Biggles (3 page)

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.