‘I’m a Victorian and proud of it,’ Biggles used to say, ‘born in May 1899,’ — and in a number of important ways Biggles remained a genuine Victorian all his life. He was what one might call ‘old-fashioned’, in his somewhat strait-laced attitude to life, the emphasis he always placed on ‘manners’ with the young, and his views on morality. Also, his whole life as an adventurer and pioneer air pilot had more in common with the careers of the tough empire-builders of the old Queen-Empress than with the ‘softies’, as he called them, among the young men of today, who incurred his wrath.
His family traditions also helped make him what he was. The name Bigglesworth, as he took great pains to explain when asked about it, started as an attempt to anglicise the Flemish, Beiggelschwarz, for one of Biggles’ far-off paternal ancestors had been a Dutchman of this name who settled in Aberdeen at the beginning of the eighteenth century, set up as a naval factor and married a local girl. She was a MacGregor — Biggles was always rather proud of that — so that from the start the Bigglesworths were an unusual mixture of wild Highlanders and dour Flemings from the flattest countryside in Europe. The mixed strain soon produced a number of unusual characters, wild self-denying men with a savage knack of embarking on lost causes. ‘The nineteenth-century Bigglesworths,’ Biggles once remarked, ‘were generally considered slightly mad.’ One of his great-great-uncles was a missionary in India who lost his faith and ended as a fakir on a bed of nails in Rajasthan. Another was an explorer who set out to find the source of the Nile in a canoe. A third was last seen in Brazil, searching for a golden city. ‘The Bigglesworths,’ he said, with something like a note of sadness in his voice, ‘tended to be losers.’
One of the few who wasn’t, and the only Bigglesworth to reach the history books, was Biggles’ celebrated uncle, Brigadier General ‘Bonzo’ Bigglesworth, who battled as a subaltern at Majuba Hill, helped save the day at Omdurman, deposited an arm at Mafeking, and left the army in disgust when the Boer War ended. He bought a small estate in Norfolk — a run-down country house with a few acres of indifferent farmland and the shooting rights across a stretch of woodland — and there he stayed until his death in 1925. ‘The ideal unimproving landlord’, as Biggles called him.
As a boy, home from India, Biggles often stayed with him, and he spoke affectionately of the old one-armed fire-eater he remembered. ‘Treated me like a son and I was a good deal fonder of him than my real father,’ he confessed. And, by all accounts, Biggles and the General had a lot in common.
The old man was an enthusiastic and alarming motorist whose red de Dion was for many years the terror of the Norfolk lanes. He also had the perpetual schoolboy’s love of gadgetry, and his best-known inventions were an explosive kite for siege warfare, an inflatable saddle, which he fondly hoped would revolutionise amphibious operations in the field, and ‘the Bigglesworth Terrestrial Torpedo’.
This alarming weapon, powered by a small Steadman petrol engine, could carry several hundredweight of high explosive for over half a mile at a speed of twenty miles an hour. One of Biggles’ early memories of holidays in Norfolk was of a field test in which the torpedo went off course, all but demolishing the stable block. The General was apparently delighted at this proof of its effectiveness and never ceased to blame ‘those flaming blockheads in Whitehall’ for not adopting it when the Great War broke out. ‘Could have shortened it by several years,’ he claimed. Biggles used to laugh about this, and his uncle’s antics, but I always thought he probably inherited something of the General’s attitude to ‘bureaucrats and damn-fool politicians’ from those early days.
By all accounts, Biggles’ father, John Henry Bigglesworth, was utterly unlike his elder brother and Biggles rarely talked about him, except with bitterness. A sober, quiet, studious man, he settled early for a life as an administrator with the Indian Civil Service, rather than compete with his famous brother’s reputation by entering the cavalry. He was romantically good-looking, if a trifle dull, and six months after his arrival Calcutta witnessed the one exciting gesture of his life, when he eloped with the daughter of the Governor of Bengal, nineteen-year-old Catherine Lacey.
‘Hideous mistake’ was Biggles’ verdict on the marriage on the one occasion when he brought himself to mention it to us. Grandpapa Lord Lacey was an exacting martinet, remembered — if at all, these days — for the speed with which he put down the Jumna Riots of 1884, and he attempted much the same tactics with his wayward daughter. Here he was less successful. For Catherine Lacey proved of sterner stuff than the malleable Bengalis, claimed that she was pregnant, and insisted on her right to wed the now appalled John Henry Bigglesworth. Lord Lacey never saw his daughter again, and the offending newly-weds were speedily despatched to Garhwal, a dreary district, south of West Bengal. Eight months later, in January 1894, their first child, Biggles’ elder brother, Charles, was born.
John Henry Bigglesworth’s career never recovered from the blunder of his marriage. He seems to have attempted to make the best of things in the approved, long-suffering Scottish manner, and was to be a conscientious Assistant Commissioner, governing an area half the size of Wales. But with that influential unforgiving father-in-law in Bengal, he had no chance of getting any further. The Indians he ruled respected him. His wife, alas, did not. Her elopement had been an escape from the boredom of Calcutta. How much more boring was her life now as the wife of a meticulously-minded government official stuck in a bungalow in Garhwal.
I soon realised, from chance remarks that Biggles dropped, that there must have been something that went terribly wrong early in his childhood. (Indeed, attentive readers of the Biggles’ books might have guessed as much.) But it was some time before I found out exactly what had happened.
Biggles was always reticent about his parents, but it was not hard to get the outlines of what was clearly a most wretched marriage — that imperious, impossible mother with her ‘vapours’ and her sulks and rages, the disappointed father who increasingly took refuge in his work, and young James Bigglesworth bearing the brunt of much domestic misery.
Clearly, he adored his mother, but as so often is the case with adoring second sons, she preferred his elder brother, Charles. For Charles, just five years older, was everything that James was not — big-boned, athletic, and a hearty, cheerful boy whose easy manner and good looks earned him friends everywhere. In painful contrast, James was undersized and shy. (Biggles showed us a few photographs surviving from this period of a white-faced, skinny little boy with straggly fair hair and melancholy eyes.) Then when his brother Charles was away in England at his boarding school, this vulnerable small boy was hit by the tragedy that changed his life. The Bigglesworths became involved in scandal.
His mother had just reached those dangerous female crossroads of the early thirties when she met her fate — in the rolling eyes and eager haunches of Captain the Honourable ‘Banger’ Thomas of the 45th Rawalpindi Horse. The Captain was undoubtedly a bounder and probably a cad. All that Biggles could remember of him was his waxed moustache, his gleaming riding-boots, and the stench of the Trichinopoly cigars he always smoked. (All his life, Biggles seems to have believed that a liking for cigars was a tell-tale symptom of a man who could not be trusted with a woman.) But for all his faults — or possibly because of them — the Captain had no difficulty captivating the sprightly Mrs Bigglesworth.
One can picture all too easily the hackneyed stages of this tropical romance — hot nights on the verandah with the cloying scent of frangipani in the air and languid evenings at the Polo Club with nothing but the mournful rhythm of the punkah to distract the lovers. Then, the whispered gossip in the bored society around the Club, the gathering suspicions of the neglected husband, the jealousies, denials, desperate affirmations, all of which culminated in that moment of high melodrama when, for the second time in Catherine Lacey’s life, she bolted.
Biggles was eleven, and his brother Charles, in England, was about to enter Sandhurst. Everybody’s sympathy went out to the abandoned husband, and no one seems to have given much attention to the small boy who was suddenly without the mother he adored. But when all possible allowances are made for John Henry Bigglesworth’s hurt feelings, the fact remains that he behaved quite dreadfully towards his son. Even in old age, Biggles could not quite forgive him. ‘He told me she had died, and never spoke of her again.’
This was a crucial point in Biggles’ life, and he would bear the scars of it forever. His grief was pitiable, and for several months was so extreme that he fell seriously ill. (This was the source of that mysterious illness Captain Johns refers to in his brief, carefully censored references to this period. Not unnaturally Biggles never wished the facts to be revealed while he was alive.) The boy’s life was actually despaired of for some while, and when he did recover, he remained extremely delicate, always prone to malarial fevers, stomach upsets and prostrating headaches.
He finally grew out of them, of course, and the natural toughness of the Bigglesworth stock ultimately kept him free of illness till his seventies. But in the long run, the most serious effect of his mother’s disappearance was on his emotional development. He once admitted — in one of his rare, unguarded moments — that he was obsessed by the memory of his mother. He was intelligent enough to sense that there was far more to her ‘death’ than the adults told him, but never dared to ask his father for the truth. He said he always felt she was alive and used to dream of finding her and being reunited with her in some far-off place. But he was also naturally tormented by the certainty that she had abandoned him. He had no way of knowing what had really happened. At times he blamed himself, but nothing could alter his belief that this one woman he had really loved had callously betrayed him. Throughout his life Biggles would always be a wary man where women were concerned.
It was his mother’s disappearance that also helped to turn young Biggles to adventure early on in life — if only to escape the boredom and the loneliness of life at home. Had his mother been there, this could not have happened, but with his father finding his relief in overwork — and possibly in drink, according to one hint Biggles dropped — he was left more or less to his own devices, and before long was escaping into the rich, exciting world beyond the narrow confines of the Club, the schoolroom, and the houses of his father’s European friends. He soon found his way around the maze of little streets that made up the Indian quarter of the town, and grew to love its noise and smells and teeming sense of life, so different from the dull security of home. Then he explored the countryside, with its dusty villages and ancient tracks that led to the forests and the hills. Here, for the first time, in the middle of this great sub-continent, he sensed the vastness of the world, and used to envy the kite-birds sailing so effortlessly in the pale blue skies above him. He would go off for days alone, searching for he knew not what, and finally return exhausted to his father’s bungalow. His father rarely noticed his absence.
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 gleam 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 conformist 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.
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.