BIGGLES – AIR ACE

by Captain W. E. Johns

(Page references are for the paperback first edition, followed by the hardback second).

IX. THE CASE OF THE SOMERSET FARMER (Pages 148 - 156/Pages 142 – 149)

This ‘Air Police’ story was originally published in “The Daily Mail’s Boy’s Annual 1963”. It was overlooked when short stories were collected and only finally collected in a book when Norman Wright gathered the “uncollected stories” into ‘Biggles – Air Ace’ in May 1999.

A police constable asks Biggles to see a man called John Moxen who has come to Scotland Yard all the way from Somerset. The man comes in and sits down, without waiting to be invited and asks “Why didn’t you answer my letter?” He tells Biggles his complaint. He is a farmer and a low flying plane has been bothering him and his family in the early hours of the morning when the moon is full and the wind is coming from the south-west. There is no aerodrome nearby. Mr. Moxen says he lives at Nuthatch Farm, near Liverton, a (fictional) village some three miles away. The nearest town is Chard (a real town). Biggles takes the man’s telephone number and says he will look into it. Biggles examines the six inch ordnance survey map of the district and then sends Ginger to fly down and investigate and photograph the fields. When Ginger returns with photographs, he confirms there is a big field with well grazed grass and several fields where he could have landed. There is a lane that runs behind, that a car could use and it leads to a main road about half a mile away. Biggles has checked with the weather men and the moon’s nearly full and the breeze is constant south-west. Biggles and Ginger fly down to keep a vigil at the field and do so for three nights, making sure they inform the farmer. On the fourth night, just after midnight, Mr. Moxan, the farmer appears with his gun under his arm. He has a mare due a foal, he says, so he is staying up. A car comes down the lane and it has no lights showing. In due course, an aircraft, with the engine switched off lands in the field. The pilot and two passengers get out and they are joined by the driver from the car in the lane. “Stand still, all of you,” rapped out Biggles. “We’re police officers and I have some questions to ask”. “Ginger was staring. For an instant he thought his eyes had been deceived by the moonlight; but taking a step forward he saw he had not been mistaken. These were all coloured people. Even more surprising, one, as her dress revealed, was a woman”. The pilot is a British man from Pakistan, who has just flown in from France, he says. He has bought two people in “to help some of my countrymen who want to come here but were refused permission. We are said to be smallpox contacts. The husband of this lady is already here. Naturally, she wanted to join him. The arrangements are made through the post”. Biggles asks Moxen to ring police headquarters in Chard and ask them to send transport for four persons. “The four Pakistanis, looking sorry for themselves appeared before the Magistrates the following day, and considering what they had done could count themselves lucky in getting off with nothing more severe than fines”. The aircraft was impounded. It was later decided on compassionate grounds that the woman, who had been recently vaccinated, should be allowed to stay with her husband, who had come in the car to meet her. “The other passenger, who refused to be vaccinated on religious grounds, after being held for a while in an isolation hospital, was sent home”. “Thus was closed one of the less important cases of the Air Police, the complaint of a country farmer having had an unusual ending”.