by Nevil Shute
He turned his switch and said, “It’s not only God you’ve got to thank, Mrs. Curtis.” He was very well aware that most of the housewives in a hundred thousand square miles of the Gulf country would be listening in to this conversation, and one good turn deserved another. “Miss Paget rode forty miles down from the top end of Midhurst to bring this message about Don. You know Jean Paget, the English girl that’s started the shoe workshop and the ice-cream shop? She was out at Midhurst spending the day when we heard Don was missing, and she rode in forty miles to tell me where this air-strip was to be. She’s only been astride a horse six times before, and the poor girl’s so sore she can’t stand. Sister Douglas has her in the hospital for a good rest. She’ll be all right in a day or two. Over.”
She said, “Oh my word. I don’t know what to say to thank her. Give her my very dearest love, and I do hope she’ll be better soon.” There was a pause, and then she said, “I’ve been so troubled in my mind about that ice-cream parlour. It didn’t seem right to have a thing like that in Willstown, and opening it on Sundays and Christmas Day and all. I couldn’t find nothing in the Bible either for or against it, and I’ve been that perplexed. But now it seems God has that under His hand like everything else. I do think it’s wonderful. Over.”
“That’s right,” said Sergeant Haines non-committally. He had been uncertain about the shop closing hours himself and had written to his head office for guidance; it was a good long time since he had been in a district where there was a shop to close. “Now I must sign off, Mrs. Curtis. Eight Queen Charlie, this is Eight Love Mike. It’s okay here if you want to close down your listening watch for tonight, Jackie. I’d like to have a listening watch in daylight hours tomorrow, from seven o’clock on. Is this Roger? Over.”
Miss Bacon said, “That is Roger, Sergeant. I’ll tell Mr. Barnes. If you have nothing more for me, I shall close down. Over.”
“Nothing more, Jackie. Good-night. Out.”
“Good-night, Sergeant. Out.”
Miss Bacon switched off her sets thankfully. There was no proper organisation for a twenty-four hour listening watch at the Cairns Ambulance; in an emergency such as this everybody had to muscle in and lend a hand. She had been on duty the previous day from eight in the morning till midnight, and from eight o’clock that morning till then; Mr. Barnes had taken the night watch and was preparing to do so again. She thought, ruefully, that she had missed Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; the show would be half over. But there was still one more night, and with any luck this flap would be over and she could see it tomorrow. She went to telephone to Mr. Barnes.
Mr. Barnes telephoned to Mr. Smythe of Australian National Airways, and Mr. Smythe telephoned to his reserve pilot, Captain Jimmie Cope. Mr. Cope said, “Hell, I hope it’s better in the morning than it was today. We’d never have got over the Tableland today. Better say take off at six, I suppose, I’ll be along at the hangar then.”
When he got to the aerodrome at dawn the old Dragon, surely the best aircraft ever built for ambulance work in the outback, was running up both engines. The clouds hung low at about five hundred feet, shrouding the hill immediately behind the aerodrome; it was raining a little. Willstown lay about four hundred miles to the west-north-west; the first seventy miles of this course lay over the Atherton Tableland with mountains up to three thousand five hundred feet in height. With no radio navigational aids he would have to fly visually all the way, scraping along between the clouds and the tree-tops as best he could.
He said a sour word or two to the control officer and took off down the runway with an ambulance orderly on board. Once in the air it was worse than ever. He flew at three hundred feet up the Barron River towards the mountains, hoping to find a break in the low cloud that would enable him to get up on to the Tableland through the Kuranda Gap. The grey vapour closed around him and the sides of the jungle-covered gorge drew very near his wings. There was no sign of a break ahead. He edged over to the starboard side and made a tight, dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare, and headed back for the coast. He lifted his microphone and said, “Cairns Tower, this is Victor How Able Mike Baker. I can’t make it by Kuranda. I’m going up to Cooktown by the coast, and try it from there. Tell Cooktown I’ll be landing there in about an hour, and I’ll want twenty gallons of seventy-three octane.”
He flew on up the tropical Queensland coast at about three hundred feet, and came to Cooktown an hour later. Cooktown is a pretty little town of about three hundred people, but it was grey and rainswept when he got there. He landed on the aerodrome and refuelled. “I’m going to try and make Willstown from here,” he said. “There’s not much high stuff on the way. If it gets too bad I shall come back. I’ll be on a direct course from here to Willstown.” He said that in case a search party should be necessary.
He took off again immediately the refuelling was finished and flew inland on a compass course. In the whole of that flight he was never more than two hundred feet above the tree-tops. He scraped over the Great Dividing Range, petering out up in this northern latitude, with about fifty feet to spare, always on the point of turning back, always seeing a faint break ahead that made it necessary to go on. Behind him the orderly sat gripping his seat, only too well aware of danger in the flight and impotent to do anything about it. For three hours they flew like that, and then as they neared the Gulf of Carpentaria the pilot started picking up the landmarks that he knew, a river bend, a burnt patch of the bush, a curving sandy waste like a banana. He came to Willstown and flew round the few houses at a hundred feet to tell them he was there, and landed on the air-strip. He taxied in to where the truck was standing waiting for him; he was strained and tired. It was still raining.
He held a little conference with Sergeant Haines and Sister Douglas and Al Burns beside the truck. “I’ll have a crack at flying him back here,” he said. “If it’s no better this afternoon he’ll have to spend the night in hospital here. I can’t fly him to Cairns in this weather. It’ll probably be better by tomorrow.” They gave him a freehand pencil map which the sergeant had prepared for him, showing him the creeks and Midhurst homestead, and the new bore, and the probable position of the air-strip, and he took off again. That was at about eleven o’clock.
Following this map he found the place without much difficulty. It was clear where they meant him to land, because trees had been felled upon a line he was to come in on, and bushes had been cleared for a short distance on what seemed to be a grassy meadow. He could see about ten men working or standing looking up at him; he could see a utility parked with a tent over it. He circled round under the low cloud, considering the risks. The runway that they had prepared was pitifully short, even for a Dragon. Time was also short, however; the man had had his compound fracture three days now. Sepsis and gangrene and all sorts of things would be setting in; he must not delay. He bit his lip and lined the Dragon up with the runway for a trial approach.
He came in as slowly as he dared over the trees, missing them by no more than five feet, motoring in with careful graduations of the throttles. Over the cut trees he throttled back and stuffed her down towards the grass, hoping it was smooth. He could . . . he couldn’t, he could never stop her in time. With wheels no more than two feet from the ground he jammed the throttles forward, held her level for a moment, and climbed away.
He turned to the orderly behind him as he circled low under the clouds, keeping the air-strip in sight. “Got a pencil and paper? Write this.” He thought for a moment. “Sorry I can’t make it. Strip must be about a hundred yards longer, or a hundred and fifty if you can manage it. I will come back at four o’clock this afternoon.” They put this in a message bag with coloured streamers flying from it, and flew over, and dropped it on the middle of the strip.
Back at the Willstown airfield he told them what had happened. “They’ve not had time to make it long enough,” the sergeant said. “You’ll find it’ll be all right this afternoon.” He drove the pilot in to the hotel
and Al Burns took him to the bar, but the pilot would drink nothing but lemonade till the difficult flying of the afternoon was over.
He lunched at the hotel and strolled into the ice-cream parlour after lunch. It was new since he had last been in Willstown, and he stared around him with amused wonder. He ordered an ice; Rose Sawyer told him briskly to be quick and eat it, because she was shutting up. He asked if she closed every afternoon and was told that she was going up to see Miss Paget at the hospital. Then, of course, he heard all about her ride.
At four o’clock he was back over the air-strip at the top end of Midhurst; the rain had stopped and he was able to approach at about eight hundred feet. He circled once and had a good look; they had made the strip much longer and he would have no difficulty now. He came in and touched down at the near end; the Dragon bounced on the uneven ground and landed again, and rolled bumping and swaying to a standstill.
He stopped the engines and got out; they took a stretcher from the cabin and the orderly began the business of getting Don Curtis on to the stretcher and into the cabin, helped by the ringers. The pilot lit a cigarette and gave one to Joe Harman.
Joe asked, “Did you hear anything about Miss Paget, down in Willstown?”
The pilot said, “She’s in the hospital. Nothing much wrong, they say; just tired and sore. She must be quite a girl.”
Joe said, “Too right. If you see anyone from the hospital, leave a message for Miss Paget, will you? Tell her I’ll be in town tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’ll do that,” said the pilot. “I’ll be staying there tonight. It’s too late now to get to Cairns; I can’t do night flying in this weather, not in this thing.”
The loading was completed now. He got into his seat; the orderly swung the propellers and they taxied back to the far end of the track. It was short, but he could make it. He opened out and took off down the runway, and cleared the trees at the far end with about fifteen feet to spare. Half an hour later he was on the ground at Willstown, helping to transfer the stretcher to the truck that was to take Don Curtis to the hospital.
In hospital that afternoon Jean Paget showed Rose Sawyer the more accessible of her wounds, great chafed raw places six inches long. “Honourable scars,” Rose said. “Pity you can’t show them.”
“It’s because everything was so wet,” Jean said. “But I’m going to have a proper pair of riding breeches made, I think. Ringers’ strides are for ringers’ skins.”
“I’d never want to get up on a horse again if it’d done that to me.”
“It’s going to be some time before I can,” said Jean.
Presently Rose said, “Tell me, Jean. Do you think there’d be any work up here for a contractor?”
Jean stared at her. “What sort of a contractor?”
“Making roads and things like that. Buildings, too.”
“Is this Billy Wakeling, from Alice?”
Rose nodded. “He wrote to me,” she said carelessly. For the bunch of seven letters that arrived by the Dakota regularly every Wednesday, this seemed to Jean to be an understatement. “You know, his father’s a contractor in Newcastle — he’s got graders and bulldozers and steam shovels and all sorts of things like that. He started Billy off in Alice after the war because he said Alice was expanding and expanding places meant work for contractors. But Billy says he’s fed up with Alice.
“He’s coming up here for a visit as soon as the wet’s over,” she added artlessly.
“He won’t get any roads or buildings to contract for here,” Jean observed. “There’s nobody to pay for them. I know what does want doing though. Joe Harman wants some little dams built up on Midhurst. I don’t know if that’s in his line.”
“I should think it might be,” Rose said slowly. “After all, it’s shifting muck, and that’s what Billy does. He’d do it with a bulldozer in the dry, wouldn’t he?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” said Jean. “Can he get hold of a bulldozer?”
“His old man’s got about forty down at Newcastle,” Rose said. “I should think he could spare one for Billy.”
“They’re only little dams,” said Jean.
“Well, everything’s got to start. I don’t think Billy expects a contract like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, not in the first year.”
Jean asked, “Could you scoop out a hole for a swimming-pool with a bulldozer?”
“I should think so. Yes, I’m sure you could. I went out with him once and watched one working. He let me drive it; it was awful fun. You’d scoop it out first with a bulldozer, and then you’d put up wooden stuff that they call shuttering and make the concrete sides.”
“Could he do all that, too?”
“Oh, Billy can do that. Why, do you want a swimming pool?”
Jean stared at the white painted wall. “It was just an idea. A nice, big pool just by the bore, with diving-boards and everything, big enough for everybody to get into and have fun. You see, you’ve got the water there, right in the main street. You’d have a wooden thing they call a cooling tower and run the water through that to cool it off before it went into the pool. Have a lawn of grass by it, where people could lie and sunbathe if they want to. An old man taking the cash at the gate, a bob a bathe . . .”
Rose stared at her. “You’ve got it all worked out. Are you thinking of doing that, Jean?”
“I don’t know. It would be fun to have it, and I believe it’ld pay like anything. Mixed bathing, of course.”
Rose laughed. “Have all the wowsers in the place looking over the rails to see what was going on.”
“Charge them sixpence for that,” said Jean. She turned to Rose, “Ask Billy to get hold of plans and things,” she said, “and tell us what it would cost when he comes up after the wet. I don’t believe that there’s a swimming-pool in the whole Gulf country. It would be fun to have one.”
“I’ll ask him. Anything else?”
Jean stretched in her bed. “A nice hair-dressing saloon and beauty parlour,” she said, “with a pretty French brunette in it who really knew her stuff, and could make one look like Rita Hayworth. That’s what I want, sometimes. But I don’t think that’s in Billy’s line.”
“It had better not be,” said Rose.
Jean got up next day and left the hospital, and walked awkwardly to the workshop. There was an air-mail letter from Mr. Pack about the air freight consignment of shoes that he had received from them. His enthusiasm was temperate; he pointed out a number of defects and crudities which would require correction in production batches; most of these they were aware of and had attended to. He finished up by saying he would try and shift them, which, knowing Mr. Pack, Jean and Aggie Topp interpreted as praise.
“He’ll like the next lot better,” Aggie said. And then she said, “I had two girls come along for jobs while you were away. One was Fred Dawson’s daughter; he’s the chief stockman or something on a station called Carlisle. She’s fifteen; her mother brought her in. She’s a bit young, but she’d be all right. The other was a girl of nineteen who’s been working in the store at Normanton. I didn’t like her so much.”
“I don’t want to take on anyone else until that first batch of shoes have been sold,” said Jean. “If Mrs. Dawson comes in again, tell her that we’ll let her know about the kid after the wet. I’d like to have her if I can. I don’t think we want the other one, do we?”
“I don’t think so. Bit of a slut, she was.”
They talked about the details of the business for an hour. “We haven’t got the overalls back yet,” said Aggie. “I went and saw Mrs. Harrison, but her back’s bad again. We’ll have to find someone else.” They issued the girls with a clean overall each week to work in, and the washing of these overalls was something of a problem to them.
“What we want,” said Jean, “is one of those Home Laundry things, and do them ourselves. We could run it off the generating set. . . . Of course, it needs hot water.” She thought for a minute. “Think about that one,” she said. “Hire it
out, do people’s washing for them. Anyway, see if you can find another Mrs. Harrison for the time being.”
Aggie said, “Everybody’s talking about your ride, Miss Paget.”
“Are they?”
She nodded. “Even that girl from Normanton, she knew about it, too.”
“How on earth did she get to hear?”
“It’s these little wireless sets they have up on the cattle stations,” Aggie said. “The boys here were telling me, they all listen in to what everybody else is saying — telegrams and everything. They’ve got nothing else to do. You can’t keep anything secret in this country.” And then she said, “I heard the aeroplane go off this morning. Was the man very bad?”
“Not too good,” said Jean. “Sister thinks they’ll be able to save the leg. We ought to have a doctor here, of course.”
“There’s not enough work to keep a doctor occupied in a place like this,” said Aggie. “Where did they fly him to?”
“Cairns. There’s a good hospital in Cairns.” She turned to the door, and paused. “Aggie,” she said, “how do you think a swimming-pool would go in Willstown? Would people use it?”
Joe Harman rode into the town that afternoon with Pete Fletcher. He put his horse into the stable behind the Australian Hotel and came to find Jean; he was wet and dirty in his riding clothes because the creeks were up, and though he had started spick and span from Midhurst as befits a man going in to town to see his girl, he had had to swim one of the two creeks on the way holding to the mane and saddle of his horse, which had rather spoilt the sartorial effect. He was half dry when he got to Willstown; he combed his hair and emptied out his boots, and went to the ice-cream parlour to ask Rose where Jean was.
He found her in her bedroom, writing a long letter to me. He tapped on the door and she came out to him. “We can’t talk here, Joe. I’ll never hear the last of it if you come in. Let’s go and have an ice-cream in the parlour.” It was borne in on her that this was literally the only place in Willstown where young men and young women could meet reputably to talk; the alternative, in the wet, would be to go into the stable or a barn. They picked a table by the wall; she looked around her at the rectangular walls and the adjacent tables with discontent. “This won’t do at all,” she said. “I’ll have some sort of booths made, little corners where people can talk privately.”