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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 secondthought, 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.
    â€˜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.
    Curiously enough he did have one uncanny foretaste of his future while he was still at Malton Hall. He was on the playing field one afternoon, trying, as he put it, ‘to avoid the dreadful tedium without exactly dropping off to sleep’, when suddenly he heard a noise he thought at first must be his uncle’s old de Dion on an unexpected visit. It grew louder and then, over the elms at the end of the cricket field, appeared an aeroplane, a Bleriot two-seater. None of the boys had ever seen an aeroplane before and, inevitably, all thought of cricket was abandoned. The plane circled the field, the pilot waved, then someone shouted, ‘Look, he’s coming down!’ And so he was. At what seemed breakneck speed the Bleriot was heading for the cricket