Biggles

by John Pearson

  He had few close friends, and those he did have tended to be outsiders like himself. His best friend at Malton Hall, a bespectacled, extremely spotty boy called Smith, was to become a distinguished scientist who was killed in the Second World War on one of the early tests of airborne radar. But at Malton Hall, Smith rather took the place of Sula Dowla as a sort of deferential crony, always on hand to give Biggles aid and moral support on his various escapades.

  For, just as in India, things still had a habit of happening to Biggles, and before long he achieved a reputation as a ‘character’ — one of those unusual boys who tend to land in trouble and can be relied on for the unexpected. Very early on, for instance, there was the extraordinary episode of the dancing bear.

  It all began one lunchtime with an announcement from the Head that a highly dangerous animal, a large brown bear, had been reported in the neighbourhood. He thought it had escaped from a menagerie, and armed men were already out pursuing it: There was no need for alarm, but the boys should all be on their guard and if they saw the animal should report it and keep well away.

  Biggles was playing games that afternoon and thought nothing more about the bear until, walking back towards the school, he noticed several men with rifles. One of them shouted to him to go back and suddenly he saw the cause of their alarm. By the hedgerow, eating berries, stood a fully-grown male brown bear. Biggles had often seen such bears in India; indeed one of Sula Dowla’s friends had been the son of a beggar with a dancing bear in the back-streets of Garhwal, and he always had a soft spot for the animal. Certainly the idea of a similar bear in England being treated as a ravening wild beast appeared ridiculous, particularly as the bear in question was already looking rather lost. It had a collar round its neck and a long thin chain exactly like the dancing bears that he had seen in India. And so, without a second thought, Biggles walked on towards the bear, oblivious of the shouted warnings from the men behind him.

  The bear looked at Biggles and Biggles looked at the bear. For some moments neither moved, then Biggles behaved exactly as he did with the bear that he had known in Garhwal. He spoke to it in Hindi, told it not to be afraid, and offered it the sugar bun that he had been saving for his tea. The bear hesitated, grunted and then thoughtfully accepted it. As it did so, Biggles picked up its chain and carried on addressing it in Hindi. For a while the bear munched his bun, then very slowly it began to dance. Biggles encouraged it and then began to lead it back towards the school. As he did so he shouted to the men to drop their guns.

  ‘I was just longing to see the look on old Chevy’s face when I walked into his study with the bear,’ he said when he recounted the tale to us. ‘He was a humourless old devil and it might have cheered him up.’ But unfortunately before he reached the school the owner of the bear appeared, a wandering Indian from a circus, who was overjoyed to find his animal safe and sound. He was effusive in his thanks and led the bear away before Biggles had a chance to enjoy the sight of Colonel Chase confronted with a fully-grown dancing bear.

  It was from this day that the Headmaster seems to have had his doubts about Biggles, but his reputation with the other boys began to grow. There were other episodes to follow. On one occasion he and the faithful Smith started a wild-goose chase for some non-existent ‘buried treasure’ which had half the inhabitants of the nearby village digging up the Common. And another time, he totally disrupted the School Corps field-day by capturing the ‘enemy’ headquarters long before the battle started.

  From time to time the question would be mooted as to exactly what he wanted for a career. Despite the united influence of both his uncle and the Head, he remained resolutely against the idea of the army. ‘Not my thing at all. Too much confounded discipline, and anyhow my brother was already in the Rifle Brigade and I’d had enough of following his footsteps, thank you very much,’ was Biggles’ attitude. Instead, he thought quite seriously of studying Oriental languages at Oxford, but the war was to put a stop to that.

  Curiously enough he did have one uncanny foretaste of his future while he was still at Malton Hall. He was on the playing field one afternoon, trying, as he put it, ‘to avoid the dreadful tedium without exactly dropping off to sleep’, when suddenly he heard a noise he thought at first must be his uncle’s old de Dion on an unexpected visit. It grew louder and then, over the elms at the end of the cricket field, appeared an aeroplane, a Bleriot two-seater. None of the boys had ever seen an aeroplane before and, inevitably, all thought of cricket was abandoned. The plane circled the field, the pilot waved, then someone shouted, ‘Look, he’s coming down!’ And so he was. At what seemed breakneck speed the Bleriot was heading for the cricket pitch and Biggles never would forget his first sight of a perfect three-point landing.

  ‘I don’t know why, but I felt something turn over within me. I’d read about aeroplanes of course, but I’d never thought about them seriously till that moment. For some reason, when I clapped my eyes on that confounded Bleriot I knew that I was hooked. Don’t ask me why, but I knew for certain that that was where my future lay.’

  The pilot was an old Maltonian, a boy called Morris whose father was a rich tobacco merchant. Biggles had known him as a senior boy a few terms earlier, and Morris was obviously enjoying showing off to his erstwhile schoolmates. Even Colonel Chase appeared impressed. Morris stayed for a hero’s tea in the pavilion, then donned his goggles and his flying helmet and flew off. He was killed in a flying accident not long after, but this did nothing to deter Biggles from the great ambition of his life. If Morris could fly then so could he. As for crashes — ‘at that time of life one never really thinks about them,’ he said. Biggles had fallen unreservedly in love with the idea of flying. It was his dream, his secret hope, the answer to that restlessness which had pursued him since his mother left. But, since it meant so much to him, he kept it strictly to himself, knowing quite well that if he talked about it openly he would be mocked by the other boys and branded as an eccentric by the Head, who thought that all careers except the army were ridiculous.

  So it was that Biggles grew up with the idea of flying as an exciting yet forbidden dream. The only person he confided in was the old General, when he was back with him one summer holiday, and the General, as Biggles had expected, was distinctly sympathetic.

  ‘Thinking of buying one of these flying machines myself. Dashed exciting, I’d have thought. Use it to fly up to London. Quicker than the train,’

  Alas, upon inquiry General Bigglesworth was advised that whilst a one-armed man could manage a de Dion — just — it was impossible to pilot a new flying machine one-handed. Biggles was even more upset than his uncle at the news — for several weeks he had been picturing himself slipping back to Norfolk during holidays and somehow teaching himself to fly in secret — but the General did his best to comfort him. ‘Before long you’ll be piloting a plane yourself,’ he said prophetically; and in the meantime, to console his nephew, he took him off to see one of the earliest displays of aircraft at the tiny flying field near Hendon where all the latest aircraft — Bleriots and Farman biplanes and a brand new Sopwith interceptor — were on show. The star of that particular afternoon was the celebrated B. C. Hucks, the first man in the world to loop the loop, a feat which at that time was rare enough to bring a murmur of excitement from the crowd.

  Apart from his dreams of flying and the friendship of his extraordinary old uncle, Biggles had few consoling features in his life. He always had admired his brother, Charles, but they had never been particularly close, and on the few occasions when they saw each other now, Biggles was painfully aware of the gulf between them. This was partly due to age and partly temperament. Charles was very like their father, and the army had brought out the keen, conformist side of his heredity. As a promising young subaltern in a famous regiment, he was also rather on his dignity towards his undersized young brother, and disapproved of Biggles’ lack of enthusiasm for the army and for Malton Hall. (Biggles suspected Colonel Chase of passing the word along that Biggles
Minor just ‘wasn’t up to scratch’.) Charles was also on much closer terms than Biggles with John Henry Bigglesworth. Since he had arrived at Malton Hall, Biggles’ letters to his father had soon trickled down to one or two a term, but Charles wrote regularly, and felt obliged to lecture Biggles on his duty to what he called ‘the pater’. Biggles resented this, and if truth be told, would not have cared too much if he had never seen or heared from his father again. Needless to say, one subject was always totally taboo between the brothers — their mother. Biggles suspected Charles of knowing more than he let on about the whole mysterious business of her departure from Garhwal and her reported death, but on the one occasion when he tried to tap his brother on the subject, Charles replied tersely, ‘that’s all over and done with’, and promptly changed the subject. They never talked of her again.

  This did not mean that Biggles had no contact with his mother’s family. Lord Lacey — unforgiving to the last — expired in Calcutta at the end of 1910. (According to one version of his death, he was overcome by a fit of apoplexy in the bath brought on by anger when a servant offered him carbolic soap.) In later life, Biggles regretted that he had never seen him. The title passed to Biggles’ uncle, Henry Lacey, a man as different from his father as anyone could possibly imagine. He was a gentle, absent-minded man, a botanist by training, who lived in. a big ramshackle house in Lewes. On hearing that he had inherited the title, his chief concern was that his duties at the House of Lords would interrupt his lifelong search for wild flowers. He need not have worried. Henry Viscount Lacey visited the House of Lords on two occasions — once to take his seat, and once when he had been to a wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and could not find a lavatory. The remainder of his life was dedicated to his monumental Wild Flowers of Heath and Hedgerow, which was published privately a year or two before his death in 1953.

  Biggles always spoke of his botanising uncle as something of a joke. He used to be invited to the house at Lewes, but much preferred staying with the General. Motorcars and land torpedoes were more to his taste than wild flowers, and Lord Lacey was so distant and eccentric that he really had no time for Biggles. But on the other hand, Lady Lacey, Biggles’ formidable Aunt Priscilla, apparently felt sorry for him and used to try to organise his life. At times she could be something of a menace. ‘Bossy old harridan’ was how he described her to us. ‘Always trying to rope me in for good works and telling me to wash behind my ears.’

  The Laceys had a son called Algernon — ‘freckle-faced, spoiled little brat I always thought him in those days’. Algernon was almost two years younger than his cousin, and it would have been impossible for any boy to have escaped the domination of a mother like Aunt Pris. Biggles tended to ignore him and it was not for several years to come that Biggles realised the truth — the insignificant Algy hero-worshipped him and would do so in his own strange way for the remainder of his life.

  There was another way in which the Laceys were important to Biggles at this time, for it was through them that he finally got news about his mother. His aunt had no inhibitions about telling him exactly what had happened, and it appeared his mother was now living in the South of France. Captain Thomas had deserted her long since, and she had married a French businessman, a Monsieur Duclos.

  For weeks after hearing this Biggles could think of nothing else, and was all for contacting her at once, but Aunt Priscilla prudently advised him otherwise. ‘You must be very understanding, James, dear boy,’ she said. ‘Your mother — whether she deserved it or not is neither here nor there — has been through hell, and now at last has found a new life for herself in France. Her husband, as I know only too well myself, is an extraordinarily jealous man. I’ve no idea how much she’s told him, so we must be extremely cautious. I will be seeing her this autumn when we are in Cannes, and I will ask her what she wants to do about you. We must, of course, respect her wishes utterly.’

  Biggles longed to see his mother; now that he knew she was alive he could not wait to be reunited with her. But he also knew his aunt was right, and so he waited as the weeks dragged by, and he was back at Malton Hall when he finally received a letter from his aunt. She had seen his mother and had talked to her about her sons. She had told her how eager Biggles was to see her, but his mother was inflexible. She sent her love, but felt ‘the time is not appropriate for a meeting’. (In fact, as Biggles told us, she had disguised her age when marrying her second husband and had not even told him of the existence of her two grown sons.)

  Biggles was nearly fifteen by now, and had sufficient self-control to hide his feelings, but he suffered horribly and, even more than when his mother left, felt himself rejected by this icy-hearted woman that he loved. It was then that something closed up inside him and he no longer really cared what happened to him. During his final years at Malton Hall he became moody and withdrawn. He had no close friends (even the faithful, spotty Smith had left him), dodged games whenever possible and hardly bothered with his work. Everything in him now was set on one ambition — flying. But he told nobody about it and it was not until the early summer of 1914 that there appeared a slender chance that all his dreams would finally come true.

  2

  Biggles Learns to Fly

  ‘It’s funny, looking back,’ Biggles remarked one day, ‘but when the 1914–18 war broke out, my greatest fear was that it would all be finished before I had a chance to join the fighting. Only goes to show how stupid one can be, but you must remember that everybody seemed to think the war would be over by Christmas, and of course my brother Charles was, off to join his regiment in France. I was bored stiff at dear old Malton Hall and the war appeared my one great chance to get into an aeroplane. But there I was, just fifteen, with the summer holidays half over, and not the faintest hope, it seemed, of ever getting closer to the enemy than my uncle’s house at Lewes. So I tried to volunteer. I went to the recruiting office, which was in Brighton in those days, and told them I was eighteen. There was a sergeant there, a great big fellow with a huge moustache, and when he saw me he just roared with laughter. “Back to school with you, Sonny Jim,” he shouted. “When they start needing schoolboys at the Front we’ll write and let you know.”

  Not for the last time in his life, Biggles was experiencing the effect of his lack of size and extraordinary youthfulness. But there was nothing he could do except soldier on at Malton Hall, and offer up his private prayers that the war would continue long enough to let him play his part in it. Which all too horribly it did. The early months of optimism and euphoria passed, and soon the boys of Malton Hall began to realise the nature of the struggle as the Head read out the names of more and more quite recent old Maltonians, ‘who have made the supreme sacrifice for King and Country’.

  But the idea of death made no impression on young Biggles, and his ambition stayed the same as ever — flying. He used to keep a scrapbook on aeroplanes and famous fliers — men like the legendary Captain Ball who shot down the first German airship over Britain, and the fearsome German ace, von Richthofen — and as the war dragged on, and life at Malton Hall seemed more and more beside the point, Biggles was becoming quite an expert in aeronautics. He still felt hideously out of things — especially with his brother Charles becoming something of a hero now. He fought with gallantry at Mons, was awarded the M.C. and promoted captain on the field of battle.

  Early in 1916, Charles, by now a major with his own battalion, was wounded badly in the leg. That Easter he was back in Norfolk, convalescing with old General Bigglesworth, and it was then that Biggles finally decided he had had enough of Malton Hall and waiting patiently for his turn to come. Another boy at school called Turner, who was two months junior to Biggles, had just been accepted into the Royal Navy as a midshipman. Biggles informed his uncle that he intended following him. The General was appalled. A Bigglesworth in the Navy! What was his silly nephew thinking of? He positively forbade it. But Biggles was determined and explained quite coolly to his uncle that he intended entering the Navy and tr
ansferring to the newly formed Royal Naval Air Service as soon as possible.

  ‘I don’t give two hoots what uniform I wear,’ he said. ‘All I want to do is fly.’

  The General knew his nephew well enough to realise he wasn’t bluffing, and when he had calmed down sufficiently to think coherently he offered him a deal.

  ‘Listen, my boy!’ the old gentleman began, ‘I want to hear no more about this Naval nonsense. It’s bad for my blood pressure. But if you promise not to mention it again and wait until you’re seventeen, I’ll see what can be done to get you commissioned into a decent regiment. You’ll have to lie about your age of course, but with my backing they’ll accept you. From then it will be up to you.’

  And so it came about that early that summer of 1916, Biggles was summoned to Whitehall. Because of the frightful losses at the Front, young officers were needed, and thanks to a letter from his uncle, Biggles was accepted as a second lieutenant into a rifle regiment, after some two weeks’ very basic training at the regimental depot outside Aldershot — and even then his luck continued. The depot was in chaos. Nobody seemed to know or care what happened to this raw young subaltern, and when he applied for an instant transfer to the Royal Flying Corps, nobody objected. Pilots were desperately needed out in France, and by the end of September it seemed that Biggles’ dearest dream had suddenly come true. He had a brand-new fur-lined flying coat which reached his ankles, a flying helmet, a pair of goggles, and an official posting to the R.F.C.’s No. 17 Flying Training School at Settling in Norfolk.

  ‘They called the place a training school for fliers,’ Biggles said. ‘In fact it was more by luck than judgment that anyone came through that so-called flying course alive. Most of the instructors there were pilots who had been sent back from France as “unfit for combat duties”, and the aircraft that they had were even worse, clapped-out old Farman biplanes that should have been in a museum when the war broke out. They were nothing short of flying death-traps. Get one in a spin and it was impossible to pull out of it. If you tried to dive, the wings came off. The crash rate was a damned disgrace, and as for training, it was survival of the fittest — or the luckiest.’