The Adventures of Captain Blatherwick

A Story by Rick White

not a great pilot

Captain Blatherwick is quite, quite mad.

He is also a terrible pilot.

He lives in an abandoned air raid shelter with his pet hedgehog, Sergeant Jeremy Spikeman.

One day, as he was tending to his petunias in the garden, Captain Blatherwick saw a flock of geese fly overhead…

“Spikeman! Enemy aircraft overhead!” Shouted Blatherwick. “Battle stations!”

Blatherwick and Spikeman rushed to their plane and took off in to the sky.

The plane was a bit old, with only one wing and the other held on with masking tape and string.

The propeller didn’t work because it had a sock stuck in it and the engine was powered by cherryade instead of aeroplane fuel.

Blatherwick and Spikeman were at least 8 feet off the ground when trouble hit them like a wet sponge in the face.

The engine gave a sputter, the propeller gave a stutter and the one remaining wing fell off.

“We’re going down Spikeman, God help us both eject, eject!”

Captain Blatherwick hit the eject button and fired himself and Sergeant Spikeman 200 feet in to the air.

Blatherwick had never believed in parachutes, he simply floated back down to earth using the air trapped inside his enormous bushy moustache.

Spikeman was not so fortunate. He flew in to the air like a rocket propelled hedgehog, flying over the horizon and disappearing in to the clouds.

Safely back on the ground, Blatherwick was beside himself with worry. “I never leave a man behind”, he said.

He set off on his motorbike with a map of Istanbul, a wedge of Battenberg cake and a canteen of cherryade as his only provisions.

He searched all around his garden for forty five minutes before calling off the search, Spikeman was lost, never to return.

Blatherwick sat in his garden drinking a mug of cold dandelion tea and crying in to his moustache when he looked up and noticed that the sun was unusally dark and spikey for noon on a Tuesday.

Just then Sergeant Jeremy Spikeman fell out of the sky and landed right on his face. It could have resulted in serious injury if not for Blatherwick’s massive, luxurious moustache, which covers 95 per cent of his face.

“Thank the Lord.” Said Blatherwick. “All’s well that ends well.”

And he and Spikeman went back in to the air raid shelter for a slice of cherryade and a mug of Battenberg cake.