Biggles and the Undersand Railway

Biggles eventually escaped from the Iranian Secret police by standing outside his hotel and catching the nine o’clock bus to Teheran. He found himself sitting at the back of the bus, between a flock of goats and an enormous woman who ate nothing but fried chicken. To Biggles consternation, all of the busses occupants’ -including the driver- spent the entire journey turned around in their seats, asking him about British soap operas, and most importantly the difference between Coronation and Ramsay Streets.

“But how can you people even have heard of Coronation Street?” Biggles shifted uncomfortably as chicken-fat dripped on one shoulder and goats peed on the other.

“Coronation Street is the greatest art form that is exported to the Middle East,” one learned bearded old woman explained.

“It is?” Biggles said more in amazement than inquiry. “Haven’t you heard of Shakespeare?”

“Oh yes,” she wheezed, “but only in Coronation Street are ugly old women portrayed in a noble way. Shakespeare makes them all in to …well ugly crones. Here in Iran, old women are now seen as interesting complex personalities. This is all due to Coronation Street.”

“I never saw that one coming.”

“Great art does that,” she agreed.

Every few kilometers the bus driver would suddenly remember he was a bus driver, and wildly drag the steering wheel around to avoid hit the oncoming traffic, potholes, dead camels, low flying cruise missiles, and because it kept the bus going in a forward direction. This had the effect of turning the inside of the bus into the interior of a space ship reentering orbit as chickens, goats and Biggles flew about in glorious abandon.

“Does he always drive like this?” Biggles grabbed an overhanging strap to stop being catapulted through the front window.

“How else could he drive?” came a hyperbolic reply.

“But isn’t it dangerous?”

“More dangerous than if he didn’t avoid crashing?”

They stopped for a lunch break and fixed the axle, which had just fallen off. Biggles looked about the mountains that soared around him and wondered if this was near Kent.

“Cigarettes?” a voice floated at his elbow.

He looked down and to his surprise a man shuffling about on a cardboard mat, holding up a box of cigarettes. Both of his legs were missing and his face was horribly scarred from phosphorus burns, he looked like the victim of a napalm attack.

“What on Earth happened to you?” Biggles almost shrieked.

“War.”

“You fought in the War?”

“No, I was late for work and got run over by a tank,” the victim said sarcastically, “of course it was the War. Want to buy some cigarettes?”

“Which War?”

“Who cares which war, they’re all the same.”

“No, they’re not,” Biggles, insisted, “a war can be just, or unjust, moral or immoral. And there are the wars I fight on, the good ones.”

“Look,” the poor wretch wearily explained. “In war there four sides.”

“Don’t you mean two?”

“If you’d shut up, buy some cigarettes and let me explain.”

“Oh right, um, lets say a pound?” Biggles handed over some of the counterfeit Iranian Rials he had once dropped on a bombing round.

“In war,” the victim explained, “there are four sides. The winners, the losers, the greedy blood sucking merchants and the victims, now guess which group I belong to?”

“Greedy blood sucking merchants?” Biggles erred on the side of caution as he lit up a Chesterfield.

“Do I look like a greedy blood sucking war merchant?” the cripple asked in amazement.

“Do cigarettes cause cancer?”

“Well, yes.”

“Are you the result of a war?”

“Obviously.”

“And did you just make a profit?”

“Only a tiny one,” the veteran stared up with an angry look, “I have to eat and feed my wife and children.”

“Ergo, you are a merchant of war,” grinned Biggles and ran off before the cripple could bite his ankles.

“You feckin’ English bastard!” was all the poor fellow could come up with, as he tried to drag himself after Biggles.

The bus journey had started again, once Biggles commandeered the bus driver’s seat, by pointing out that as an Ace pilot he could fly anything even a runaway bus, as he kicked the driver out the door, and tore off down the road with passengers and the driver in hot pursuit.

“It's a long way to Tipperary, It's a long way to go.” Biggles merrily sang, “It's a long way to Tipperary. To the sweetest girl I know!” then he paused as he mentally calculated the distance to Tipperary.

“Hey,” he said to himself. “It really is a long way to Tipperary.”

Swerved the bus round and headed back towards Iraq and the officer’s mess in Baghdad.

“Sorry” he called out as he roared past the passengers. “I’m late for snooker night.”

Before disappearing in a storm of dust over the horizon. It all would have been another splendid escape - if he hadn’t run out of diesel at the very hotel he had escaped from the day before.

Copyright reserved by Jim O’Brien ©

Biggles Escapes!

For three days Biggles had wandered across the desert looking for rescue or at least a bus. It had gotten to the point where he wanted to be captured again. He had escaped from the Iranian secret police three nights before, by simply going outside for a cigarette, while they were watching some obscure Egyptian soap opera. The show was so incomprehensible it featured a young woman wearing nothing but a towel, who seemed to spend her entire life singing about a boy who had run off with a camel driver. Biggles had gotten bored waiting for her to take off the towel. Since he could make neither head nor tail out of, he went for a walk, and after trudging over a sand dune to see what was on the other side; he had become completely and utterly lost. So out of sheer force of habit, he escaped and now he wanted to be caught again as that was his best chance to making it back to old Blighty.

At this moment, he was lying at the top of a sand dune watching a herd of sheep, and he was getting fed up with waiting to be captured. More to the point he wanted a good cup of tea, which was harder to find in this country than a man who wasn’t wearing a dress.

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Biggles gave up and ran down the sand dune to the sheepherder waving his arms in the air and shouting hallo. The herdsman took one look at the stranger and began shooting at him. Biggles ran straight back up the dune and hid behind a rock. “I say,” he said to himself, “what happened to the Geneva Convention?”

At the bottom of the hill, the sheepherder also hid behind a rock and for several minutes they cautiously watched each other. The herdsman was taking no chances, since over the last two weeks, strange planes had been coming out of nowhere strafing and bombing his herd and he was in no mood for idle conversation with foreigners.

“I say!” Biggles finally called out, “do you know the way to Piccadilly?”

The sharp retort of the rifle coincided with Biggles’ flying cap being knocked off.

“I take it that’s a no,” Biggles picked up his cap and put it back on, to his annoyance he discovered the bullet had knocked off his Snoopy badge. He called out again from behind the rock. “By the way, I’m Biggles, so pleased to meet you.”

The herdsman felt some confusion, as normally people always shot back at this point. A stranger stopping in the middle of the desert just for a conversation, either meant he was a cousin - and Biggles certainly didn’t look like a cousin - or he was an enemy, and Biggles seemed too incompetent for either.

Maybe was he a rug salesman and a good rug salesman was hard to find.

“Hallo, foreigner!” he called out. “Have you carpets to sell?”

“Sorry Mister Abdullah,” Biggles called back jokingly, “I left them in the pickup truck back in Sussex.”

The herdsman, whose incredibly name really was Abdullah, stood up and looked with surprise up the hill. He wondered how on earth the foreigner knew his name, and more to the point where was Sussex. Before too long Biggles was invited down to the camp for tea and sheep’s eyeballs.

Biggles held one of the eyeballs up to his face.

“It’s staring at me.”

“That mean’s it is happy to see you,” laughed Abdullah.

“What about the sheep?” Biggles was nervous.

“The sheep is not happy to see you,” and Abdullah clapped his hands at the absurdity of foreigners.

Biggles put it in his mouth and slowly bit down on it. It popped like a squishy sea polyp and burst open. He shuddered as he swallowed it.

“Rather tasty,” he managed gasping, “I don’t suppose you know where I could find a plane.”

Abdullah looked at him with some anger.

“There have been planes attacking my sheep,” he picked up his old carbine, “do you know anything about this? I only have all these eyeballs, because I took them from the fly blown carcasses of all the dead ones.”

Biggles gagged on the next eyeball.

“No, not a bit,” he lied between retches, as he felt his taste buds turn into maggots “do you have any salt?”

 

The next day Abdullah showed him how to ride camels and lead him across the desert. The Sun poured down upon the desert with such a villainous heat that at one point Biggles, in delirium thought he was playing County Cricket for Sheffield and would have taken the field to bat if Abdullah hadn’t kept dragging him back on the saddle. Crows circled in the sky cawing incessantly until Abdullah shot one and gave it to Biggles for lunch.

“Aren’t you having any?” asked Biggles as he poked at his fried crow.

“It is forbidden,” grinned Abdullah, “but it is not forbidden to serve it to unbelievers.”

“Pretty sure they wouldn’t serve this at Maxim’s. It could do with a bottle of Chablis.”

“Have you a wife, Biggles of the air?” asked Abdullah.

“Yes, I call her Mrs. Biggles, I seem to have forgot her original name years ago.”

“Is she as beautiful as a falcon soaring above an oasis?”

“More of a vulture hovering over a gasworks.”

“These are things I know not of,” muttered Abdullah. “Is your country a great country?”

“Only when we beat the Australians at cricket,” Biggles crunched down on a wing, “the rest of the time we have to explain the whole Empire thingy, and how the sun never sets - although of course it has, and continues to set with unfailing regularity.”

“Strange is your world.”

“Even stranger is your cooking.”

“There is a hotel near here, where I am told there is good cooking.”

“As long as the television doesn’t show endless reruns of Egyptian soaps.”

Which of course it did, being the same hotel he had absconded from four days beforehand. Oddly the Secret Police never noticed he was missing and were still watching the same obscure Egyptian soap opera - even odder still the girl was wearing the same towel and singing the same song about the camel driver’s boy.

Copyright reserved by Jim O’Brien ©

In which Biggles is captured – yet again

Biggle’s plane came in too low; so low he accidentally landed on soccer field in the middle of a game, and was promptly arrested by the Iranian umpire for being offside. 

“Can you tell me your name, please,” the Iranian police captain sighed after Biggles had been arrested and held at the local station.

“Shan’t,” said Biggles folding his arms across his chest defiantly.

The captain rubbed his forehead with both his hands, and sighed again.

“You’re at least supposed to tell us your name, rank and serial number.” He wearily explained for the ninth time. “As put down in the Geneva Convention on …”

“Shan’t,” Biggles poked out his tongue. “You jolly Abdullahs shot me down again.”

The captain asked over his shoulder to another guard, “Is he talking about Afghanistan's foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah?” but the other guard shrugged his shoulders and continued drinking his tea.

“Look my name isn’t Abdullah,” the captain began doodling on the paper, “my name is Captain Arash. I don’t even know anyone called Abdullah. I’m a Persian. Now for the love of God, can you please tell me your name?”

“What about the bally holes in my plane?” Biggles jabbed with his index finger on the table, “you can’t get them fixed down the local bike shop you know!”

“You invade Iranian airspace, attack a field of sheep, and land in the middle of the quarter-final match between Iran and Kazakhstan of the Asia-Cup. Why shouldn’t we shoot at your plane?”

“What about my cup of tea?” Biggles became petulant.

“It’s right there in front of you, with milk even.”

“Smell’s like camel,” Biggles poked his tongue at it.

“Yes,” the captain rested his head on his hands and sighed with infinite patience “well, we couldn’t get any milk from a Jersey cow as you requested, so we did the best we could and milked a donkey. It’s perfectly good, although we do prefer only sugar with our tea.”

“Any biscuits?”

The captain opened a box of Ferrero Rocher Chocolates.

“Will these do?”

“Ooh Ferrero-Rocher,” Biggles grinned as he peeled one open.

“Look, someone from Savama,” the captain almost pleaded with Biggles, “which is the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security will soon be here, and they torture people, so you’re much better off telling me who you are or they might just tear it out of you.”

“You cads!” shrieked Biggles, “I’ve been tortured by Russians, Italian waiters, French taxi drivers and even the occasional German High command - and trust me when it comes to being tortured the Huns know or two. Nobody tortures Biggles, …oh bugger.”

“Biggles,” Captain Arash wrote this down, “with one or two ‘g’?”

“Ahem - two.”

“Rhymes with giggles?”

“You know, I’ve never noticed that before.”

The captain looked at Biggles studiously for several minutes, trying to recall something, as Biggles face became more and more covered with chocolate.

“You’re not the same Biggles we shot down a month ago, are you? The one who attacked a donkey and a field of sunflowers? The one who blew up Persepolis - one of our most treasured monuments, considered one of the great archaeological sites.  The one who escaped by wearing a Burqa, after we had already handed him back to the British, so we had to hand him back twice? Not, that Biggles?”

Biggles’ face went bright red and he looked awkwardly at the ceiling fan.

“No, that name is just a coincidence,” Biggles lied unconvincingly. “You’re thinking of Rupert Biggles, I on the other hand am James Bigglesworth, different chap altogether.”

“James Bigglesworth,” the Captain wrote down meticulously.

“Oh bother!”

“And can you tell me why you invaded Iranian airspace?”

“Is this Iran?” Biggles looked startled. “I thought it was Egypt.”

“Well, can you tell me why you invaded Egyptian airspace?”

“I thought it was on the way to Syria.”

“And have you any reason for invading Syrian airspace.”

“I was meeting a chap about a dog.”

“So, let me get this straight, you were flying to Syria using a British Royal Airforce Harrier II jumpjet,” the captain looked skeptical, “armed with Air to Surface missles and Paveway IV airburst bombs. Just to meet a man about a dog?”

“How on earth did you know all that?”

“Your logbook says,” the Captain opened up a small notebook, “and I quote, ‘fly Harrier II jump jet to Iran, and attack sheep with Air to Surface missiles and Paveway IV airburst bombs. Mister Abdullah won’t know what hit him. Be back in time for snooker with Algy and Ginger. I’m so spiffing. Biggles.’.”

“If you bally well knew all this,” Biggles looked annoyed, “why in blazes are you asking me?”

“When dealing with madmen, it pays to check your facts.” The Captained smiled. “You’re going to put into a hotel until such time as your government can explain why you are attacking all the sheep in my country.”

“What about those jolly Savamas, the secret police chaps,” Biggles quizzed worriedly, “the ones you said were going to torture me?”

“I just did,” Captain Arash, grinned, “I actually am in the Savama. You see, Captain Biggles we’re not idiots, my culture is over four thousand years old, it is comparable to Egypt, India and the ancient Greece. The Persian Empire was, and perhaps one day will be again, as complicated and vast as you could imagine. We are as sophisticated a people as you are ever likely to meet, and while the American press may seek to demonize us, a lot of us simply are not the monsters that we have been portrayed as, and though this may come as surprising to you – we do hold by the Geneva Convention, and you will in time be handed back to the British. We really couldn’t do that, if you were in many pieces, now then could we?”

“Er, bally well say not.” Biggles blew his cheeks out repeatedly.

“Except for one tiny little thing.”

“Yes?”

“The chocolates were really laxatives. Good day.”

Copyright reserved by Jim O’Brien ©