THE BOY BIGGLES

by Captain W. E. Johns

NB - IN THIS BOOK BIGGLES IS REFERRED TO AS “JAMES” BUT FOR THE SAKE OF THE STORY SUMMARIES; I HAVE REFERRED TO HIM AS BIGGLES.

VII A SORT OF EDUCATION (Pages 81 - 88)

“There is no record of the first occasion when young James Bigglesworth found it necessary to kill something; but living where he did when he was a boy, on the fringe of the jungle country in the United Provinces of India, then under British rule, with pests, some of them dangerous, finding their way into the garden and even into the house, it is likely that his experience in this respect began when he was quite small.

We know he had at least two early escapes from sudden death from what was, and still is, the most common peril in rural India: snake-bite; which accounts for thousands of deaths every year”. When Biggles was nine, he opened the bathroom door and a krait fell on him. He slammed it in the door and broke its back. On another occasion he found a cobra in his boot and he killed it with an old gold club – a putter. On yet another occasion, looking for a golf ball in the garden a krait went up his leg and he beat it off and killed with it with the same golf club. One of his narrowest escapes from fatal injury was with a dog, this one “was in the throes of hydrophobia, commonly called rabies”. Biggles was sitting on the verandah of his father’s bungalow when he heard screams. It was a young Indian girl, the daughter of their dhobi-wallah (an Indian laundryman). She was fending off a rabid dog with the remains of her laundry basket. Biggles gets a .22 rifle and attracts the dog’s attention. When it runs towards him he shoots it three times, the last shot almost in the dog’s mouth. The girl is alright, with not a scratch on her and Biggles sends her home to have a bath in order to get any dog saliva off. The girl’s father arrives and Biggles tells him to burn the dog’s body. “James’ father strode up”. He tells Biggles to fetch him in future if this should happen again. “It may be, too, that it was this sort of education that taught him to think fast, act and remain calm in moments of extreme danger. A month after this affair he was on his way to England, to school. He never saw his father again. Many years were to pass before he had the unforgettable smell of India in his nostrils. (Biggles returns to India in BIGGLES GOES HOME). When he left her shores he was still a boy with no suspicion of what the future held, of the war that was to change his life, of the still more deadly perils that awaited him in the skies of a stricken Europe. When he returned it was as a battle-scarred veteran”.