By Dominic Gregory
“Do you really think all lives are worth saving?”
This is the question that Dungeness lifeboat volunteer Dominic Gregory faces from a man on the beach when he and his crewmates return from trying to rescue strangers from some of the most dangerous seas on earth. This extraordinary book gave me an insight into what drives local volunteers to risk their lives to save others. It also provides a vivid description of this strange area of the south coast, and highlights some of the art and literature that have come from “the end of the world”. Derek Jarman, Joseph Conrad and other coastal ghosts haunt this text.
Gregory’s very personal reflections made me think about nature, danger, migration, comradeship, and solidarity. It will come as a surprise to some that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is a charity with mainly volunteer crews. The descriptions of training for saving lives, and then of real-life callouts, are vivid and gripping. I felt like I knew this crew by the end.
But as the opening question shows, while the law of the sea and the principle of the RNLI is that every life is of equal value, some feel that some lives are not worth saving. Specifically, the lives of people making an illicit crossing in unsafe small boats. Gregory writes: “Simply put, to ignore a cry for help at sea would be to break the law, no matter whether on one side of a border or the other. The law considers it irrelevant if the vessel in distress is captained by an experienced mariner or someone with no experience whatsoever; the law is blind to wealth or poverty, ethnicity or religion, sexuality or gender. Rather, this law is as good as universal. It is a human right”.
What struck me most about The Lifeboat at the End of the World was that the extraordinary actions of the crew were and are part of their ordinary lives. Essential reading.
Review by Bethan