A Narrow Escape Day 3

In which Sid and Doris find a WW1 pilot in Bath.

From Bathampton to where we stopped in Bath would be a thirty five minute walk but seemed to take most of Wednesday morning. The canal runs right through the centre of town which is the full Georgian loveliness in honey sandstone, so they must have spent about ten years scrubbing off two centuries of soot. The horse poo pollution was more easily shifted and the gardens still look very good, possibly as a result.

The Assembly Rooms and baths of Aquae Sulis are still shut but we give the town a good look. In a second hand bookshop we see 1930s Biggles books by WE Johns about an intrepid flyer, and straight away we send Tim a picture of the titles. He has nearly all of these very badly written boys‘ adventures in paperback and in hardback and has moved on to collecting them in translation. Everybody seems normal until you get to know them.

Johns’ own life was exciting. At the beginning of WW1 he was a sanitary inspector in Norfolk. He joined up and was sent to Gallipoli. As if surviving that wasn’t enough he took flying training, became an instructor and had many near misses as planes were no more reliable than cars of the period, but with worse consequences. Later he was a bomber pilot in DH4s, being shot down and imprisoned in September 1918 which probably saved his life.

He presciently wrote about the German and Japanese threats in 1930s periodicals  he edited and in his Biggles books. Many of these were on the library shelves at Sid’s prep school and were avidly consumed. Probably also by Molesworth and Peason. Now Sid has more respect for the man and has more context to judge the writing. There is plot. The characterisation is a bit prep school.

Naturally Doris ensures we go back to the boat by a new route and we see the very deep lock necessary to get the canal under the new road and up/down to the Avon. It is 18’ deep and is clearly not an original early 19th century effort. To avoid people falling in, it is surrounded by the usual canal-side aid to health and safety, which is a small painted white line.

Looking at the weirs and currents on the Avon we decide we will not try it on our very first narrow boating trip, and instead we’ll turn boat around and head back towards the Caen Flight at Devizes.  Mr Bat knows a rhyme about Devizes and will sign off with it at the end of the trip.