The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (8 page)

To my knowledge Dr Clyde Fenton was one of the rare ‘true’ Flying Doctors in as much as he was both an accomplished pilot as well as being a very good, and greatly admired, doctor. And when I say ‘an accomplished pilot’ I say that with a touch of mirth, as my story will reveal, because while Clyde was a bit of a character, a real larrikin so to speak, he was also quite naughty at times, the daredevil type. Still, he did a tremendous amount of good up in the Northern Territory which was probably why he was able to get away with so much.

When I first ran into Clyde, which was immediately after the war, Darwin was still under military control. And in those days, my late husband, Fred, an ex-RAAF Squadron Leader, had been appointed as the Regional Director of Civil Aviation. This was a posting that made him instrumental in assisting in the re-establishment of overseas air services, both in and out of Australia.

Anyhow, Clyde and Fred didn’t see eye to eye on many issues. For starters, Clyde didn’t have too much respect for public servants. His favourite description of their livelihood was that of a ‘dog-eat-dog’ existence. So, when the new Department of Civil Aviation went about restructuring Air Traffic Control, Clyde dug his heels in. Though he still kept on flying, he steadfastly refused to obtain the appropriate pilot’s licence.

It was then that the Department of Civil Aviation
sent a directive, via my husband, insisting that Clyde obtain this certain category of licence in accordance with the type of planes he was flying. Of course, Clyde, being Clyde, was of the mind that having already been a pilot during the war a licence issued by the DCA wasn’t worth a fig.

‘A complete load of administrative rubbish’ was how he described the situation.

So dear old Clyde completely disregarded the directive and continued on his unflappable way. Naturally, this type of behaviour riled the DCA. Yet they were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea because the only pilots who they could legally stop from flying were the ones who had been licensed under their own organisation and, of course, Clyde had refused to get that particular licence.

Now a lot of people admired Clyde for this particular stance. They saw him as someone who wasn’t afraid to buck the system, a kind of Wild West maverick, a rough diamond.

But the DCA didn’t see it that way. Yes, Clyde was a delightful feller and he was a proven pilot. No one could argue with that, what with his war record and all, but things were changing in Darwin. With so many people coming into Australia so soon after the war, the authorities just couldn’t have these self-willed pilots out there doing their own thing.

For example, imagine the turmoil it might cause if a Constellation came in to land and there was Clyde doing a couple of loop-d-loops around the airstrip, which, I might add, was something that he’d been known to do. Another of his tricks was to put the wind up everyone by flying low over the open-air picture
show at night or over people who were having a quiet picnic on the beach.

Now this might have been a great lark for Clyde, but the DCA demanded order in the skies. So the Melbourne Headquarters became increasingly impatient with Clyde and they said to Fred, ‘You’ve got to get him licensed.’

So Fred followed it up and this is where my story comes in.

One evening everyone was gathered in the Darwin Club and the big talk of the moment was how Clyde had refused, yet again, to get his licence. There they all were, Clyde included. Now Clyde liked a few drinks and after a while he saw Fred talking to the local sergeant of police. ‘Watch this,’ he said to his group of mates and he came over to Fred and the sergeant.

‘Righto,’ Clyde said, holding out his hands. ‘Here I am, you might as well handcuff me now and drag me off to prison.’

Then, as was usual with Clyde, he put on a big song and dance about the whole affair. Anyway, this skylarking about started to get up the nose of the sergeant and he said to Fred, ‘I’ll fix him.’ Quick as a flash the police officer took out his handcuffs and snapped them on Clyde’s wrists.

Well, this was a great joke, especially to Clyde. He started wandering about the club, holding his glass in his handcuffed hands, amid much laughter and carry-on.

‘Look what they’ve done to me,’ Clyde announced to all and sundry. ‘They’ve finally arrested me.’

Oh, it was a real talking point.

Anyway, as the story goes, the sergeant got sick of all this carry-on and went home. So when Clyde had
had enough of the handcuffs and couldn’t find the sergeant, he came over to Fred. ‘Righto, Fred,’ he said, ‘the joke’s over. You can take these things off now.’

‘Sorry, Clyde, no can do,’ Fred said. ‘The sergeant’s gone home and he’s taken the keys with him.’

‘But you can’t leave me like this,’ Clyde retorted.

Now Fred wasn’t beyond having a bit of a joke himself. So he said to Clyde, ‘Well, Clyde, the only thing that I can suggest is I take you down to the police station and you can wait there until the sergeant comes back on duty.’

‘When’ll that be?’ asked Clyde.

‘I think he’s gone to Alice Springs for a couple of days,’ Fred said in a matter-of-fact way.

Well, Fred reckoned that you should’ve seen the look on Clyde Fenton’s face. The wind had really been taken out of his sails at that comment.

I was stationed in Derby, living by myself at the time. There I was, a guy in his twenties with no commitments at all.

My wife-to-be was a community nursing sister over in Wyndham, and every week she drove down to the stations around the Halls Creek area, giving immunisations and that type of thing. Then every second Thursday, in order to link in with her previous clinic trips, I flew up there to pick up her and a doctor, and we did the follow-up air trips.

The standard procedure on those mornings was to get out of bed at about three o’clock. It’d be as black as the insides of a pig. I’d have a cup of tea, then drive to the airport, open up the hangar, push the Queen Air out, put the car in the hangar, and close the doors. Then I’d climb into this aeroplane, an aeroplane, mind you, that someone had just about given me free rein to fly. It was virtually mine. And I’d fire this monster up, stoke up all the radios, call up on the HF frequency and talk to Perth or Port Hedland, whichever one was on duty.

‘Perth (Port Headland), this is Foxtrot, Delta Victor, taxiing, Derby for Wyndham.’

And they’d come back sounding surprised, as they always did, thinking ‘Who in their right mind would get out of bed at bloody three o’clock in the morning to go flying?’

Me.

So I’d taxi out, do all my run-ups and cockpit checks, then thunder down the runway, focusing on the instruments. As soon as I left the runway lights it was pitch black. Apart from the faint reflective light inside the windscreen, it was just a puddle of ink outside. Under those conditions there’s no horizon. No visual reference. No bugger-all. I’d just focus on and fly the instruments.

Up I’d go. I’d turn left and climb towards 7500 feet. When I hit 7000 feet I’d engage the auto-pilot. Then I could relax. I was free.

There I was in this magnificent aeroplane at four o’clock in the morning, nobody within a million miles of me for all it mattered. And I’d sit back and look out the window at billions and billions and billions of stars. Each and every one of them was mine. I was in heaven, and heading to Wyndham for the six o’clock pick-up of the doctor and the nursing sister.

Well, it’s all just been pretty predictable stuff really. The evacuations that we’ve had to make out of here have gone off pretty much without a hitch. By ‘here’ I’m meaning Mount Vernon Station which is north of Meekatharra, in the central east of Western Australia.

Anyway, it’s always amazed me how the Flying Doctor has been able to get in and out in quick-smart time. They’re pretty efficient, you know, the lot of them — the doctors, the nurses, the pilots. We haven’t even had any high-flaunting dramas about aeroplanes getting bogged in the bulldust or the mud like they have at other places. Still and all, there was one time I remember when the Flying Doctor plane was delayed from leaving our place, and that was for a bit of an odd sort of reason really, so I’ll tell you about that one if you like.

As I said, the Flying Doctor plane has been able to get in and out in no time at all apart from this occasion when a young lad, a jackaroo he was, came off his horse and got his foot caught in the stirrup. Gee, he was in a mess. The poor kid had been dragged along the ground for a fair way and, among all that, the horse had trampled over him. I tell you, he was a pretty bruised and battered young man.

Anyway, we sent out an emergency for the Flying Doctor. When the plane arrived, on board was a doctor, a pilot and a nursing sister. So they settled the young stockman down and had just loaded him onto the plane when the nursing sister decided that
she’d better go to the toilet before they flew back to the Meekatharra base.

‘Sure,’ I said and directed her off to the nearest loo, an outside construction it was. ‘You go down this way and that, and it’s just around the corner, over there, in that direction.’

Now one of the peculiarities of this particular toilet was that it had a metal door. So, when the sun shone on it, the metal expanded. Of course, we knew this and whenever we used the toilet we kept the door slightly open. But the nursing sister didn’t, and with all the kerfuffle over the young stockman it completely slipped my mind to tell her. To make matters worse, this was a warm day, a very warm day indeed.

So off she went and the doctor completed what was necessary for the young stockman while the pilot did his pre-take-off checks. Some time passed and the nursing sister still hadn’t returned. So there we were, standing around, trying to fill in the time with idle chat. And we waited and we waited until eventually we’d just about exhausted every avenue of conversation from the price of beef right through to the current climatic conditions…and still she hadn’t appeared.

By this stage, the patient was looking quite distressed, the poor kid. What’s more, the doctor seemed pretty anxious and the pilot was gazing at his watch then up at the skies then back at his watch again. So there we were, hovering around the plane kicking the dust with our boots, trying to think of what to talk about next, which we couldn’t because all the while we were wondering what the hell was going on with the nursing sister.

Anyway, all this tension proved too much for my
husband. ‘Oh gee,’ he blurted, ‘I don’t know, perhaps she isn’t feeling too well.’

With this comment, the men turned to me. Being a female I put two and two together and came up with the obvious — that they weren’t too comfortable about knocking on a toilet door to find out what a woman’s problem might be.

‘I’d better go and check on her, then,’ I said.

‘Good idea,’ they chorused.

So I went over to the toilet and tapped on the door. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but are you okay in there?’

‘I’m in big trouble,’ came the plaintive reply.

‘What’s up?’ I asked, thinking the worst.

‘The door’s stuck and I can’t get out.’

So I had a go at opening the thing and it was stuck, all right, stuck good and proper. What’s more, it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I tried. Then I had to call the men around to have a go. God it was funny. If you can imagine the scene, there we were out in the middle of nowhere with these three men huffing and puffing and pushing and pulling at the door of the toilet which in turn was causing the complete structure to sway back and forward, and there was this poor woman stuck inside thinking that all her nightmares had come at once.

But they eventually managed to free it.

‘One, two, three,’ they called and gave an almighty pull.

The toilet door flung open and out stepped one very embarrassed nursing sister — as red as a beetroot, she was.

‘Well,’ she snapped, ‘shall we go then?’ And she strode off in the direction of the plane.

I first became aware of the Royal Flying Doctor Service through a chap called Dr Clyde Fenton. That was back during the war, like, when Clyde was the Commanding Officer of No 6 Communications Unit, out at Batchelor, which was about 60 miles south of Darwin.

At that time, Clyde was working solely as a pilot, not as a doctor. What’s more, he had an excellent reputation as a pilot, one which was only surpassed by his dubious reputation of being a bit of a rogue, especially where the establishment was concerned. Clyde simply refused to obey their rules. In actual fact he didn’t obey much at all. He was pretty much a law unto his own. Still and all, I must say that, in my experience, I found him to be an extremely likeable and fair Commanding Officer.

But as well as being a pilot and a rogue and, no doubt, a good medical man, Clyde was also a well-versed story-teller.

There’s one story that sticks out in my mind, just for starters. This incident happened when he was a Flying Doctor, back before the war. It involved either a Tiger Moth or a Fox Moth, I can’t remember exactly. But it doesn’t matter because both aircraft were twoseaters. Now what I mean by the planes being twoseaters is that, in both the Tiger Moth and the Fox Moth, the pilot sat in the back seat and the passenger sat directly in front of him, in the front seat. And to make matters more difficult there was no direct means of communication between one and the other.

Anyway, one day, Clyde got a message to go out to pick up Mrs so-and-so from some station property. Miles away, it was. This Mrs so-and-so was due to have a baby and they were keen to get her into the maternity ward so that they could keep an eye on things. So Clyde jumped into his plane and off he flew. But when he arrived, he checked this woman over and came to the conclusion that there was no real rush over the matter. In his medical opinion, she had another week or perhaps even two weeks up her sleeve.

But to save himself another long trip out to the property and back, Clyde decided to take the woman back into the hospital anyway. So he positioned her in the front seat. He made sure that she was comfortable, then double-checked that she was okay. ‘Are you sure that you’re okay?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied. Then he took off to return to the base. They’d been in the air for about half an hour when Clyde noticed that the woman seemed to be in some sort of discomfort.

‘She can’t be,’ he muttered to himself.

But the further on they flew, the more this woman’s discomfort seemed to increase, and before long, there she was, twisting this way and that. Now the more that this woman wriggled about, the more Clyde began thinking that his previous diagnosis might’ve been a week or two off the mark. It’d happened to doctors before. You couldn’t always be right. Nothing’s 100 per cent certain. Perhaps the stress and vibration of the flight was bringing the baby on prematurely. But it was only when the situation reached desperation point and the woman attempted to lift herself out of the seat that Clyde’s concern turned to panic.

‘Hell,’ he said, ‘the baby’s coming.’

So Clyde was left with no other option than to put the plane down, and put it down mighty quick, or there could be big trouble. Now it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to put a plane down in the middle of nowhere, especially when that ‘middle of nowhere’ happens to be nothing but desert and scrub. So he searched around the area and the first piece of half reasonable land he came across, he took the bit between the teeth and went for it.

Now, as you might well imagine, landing a plane in those sorts of geographical conditions was a precarious exercise at the best of times. But with a woman on board who was on the verge of giving birth, Clyde was fully aware that any sudden bumps or violent shaking may well get the birthing process rolling before he could attend to the situation.

But as luck and good flying skills would have it, Clyde managed to make a reasonably smooth landing. Then as soon as the plane came to a halt he shouted, ‘Keep calm. Keep calm. Breathe nice and deep. First, I’ll get you out of the plane and we can take things from there.’

Then he grabbed his medical bag, jumped out and raced around to tend to the woman. It was at that point that Clyde happened to notice a strange, sheepish look on the woman’s face. Now this particular facial expression caused him to do a double take.

‘You are about to have the baby, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘No,’ whispered the woman.

‘Then why all the discomfort in the passenger’s seat?’ he asked.

‘Me undies got all knotted up,’ she replied.