The Rainbow and the Rose Read Online Free PDF

the sergeant and I seemed to tower over him.
    ‘Sorry to wake you, Doctor,’ said the sergeant. ‘But it’s Captain Pascoe.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ he muttered. ‘What about Captain Pascoe?’
    ‘This is Mr Clarke,’ the sergeant said. He corrected himself. ‘Captain Clarke, I should say, with A.C.A. We’re waiting on a call from Hobart now about flying in a doctor to him there. It don’t seem possible to get him out just yet, but there’s a clear patch of weather coming for a few hours now, so Captain Clarke could maybe fly you in.’
    The boy rubbed a hand over his face and shook his heada little, shaking away his sleep. ‘What’s he got? Fractured skull, isn’t it?’
    ‘He’s got a fractured thigh as well, they say.’
    ‘What about the other one? The appendicitis?’
    ‘There’s that, too,’ the sergeant said. ‘But the report on the morning session was to say she’s better.’
    The doctor stood in silence. Presently he plunged his hand into the pocket of his dressing gown and produced a packet of cigarettes. He offered them to us and we both took one. He lit them for us, and lit his with another match. ‘I asked Mrs Haynes if she could bring us up some tea,’ he muttered.
    ‘That’ll be nice,’ the sergeant said politely.
    We stood in silence till the doctor spoke again. ‘I couldn’t do two major operations there,’ he said irresolutely. ‘It’s like asking anyone to set up a hospital with – nothing. And no help. It’s not a reasonable thing to ask of anyone. You’ll have to get them out to where the job can be done properly.’
    ‘There doesn’t seem to be much hope of getting them put,’ I said.
    ‘Why not? There’s an airstrip there.’
    He was stalling; that was evident. I couldn’t help being a bit sorry for him in his predicament. He looked so young, so inexperienced. He was tired, too. I was tired for I had had no sleep at all, but then I was a lot older than he was. ‘Do you know about aeroplanes and flying?’ I asked.
    He shook his head. ‘I thought of learning to fly once, but it costs too much.’
    ‘I’ll try and explain,’ I said. ‘The Hoskins could only make a very short strip there, only about two hundred yards long and about forty feet wide. It’s really no more than a little bit of road on top of a ridge of hill. To land even the smallest aeroplane on that you’d need to have perfect weather and the wind blowing straight along the strip. Well, now we’ve got a wind that won’t be less than thirty miles an hour any time today, and blowing dead across the strip, at right angles toit. I can’t land in a cross wind like that. No pilot could, upon a lightly loaded aeroplane, the sort of a slow aeroplane you’d have to take to use that strip and not run off the end. Johnnie Pascoe took a chance and tried it yesterday, to get the child out. He bought it.’
    He looked at me, a little sullenly. ‘If you can’t land there, what’s the use of talking?’
    ‘There
is
one thing that we can do,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a patch of clear weather this morning, that won’t last longer than a few hours. I can take an Auster there and fly slowly across the strip, with any luck, heading in to wind. I won’t be more than five feet up – I may even be able to touch my wheels. We’ll be flying at about forty miles an hour into a thirty mile an hour wind, so we shan’t be doing more than ten miles an hour across the strip. I might even be able to hold her stationary for a few seconds, with the wheels upon the ground. An active man could just step out on to the strip. In any case, it won’t be much of a jump.’
    We stood in silence, and in the silence Mrs Haynes came clumping up the stairs and into the room. She had a tray with three cups of strong tea on it, and a bowl of sugar. ‘I brought you some tea,’ she said comfortably. ‘It’s still blowy outside, but it looks as if it’s fining up. We might be going to have a nice day.’
    We thanked her