My First Aeroplane

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My First Airplane by H. G. Wells. This is a
LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Read by Christa Zaleski My first Aeroplane, My first aeroplane,

(00:21):
What vivid memories of youth that recalls far back. It
was in the spring of nineteen twelve that I acquired
Aluda Magna, the Great Lark, for so I christened her.
And I was then a slender young man of four
and twenty, with hair, beautiful blonde hair all over my
adventurous young head. I was a dashing young fellow enough

(00:42):
in spite of the slight visual defect that obliged me
to wear spectacles on my prominent aquiline, but by no
means shapeless nose, the typical flyer's nose. I was a
good runner and swimmer, a vegetarian as ever, an all wooler,
and an ardent advocate of the extremest views in every
direction about everything. Precious little in the way of a

(01:04):
movement got started that I wasn't in. I owned two
motor bicycles and an enlarged photograph of me at that
remote date in leather skull cap, goggles and gauntlets still
adorns my study fireplace. I was also a great flier
of war kites, and a voluntary scout master of high
repute from the first beginnings of the boom and flying. Therefore,

(01:27):
I was naturally eager for the fray. I chafed against
the tears of my widowed mother for a time, and
at last told her I could endure it no longer
if I'm not the first to fly in Mintonchester, I said,
I leave Mintonchester. I'm your own son, mummy, and that's me.
And it didn't take me a week to place my
order when she agreed. I found one of the old

(01:49):
price lists the other day in a drawer full of
queer wood cuts of still queerer contrivances. What a time.
That was. An incredulous world had as consented to believe
that it could fly, And in addition to the motorcar people,
and the bicycle people and so on, a hundred new,
unheard of firms were turning out airplanes of every size

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and pattern to meet the demand. Amazing prices they got
for them, too. Three hundred and fifty was cheap for
the things I find four hundred and fifty five hundred,
five hundred guineas in this list of mine, and many
as capable of flight as oak trees. They were sold too,
without any sort of guarantee and with the merest apology

(02:32):
for instruction. Some of the early airplane companies paid nearly
two hundred percent on their ordinary shares. In those early years,
How well I remembered the dreams I had and the doubts.
The dreams were all of wonder In the air, I
saw myself rising gracefully from my mother's paddock, clearing the
hedge at the end, circling up to get over the

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Viker's pear trees, and away between the church steeple and
the rise of Withacombe towards the market place. Nor how
they would stare to see me, young mister Betts again,
They would say, we knew he'd do it. I would
circle and perhaps wave a handkerchief, And then I meant
to go over Lipton's gardens to the grounds of Sir
Digby Foster. There a certain fair denzy in might glance

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from the window, AI, youth, youth, My doubts were all
of the make I should adopt the character of the
engines I should choose. I remember my wild rush on
my motorbike to London to see the things and give
my order, the day of muddy traffic dodging as I
went from one shop to another, my growing exasperation at

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hearing everywhere the same refrain sold out can't undertake to
deliver before the beginning of April. Not me. I got
a Luda Magna at last at a little place in
Blackfriar's Road. She was an order thrown on the firm's
hands at the eleventh hour by the death of the
purchaser through another maker, and I ran my modest bank

(04:03):
account into an overdraft to get her. To this day,
I won't confess the price I paid for her, poor
little Mumsie. Within a week she was in my mother's pandock,
being put together after transport by a couple of not
due intelligent mechanics. The joy of it and a sort
of adventurous tremulousness. I'd had no lessons. All the qualified

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teachers were booked up as to pendous fees for months ahead.
But it wasn't in my quality to stick at a
thing like that. I couldn't have endured three days delay,
I assured my mother I had had lessons for her
peace of mind. It is a poor son who will
not tell a lie to keep his parent happy. I
remember the exultant turmoil of walking round the thing as

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it grew into a credible shape, with the consciousness of
half Mintonchester peering at me through the hedge, only deterred
by our new trespass board and the disagreeable expression of Snape,
our trusted gardener, who was part mowing the grass and
partly on the sentry go with his scythe from swarming
into the meadow. I lit a cigarette and watched the

(05:08):
workmen sagely, and we engaged an elderly unemployed named Snortecombe
to keep watch all night to save the thing from Medler's.
In those days, you must understand an aeroplane was a
sign and a wonder allah Da Magna was a darling
for her time, though nowadays I suppose she would be
received with derisive laughter by every schoolboy in the land.

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She was a monoplane and roughly speaking, a blaiat, and
she had the dearest, neatest seven cylinder forty horse power
g k C engine with its g bs flywheel that
you can possibly imagine. I spent an hour or so
tuning her up. She had a deafening purr, rather like
a machine gun in action, until the viker sent round

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to say that he was writing a sermon upon peace
and was unable to concentrate his mind on the topic
until I desisted. I took his objection in good part,
and after a culminating volley of one last lingering look,
started for a stroll round the town. In spite of
every endeavor to be modest, I could not but feel
myself the sinister of every eye. I had rather carelessly

(06:16):
forgotten to change the leggings and breeches I had bought
for the occasion, and I was also wearing my leather
skull cap with ear flaps carelessly adjusted so that I
could hear what people were saying. I should think I
had half the population under fifteen at my heels before
I was half way down the high street. You going
to fly, mister Betts, says one cheeky youngster, like a bird,

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I said, don't you fly till we comes out of school?
Says another. It was a sort of royal progress that
evening for me. I visited old Lupton, the horticulturist, and
he could hardly conceal what a great honor he thought it.
He took me over his new greenhouse he had now got,
he said, three acres of surface under glass, and showed

(06:59):
me all sorts of clever dodges. He was adopting in
the way of intensive culture. And afterwards we went down
to the end of his old flower garden and looked
at his bees. When I came out, my retinue of
kids was still waiting for me. Reinforced. Then I went
round by paramours and dropped into the bull and horses,
just as if there wasn't anything particular up for a

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lemon squash. Everybody was talking about my aeroplane. They just
shut up for a moment when I came in, and
then burst out with questions. It's odd nowadays to remember
all that excitement. I answered what they had to ask me,
and refrain from putting on any side. And afterwards, Missus
Fletman and I went into the commercial room and turned

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over the pages of various illustrated journals and compared the
pictures with my machine in a quiet, unassuming sort of way.
Everybody encouraged me to go up, everybody. And I stress
on that, because, as I was soon to discover, the
tides and nabs of popular favor are among the most
inexplicable and inconsistent things in the world. I particularly remember

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Old Cheeseman, the pork butcher whose pigs I killed, saying
over and over again, in a tone of perfect satisfaction,
you won't have any difficulty in going up. You won't.
There won't be any difficulty about going up, And winking
and nodding to the other eminent tradesmen there assembled, I
hadn't much difficulty in going up. Allada Magna was a

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cheerful lifter, and the roar and spin of her engine
had hardly begun behind me before she was off her wheels,
snap snapped. They came up above the ski gliders and
swaying swiftly across the meadows towards the vicarage hedge. She
had a sort of onward roll to her, rather like
the movement of a corpulent but very buoyant woman. I

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had just a glimpse of brave little Mother, trying not
to cry and full of pride in me on the verandah,
with both the maids and old snape beside her, and
then I had to give all my attention to the
steering wheel if I didn't want to barge into the
Viker's pear trees. I'd felt the faintest of tugs. Just
as I came up and fancied, I heard a resounding

(09:11):
whack on our new trespassers will be prosecuted board. And
I saw the crowd of people in the lane running
this way and that from my loud humming approach. But
it was only after the flight was over that I
realized what that fool Snortacombe had been up to. It
would seem he had thought the monster needed tethering. I
won't attempt to explain the mysteries of his mind. And

(09:32):
he had tied about a dozen yards of rope to
the end of either wing and fixed them firmly to
a couple of iron guy posts that belonged properly to
the Badminton net. Up they came at the tug of
the Eluda, and now they were trailing and dancing and
leaping along behind me, and taking the most vicious dives
and lunches at everything that came within range of them.

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Poor old temple com got it hottest in the lane.
I'm told a frightful whack on his bald head, and
then we ripped up the Viker's cucumber frames, killed and
scattered his parrot, smashed the upper pane of his study window,
and just missed the housemaid as she stuck her head
out of the upper bedroom window. I didn't, of course,
know anything of this at the time. It was on

(10:16):
a lower plane altogether from my proceedings. I was steering
past his vicarage a narrow miss, and trying to come
round to clear the pear trees at the end of
the garden, which I did with a sgrace, and the
trailers behind me sent leaves and branches flying this way,
and that I had reason to thank Heaven for my
sturdy little G. K. C's. Then I was fairly up

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for a time. I found it much more confusing than
I had expected. The engine made such an infernal whoh
for one thing, and the steering tugged and struggled like
a thing alive. But I got her heading over the
market place all right. We buzzed over stunts the green grocers,
and my trailers hopped up his back premises and made

(10:58):
a sanguary mess of the tile on his roof and
sent an avalanche of broken chimney pot into the crowded
street below. Then the thing dipped. I suppose one of
the guy posts tried to anchor for a second in
Stunts rafters, and I had the hardest job to clear
the bull and horse stables. I didn't, as a matter
of fact, completely clear them. The ski like alighting runners

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touched the ridge for a moment, and the left wing
bent against the top of the chimney stack and floundered
over it in an awkward, destructive manner. I'm told that
my trailers whirled about the crowded market place in the
most diabolical fashion as I dipped and recovered, But I'm
inclined to think all this part of the story has
been greatly exaggerated. Nobody was killed, and I couldn't have

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been half a minute from the time I appeared over
Stunts to the time when I slid off the stable
roof and in among Lipton's glass. If people had taken
reasonable care of themselves instead of gaping at me, they
wouldn't have got hurt. I had enough to do without
pointing out to people that they were likely to be
hit by an iron guyepost which had seen fit to
follow me. If anyone ought to have warned them, it

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was that fool snortcum. Indeed, what with the incalculable damage
done to the left wing and one of the cylinders
getting out of rhythm and making an omenace catch in
the whirr, I was busy enough for anything on my
own private personal account. I suppose I am, in a
manner of speaking, responsible for knocking Old Dutney off the

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station bus. But I don't see that I can be
held answerable for the subsequent evolutions of the bus, which
ended after a charge among the market stalls and cheeseman's
shop window. Nor do I see that I am to
blame because an idle and ill disciplined crowd chose to
stampede across a stock of carelessly distributed earthenware and overturned

(12:44):
a butter stall. I was a mere excuse for all
this misbehavior. I didn't exactly fall into Lupton's glass, and
I didn't exactly drive over it. I think ricocheting describes
my passage across his premises as well as any single word.
It was the queerest sensation being carried along by this

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big buoyant thing, which had, as it were, bolted with
me and feeling myself alternately lifted up and then dropped
with a scrunch upon a fresh greenhouse roof. In spite
of all my efforts to get control, and to the
infinite relief, when at last at the fifth or six pounds,
I rose and kept on rising, I seemed to forget

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everything disagreeable instantly. The doubt whether after all Aluda Magna
was good for flying vanished. She was evidently very good.
We whirred over the wall at the end, with my
trailers still bumping behind and beyond, one of them hitting
a cow which died the next day. I don't think
I did the slightest damage to anything or anybody all

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across the breadth of Cheeseman's Meadow. Then I began to
rise steadily but surely, and getting the thing well in hand,
came swooping round over the piggeries to give Minton Chest
a second taste of my quality. I meant to go
up in a spiral until I was clear of all
the trees and things, and circle about the church spire.

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Hitherto I had been so concentrated on the plunges and
tugs of the monster I was driving, and so deafened
by the uproar of my engine that I had noticed
little of the things which were going on below. But
now I could make out a little lot of people
headed by Lepton with a garden fork, rushing obliquely across
the corner of Cheeseman's Meadow. It puzzled me for a

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second to imagine what they could think they were. After
up I went whirring and swaying, and presently got a
glimpse down High Street of the awful tangle everything had
got into in the market place. I didn't at the
time connect that extraordinary smash up with my transit. It
was the jar of my whack against the weathercock that
really stopped my engines. I've never been able to make

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out quite how it was I hit the unfortunate vein.
Perhaps the twist I had given my left wing on
Stunt's roof spoilt my steering, but anyhow I hit the
gaudy thing and bent it, and for a lengthy couple
of seconds I wasn't by any means sure whether I
wasn't going to dive straight down into the market place.
I got her right by a supreme effort. I think

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the people I didn't smash might have squeezed out one
drop of gratitude for that drove pitching at the tree
tops of the WITHI cumb got round and realized the
engines were stopping. There wasn't any time to survey the
country in arrange for a suitable landing place. There wasn't
any chance of clearing the course. It wasn't my fault

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if a quarter of the population of Mintinchester was swarming
out over Cheeseman's meadows. It was the only chance I
had to land without a smash, and I took it down.
I came a steep glide, doing the best I could
for myself. Perhaps I did bowl a few people over,
but progress is progress, and I had to kill his pig.

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It was a case of either dropping among the pigs
and breaking my rush, or going full tilt into the
corrugated iron piggeries beyond. I might have been cut to ribbons,
and pigs are born to die. I stopped and stood
up stiffly on the framework and looked behind me. It
didn't take me a moment to realize that Mintinchester meant

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to take my poor efforts to give it an aviation
day all to itself. In a spirit of ferocious ingratitude.
The air was full of the squealing of the two
pigs I had pinned under my machine, and the bawling
of the nearest spectators. Looped and occupied the middle distance
with a garden fork with the evident intention of jabbing

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it into my stomach. I am always pretty cool and
quick witted in an emergency. I dropped off poor Aluda
Magna like a shot, dodged through the piggery, went up
by Frubisher's orchard, nipped over the yard wall of Hank's cottages,
and was into the police station by the back way
before anyone could get within fifty feet of me. Hullo,

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said Inspector Ninton. Smashed the thing, No, I said, but
people seemed to have got something the matter with them.
I want to be locked in a cell for a fortnight.
Do you know? I wasn't allowed to come near my
own machine. I went home from the police station as
soon as the first excitement had blown over, a little
going round by love Lane and the chart, so as

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not to arouse any febrile symptoms. I found mother frightfully indignant.
You can be sure at the way I had been treated.
And there, as I say, was I standing a sort
of siege in the upstairs rooms. A sturdy little alda
magna away in Cheeseman's fields, being walked round and stared
at by everybody in the world but me. Cheeseman's theory

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was that he had seized her. There came a gale
one night and the dear thing was blown clean over
the hedge among Lupton's greenhouses again. And then Lupton set
round a silly note to say that if we didn't
remove her, she would be sold to defray expenses, going
off into a long tirade about damages in his solicitor.
So mother posted off to clamps the furniture removers at

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up Norton Corner, and they got hold of a timber wagon,
and popular feeling had allayed sufficiently before that arrived for
me to go in person to superintend the removal. There
she lay like a great moth above the debris of
some cultural projects of Lupton's, scarcely damaged herself except for
a hole or so, and some bent rods and stays
in the left wing, and a smashed skid but she

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was bespattered with pig's blood and pretty dirty. I went
at once by instinct for the engines and had them
in perfect going order before the timber wagon arrived. A
sort of popularity returned to me. With the procession home.
With the help of a swarm of men, we got
aloude Magna poised on the wagon, and then I took

(18:52):
my seat to see she balanced properly, and a miscellaneous
team of seven horses started to tow her home. It
was nearly one of when we got to that, and
all the children turned out to shout and jeer. We
couldn't go by Pook's Lane and the vicarage because the
walls were too high and narrow, and so we headed
across Cheeseman's Meadows for Stoke's Waist and the Common to

(19:14):
get round by that detour. I was silly, of course,
to do what I did. I see that now, but
sitting up there on my triumphal car with all the
multitude about me excited me. I got a kind of
glory on. I really only meant to let the propellers
spin as a sort of harangue, but I was carried away.
Was It was like something blowing up, and behold, I

(19:38):
was sailing and plunging away from my wayIn across the
common for a second flight, Lord, I said, I fully
meant to run up the air a little way, come about,
and take her home to our paddock. But those early
aeroplanes were very uncertain things. After all, it wasn't such
a very bad shot to land in the vicarage garden,

(19:58):
and that practically what I did. And I don't see
that it was my fault that all the vicarage and
a lot of friends should be having lunch on the lawn.
They were doing that, of course, so as to be
on the spot without having to rush out of the
house when a Ludamagna came home again quiet exultation. That
was their game. They wanted to gloat over every particular

(20:20):
of my ignominious return. You can see that from the
way they had arranged the table. I can't help it
if fate decided that my return wasn't to be so
ignominious as all that, and swooped me down on the
lot of them they were having their soup. They had
calculated on me for the dessert. I suppose to this day,
I can't understand how it is I didn't kill the vicar.

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The forward end of the left wing got him just
under the chin and carried him back a dozen yards.
He must have had neck vertebrae like steel, And even
then I was amazed his head didn't come off. Perhaps
he was holding on underneath, but I can't imagine where.
If it hadn't been for the fascination of his staring face,

(21:03):
I think I could have avoided the verandah. But as
it was, that took me by surprise. That was a
fair crumple up. The wood must have just rotted away
under its green paint. But anyhow, it and the climbing
roses and the shingles above and everything snapped and came
down like stage scenery, and I and the engines and

(21:24):
the middle part drove clean through the French windows on
to the drawing room floor. It was jolly lucky for me.
I think that the French windows weren't shut. There's no
unpleasanter way of getting hurt in the world than flying
suddenly through thin window glass. And I think I ought
to know. There was a frightful jobation, but the vicar

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was out of action. That was one good thing. Those
deep sonorous sentences, but perhaps they would have calmed things.
That was the end of a ludam Magna, my first aeroplane.
I never even troubled to take her away. I hadn't
the heart to. And then the storm burst. The idea
seems to have been to make Mother and me pay

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for everything that had ever tumbled down or got broken
in Mintinchester since the beginning of things. Oh and for
any animal that had ever died a sudden death in
the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The tariff ruled high too.
Cows were twenty five to thirty pounds in upward, pigs
about a pound each, with no reduction for killing A

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quantity verandas verandas were steady at forty five guinea. Dinner
services too were up, and so were tiling in all
branches of the building trade. It seemed to certain persons
in Mintinchester I believed that an era of unexampled prosperity
had dawn upon the place, only limited in fact, by

(22:49):
the solvency of me and Mother. The vicar tried the
old sold to defray expenses racket, but I told them
he might sell. I pleaded defective machinery and the hands
of God did my best to shift the responsibility on
to the firm in Blackfriars Road, and as an additional precaution,
filed my petition from bankruptcy. I really hadn't any property

(23:11):
in the world, thanks to Mother's goodness, except my two
motor bicycles, which the roots took, my photographic dark room,
and a lot of bound books on aeronautics and progress. Generally, Mother,
of course wasn't responsible. She hadn't lifted a wing well
for all that disagreeables piled up so heavily on me,
what with being shouted after by a rag tag and

(23:33):
bobtail of schoolboys and golf caddies and hobbledy hoys when
I went out of doors, threatened with personal violence by
stupid people like old Lupton who wouldn't understand that a
man can't pay what he hasn't got, pestered by the
wives of various gentlemen who saw fit to become out
of works on the strength of alleged injuries, and served

(23:54):
with all sorts of silly summonses for all sorts of
fancy offenses such as mischievous mischief and manslaughter, and Wilfrid
damage and trespassed that I simply had to go away
from the Mintinchester to Italy and leave poor little mother
to manage them in her own solid, undemonstrative way, which
she did, I must admit, like a brick. They didn't

(24:17):
get much out of her anyhow, But she had to
break up our little home at Mintonchester and join me
in a rosa. In spite of her dislike of Italian cooking.
She found me already a bit of a celebrity because
I had made a record, so it seemed, by falling
down three separate crevices on three successive days. But that's
another story altogether. From start to finish, I reckoned that

(24:41):
first aeroplane cost my mother over nine hundred pounds. If
I hadn't put my foot down and she had stuck
to her original intention of paying all the damage, it
would have cost her three thousand. But it was worth it.
It was worth it. I wish I could live it
all over again, And many an old cadure like me
sits at home now and deplores those happy, vanished, adventurous

(25:04):
times when any lad of spirit was free to fly
and go anywhere, and smash anything and discuss the question
afterwards of just what the damage is amounted to and
what his legal liability might be. End of my first
aeroplane