Read A Summer Bright and Terrible for Free Online Page A

the British Association,
published a series of investigations into the spirit world. Nothing, it seemed,
lay beyond the reach—if not the grasp—of science. Nothing was impossible,
though much remained mysterious, only dimly glimpsed, going bump, bump, bump in
the forests of the night.
     
    As a child growing into a young man, Hugh
Dowding was a normal product of those times; that is, he ignored them. Neither
scientifically nor psychically acute, he displayed little interest in all these
revolutionary thoughts swirling in the wind. Though at a later and crucial
period in his life the atmosphere he had unconsciously absorbed in his youth
would surface, at the time he was concerned solely with his own life, with
finding his own way, which was as difficult for him as it is for most of us.
    Often described as a typical dour Scotsman, he
was nothing of the kind unless environment tops heredity. He came from a long
line of Englishmen who would seem right at home in the classic villages
described by Agatha Christie. On both sides his forebears were mostly clerics,
earning small but regular livings in various English parishes, with one
great-grandfather who won and lost a fortune, a maternal grandfather who was a
general, and an eccentric uncle, nicknamed “Beelzebub,” who retired from the
navy as an admiral and left for South America to catch insects. His father was
an English schoolteacher who bought his own preparatory school in Scotland, and
so Hugh was born there, in Moffat, in 1882. Growing up as the son of the headmaster, Hugh decided
that the only thing he didn’t want to be in life was a schoolteacher. But then
what was one to do? The usual choices for the son of a poor professional were
the Church, law, medicine, or the army or navy.
    Hugh chose the army for a reason that any
schoolchild could understand: All the other professions required the study of
Greek.
    And so, upon graduation from Winchester, he
gained enrolment in a one-year army course that would guarantee him a
commission in the Royal Engineers. All he had to do was complete the course
successfully. Unfortunately, the impetus of not having to learn Greek wasn’t
sufficient to induce him to take the course seriously, and he failed. “I would
have got the commission if I had kept my place, but I failed through laziness,
he admitted. He wasn’t tossed out of the army completely, but he was forced to
take a lower position, as a subaltern gunner in the artillery.
    Which wasn’t at all bad. The year was 1900, he
was eighteen years old, and life as a subaltern in an army at peace was rather
pleasant. He was soon sent to India, where he enthusiastically took up horse
racing and polo. The other traditional occupations of the young officers,
drinking, carousing, and fornicating, didn’t interest him as much, and so it
was here that he earned his nickname, “Stuffy.” But he thought it was the
others who were the stuffy ones; they were the ones who weren’t open to new
ideas, as he soon discovered.
    Aside from the pleasant life he led, several
episodes confirmed his opinion of the closed-mindedness of others. This
assessment would replay itself later, in more important times. In one of the
ongoing army exercises, Dowding was given command of one section, while the
opposing group of Ghurkas was to be led by one of his contemporaries, another
subaltern, named Cyril Newall. The exercise was scheduled to begin at six a.m.,
but Dowding roused his troops and had them on the march by four o’clock. He
caught the Ghurkas at their breakfast, and routed them. This was the beginning of a long rivalry with Newall, which would
have serious consequences in 1940.
    At other times his initiative served only to
get him in trouble. The first time he took his turn as garrison orderly
officer, he found that one of his duties was to inspect the daily meat ration.
Not knowing anything about what to look for in such an inspection, he bought a
manual that warned that sometimes old