The War in the Air | Page 6

road, to add himself as one more voluntary
public danger to the amenities of the south of England.
"Orf to Brighton!" said old Smallways, regarding his youngest son from the sitting-room
window over the green-grocer's shop with something between pride and reprobation.
"When I was 'is age, I'd never been to London, never bin south of Crawley--never bin
anywhere on my own where I couldn't walk. And nobody didn't go. Not unless they was
gentry. Now every body's orf everywhere; the whole dratted country sims flying to pieces.
Wonder they all get back. Orf to Brighton indeed! Anybody want to buy 'orses?"
"You can't say I bin to Brighton, father," said Tom.
"Nor don't want to go," said Jessica sharply; "creering about and spendin' your money."
3
For a time the possibilities of the motor-bicycle so occupied Bert's mind that he remained
regardless of the new direction in which the striving soul of man was finding exercise and
refreshment. He failed to observe that the type of motor-car, like the type of bicycle, was
settling-down and losing its adventurous quality. Indeed, it is as true as it is remarkable
that Tom was the first to observe the new development. But his gardening made him
attentive to the heavens, and the proximity of the Bun Hill gas-works and the Crystal
Palace, from which ascents were continually being made, and presently the descent of
ballast upon his potatoes, conspired to bear in upon his unwilling mind the fact that the
Goddess of Change was turning her disturbing attention to the sky. The first great boom
in aeronautics was beginning.
Grubb and Bert heard of it in a music-hall, then it was driven home to their minds by the
cinematograph, then Bert's imagination was stimulated by a sixpenny edition of that
aeronautic classic, Mr. George Griffith's "Clipper of the Clouds," and so the thing really
got hold of them.
At first the most obvious aspect was the multiplication of balloons. The sky of Bun Hill
began to be infested by balloons. On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons particularly
you could scarcely look skyward for a quarter of an hour without discovering a balloon
somewhere. And then one bright day Bert, motoring toward Croydon, was arrested by the
insurgence of a huge, bolster-shaped monster from the Crystal Palace grounds, and
obliged to dismount and watch it. It was like a bolster with a broken nose, and below it,
and comparatively small, was a stiff framework bearing a man and an engine with a
screw that whizzed round in front and a sort of canvas rudder behind. The framework had
an air of dragging the reluctant gas-cylinder after it like a brisk little terrier towing a shy
gas-distended elephant into society. The combined monster certainly travelled and
steered. It went overhead perhaps a thousand feet up (Bert heard the engine), sailed away
southward, vanished over the hills, reappeared a little blue outline far off in the east,

going now very fast before a gentle south-west gale, returned above the Crystal Palace
towers, circled round them, chose a position for descent, and sank down out of sight.
Bert sighed deeply, and turned to his motor-bicycle again.
And that was only the beginning of a succession of strange phenomena in the
heavens--cylinders, cones, pear-shaped monsters, even at last a thing of aluminium that
glittered wonderfully, and that Grubb, through some confusion of ideas about armour
plates, was inclined to consider a war machine.
There followed actual flight.
This, however, was not an affair that was visible from Bun Hill; it was something that
occurred in private grounds or other enclosed places and, under favourable conditions,
and it was brought home to Grubb and Bert Smallways only by means of the magazine
page of the half-penny newspapers or by cinematograph records. But it was brought
home very insistently, and in those days if, ever one heard a man saying in a public place
in a loud, reassuring, confident tone, "It's bound to come," the chances were ten to one he
was talking of flying. And Bert got a box lid and wrote out in correct window-ticket style,
and Grubb put in the window this inscription, "Aeroplanes made and repaired." It quite
upset Tom--it seemed taking one's shop so lightly; but most of the neighbours, and all the
sporting ones, approved of it as being very good indeed.
Everybody talked of flying, everybody repeated over and over again, "Bound to come,"
and then you know it didn't come. There was a hitch. They flew--that was all right; they
flew in machines heavier than air. But they smashed. Sometimes they smashed the engine,
sometimes they smashed the aeronaut, usually they smashed both. Machines that made
flights of three or four miles and came down safely, went up the next time to headlong