my father had taken me in his car to Hendon to see the passenger-flights at two guineas a head, and the excellent Verrier had taken me up with him. Immediately I became 'bitten' with aviation, and instantly decided to adopt it as a profession.
At first the governor—as all governors do—set his face firmly against such a risky business, but at last I persuaded him to plank down the fees, and thereupon I began a course of tuition in flying, with the result that I now owned my own big monoplane upon which I was conducting certain important experiments, in association with Teddy Ashton.
'See that in the paper this morning about the new German Fokker monoplane?' I asked him as we both smoked and rested, our machines standing side by side outside.
'Of course, my dear old Claude,' was his reply. 'It would be one of the jokes of the war if it wasn't such a grim jest. Remember what they said recently in Parliament—that we held the supremacy of the air, and that it is maintained.'
'All humbug,' I declared bluntly. 'Sad though it is to admit it.'
'Of course it is!' cried Teddy very emphatically. 'The fact is that the public haven't yet realized that the joke is against our Government "experts" who now see all their science set at nought by a rule-of-the-thumb Dutchman who, by the simple process of putting a big engine into a copy of an obsolete French monoplane, has given his own country's chief enemy the freedom of the air.'
I agreed with him; and his words, I confess, set me thinking. The papers had been full of the Fokker
