by Nevil Shute
The announcer allowed them two or three exchanges, and then he cut them short. He said, ‘Before we go on with the morning schedule, has any other station anything to say about Lewis River?’
At the set the sergeant touched a switch and spoke into the microphone. ‘This is 7PC, Buxton. There is a Captain Clarke here wants to speak. Over.’
‘Okay Buxton. Put Captain Clarke on.’
I went to the microphone and said, ‘Clarke speaking. Have you heard anything about me from Essendon? Over.’
‘Yes, we had a message to say you were coming. We’re very glad to hear that there’s a pilot at Buxton. What aircraft have you got there?’
‘There’s an Auster fuelled and serviceable,’ I said. ‘There’s a Tiger with a canister in the front seat that could be made serviceable in half a day.’
‘Okay. Did you hear me talking to Mrs Hoskins?’
‘We heard all of that.’
‘This break in the weather that’s coming won’t last longer than two or three hours, according to the Met. After that it’s going to clamp down again for an indefinite period, days perhaps. The Met don’t think there’s going to be much reduction in the wind velocity. If that’s right, we shan’t be able to go round the south coast from here unless we take the Proctor, and that’s not got a hope of landing on that strip. We shall try it with an Auster taking the doctor as a passenger, with his operating gear. We don’t expect to be able to land properly, but in this wind force we hope to be able to fly so slowly across the strip into wind that he’ll be able to jump out without hurting himself. But we’ll have to go over the mountains to get there at all, and that may not be possible. Over to you.’
‘Clarke here. The wind’s dead across the strip, is it? Over.’
‘It is at present, and not likely to change much, according to the Met.’
‘It’s a job for a parachute doctor, surely?’ I said. ‘Over.’
‘I know it is, but we haven’t got one. The R.A.A.F. are sending down a Lincoln with a parachute doctor and a parachute nurse, but it’s got to come from Brisbane and I don’t think it’s taken off yet. It can’t be here before the early afternoon, and then we’ll have to brief them. It doesn’t look as though this break will last so long as that. Over to you.’
‘I can make the Lewis River down the coast,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it. Over.’
‘Are you willing to try and put a doctor down?’ he asked. ‘Over.’
I paused before replying. It was years since I had flown anything like that, but I had been good on Austers once, when I was instructing at Ballarat before I joined the airline. ‘I’m game to try it,’ I said. ‘I know what you want. Whether I’ll succeed in landing him – well, that’s another thing.’
‘What’s the weather like with you, now?’ he asked. ‘Any sign of this break?’
‘Hold on.’ I spoke rapidly to the sergeant, and he led me outside. Twenty yards up the street there was a gap between the houses and a view across flat country to the west. There was a line of blue sky down on the horizon.
I hurried back to the police station and the microphone. ‘Clarke speaking,’ I said. ‘It’s breaking over to the west, about twenty miles away. With this wind it might be clear here in half an hour. Over.’
‘The Met only give it about three hours before it clamps again,’ he said. ‘I’d like to fly our doctor up to you, but I don’t know that there’s time for that. Have you got a doctor there with surgical experience, who would be willing to try it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I turned to the sergeant and asked him. ‘Is there a doctor here?’ He replied, ‘Dr Turnbull.’ I said, ‘You’d better speak,’ and he took the microphone.
‘This is Sergeant Farrell,’ he said. ‘Dr Turnbull lives here. He does surgery on accidents and that.’
Hobart said, ‘I don’t know him. Is he young and active, or is he an old man?’
The sergeant said, ‘He’s young. Only come out of medical school two or three years.’
We left it that the sergeant should take me to see the doctor and we would speak again at half past eight. Hobart went on with other stations and the constable sat down to monitor the conversations. I turned to Billy Monkhouse.
‘We’ll have to hop around now, Mr Monkhouse,’ I said. ‘Will you go to the aerodrome and run that Auster up? I want to do two or three landings on her before I take off for the Lewis River. I’ll go with Sergeant Farrell now to see this doctor, and I’ll come out to the aerodrome immediately after that. Then we’ll come back here and see what the form is at half past eight.’
‘Take the dual out?’ he asked.
‘Oh – yes. We shan’t want that.’
He went off and got into his little car and drove away, and I went with the sergeant to the police car. As we got in I said, ‘Tell me about Dr Turnbull. We’re going to his house?’
‘He hasn’t got a house,’ he said. ‘He lives with the Reverend Haynes – he’s the vicar. He has two rooms in the vicarage and Mrs Haynes does for him.’
‘He isn’t married?’
‘No.’
‘Does he have his surgery in the vicarage?’
He slipped the gear in and looked over his shoulder as he backed the car out. ‘He’s got a surgery in a room in the office building, over Woodward’s shop. That’s where he sees people mostly, but he won’t be there yet. I’ll take you to the vicarage.’ He swung the car round into the road. ‘We never had a doctor here in Buxton till he came, two years ago,’ he observed. ‘He’s squatting, you might say. We used to have to get a doctor out from Devonport before.’
‘Do people like him?’
‘Oh, aye. He’s Tasmanian – his father has a fruit farm on the Huon River. He’s only a young chap, you know.’
We drove about a quarter of a mile up to the church. It was a stone-built church with a square tower, very like an English church as many in Tasmania are. Beside it was a forbidding, two-storey vicarage with Gothic windows and a slate roof. There was a brass plate on the gate leading into the front garden, unpolished for a fortnight. We parked the car and went up the front steps of the house and knocked on the Gothic, ironbound, hardwood front door. We pressed a button and a clockwork bell rang on the inside of the door.
Presently the handle clanked, and it was opened by a boy of ten, in grey shorts and a sweater. The sergeant asked if we could see the doctor. He stared at us without speaking, and then he ran back to the kitchen at the rear of the house, leaving the door open. We heard him say, ‘Mum, there’s people to see Alec.’
The vicar’s wife came to us at the door, a little grey, a little portly, with a good-natured face, wearing a rough apron over a black dress; she smoothed worn hands upon it as she came because she had been getting breakfast. ‘Good morning, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Did you want to see the doctor?’
‘If we can,’ he replied.
She stood smoothing her hands on the apron. ‘I was letting him lie,’ she said. ‘He was out till four in the morning with Mrs Jardine’s baby. Is it anything urgent?’
‘It’s Captain Pascoe,’ the sergeant said. ‘We want him to fly down to Lewis River.’
‘Oh … Had I better wake him, do you think? He’s only had three hours in bed.’
‘I think you’d better, Mrs Haynes. There’s not much time to lose.’
‘Well, come upstairs.’ She turned and led the way up polished and uncarpeted stairs to the top floor. Here the boards were out of sight of the front door, and were unpolished. She opened a door for us. ‘Just wait in there and I’ll tell him.’
It was the doctor’s private sitting room, and it wasn’t much. There was a square of threadbare carpet in the middle of the floor, an oval table with a knitted doily in the middle of it and an ashtray upon that. There were two upholstered chairs with broken springs before a fireplace in which no fire had burned that winter, and one small wicker-seated chair at the table. There was an antique, horsehair sofa with one le
g missing, supported on a chunk of wood. A faded print of the Good Shepherd hung above the fireplace. A small bookcase housed an array of medical volumes, some copies of the Australian Medical Journal, and three or four paper-backed novels.
We stood in the cold room, waiting, listening to the murmur of voices in the next room followed by the creak of bed springs. We heard the woman go downstairs again, and presently the doctor came in at the door in his pyjamas, bleary-eyed from sleep, hair tumbled, doing up the cord of his dressing gown. ‘Morning, Sergeant,’ he said thickly. ‘What can I do for you?’
He looked incredibly young. I learned later that he was twenty-eight, but that morning he looked about fifteen. He was only about five foot seven in height and he had the clear skin and staring red hair of a boy, that generally darkens quickly in the twenties. He was slight in build; both 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 head a 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 to it. 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 mechanically, and she went out. ‘You could break a leg trying to do that,’ he said. ‘Anything could happen.’
He was the only doctor that we’d got. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to break a leg,’ I said patiently. ‘We don’t want any more casualties there. If I can’t make it so that you can just step out, we’ll come home again.’
‘Suppose I were to do that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t hope to do much for either of them.’ He stared up at me with some hostility. ‘You know all about aeroplanes. Well, you don’t know much about medicine. Am I supposed to do a wonder-operation on a fractured skull with nothing but a blunt penknife and a kettle of muddy water? Or take out an appendix? There’s not a hope of a successful operation. I can tell you that. I can tell you another thing. If I try it, both patients will die.’
The sergeant said quietly, ‘A cup of tea, Doctor.’ He passed a cup to him and gave me one, and passed the bowl of sugar.
‘If I can land you, I can land anything else in reason,’ I said. ‘It may be necessary to drop it. But I can land your instruments, and anything else you’ll need, provided that the weather holds if a second trip is necessary. A steriliser, perhaps.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ he said irritably. ‘There’s no electric current …’ And then he said, ‘There’s only one thing to be done. They’ll have to send a party in to them by land. They can fly in to Lake Pedder, can’t they? Well, it can’t be more than thirty miles from there.’
I shook my head. ‘I doubt if they’d make Lake Pedder,’ I said. ‘Not with all this low cloud. It’s in the middle of the mountains.’ I turned to the sergeant. ‘I think they ought to start a land party, though. How long would it take them to get through?’
He rubbed his chin, ‘They can get a truck as far as Kallista,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Then there’s a track to the Gordon River – that would be how they’d go. That’s about twenty miles. After that, it might be about another forty miles over the mountains and through the bush to reach the Lewis River.’ He paused in thought. ‘I’d say it might take a land party four days,’ he said.
I asked the doctor, ‘Would they be alive in four days’ time?’
‘The girl will,’ he said. ‘From what you say, her appendix is subsiding. That often happens. She’d probably be able to walk out by then.’
‘What about Captain Pascoe?’
He was silent. We all stood looking at each other.
At last I said, ‘Well, that’s the position. Hobart are coming on the air again at half past eight. They’re going to send out an Auster with a doctor to try and get through; if they do they’ll try to land him in the way I said. But I don’t think they’ll make it over the mountains, in this cloud. And they’ve not got the range to go by the south coast.’
‘Who’s the doctor?’ he asked.
The sergeant said, ‘It would be Dr Parkinson. He does air trips for them now and then. Did one last year, to Maria Island.’
‘Well, why can’t they fly up here and take on more petrol, and then fly down the coast from here?’
‘They’ve got to get here, for one thing,’ I said. ‘They’d have to go pretty well to Launceston to avoid the mountains, and then due west another sixty miles against the wind. It’d be a three-hour flight before they could be here to start the job, in an Aust
er. From what the Met say this clear patch is only going to last about three hours.’
He stood in silence before us. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m afraid of jumping out there,’ he said at last. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad. It’s what comes after that that I don’t like. I can’t see any hope of a successful operation, in that place. And if I operate and then he dies, just think what the papers will say!’
It seemed to me that it was time to be brutal, and I was getting a bit tired of this. ‘The papers will be on to this already, by this time,’ I said. ‘You’d better think what they will say if you refuse to go, and then he dies.’
He stood there biting his lip.
‘We’re all in a bit of a jam over this,’ I said. ‘You, most of all, perhaps. We’d better go through the motions of doing the best we can.’
‘There’s another way to look at it,’ the sergeant said. ‘I know the chance is that you won’t be able to save him, everything against you as it is. But you might save him. He might recover. Just think of what the papers would say then.’
He stood irresolute. ‘I’ll add a bit to that,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a good break with the Press. I’ll tell them you insisted on going to do what you could, at the risk of your own life.’
He looked up at me. ‘You’d tell them that? Even if he dies?’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘Especially if he dies.’
He still hesitated. ‘All my other patients …’ he said. ‘There’s no telling when I could get back from the Lewis River.’
The sergeant asked, ‘You got anything urgent? Babies coming down, or anything of that?’
‘Not exactly … But I can’t just run out and leave the practice.’
‘The district nurse is here,’ the sergeant said. ‘And there’s plenty of doctors in Devonport, come out in an emergency.’
‘I suppose so. If I went I’d have to take an awful lot of things with me. Some of them in bottles – liquids. They’d all get broken, wouldn’t they?’
‘We’ll just have to do our best,’ I said. ‘That’s all we can do. Pack them with a lot of padding in an old suitcase, and see what we can do.’
