Biggles (2 page)

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.