The Rainbow and the Rose

John Pascoe must have created something like a record for a pilot in civil aviation, because he went on flying a D.C.6b across the Pacific from Sydney to Vancouver as a senior captain of AusCan Airways till he was sixty years old. The Department of Civil Aviation stuck their toes in then. They couldn’t stop him flying because he was still perfectly fit and could pass every medical test they could think up. Perhaps they were afraid of what the papers might say if there should ever be an accident. At any rate, they refused to renew his licence for regular airline flying, on the score of age. He took his pension and bought three small aeroplanes out of his savings, and formed himself into a small aero club and superphosphate spreading company at Buxton in Tasmania. Flying was his whole life and he had few other interests, so he went on flying.

He was unmarried; back in the dark ages before ever I knew him there had been a divorce. He was the healthiest man of his age that I have ever met; at the time of his retirement he used no spectacles and still had all his own teeth. He was a very good tennis player. He was athletic in most ways; on his summer leaves he used to go on packhorse trips into the Canadian Rockies for the fishing, and at Nandi in the Fiji Islands where he was based in his last year of airline flying he did quite a bit of skin-diving, using an aqualung. I knew him for nearly thirty years; in fact, he taught me to fly when I was eighteen
at Duffington aerodrome near Leacaster where my father was a solicitor.

Buxton is a little place in north Tasmania where the aerodrome is a grass field with no runways. I went there once before Johnnie Pascoe’s time. I was flying a D.C.3 from Hobart to Melbourne in the winter in deteriorating weather when an oil pipe on the port engine split just as I was starting on the crossing of the Bass Strait, so that I had to stop that engine. I didn’t feel like going on across a hundred miles of sea like that and Area Control agreed with me quite quickly when I put my problem to them on the blower. Hobart had closed in by that time and Launceston wasn’t too good, so they sent me in to Buxton which has dead flat country all around. I slithered in over the fence and put her down and boy! was I glad to be on the ground! So were the passengers.

I don’t think the population of Buxton can be more than three thousand, though it is the centre of a prosperous grazing district. It has one hotel, so bad that the commercial travellers avoid it and drive long distances to do so. It’s not a place that I would care to live in personally, but I’m not Johnnie Pascoe. There was quite a bit of minor flying to be done there, though, and I suppose that’s why he went. He had a Tiger Moth fitted up with a canister for spreading fertiliser from the air and he did a bit with that, and he had two Austers for instruction and occasional charter flights. He had a ground engineer called Billy Monkhouse to look after these three aeroplanes, who was nearly as old as he was. He lived in a small house just by the aerodrome and got a woman in each day to do for him; he went duck shooting with the locals in the autumn and trout fishing with the Shire Clerk in the spring. He got the sort of life he wanted, I suppose.

He always looked about the same, from the time I first remember him when I was a boy. He would have been about five foot nine in height with partially grey hair, regular
features, rather a fine face, very tanned, a little lined towards the end. He hadn’t got a very great deal of humour in him, rather stiff. Women liked him, but I don’t know that he liked them very much; at any rate, he gave the impression of being careful. ‘Once bit, twice shy,’ he told me once, and I suppose he was speaking of the divorce. ‘But that doesn’t seem to stop one being bitten …’

He was born a Canadian, in Toronto I believe. He went to England as a flight cadet to train with the Royal Flying Corps in 1915 and he never went back to Canada – not to live, that is, though he must have passed through it often enough. He lived and worked in England and the Far East all the time between the wars, but it was as a Canadian that he got his job with AusCan after the Second War. All the pilots on that line had to be either Australian or Canadian for some point of politics.

Well now. I emigrated to Australia when I got married just after the Second War. I was in the motor trade at first, but then I got a job instructing with the aero club at Ballarat which got me back into the aircraft world. I joined Australian Continental Airways some time ago, and I’ve been a captain with them for the last five years. In July of last year I was on the Sydney-Melbourne run flying a Viscount with Dicky Powell as first officer. On that tour I used to take up Flight 82 in the late afternoon, get a three hour break in Sydney, and bring the last flight back, Flight 156 that left at 20.25 and got to Essendon at half past ten at night. I didn’t like that duty much, for several reasons. One got to Sydney after the shops shut and with too little time to go into the city for a movie. If possible I like to be at home in the late afternoon because of reading to the kids before they go to bed. One sees so little of them, otherwise. I like to help them making models, dressing dolls, and all that sort of thing. Instead, I had to stick around for three hours at Kingsford Smith airport five hundred miles away from them, reading a book
in the pilots’ room, listening to the radio, or just snoozing in a chair.

That year we had a terrible July. I was sitting there one evening half asleep, listening to the radio and the wind outside and the rain beating on the window. The seven o’clock news was just coming on, and I stayed to listen to that before going in to tea. I sat dozing through all the stuff about Egypt and the Middle East, and all the stuff about the floods along the Murray. Then there came a bit that jerked me suddenly awake. The announcer said something like this:

I was a bit upset when I heard this news. We all knew Johnnie Pascoe because for a time Sydney had been one of his terminals and he still passed through now and then. The world of aviation is a small one in Australia. But I knew him better than anyone, of course, because I had known him off and on for thirty years, ever since he taught me to fly in England at the Leacaster Flying Club. In 1942 I had met him in Cairo when he was flying a courier service to England in a Hudson. In 1944 he had flown me back to Lyneham from Calcutta in a Liberator after I got shot up in
Burma. I had met him many times since then, particularly in Australia. All through my life I had known Johnnie Pascoe, quiet, grizzled, and competent. He was a part of my experience.

When I went for briefing and ran through the flight plan with Dick Powell I asked the Control Officer, ‘Did you get any more on Johnnie Pascoe than was on the news?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Hobart sent a machine out just before dark, but it didn’t get far. It’s clamped down over the mountains.’

‘Is it right he got a fractured skull?’

‘So they say.’

‘They got that over the radio?’

‘That’s right. They’ve got a transceiver at the Lewis River.’

I had already got the weather gen for my flight, but I went back and saw the Met Officer again. I asked him, ‘What’s the form for tomorrow – on the west coast of Tasmania? I’m wondering how they’re going to get Johnnie Pascoe out.’

He turned to his chart, and stood tapping his pencil against his teeth, silent. Then he laid it on the chart. ‘There’s this depression stationary at the eastern end of the Bass Strait. It’s been there for four days. There seems to be another forming down to the south-west –
here.
’ He traced a little circle on the chart. ‘Might push it away.’

‘Get a clear interval before the second one comes up?’

‘We might. I could tell you better tomorrow morning. If we do, it’ll deteriorate again. It’s like that at this time of year, of course.’

I went out to the aircraft and put all this out of my mind. You must do that and I had got into the habit of it years before; when you’re doing pre-flight checks you only want to think about the pre-flight checks. It was a miserable night with a strong gusty south-west wind that was going to make
us fifteen minutes late on schedule, with drifts of rain lashing against the machine.

Presently I got my clearance from the Tower and taxied out to the runway, and took her off. When we were on our way and climbing upon course I had time to think about Johnnie Pascoe again, and the more I thought the less I liked my thoughts. The west coast of Tasmania must be one of the most inaccessible districts in the world. It’s only about a hundred miles from Hobart but there are no roads there at all and only one bush track that you can walk along, and that doesn’t go within forty miles of the Lewis River. The mountains stick up in pinnacles all over the country, sort of haphazard, not in definite ranges. The valleys that meander in between and all around these islands of mountain are filled with bush so dense that you cannot penetrate it on foot but have to cut your way through yard by yard with a machete. When you get towards the coast you come upon occasional plains, but these are button-grass plains where no feed grows that will sustain a horse. You can’t work a horse in that country at all. If you want to get in to the Lewis River you must go on foot packing all you need for the next fortnight on your back, hacking your way through the horizontal scrub yard by yard. Or you can go round the coast in a fishing boat if the weather is good enough for entering the estuary, which is uncharted and unbuoyed. Or you can fly in to their tiny airstrip. That was what Johnnie Pascoe had tried to do.