05.09.06
Lifeboats
The medical students out on their rag week were collecting for the RNLI. Everyone, I suppose, has a cause for which they will turn around in a crowd and fight their way back in order to put money in the bucket. For me, it’s the lifeboats.
I grew up in a town with a lifeboat station (it housed an Atlantic, a rigid self-righting inflatable capable of 35 knots). For anyone who has lived close to a lifeboat, or who has known people who work at sea, supporting the lifeboats feels as normal as paying for your milk.
Part of the unrefusable call of the lifeboats comes from an awareness of the never-ending cruelty of the sea, its protean capacity for putting you in trouble. Part comes from the absolute impossibility of reading about the activities of the lifeboats with a dry eye (if you are feeling sturdy, remind yourself of the Wells and Penlee disasters. Part comes from the fact that the lifeboat service is a charity more or less because you could not pay people to risk their lives in this way: it is the sort of sacrifice that must, it seems, be made freely.
For me, I suppose, the RNLI consists of moments that cast a shadow, a horror over the heart. Local men racing down the High Street in answer to “the shout”. The coastguard helicopter clattering low above the river in assistance. The line “For those in peril on the sea”. Simply reading the phrase “lost with all hands” in a history is enough to unman me.
The very worst thing, though, is the maroons. You have to understand that though the water is pretty quiet, you do get used to sporadic unexpected noises. The river I grew up on knows foghorns and klaxons (the timber ships use them to call back the crew before setting sail, which I used to fear as the four-minute warning). On top of this, the yacht clubs along the town front still use cannon to start and finish races. And, across the way, as I’ve mentioned previously, the ministry of defence would occasionally blow something up.
The only noise that stops you in your tracks, though, is two muted pops, the maroons going up. Locals cast their eyes off to the east, over the lifeboat station, squinting for two woolly purple bursts of smoke hanging low in the sky, calling the crew in.
When the RNLI were able to equip the crew with pagers, for a short while they stopped sending up maroons, reckoning it an unnecessary cost. They were very soon reinstated at the insistence of the locals. Of course it is a tremendous instance of keeping the work of the lifeboats visible, and fundraising suffered without it. I, however, like to think of it as a shout to the whole community, a call for their collective willpower to send the lifeboat through the swell and, more importantly, bring it back again.
Locals don’t tend to think about the sailors in distress, funny as that seems. Every ounce of concern is directed towards the lifeboatmen. No seaside community wants its own entry in the famous history, its own collection of RNLI medals, its own stories of sons following dead fathers out on the boats, its own reputation for courage. It wants the lifeboat back in its shed, where it belongs, and the men, still in their oilskins, in the pub, raising their glasses to another easy shout.