The Summer Skies by Jenny Colgan EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Jenny Colgan
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
My great-grandfather, Captain Ranald Murdo MacIntyre of the RAF City of
Aberdeen Auxiliary Squadron 612, was not a tall man. That was possibly,
most people agreed, what made him so damn feisty in the first place.
He was stocky, though, with a bullet head and an expression that almost
dared you to defy him and then face the consequences. He was one of those
for whom the war was a great time; a huge adventure that broke open his
small view of the world from a small town on the north coast of Scotland.
He joined up right away – RAF, back when the life expectancy of those
boys was about six months. From the second he took off in a Spitfire, he
loved it. He flew fearlessly and into anything, defending the Firth of Forth,
and almost entirely buzzing their arch enemies – not the Luftwaffe, as it
happened, but 602, the Glasgow Auxiliary Squadron, their west-coast rivals
– more than was strictly necessary.
Finally, before his six months were up and the law of averages took him
– not that Ranald MacIntyre had any truck with those – the RAF grounded
him at Leuchars, and got him to train the next cohort, and the next, which
he did with the same exuberant vehemence with which he had tackled the
skies. And when the war was over, the chances of him going back to tend
the family croft had dwindled to nothing.
He found a little plane, a Cessna, from somewhere – it was entirely
possible, word went, that the RAF had given it to him simply to make him
go away, as teaching pilots suicidal combat bravery wasn’t quite as popular
a requirement in the post-war period as it had been before – and
immediately started a service flying the archipelago, the majestic chain of
islands that run off the north coast of Scotland, which up until then had
been connected with only intermittent ferries or, just as often, sail- and
rowboats.
The islands thought they had been doing fine on their own, thank you
very much, and didn’t need this ungodly noisy oily interference in the
rhythms of their year, until they started to find it more and more useful to
get hold of a paper that was only a day old, or being able to visit a doctor or
even spend a day visiting the huge big tempting cities and bright lights of
Oban and Inverness. The kirk wasn’t pleased, but not much pleased them
anyway.
And the tiny air taxi service, which would stop and pick up more or less
anyone anywhere, thrived. First for the novelty value, secondly for the
convenience of the thing and thirdly for Ranald’s complete inability to be
put off or fazed by all but the very worst of the weather, and if you are
familiar with the north coast of Scotland at all, you will know that that is a
formidable talent.
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