The last inch is content. Can a brief retelling of James Aldridge "father and son"

Working in Canada on an old DC-3 plane gave Ben a "good temper", thanks to which last years he flew a Fairchild over the Egyptian deserts, looking for oil for an oil exporting company. To land the geologists, Ben could land the plane anywhere: “on the sand, on the bushes, on the rocky bottom of dry streams and on the long white shallows of the Red Sea,” each time “winning last inch above the ground".

But now this work is over: the company's management has given up trying to find a large oil field. Ben is 43 years old. His wife, unable to withstand life in the "foreign village of Arabia", left for her native Massachusetts. Ben promised to come to her, but he understood that in his old age he would not be able to hire a pilot, and "decent and decent" work did not attract him.

Now Ben has only a ten-year-old son, Davy, whom his wife did not consider it necessary to take with her. It was an introverted child, lonely and restless. His mother was not interested in him, and the boy was afraid of his abrupt and laconic father. The son was a stranger to Ben and an incomprehensible person with which he didn't even try to find mutual language.

And now he regretted that he had taken his son with him: the "sharp" rental plane was shaking strongly, and the boy was nauseous. Taking Davy to the Red Sea was another of Ben's generous impulses that rarely ended well. During one of these impulses, he tried to teach the boy to fly an airplane. Although Davy was a quick-witted child, his father's rude shouts eventually brought him to tears.

On the secluded coast of the Red Sea, Ben was led by a desire to make money: he had to shoot sharks. The television company paid well for the footage of such a film. Landing the plane on a long sandbank, Ben forced his son to watch and study, although the boy was very ill. “It's all about the last inch,” the pilot instructed.

The sandbank formed Shark Bay, so named because of the toothy inhabitants. After giving his son a few harsh orders, Ben disappeared into the water. Davy sat on the shore until dinner, looking at the deserted sea and thinking what would happen to him if his father did not return.

The predators weren't very active today. He had already shot several meters of film when a cat shark became interested in him. She swam too close, and Ben hurried to the beach.

During lunch, he discovered that he had taken only beer with him - he again did not think about his son who does not drink beer. The boy wondered if anyone knew about this trip. Ben said that you can only get to this bay by air, he did not understand that the boy was not afraid of intruders, but of being alone.

Ben hated and feared sharks, but after dinner he dived again, this time with a horse's leg bait. With the money he received for the film, he hoped to send Davy to his mother. The predators gathered around the meat, but the cat shark rushed at the person ...

Bleeding, Ben climbed onto the sand. When Davy ran up to him, it turned out that the shark almost tore Ben right hand and severely damaged the left. The legs were also all cut and chewed. The pilot realized that his affairs were very bad, but Ben could not die: he had to fight for Davy's sake.

Only now did the father try to find an approach to the boy in order to calm him down and prepare him for an independent flight. Loosing consciousness every minute, Ben lay down on a towel and kicked off the sand while his son dragged him to the "sharp". So that his father could climb into the passenger seat, Davy piled stones and pieces of coral in front of the plane door and dragged his father along this ramp. Meanwhile rose strong wind and it began to darken. Ben sincerely regretted that he had not bothered to recognize this gloomy boy and now cannot find the right words to cheer him up.

Following his father's instructions, Davy barely lifted the plane into the air. The boy remembered the map, knew how to use the compass and knew that he had to fly along the sea coast to the Suez Canal, and then turn to Cairo. Ben was unconscious most of the way. He woke up when they flew up to the airfield. "Ben knew that the last inch was approaching and everything was in the hands of the boy." With incredible efforts, he raised himself in his chair and helped his son to put the car. At the same time, they miraculously missed a huge four-engined aircraft.

To the surprise of the Egyptian doctors, Ben survived, although he lost left hand along with the ability to fly planes. Now he had only one concern - to find a way to the heart of his son, to overcome the last inch separating them.

You read summary short stories The Last Inch. We'll be glad if you take the time to read it in full.

James Aldridge

LAST INCH

It is good if, having flown more than one thousand miles in twenty years, you still feel the pleasure of flying by the age of forty; it's good if you can still enjoy how artistically accurately you landed the car; Squeeze the handle a little, raise a light cloud of dust and smoothly win back the last inch above the ground. Especially when landing on snow: dense snow is very convenient for landing, and sitting well on the snow is as pleasant as walking barefoot on the fluffy carpet in a hotel.

But with flights on "DS-3", when you lift an old car, it used to be in the air in any weather and fly over the woods anywhere, it was over. Working in Canada gave him a good temper, and it is not surprising that he ended his flying life over the deserts of the Red Sea, flying the Fairchild for the Texegipto oil export company, which had oil exploration rights all over the Egyptian coast. He flew the Fairchild over the desert until the plane was completely worn out. There were no landing sites. He put the car wherever geologists and hydrologists wanted to get off - on the sand, on the bushes, on the rocky bottom of dry streams and on the long white shoals of the Red Sea. The shallows were the worst: the smooth-looking surface of the sand was always dotted with large chunks of white coral with razor-sharp edges, and if it were not for the Fairchild's low centering, it would have turned over more than once due to a puncture of the camera.

But that was all in the past. Texegipto abandoned costly attempts to find a large oil field that would have yielded the same profits as Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and the Fairchild turned into a pitiful ruin and stood in one of the Egyptian hangars, covered with a thick layer of multi-colored dust, all excised from the bottom narrow, long cuts, with frayed cables, with some semblance of a motor and devices suitable only for a landfill.

It was all over: he turned forty-three, his wife left him home on Linnen Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and healed as she liked: she took the tram to Harvard Square, bought groceries in a store without a seller, stayed with her old man in decent wooden house- in a word, she led a decent life, worthy of a decent woman. He promised to come to her in the spring, but he knew that he would not do it, just as he knew that he would not receive a flight job in his years, especially the one to which he was accustomed, he would not receive it even in Canada. In those parts, supply exceeded demand when it came to experienced people; farmers in Saskatchewan learned to fly their own Pipercabs and Osters. Amateur aviation deprived many of the old pilots a piece of bread. They ended up hiring themselves to serve the mines or the government, but such a job was too decent and respectable to suit him in his old age.

So he was left with nothing, except for the indifferent wife, who did not need him, and the ten-year-old son, who was born too late and, as Ben understood in the depths of his soul, a stranger to both of them - a lonely, restless child who at ten years old felt that the mother is not interested in him, and the father is an outsider, harsh and laconic, not knowing what to talk to him about in those rare moments when they were together.

And now it was no better than always. Ben took the boy with him to the Oster, which was swinging wildly at an altitude of two thousand feet above the coast of the Red Sea, and waited for the boy to rock.

If you vomit, ”Ben said,“ bend down to the floor so as not to get the whole cabin dirty.

Okay. - The boy looked very unhappy.

Are you afraid?

The little "Oster" was mercilessly thrown from side to side in the hot air, but the frightened boy still did not get lost and, fiercely sucking on the lollipop, looked at the instruments, the compass, the jumping artificial horizon.

A little, ”the boy replied in a quiet and shy voice, unlike the rough voices of American guys. - Will the plane break down from these shocks?

Ben did not know how to console his son, he told the truth:

If the machine is not monitored and checked all the time, it will inevitably break down.

And this one ... - the boy began, but he was very sick, and he could not continue.

This one is fine, ”the father said irritably. - Quite a good plane.

The boy lowered his head and began to cry softly.

Ben regretted taking his son with him. In their family, generous impulses always ended in failure: both of them were like that - a dry, crying, provincial mother and a sharp, irascible father. During one of the rare bouts of generosity, Ben once tried to teach the boy to fly a plane, and although the son turned out to be very understanding and quickly learned the basic rules, every shout from his father brought him to tears ...

Do not Cry! Ben ordered him now. “You don’t have to cry! Raise your head, do you hear, Davy! Pick up now!

But Davy sat with his head down, and Ben more and more regretted having taken him with him, and gazed dejectedly at the barren, deserted coast of the Red Sea spread under the wing of the plane - an unbroken strip of a thousand miles separating the soft washed-out colors of the land from the faded green water. Everything was motionless and dead. The sun burned out all life here, and in the spring, for thousands of square miles, winds lifted masses of sand into the air and carried it to the other side of the Indian Ocean, where it remained forever at the bottom of the sea.

Sit up straight, he told Davy, if you want to learn how to land.

Ben knew his tone was harsh and he always wondered why he couldn't talk to a boy. Davy looked up. He grabbed the control board and leaned forward. Ben removed the throttle and, after waiting until the speed slowed down, pulled hard on the trimmer handle, which was very inconveniently located on these small English planes - at the top left, almost overhead. A sudden jolt shook the boy's head down, but he immediately lifted it up and began to look over the drooping nose of the car at a narrow strip of white sand by the bay, like a cake thrown on this deserted shore. My father drove the plane straight there.

How do you know where the wind is blowing from? the boy asked.

Over the waves, over the cloud, by the flair! Ben shouted to him.

But he himself did not know what he was guided by when he was flying the plane. Without thinking, he knew to within one foot where he would land the car. He had to be precise: a bare strip of sand did not give a single extra span, and only a very small plane could land on it. It was a hundred miles from here to the nearest native village, and all around was a dead desert.

It's all about timing, ”Ben said. - When you level the plane, you need to keep the distance to the ground six inches. Not a foot or three, but exactly six inches! If you take it higher, you will knock on landing and damage the plane. Too low - you get on a bump and turn over. It's all about the last inch.

Davy nodded. He already knew that. He saw an Oster roll over in El-Bab, where they rented a car. The student who flew it was killed.

You see! - shouted the father. - Six inches. When it starts to descend, I take the handle on myself. To myself. Here! he said, and the plane touched the ground softly like a snowflake.

The last inch! Ben immediately turned off the engine and put on the foot brakes - the nose of the plane went up, and the car came to a stop at the water's edge - it was six or seven feet away.

Two pilots air line who discovered this bay named it Shark - not because of its shape, but because of its population. It was constantly home to many large sharks that swam from the Red Sea, chasing shoals of herring and mullet that sought refuge here. Ben flew here because of the sharks, and now, when he got to the bay, he completely forgot about the boy and from time to time only gave him orders: help with unloading, bury a bag of food in wet sand, moisten the sand, watering it sea ​​water, provide tools and all sorts of little things needed for scuba gear and cameras.

Does anyone ever come here? Davy asked him.

Ben was too busy to pay attention to what the boy was saying, but he shook his head when he heard the question.

No one! Nobody can get here except by a light plane. Bring me two green bags that are in the car and cover your head. It wasn't enough for you to get sunstroke!

Davy did not ask any more questions. When he asked his father about something, his voice immediately became sullen: he had expected a sharp answer in advance. The boy did not even try to continue the conversation and silently did what he was ordered to. He watched carefully as his father prepared scuba gear and a camera for underwater filming, going to shoot sharks in the clear water.

The idea of ​​the novel "The Last Inch" came from an outstanding English writer James Aldridge when he visited Shark Bay in Egypt.

Nevertheless, inspired by this exotic location and risky underwater filming, Aldridge dedicated his work to the valuable human qualities - courage, courage and inner strength that propels people forward.

The story "The Last Inch" is a story about the formation of a personality and about overcoming fear for the sake of life, for the sake of love for oneself, one's loved ones and the world around us.

The Last Inch follows a professional pilot Ben and his son heading to Shark Bay to shoot a documentary. Ben is attacked by one of the sharks and wounds him, now he cannot move.

But Ben is tormented not only by the pain he is experiencing, but by the realization that his ten-year-old son Davy may be all alone and will not be able to find his way back if something happens to his father.

The next problem is the difficult relationship between the son and the father. It was always difficult for them to find a common language, and the main reason for this was that the father never looked for him.

But now father and son need to work together in such difficult and life-defining circumstances. Ben has to overcome pain and anguish, and to cheer up Davy, because he realizes that the only way out to save them is by plane. And the plane will have to be driven by a ten-year-old boy.

Overcoming the hero of his own fear and powerlessness

Ben understands that the most important thing now is not to lose heart and believe that everything will work out. These thoughts help him gain strength, get up and, with the help of his son, get to the plane and tell him what to do.

Aldridge creates a picture of a decisive moment in a person's life - when everything depends on courage and fearlessness. Main character of the novel "The Last Inch" does not remember how scared he is, does not think about all the dangers that await him and his son, does not allow physical pain to control him.

Despite the fact that physically and mentally little Davy will find it very difficult to fly the plane, Ben believes in him and believes in own strength... He is driven forward by an unlimited love for life, his own and the life of a ten-year-old son, who can save both of them.

Davy managed to do everything that was needed - he brought the plane to Cairo and managed to land it on the ground. He accomplished a real feat and gave life to his father and himself.

But Ben himself did the feat, he overcame his fears and depressing impotence, managed to start moving and charged his vital energy frightened son. It was thanks to him that Dani managed to give birth to fearlessness and courage, which are hardly born in adult men.

Human strength and fearlessness

James Aldridge's novella is a manifesto of human strength and fearless courage that can change or save lives at a crucial moment.

Pilot Ben's composure and his son's stunning courage - vivid examples the fact that a person is always stronger than circumstances. The writer shows that the most important thing is not to give up and believe in yourself and the strength of your personality.

James Aldridge

LAST INCH

It is good if, having flown more than one thousand miles in twenty years, you still feel the pleasure of flying by the age of forty; it's good if you can still enjoy how artistically accurately you landed the car; Squeeze the handle a little, raise a light cloud of dust and smoothly win back the last inch above the ground. Especially when landing on snow: dense snow is very convenient for landing, and sitting well on the snow is as pleasant as walking barefoot on the fluffy carpet in a hotel.

But with flights on "DS-3", when you lift an old car, it used to be in the air in any weather and fly over the woods anywhere, it was over. Working in Canada gave him a good temper, and it is not surprising that he ended his flying life over the deserts of the Red Sea, flying the Fairchild for the Texegipto oil export company, which had oil exploration rights all over the Egyptian coast. He flew the Fairchild over the desert until the plane was completely worn out. There were no landing sites. He put the car wherever geologists and hydrologists wanted to get off - on the sand, on the bushes, on the rocky bottom of dry streams and on the long white shoals of the Red Sea. The shallows were the worst: the smooth-looking surface of the sand was always dotted with large chunks of white coral with razor-sharp edges, and if it were not for the Fairchild's low centering, it would have turned over more than once due to a puncture of the camera.

But that was all in the past. Texegipto abandoned costly attempts to find a large oil field that would have yielded the same profits as Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and the Fairchild turned into a pitiful ruin and stood in one of the Egyptian hangars, covered with a thick layer of multi-colored dust, all excised from the bottom narrow, long cuts, with frayed cables, with some semblance of a motor and devices suitable only for a landfill.

It was all over: he turned forty-three, his wife left him home on Linnen Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and healed as she liked: she took the tram to Harvard Square, bought groceries in a store without a seller, stayed with her old man in a decent wooden house - in a word, she led a decent life, worthy of a decent woman. He promised to come to her in the spring, but he knew that he would not do it, just as he knew that he would not receive a flight job in his years, especially the one to which he was accustomed, he would not receive it even in Canada. In those parts, supply exceeded demand when it came to experienced people; farmers in Saskatchewan learned to fly their own Pipercabs and Osters. Amateur aviation deprived many of the old pilots a piece of bread. They ended up hiring themselves to serve the mines or the government, but such a job was too decent and respectable to suit him in his old age.

So he was left with nothing, except for the indifferent wife, who did not need him, and the ten-year-old son, who was born too late and, as Ben understood in the depths of his soul, a stranger to both of them - a lonely, restless child who at ten years old felt that the mother is not interested in him, and the father is an outsider, harsh and laconic, not knowing what to talk to him about in those rare moments when they were together.

And now it was no better than always. Ben took the boy with him to the Oster, which was swinging wildly at an altitude of two thousand feet above the coast of the Red Sea, and waited for the boy to rock.

If you vomit, ”Ben said,“ bend down to the floor so as not to get the whole cabin dirty.

Okay. - The boy looked very unhappy.

Are you afraid?

The little "Oster" was mercilessly thrown from side to side in the hot air, but the frightened boy still did not get lost and, fiercely sucking on the lollipop, looked at the instruments, the compass, the jumping artificial horizon.

A little, ”the boy replied in a quiet and shy voice, unlike the rough voices of American guys. - Will the plane break down from these shocks?

Ben did not know how to console his son, he told the truth:

If the machine is not monitored and checked all the time, it will inevitably break down.

And this one ... - the boy began, but he was very sick, and he could not continue.

This one is fine, ”the father said irritably. - Quite a good plane.

The boy lowered his head and began to cry softly.

Ben regretted taking his son with him. In their family, generous impulses always ended in failure: both of them were like that - a dry, crying, provincial mother and a sharp, irascible father. During one of the rare bouts of generosity, Ben once tried to teach the boy to fly a plane, and although the son turned out to be very understanding and quickly learned the basic rules, every shout from his father brought him to tears ...

Do not Cry! Ben ordered him now. “You don’t have to cry! Raise your head, do you hear, Davy! Pick up now!

But Davy sat with his head down, and Ben more and more regretted having taken him with him, and gazed dejectedly at the barren, deserted coast of the Red Sea spread under the wing of the plane - an unbroken strip of a thousand miles separating the soft washed-out colors of the land from the faded green water. Everything was motionless and dead. The sun burned out all life here, and in the spring, for thousands of square miles, winds lifted masses of sand into the air and carried it to the other side of the Indian Ocean, where it remained forever at the bottom of the sea.

Sit up straight, he told Davy, if you want to learn how to land.

Ben knew his tone was harsh and he always wondered why he couldn't talk to a boy. Davy looked up. He grabbed the control board and leaned forward. Ben removed the throttle and, after waiting until the speed slowed down, pulled hard on the trimmer handle, which was very inconveniently located on these small English planes - at the top left, almost overhead. A sudden jolt shook the boy's head down, but he immediately lifted it up and began to look over the drooping nose of the car at a narrow strip of white sand by the bay, like a cake thrown on this deserted shore. My father drove the plane straight there.

How do you know where the wind is blowing from? the boy asked.

Over the waves, over the cloud, by the flair! Ben shouted to him.

But he himself did not know what he was guided by when he was flying the plane. Without thinking, he knew to within one foot where he would land the car. He had to be precise: a bare strip of sand did not give a single extra span, and only a very small plane could land on it. It was a hundred miles from here to the nearest native village, and all around was a dead desert.

It's all about timing, ”Ben said. - When you level the plane, you need to keep the distance to the ground six inches. Not a foot or three, but exactly six inches! If you take it higher, you will knock on landing and damage the plane. Too low - you get on a bump and turn over. It's all about the last inch.

Davy nodded. He already knew that. He saw an Oster roll over in El-Bab, where they rented a car. The student who flew it was killed.

You see! - shouted the father. - Six inches. When it starts to descend, I take the handle on myself. To myself. Here! he said, and the plane touched the ground softly like a snowflake.

The last inch! Ben immediately turned off the engine and put on the foot brakes - the nose of the plane went up, and the car came to a stop at the water's edge - it was six or seven feet away.

The two air line pilots who discovered this bay named it Shark - not because of its shape, but because of its population. It was constantly home to many large sharks that swam from the Red Sea, chasing shoals of herring and mullet that sought refuge here. Ben flew here because of the sharks, and now, when he got to the bay, he completely forgot about the boy and from time to time only gave him orders: help with unloading, bury a bag of food in wet sand, moisten the sand, watering it with sea water. water, provide tools and all sorts of little things necessary for scuba gear and cameras.

Does anyone ever come here? Davy asked him.

Very briefly, a pilot who has lost his job is trying to raise money by shooting sharks. On the set, he takes a ten-year-old son, with whom he does not go well. The shark attacks the pilot, and the son rescues the wounded father.

The titles of the chapters are conditional and do not correspond to the original.

Ben's life story

Ben was a good pilot. He gained the necessary experience while flying in Canada on an old DC-3 aircraft. In recent years, he has flown on Fairchild, looking for oil for the non-export company Texegipto. To land the geologists, Ben could land the plane anywhere: “on the sand, on the bushes, on the rocky bottom of dry streams and on the long white shoals of the Red Sea,” each time reclaiming the last inch above the ground.

But now this work is over. The company's management gave up trying to find a large oil field and decided that they did not need a reconnaissance aircraft. Ben is 43 years old. His wife, unable to bear life in the hot Egyptian desert, left for her native Masachusetts. Ben promised to come to her, but he understood that he would not be able to hire a pilot in his old age, and "decent and decent" work did not attract him.

Now Ben has only a ten-year-old son, Davy, whom his wife did not consider it necessary to take with her. It was an introverted child, lonely and restless. His mother was not interested in him, and the boy was afraid of his abrupt laconic father. For Ben, the son was a stranger and incomprehensible person, with whom he did not even try to find a common language.

Shark attack

And now he regretted that he had taken his son with him - the Oster plane, rented by Ben, was shaking badly, and the boy was nauseous. Taking Davy to the Red Sea was another of Ben's generous impulses that rarely ended well. During one of these impulses, he taught the boy how to fly an airplane. Although Davy was a quick-witted child, his father's rude shouts eventually brought him to tears.

Ben was brought to the secluded coast of the Red Sea by another job: he had to shoot sharks. The television company paid well for the footage of such a film. Landing the plane on a long sandbank, Ben forced his son to watch and study, although the boy was very ill.

The sandbank formed Shark Bay, so named because of the toothy inhabitants. After giving his son a few harsh orders, Ben disappeared into the water. Davy sat on the shore until lunchtime, looking at the deserted sea, and thinking what would happen to him if his father did not return. The predators were not very active today, and Ben decided to lure them with a horse leg, which he took with him. He had already shot several meters of film when a cat shark became interested in him.

The fish was four feet long and weighed only God knows how much; she glanced at him from her hideout, as she had the last time — a week ago. She must have lived here for at least a hundred years.

She swam too close, and Ben hurried to the beach.

During lunch, he found that he took only beer with him - he did not think about his son who does not drink beer again. The boy wondered if anyone knew about this trip. Ben said that this bay can only be reached by air, he did not understand that the boy was not afraid of intruders, but of loneliness.

Ben hated and feared sharks, but after dinner he dived again, this time with bait. With the money he received for the film, he hoped to send Davy to his mother.

The predators gathered around the meat, but the cat shark rushed at the man. Ben crawled out onto the sand, bleeding. When Davy ran up to him, it turned out that the shark almost tore off Ben's right arm and badly injured his left. The legs were also all cut and chewed.

Ben realized that his affairs were very bad, but he could not die. He had to fight for Davy. Only now he tried to find an approach to the boy and persuade him to sit at the controls of the plane.

Father and son

For a more detailed content of this passage, read the retelling "".

Loosing consciousness every minute, Ben lay on a towel and kicked off the sand while his son dragged him to the plane. So that his father could climb into the passenger seat, Davy put stones and pieces of coral in front of the plane and dragged his father along this ramp.

You can do anything in life, Davy, - he said in a weak voice, - if you don't strain yourself. Do not overstrain ...

Only now Davy realized that the role of the pilot went to him. Meanwhile, a strong wind rose and it began to get dark. Ben sincerely regretted not bothering to recognize this gloomy boy, and now he cannot find the right words to cheer him up.

Following his father's instructions, Davy barely lifted the plane into the air. The boy remembered the map, knew how to use the compass and knew that he had to fly along the Suez Canal, and then turn towards Cairo. Ben was unconscious most of the way. He woke up just before landing. Raising himself with difficulty in his chair, Ben helped his son to put the car. At the same time, they miraculously missed a huge four-engined aircraft.

To the surprise of the Egyptian medics, Ben survived, although he lost his left arm along with the ability to fly planes. Now he had only one concern: to find a way to the heart of his son, to overcome the last inch separating them.