The Rainbow and the Rose (6 page)

I nodded. ‘You won’t have any difficulty.’

He got back into the machine and I gave him the suitcase to hold upon his knee, and then we pushed the machine out into the wind. On the tarmac I got in beside the doctor, closed the door, and nodded to the ground engineer. While the two boys held the wing struts he swung the little propeller for me and the engine caught; I let her run for a minute and then ran her up, trying the magnetos. Everything was in order. I nodded to him and they pulled the chocks away. With the boys upon the struts I taxied out a little way across wind, turned into wind, waved them away, and took the machine off.

In the air it was very bumpy, of course. The doctor sat gripping his suitcase, tense and obviously anxious. I turned on course and held the machine on the climb because not far away were mountains that we had to cross. They lay across our path, snow-covered in the sunlight. To the east the cloud hung down upon them still, to the west all was clear with sunlight and blue sky. I pulled out my map and set to work to identify the peaks, and the course that I must
make good over the land. We had about fifteen degrees of drift.

My business finished, I turned to the doctor. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ I said.

He lifted his head and looked around, relaxing a little. ‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘Awfully pretty.’ And then he said, ‘You know, this is the first time I’ve ever been up.’

I was startled. I suppose I should have thought of that. On the airline, of course, it is common to go down the cabin and find passengers who have never flown before. I generally pause and chat to them, ask them where they are going, let them talk a little, offer them a cup of coffee and tell the hostess to bring it. It had simply never entered my head that this doctor, young and active as he was, was totally unused to flying. With my mind set on other things, upon the need to get a doctor to the Lewis River, I had treated him pretty rough.

I dared not weaken him with any sympathy, however. ‘You’ve missed a lot,’ I said. The thing to do now was to get him interested. ‘Do you sail a boat?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I do that a good bit. We’ve got a sailing dinghy at home.’ I remembered that his home was on the Huon River, a deep inlet of the sea to the south of Hobart.

‘This is just like sailing a boat,’ I said. There was no dual control in the machine, for the ground engineer had taken it out. I took his hand and put it on the stick beneath my own, and flew the machine like that for a time in the rough weather, so that he could get the feel, explaining the motions to him as I had so often done before upon the first flight of a pupil. In a quarter of an hour he was doing it on his own, and seemed to have relaxed.

It got bitterly cold. We had to go up to about five thousand to get over the hills, and it must have been well below freezing there. I had my leather coat and helmet and
a muffler and even so I was cold; my feet chilled and my hands blue. In his normal overcoat he must have been much colder. However, over Macquarie Harbour I started to let down and it got warmer. We came to the coast and flew on southwards at a thousand feet; it was still sunny but the sea was grey and rough, and we were crabbing along with a big drift.

I identified Mount Osmond, and began looking for the Lewis River. Several small rivers run down from the mountains to the sea in that part of the country, and we were uncertain for a few minutes which it was; they all looked equally impossible for a boat to enter. Then Turnbull saw the house, and pointed it out to me. There was no other house upon the coast for thirty miles, so this one had to be it.

It lay in the middle of a sort of undulating moor. Part of this moor round about the house had been cut like a peat bog over a fairly wide area; here there were one or two pools of water, and tumbledown wooden structures, and a few concrete tanks, and pipes running about the landscape. That would be the tin working, where they washed the metal out of the surface soil. The house was a white wooden building, single storey, standing in a fold of the land for shelter, with a little stream beside it and a kitchen garden. As we circled round, a woman came out on the step and waved to us.

Then I saw the wreckage of the Auster Pascoe had flown in, and that led me to the airstrip. Used as I was to proper runways, I could hardly believe my eyes at first. It was difficult to see because the button grass was thin upon the ground around it, and so this thing looked more like a little fortuitous line of soil where no vegetation grew. I brought the machine round and dropped off height to fly along it and have a good look. It was no better than a little bit of cart track that led nowhere. That was what the data sheet had told me, of course, but I suppose I hadn’t really believed that it could be so bad.

I went up again and circled round. The woman had come out of the house with what looked like a bundle of washing in her arms and she was doing something a bit to one side of the south end of the strip. I circled closer to see what she was up to, and saw that she was putting up a windsock on a little flagstaff; Rhys-Davids must have given her that. It was a help, definitely, for there was nothing else to tell you the wind direction except the run of the seas. When she got it up it stood out stiff and horizontal from the mast, making an angle of about seventy degrees to the strip.

She was now laying a sheet out upon the ground, pinning it down with stones. I turned to the doctor. ‘I’m going to do a dummy run over that sheet,’ I said. ‘Don’t put the suitcase out this time. Next time.’

I brought her round and headed into wind over the sheet, flying at fifty or sixty on the clock and throttling to lose height. It was turbulent, of course, but not too bad; we passed fairly slowly over the sheet ten feet up and I knew that I could get her slower than that. I put on power and went round again, thinking that I should have to watch for the increased drag on the machine as he opened the door, and not let that fox me. ‘We’ll put it out this time,’ I said. ‘Wait till I tell you and then open the door a bit and hold it balanced on the edge, ready to shove it out. Don’t drop it till I say.’

I took a longer run-up this time, to give him plenty of time. He got the door open a bit and seemed to have some trouble with it; it was hinged at the front side, of course, and for the first time a doubt flitted through my mind. It seemed to require a good deal of pushing to get it open, and when the trailing edge was standing a few inches proud the effect on the machine was very noticeable. However, he got the suitcase down on to the sill and partly out, and then glanced up at me and nodded.

I brought her in more slowly this time, and lower, flying
at fifty minus. She still had plenty of control and we were going quite slowly over the ground; I could have run pretty well as fast. I reckoned he would take a little time, so when we were fifty yards from the sheet and about four feet up I shouted, ‘Shove it out now!’

He had a great struggle to do so. The case was only a foot deep, but he had the greatest difficulty in opening the door so far as that, and the machine yawed a bit, and I tried to open up the throttle a little. I had to keep my eyes on what I was doing, and I could only sense what was going on beside me. He was working in an awkward attitude, of course, sitting down and strapped in. We sailed over the sheet while he was still struggling and I went on as slowly as I could, four or five feet up, intent upon the flying. Finally I think he levered the door open with the suitcase and managed to get it out; it fell on the low scrub a hundred yards beyond the sheet. I shoved the throttle forwards and went up again.

I turned to him. ‘I’m sorry about that door. I didn’t think that it would be so difficult, at this slow speed. I ought to have lashed the case on outside somehow. Then we could have cut the lashing.’

He looked down at it as we circled round. ‘I think it fell pretty soft,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it didn’t come open.’

I was very worried about the door now. ‘I’m going to make another dummy run,’ I said. ‘I’m going to put her on the ground if I can, and hold her there for a few seconds. While I’m doing that – when I tell you – just see if you can open that door wide enough to get out. But don’t get out this time. Just try the door, and see.’

I brought her round again; the woman had gone to the suitcase and was examining it. The ground on each side of the strip fell away most smoothly at the south end. Here the air turbulence would be least, and I made my run-up on that. As I approached the strip that lay crossways before me I brought her in more and more slowly, flying by the feel of
the drop of the tail behind me. Five feet, three feet, one foot up; we crossed the near edge of the strip and I put her on the ground, throttled a bit more and put the stick forward a little. We were motionless on the ground now, with the tail well up and a good bit of engine power. I shouted. ‘All right, try that door!’

He lifted the catch and shoved it open. The blast of the slipstream was strong upon it, and to make things worse I had to open up the throttle to counter the increasing drag. I shot a glance at him as he struggled. With one hand he could only open it a few inches; with both hands only an inch or two more. With a sick feeling in my throat I realised that we were up against something here that I had not reckoned on. With all my skill in putting down upon that strip, the doctor might not be able to get out of the cabin of the aeroplane.

I shouted to him to shut the door, and took off again. When we were well up and circling, I turned to him. ‘This is my fault,’ I said. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to push it far enough open to get out?’

‘I could get out all right if it wasn’t for the door,’ he said. ‘We weren’t moving at all. It’s the wind holding it or something.’

‘It’s the slipstream from the prop,’ I said. ‘I have to keep the motor going pretty hard.’

‘If you could stop it for a moment,’ he said, ‘I’m sure I could get out.’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t do that.’ I sat there weighing up the position. There was a red lever at the door hinge; it was there for the purpose of jettisoning the door as an emergency exit. If I pulled that down the hinge pins would be withdrawn and the door would fall out and fly away, leaving a great empty space where it had been. If I did that while we were flying it would probably hit the tail, and we might both be killed. If I told him to do it while I held her on the ground it might fall away safely or we might tie something on to it
to keep it from the tail – my scarf, perhaps. Then he could get out. But after that I should have to take off with just a great big hole where the door had been, and fly her home like that.

Would that Auster fly safely without the door in place? I had never flown one like that, nor had I heard of anyone else doing so. It might be quite all right. Probably it would. I studied the fuselage. It was a little narrower at the front end of the door by the instrument panel than it was at the rear end, in way of our seats; the fuselage tapered forward to the engine. That meant, with the door removed, a great blast of air would come into the cabin as I flew, building up a pressure. I turned and scrutinised the structure behind me. The main frame and the wings would probably be all right, but the big sheet of perspex that roofed the rear end of the cabin might well go, and take with it the fabric covering of the rear fuselage. The cover of the fin might go. I did not think that the machine would be unflyable, but it might be very much damaged. Anything that was going to happen would probably happen at a very low altitude, just as I was taking off. That wouldn’t be so good, for there would be no time to think, no time for a recovery of any control lost.

On the other hand, I could put the doctor on the ground, and Johnnie Pascoe had a fractured skull. And it might all be perfectly all right, no damage to the aeroplane at all.

I bit my lip and went on circling round. This was my fault, fairly and squarely, I was the one who was supposed to know about aeroplanes, and I had boobed, fallen down on the job, with all my years of experience behind me. In all those years of flying I had had things happen to me in the air from time to time, sufficient to warn me; I had always had height, and luck, and perhaps skill, and I had always got away with it. This time I might not do so, for there would be no height. It would come at fifty feet or less, a great cracking noise behind me, followed by a jammed elevator or a jammed rudder, no
landing possible ahead, no control, no time to try anything, no time even to think before we hit the ground, the engine came back into my lap, the fire broke out. Too bad on Sheila and my children, and I thought what she had said, ‘Don’t go and buy it yourself, Ronnie …’

All this passed very quickly through my mind. The doctor said after a moment, ‘It’s sitting like this makes it difficult to shove it open. I think if I was getting out and put my backside against it, I could squeeze through.’

‘Do you think you could?’

‘I could try.’

I glanced around, and now there was a new development. It was bright and sunny where we flew, but over to the west I saw fresh cloud low down upon the sea at the horizon. I glanced at my watch; it was five minutes to eleven; before long we must be on our way home or we should be out of fuel. The Met had been quite right. More bad weather was coming up; it would be overcast here in an hour and probably low cloud and rain after that. There would be little prospect of a second trip today.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it. Undo your belt and take off your coat. But look, Alec. Be ready to hang on and get back into the machine if I tell you. I shan’t be able to stay down on the ground for very long.’

It was the first time I had called him by his Christian name.

I thought for a moment as I turned downwind if I dare throttle back upon the ground for a few seconds while he got out. The windsock stood straight and stiff and horizontal from the mast, and the air was very bumpy. The wind was still at least thirty miles an hour, perhaps more; it was around the stalling speed of the machine. I could not depend upon the woman to help me; for one thing, there was no means of communicating with her. If I throttled back, if once I let the tail go down, the machine would lift in the wind and
blow over backwards. I put the thought out of my mind, and turned on final.