Biggles Read Online Free Page B

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 subjectsand 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