numerous for that. Instead, he was relying on a secret weapon to bring terror to the enemy. A few days earlier he had asked his father for some fireworks and papier-mâché masks for Guy Fawkes day. (Although they were in India, Biggles’ father was always keen to celebrate the festivals that he had known in England.) His father had agreed, but Biggles had an idea for a special Guy Fawkes celebration of his own. He gave each member of the gang a Guy Fawkes mask, whilst he and Sula Dowla took charge of the loudest of the fireworks. Then they all crept towards the warehouse.
For a while they lay in wait, and then at Biggles’ signal every boy began a fearful wailing. The racket was enough to wake the dead, and while it was at its height, Biggles and Sula Dowla lit the fireworks and lobbed them through the warehouse windows. Then, as the first of them exploded, Biggles and Sula Dowla led the charge, waving their wooden swords and screaming like banshees. But it was probably the Guy Fawkes masks that did the trick. The sight of them was too much for the ‘Buffaloes’ and they fled, leaving their camp to Biggles and his small victorious gang.
This was the beginning of a whole series of successful ‘wars’ which Biggles and Sula waged: but although Biggles seems to have enjoyed the planning and organising of what he called the gang’s ‘intelligence section’, there were times when he grew bored with the little town and tired of his friends. When these moods took him he would long to be away and would dream of travelling — across the hills and the far-off Himalayas to the north and on to China, or westwards to Bombay and then across the seas to Africa. The only books he read were books of travel and the only adult who remotely understood him was one of his father’s few real friends, the legendary white hunter, Captain Lovell of the Indian Army.
Lovell, by all accounts, was an extraordinary character, a short, fat, dumpy little man with a glaring eye and a bristling red moustache. In youth he had been known as a great shikari, with countless tigers to his credit and a reputation for extrordinary toughness. (At Kaziranga, in Assam, he was once badly mauled by a tiger, left in a swamp for dead, and reappeared some three days later, dragging the tiger’s skin behind him. ‘I got the brute’ was all he said before collapsing.)
This was a story that appealed to Biggles, and although the Captain was now past his prime and living on his pension in Mirapore, near Garhwal, he became the first of Biggles’ boyhood heroes. Biggles used to call him ‘Skipper’, and the old hunter, who apparently liked nothing more than talking about himself, seems to have done a lot to teach him his earliest philosophy of life. Biggles once asked him if he had ever known fear.
‘Course I have, boy,’ the old hunter answered. ‘Only a damn fool doesn’t feel afraid when faced with death. But it’s the man who is afraid, yet faces up to it, who deserves a royal salute. That’s the true test of courage, James my lad. Such men are gold, pure gold.’
Biggles remembered that. He was also impressed by Captain Lovell’s admiration for what he termed ‘gameness’ in a man.
‘Doesn’t much matter, James my boy, whether you win or lose as long as you’re really game until the end. Gameness is what distinguishes the men from the boys, when the chips are down.’
And it was Captain Lovell who instilled in Biggles his own special version of ‘the White Man’s Burden’.
‘Whenever I was really up against it, I would tell myself, “Skipper, old boy, you’re British. And a Britisher is worth two Huns, five Frenchmen and a dozen darkies. So pull yourself together!”’
With sentiments like these to spur him on, Biggles became increasingly demanding of himself. By the time he was seven he had learned to shoot — potting at crows with a small shotgun of his father’s which all but blew his head off when he fired. Now on his expeditions through the local countryside he was rarely without his rifle, and whilst he theoretically believed that hunting for sport was ‘barbarous’ (this was his father’s view), he found enough occasions when wild animals were threatening life and limb to give him an excuse for action.
On one occasion he despatched a rabid pariah-dog which had been threatening the children in a nearby village. Another time he was on hand to deal with a leopard that had been stealing livestock and was threatening an old villager who had tried fruitlessly to scare it off. And on one memorable occasion the boy’s longing for excitement and adventure nearly finished his career for good.
This was the time when the district where he lived was suffering the rare attentions of a man-eating tiger. There had been vague reports about the beast — goats had disappeared, a native woman had been killed some miles away at Delapur, and Captain Lovell had been in his element trying to track it down. Typically, Biggles’ father gave scant attention to these stories. Certainly he did nothing to warn his son about the danger and Biggles had continued his carefree wanderings with Sula Dowla.
Some people naturally attract danger. Biggles did so all his life, and even as a boy the tendency was there. He always said that he had no intention of searching for the tiger — nothing was further from his thoughts. But some mysterious intuition made him take his rifle with him that morning as he strolled to Sula Dowla’s house beyond the tea plantation. And something made him take a short cut home across a stretch of scrubland known as ‘the Plains’. It was on the Plains, emerging from a patch of scrub, that Biggles and the tiger came face to face.
Frequently in later life Biggles would be faced by almost certain death, and every time some instinct of survival seems to have brought him through. It did so now. For the first time he was experiencing that strange clear-headedness in the face of danger which is the hallmark of the man of action. He could smell the rank stench of the animal, see the dull glea
m in its yellow eyes and sense its vicious power. But, to his surprise, he was not afraid. Quite calmly, he considered what to do and found himself repeating some advice old Captain Lovell had once given him. ‘If you surprise a dangerous animal, never run. It’s fatal and you wouldn’t have a hope. Stand absolutely still, stare the beast out, and do your best to show him that you’re not afraid.’
He did this now and for what seemed an age Biggles and the tiger stayed stock still, facing one another. Gradually it seemed that the advice would work. The tiger moved its head away, as if anxious to escape Biggles’ gaze. Its tail dropped and it was on the point of slinking off when Biggles made a terrible mistake. He sneezed. The tiger turned to face him in a flash, growled, crouched back on its haunches and prepared to spring.
There was no question now of simply staring at the beast. The time for action had arrived, and very slowly Biggles raised his rifle to his shoulder, sighting the animal between the eyes. It moved forward, limping slightly, stopped as if still undecided, crouched again, then, uttering a low growl, darted forward. Biggles fired — to no avail. The beast came on. He fired again, still uselessly it seemed, and the tiger was almost on him when he fired straight at its open mouth.
He never knew quite what happened next, for as he closed his eyes and waited for the blow to fall, the tiger uttered one last fearful growl, swerved past him and went bounding off into the shelter of the undergrowth. Then came an anti-climax. Biggles ran home to tell his father of the tiger and of his miraculous escape. But John Henry Bigglesworth seemed unimpressed. Not even a tiger in his own back yard could bring a flicker of excitement to that cold impassive man.
‘Wounded it eh, did you boy? That’s bad. Wounded tiger is the very devil. I’ll send out word so that the people keep well clear of the Plains, and we’ll attend to Mr Tiger in the morning.’
Biggles waited, hoping for praise or possibly some brief paternal sympathy. Even in Garhwal it wasn’t every day a boy of thirteen had an encounter with a tiger and escaped to tell the tale. But all his father said was, ‘Go and drink a glass of water, boy. You look as if you need it.’
It was a remark that Biggles never would forget. And when, next day, he duly watched his father and the Captain shoot the tiger at the climax of a full-scale tiger hunt across the Plains, all that Biggles felt was bitterness and dreadful disappointment. His father fired the fatal shot, but when the Captain shouted, ‘Oh, good shot, Bigglesworth! Great work!’ Biggles felt cheated. It was his tiger, not his father’s. But he had learned enough about that distant man to keep his feelings to himself.
He also kept his feelings to himself a few weeks later when his father, with his habitual absence of emotion, calmly informed him that he had a week to pack up his belongings. He was off to England to the boarding school where his brother Charles had been.
This was a moment of profound unhappiness for Biggles. Much as he longed to travel, he could feel nothing but despair at the idea of exchanging the freedom of Garhwal for a boarding school in that far-off island with its cold, fog, and icy seas. With Charles now at Sandhurst, he would be absolutely on his own — no Sula Dowla he could take on expeditions through the forest, no gangs of small Indian boys to organise in battle, no Captain Lovell to tell tall tales about his exploits as a hunter. Even the bungalow where he had grown up appeared precious to him now. Suddenly his whole world seemed threatened, but he had no one to confide in, and so once again he kept his fears and sadness to himself. When the day of his departure dawned he shook hands with his father, bade a dignified farewell to all the members of his gang who had assembled at the bungalow to see him off, and managed to fight back his tears. He had told Sula Dowla that when he had finished school he would return, but in his heart of hearts he knew he never would. Had Captain Lovell known just how ‘game’ young Biggles was being at that moment, he would have been proud of him.
Malton Hall School near Hertbury was not the place to make a sensitive small boy feel particularly at home. It was a mid-nineteenth-century foundation, set up as a sort of poor man’s Wellington College, to turn out the future soldiers and colonial administrators the Empire needed. Discipline was strict, food more or less inedible, and bullying the order of the day. Biggles arrived there for the autumn term of 1912, at a time when the school was still under the direction of its elderly headmaster, Colonel Horace ‘Chevy’ Chase, an unbending figure with a steely eye and closely cropped grey hair. Chase was a martinet, far more the keen ex-soldier than a scholar, and the school reflected this.
Biggles had been unwell. The voyage and the English climate had brought on a serious recurrence of malaria, which meant that he had to spend some weeks convalescing with his uncle, the General, at his place in Norfolk. From the start they got on well together. The General was a kindly man beneath his fiery exterior, and he felt sorry for the motherless small boy. His sickliness disturbed him, but he was delighted when he found he was a first-rate shot. He did his best to ‘build him up’ — with massive meals of half-cooked beef which Biggles hated — and Biggles’ recovery did credit to the General’s care. (In fact, the most important element in the boy’s recovery was simply the old General’s kindness and concern. Unlike his cold fish of a brother, ‘Bonzo’ Bigglesworth was an emotional, warm-hearted man, and Biggles instantly responded to him.) When Biggles left for Malton Hall, his uncle gave him half a sovereign and some good advice.
‘If anyone tries to bully you, my boy, punch them on the nose. It always works, however big they are, provided you punch hard enough.’
To start with, Biggles loathed his school. During his first interview with the Headmaster he was exhorted to stand up straight and not to mumble, and told he was expected to live up to the example of his brother, who had been head boy and had apparently brought glory to the school through his success in the Sandhurst examinations. Colonel Chase pronounced it ‘Sandust’ and at first Biggles didn’t understand him. When he did, he tactlessly replied that he had no intention of entering the army.
‘What do you want to do then, boy?’ the Head inquired.
‘Travel, sir,’ said Biggles with alacrity. At which the Head said, ‘Humph! We’ll have to see about that,’ and ended up by warning the small boy not to come snivelling to him with his troubles. Biggles decided there and then that he would rather die than do so, and with a sinking heart went off to face his fate.
Biggles soon found that he could deal with the bullying. He was wiry and tough and though undersized had learned some useful tricks in his battles with the rival gangs in India. He also had a powerful temper when he considered that his dignity was threatened; when a larger boy caller Hervey picked on him and called him a ‘mangey punkah wallah’ he saw red, and promptly put his uncle’s good advice to practical effect. Hervey did not pick on him again.
But what did worry Biggles, more than the bullying at Malton Hall, was the sense he had of being out of things. This was his first experience of English boys en masse and he was made to feel a foreigner among them. They were so different from the courteous Sula Dowla and he found them arrogant, uncouth and rather boring, with their tedious school slang and their obsessional concern with football. Biggles did not like football. (After polo, it struck him as a very common game, but he had the sense to keep this to himself.) None of them spoke Hindi or had shot a tiger and there was not a single boy at Malton Hall he would have chosen to accompany him into the jungle.
On the other hand, he longed to be considered one of them, if only as an antidote to loneliness. And so he consciously began to copy them — the words they used, their attitudes to life, the whole strange tribal rigmarole of Edwardian middle-class small boys. This was the beginning of that exaggerated pre-war Englishness that Biggles never lost. That over-hearty turn of phrase, the breezy manner and the apparently unthinking code of ‘what one expects an Englishman to do’ were not so much the real Biggles as a protective pose that he adopted. And as so often happens with adopted poses, it stuck. But beneath the carefully conf
ormist self that he was now adopting, Biggles remained entirely his own person, sharp, intelligent, and something of a loner.
He made it clear that he had no intention of following in the footsteps of his famous brother. He was no athlete, cricket bored him even more than football, and he utterly lacked the temperament for team games. Nor, as Colonel Chase soon realised, was Biggles reliable ‘prefect material’ as his brother Charles had been. He was not exactly a ‘subversive element’ — one of the Colonel’s favourite phrases for schoolboy wickedness — but he remained emphatically an individual throughout his time at Malton Hall, and, for all his efforts to conform, a definite outsider.
According to Captain Johns, at this time Biggles appeared a ‘slight, neatly-dressed, delicate-looking boy [with] thoughtful eyes, a small firm mouth, and fair hair parted at the side’. He was, he adds, ‘no better and no worse than any other schoolboy of his age and era. Like any normal boy he excelled in some subjects and failed dismally in others. He was thoughtful and inclined to be serious rather than boisterous.’
Biggles confirmed this picture of himself. The subjects he ‘excelled’ in were history, geography and French. (He had inherited a flair for languages from his mother.) Mathematics was an absolute blind spot for him; so was science, but he possessed mechanical aptitude above the average.
