Biggles Read Free

the Club, the gathering suspicions of the neglected husband, the jealousies, denials, desperate affirmations, all of which culminated in that moment of highmelodrama 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 findinghis 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