Lifeboat! by Margaret Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

but he was shivering uncontrollably. The inflatable drifted north-eastwards at the rate of approximately three knots carried by the ebbing tide and pushed further by the south-westerly offshore breeze. The sea seemed, to the boys, much rougher out here. The little black-and-orange dinghy tossed and bucked and the waves slapped against the sides, splashing water over the edge and drenching the already bedraggled pair.
    â€˜Nigel,’ Martin whimpered. ‘I feel sick.’
    â€˜Well, ’ang yer ’ead over the side. I don’t want it all over me!’ snapped the unsympathetic fat boy. He was uncomfortably wet and the cold was just beginning to penetrate even his extra layers of fat, but nausea—even out here on the rolling ocean—never worried Nigel.
    â€˜Eh, I’ve just thought.’ Excitement, hope was in Nigel’s voice. ‘The lifeboat! It’ll see us when it comes back.’
    He was struggling to stand up, raising his arms, already convinced that the lifeboat would see him at once. ‘But we ought to wave …’
    The dinghy rocked dangerously.
    â€˜Oooh, Nigel, don’t. You’ll tip us over!’ Martin screeched but at that second the fat boy slipped on the wet plastic and fell on to one side of the dinghy, his weight squashing the inflated side. Martin, weak with cold and sea-sickness, slithered helplessly towards Nigel, landing in a sprawling heap against him. The dinghy tipped up, the lighter side leaving the water, and the side where the two boys were dipping almost beneath the waves. Martin was wedged in the corner of the dinghy but Nigel, already half over the side, slipped backwards.
    There was nothing to save him on the slippery PVC—his head and shoulders dipped beneath the water, his arms threshed and his legs flailed the air.
    Martin watched in horror as, almost in slow motion, Nigel slid into the sea.

Chapter Five
    Mike Harland had discovered gliding four years ago. He had come upon it by accident. Out cycling around the Lincolnshire Wolds one summer Sunday about four miles from the village where he lived, he had been startled by the sudden appearance of a glider surging up from behind a clump of trees. Intrigued, he had pedalled towards it. Closer he could see the cable pulling the glider higher and higher, climbing into the sky at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
    But how? And where?
    The how was a winch attached to the end of a converted double-decker bus and the where was a disused Lincolnshire airfield which the glider club had rescued and resuscitated. Instead of the Lancaster bombers blundering down the runways and lifting reluctantly into the air, now the silent, ethereal bird-like craft skimmed smoothly across the grass and soared upwards into the sky.
    Mike Harland had leant across his handlebars and stared, open-mouthed and fascinated.
    He was back the following weekend determined to get a flight. He signed a form to become a day member of the Golden Eagle Gliding Club, paid his flight fee and the launch fee and went up for two separate flights of ten minutes duration with one of the club’s instructors.
    That was just the beginning.
    Mike was twenty-three and in the final stages of becoming a qualified architect. He was not particularly tall, thin and with floppy straight mouse-coloured hair and hazel eyes, and a mouth that was a little inclined to sulkiness. It happened that he was between girlfriends at the moment when gliding entered his life and took it over.
    Like all the converted, he became more fanatical about it than the original devotees. It was an expensive hobby. Sometimes he didn’t eat lunch mid-week to be sure of getting a flight at the weekend, though he was careful to keep this fact hidden from his widowed mother with whom he still lived. Girlfriends of the past faded into obscurity. The only girls he even noticed were the one or two at the gliding club.
    He took a course of instruction, passed all the