Lifeboat! Read online

  Nigel Milner gripped Martin’s stalk-like arm. ‘I say, let us play lifeboats. I’ll be t’captain.’

  Scornfully Martin said, ‘T’ain’t “ captain”, ’tis coxswain!’ He pronounced it “cockswane”. ‘ I seen it in that guide book they got at the flat.’

  ‘Oh Clever Dick.’ Nigel punched Martin’s arm again.

  ‘Gerroff! ’Sides, we can’t. We can’t blow us dinghy up.’

  ‘Don’t need to.’ Nigel leant towards him excitedly. ‘Don’t you remember? Last night we was late back from the beach and Mam was werritin’ about bein’ late for t’bingo. Well—Dad never let the dinghy down!’ He delivered the last sentence like a coup de grâce and stood back to watch Martin’s expression. But the enthusiasm he had anticipated was not forthcoming.

  ‘They’ll be mad,’ Martin volunteered. ‘That’s why he lets it down ev’ry night, so’s we won’t go playin’ in it by us selves.’

  ‘Baby Buntin’.’ Nigel said scathingly. ‘Who’s chicken then? Look the sea’s as calm as anything.’ He waved his fat arm in the direction of the ocean.

  They looked. The sea was indeed calm, the morning mist still shrouding the water’s edge in secretive patches, mist that heralded another hot day—the last of their holiday. Nigel’s next manoeuvre was to remind his younger brother of this fact. ‘ Won’t ’ave another chance this year,’ he said slyly. ‘By the time me dad gets up, it’ll be time to pack up an’ go for t’train home.’ Back to dusty grey streets and concrete playgrounds without a

  drop of salt water or a grain of sand.

  Martin hesitated, wavered and was lost. ‘Come on, then.’

  They raced across the beach, sand showering from their flying

  feet.

  Behind them, deceptively benign, the sea lay in wait for the

  innocents.

  Chapter Two

  As the lifeboat chewed its way through the shallows towards the open sea, Timothy Matthews stood watching the boat he had just helped to launch and feeling the inevitable twinge of longing, that peculiar ‘left-behind’ feeling he always felt as he watched the lifeboat out of sight.

  Tim could not remember a time when he had not been at the water’s edge, or very near it, at a launch. Not always as a launcher, of course; only comparatively recently had he been old enough to take an active part. But no one had ever been able to stop him being there watching, longing to go with them, waiting to grow up …

  As he turned from the shoreline, he saw the two boys and it was like a ghostly reminder of his own childhood. Only now there were two of them and there had only ever been one of him.

  Tim had always been a loner.

  He paused a moment to study the two boys. The fat one was talking urgently to the smaller one, bending towards him, bullying him almost, it seemed to Tim. Then they turned and ran across the sand.

  Tim smiled and shook his head wonderingly. He glanced over his shoulder at the lifeboat, a hazy shadow through the patchy sea-mist, but still visible.

  That was where any similarity between him and the two boys ended.

  Timothy Matthews would never have left the beach until the lifeboat had been gone completely from sight for at least ten minutes.

  No one had ever been able to stop him. His house-father in the Home, his teachers at the local grammar school, even the headmaster who was feared by many a would-be truant, all had been helpless when confronted by the boy’s obsession.

  The instant the maroons sounded, Tim had been away to the boathouse, leaving meals unfinished, lessons, the football field—to the cries of anger from his friends if he were in goal. He would even leave his bed in the dormitory of the Children’s Home where he had lived since babyhood. Nothing and no one could deter him from being present every time the lifeboat was launched. Since the age of seven, he had only missed one launch and that had been because he was in hospital under sedation on the operating table losing his tonsils.

  Even ordinary childish illnesses had not deterred him. On different occasions he had appeared at the boathouse covered in chicken-pox blemishes, measles and an out-of-shape mump-swollen face. Once, during a nasty bout of ’flu, the only reason he had escaped pneumonia was that his housemother had followed him in her car and then he had only been persuaded to get into the car if she promised to follow the lifeboat to the beach and park as near as possible so that he could watch the launch.

  All punishment failed. Neither canings, nor detentions, nor early-to-bed had any effect. As soon as the maroon sounded there was no stopping him. Even a car back-firing was enough to make him leap to his feet.

  ‘Bend over, Matthews,’ the headmaster would say with resignation.

  ‘Yes, sir. Do you know, sir, it was the fastest launch this year? I timed it. Twelve minutes, forty-five seconds.’ (Whack) ‘It’s a member of the crew of a trawler, sir, he’s got an appendicitis that’s gone wrong.’ (Whack)

  ‘Peritonitis.’ (Whack) The headmaster supplied the information along with another stroke.

  ‘That’s it, sir. That’s what he’s got. I reckon,’ (Whack) ‘they ought to call in the helicopter from the airbase.’ (Whack)

  ‘I’m sure the coxswain will take heed of your advice, Matthews.’ (Whack)

  The headmaster turned away, but the boy had not finished even if the caning was done. He stood up, his eyes shining, the ready smile still on his mouth. ‘Oh, he’s a great coxswain, Mr Macready. Eighty-seven lives he’s saved in the eleven years since he’s been coxswain. It’s all up on a board in the boathouse, sir …’

  ‘Yes, yes, that will be all, Matthews. Return to your class.’

  Only now, in the face of the headmaster’s lack of interest in the town’s lifeboat activities, did the boy’s expression alter. Tim could not understand how anyone, particularly the headmaster who was always exhorting his pupils to take a lively interest in whatever was going on around them, could not be as enthusiastic as he was about the lifeboat.

  The headmaster sighed as the door closed behind Matthews. ‘Doesn’t anything have an effect on that boy?’ he murmured.

  The school’s secretary, typing in her corner, glanced at him, pursed her lips and said nothing but pounded the keys even harder. Mrs Hibbett did not agree with punishing young Matthews. She thought the boy showed spirit.

  The next time Matthews stood in front of Mr Edwards, the headmaster said, ‘Well, boy, so it’s happened again, has it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Do you know, sir, they were a crew member short. If only I’d been older perhaps they’d have let me go.’

  Mr Edwards raised his eyebrows and murmured, ‘Heaven forbid!’ Clearing his throat he added, ‘Well Matthews, caning seems to have no effect. I—er—understand you particularly dislike the writing of essays. Is that correct?’

  The boy grimaced. ‘ Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, then. I suggest you remain in detention after school this evening and write me out a full account of the launch of the lifeboat and why you feel the crew have especial need of your presence every time a launch takes place.’ The sarcasm was lost on Tim. His eyes were shining. ‘Yes, sir.’

  As the door of his study closed behind a jubilant Matthews, Mr Edwards remarked to his secretary, ‘Mrs Hibbett, I think I have just been outmanoeuvred.’

  She said nothing but smiled down at her typewriter.

  The essay had been a brilliant piece of prose from the fourteen-year-old boy and was passed amongst the staff as an example of what Matthews was capable of achieving.

  ‘If only they put a question in the G.C.E O-level paper about lifeboats,’ remarked his English teacher wryly, ‘he’ll get a distinction!’

  Throughout his boyhood Tim had always been welcome at the Macready home. Mary Macready had been like a mother to him. She had never fussed over him—she hadn’t been that sort of woman, but he had loved her for her serenity, her smile, her warmth.

  Her sudden death had left Tim Matthews every bit as desolate as her husband and daughter.

  They had gr
own up together—Tim and Julie Macready. They had gone to Saltershaven Grammar School, though Julie, a year older than Tim, had been in the form above him all the way through the school.

  In their early teens they had gone sailing together, roller-skating, ten-pin bowling, and played tennis. And they could not count the number of times they had waited together for the lifeboat to come back from the sea.

  Julie had grown from a spotty, gawky school-kid into a pretty college student and now, at this Bank Holiday weekend, Tim was two weeks past his eighteenth birthday and had just received the results of his A-level examinations. The cheeky boyish grin was still there, the springy fair hair and the brilliant blue eyes. He was tall and thin and slightly round-shouldered after months of swotting—a defect which was likely to be quickly rectified by his chosen career. His obsession with the local lifeboat had grown into a love for the sea and in a few weeks he was due to join the Royal Navy. So this weekend held a kind of poignancy for him. It was the end of an era in his life, the end of being there whenever the lifeboat was launched. The end of his easy friendship with each and every member of the crew, who had come to regard him as a kind of talisman.

  Was it to be the end too of his friendship with the Macready family? He would come back, of course, but could it ever be quite the same again?

  ‘What is it this time?’

  She was standing in the open doorway of the empty boathouse as the launchers, Tim amongst them, manoeuvred the heavy trailer back into position to await the recall when the lifeboat was ready to beach.

  ‘Hi, Julie.’ Tim moved towards her. ‘They’re not sure. Bill Luthwaite and Jack Hansard thought at first it could be a hoax call, but then the coastguard saw a flare down Dolan’s Sand way, but they’ve no idea yet what it is.’

  Julie pulled a face. ‘Oh, one of those. Then there’s no knowing what time he’ll be back.’

  ‘No. I say—shall we go sailing tomorrow? Sandy would lend us his boat. I’m off in a couple of weeks, you know, so there won’t be many more times when …’

  ‘Oh Tim, I’m sorry. I can’t. Is it so soon you go?’

  ‘Yes—the fourteenth of September.’

  ‘I am sorry. I’d have loved to have gone—really, but I’ve got this friend coming down for the weekend. Someone I met at college.’

  Knowing it to be an all-girls’college Julie attended, Tim blundered on, ‘Well, she wouldn’t mind, would she? I mean, we could all three go, couldn’t we?’

  There was a pink tinge to Julie’s cheeks and she avoided Tim’s gaze. ‘It’s not a she—it’s a he. He goes to the university adjoining our campus.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I see,’ Tim said flatly.

  There was an awkward silence between them, a constraint that had never been there throughout their childhood friendship.

  With the toe of his training shoe, Tim scuffed at the little heap of sand that had blown up against the boathouse door.

  ‘Well then, I’d better be off to the shops,’ Julie murmured. ‘I’ll—er—see you again before you go, Tim.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ He tried to smile, but for once his cheery grin was difficult to summon.

  He watched her walk away from him. ‘Lucky sod!’ he muttered to himself of the unknown undergraduate, then he turned and went back into the boathouse.

  The two Milner boys dragged the orange-and-black inflatable from the square of back-yard behind the holiday flats. It was approximately six feet by four feet in heavy-duty PVC with paddles and five buoyancy compartments and blown up by means of a 12-volt inflator.

  Across the road they carried it, struggling and awkward, between them. Down the concrete steps and through the sunken gardens along the foreshore, past the bowling-greens and up again over the low sand-dune and across the promenade and down on to the beach itself. Reaching the sand they dropped it and towed it by its grab rope, slithering behind them towards the sea.

  No one saw them go—at least no one who could foresee the danger. The coastguard was occupied on the radio link to the out-going lifeboat; the beach cleaners were too busy, their heads down searching for broken glass and sharp tin cans. The beach life-guards had yet to come on duty and no one amongst the smattering of tiny figures on the wide expanse of beach took any notice of the two small boys intent upon their own game: not the man with his metal-detector, nor the woman walking her dog, nor the two other children constructing a dam.

  By the time Nigel and Martin Milner reached the shallows they were obscured by the lingering wisps of morning sea-mist, hidden from the watchful eye of their parents—had their parents been awake to be watchful—and out of sight of the vigilant coastguard. They were alone in a make-believe world of their own creation with only the enticing whisper of the sea to lure them on.

  They played for some time in the shallows, bouncing in and out of the dinghy, carried to and fro by the waves running up the beach and then receding. They pretended to launch their dinghy—just like they had seen the lifeboatmen do. Martin already aboard, Nigel pushed the dinghy out beyond the breakers and flung himself into the craft. Bobbing and drifting, they played their game, confident that the waves breaking on to the sand would carry them back to the beach.

  They did not realise that though the surf carried them towards the sand, each time the ebb pulled them a few inches further and further out to sea.

  They could not have chosen a more dangerous set of circumstances. The time— two hours and thirteen minutes after high water—was the very point when the ebb was at its strongest. The patchy morning mist hid them from the view of anyone on the beach or promenade. To make matters worse, a light, offshore breeze began, gently at first and then with increasing strength, blowing away the mist but pushing the dinghy further and further out to sea …

  The time was 09.55.

  Chapter Three

  Saltershaven was a seaside holiday resort on the Lincolnshire coast. Its resident population of twenty-three thousand could be more than trebled during the summer months. The hotels, guest-houses and holiday flats which lined the promenades along the sea front and many of the roads leading from the town to the foreshore; the chalets, the caravans and tents—all catered for over twenty thousand people staying in the town at the height of the holiday Season.

  The words ‘The Season’ were as familiar to the residents of Saltershaven as they had once been to the Society World of London in a bygone era—but with a very different meaning. For those directly involved with the holiday trade, the Season meant a long day often beginning before dawn and certainly never ending before dusk. The cafés, the cinema and theatres, the snack-bars, the gift-shops, the amusement arcades; the foreshore with its putting-greens, bowling-greens, kiddies’ corner, boating-lake, and paddling-pools; the swimming-pool with its chalets; all catered not only for the visitors who came to stay for a week or two, but for the thirty thousand or more people who visited the resort daily by car, coach or rail. All needed to be catered for—to be fed, to be entertained and sometimes to be protected in an unfamiliar environment. The city child let loose on a wide expanse of beach with an endless supply of sand and water at his disposal was vulnerable.

  Innocence and ignorance—the two ingredients most calculated to court disaster.

  At the moment when the Milner boys’ inflatable began to be pulled away from the shore by the ebbing current off the central beach at Saltershaven, seven nautical miles away the Mary Martha Clamp reached the area between the Inner Dog’s Head sandbank and the coastal marshland of Dolan’s Sand at the northern end of the St Botolphs Deeps. Coxswain Macready throttled back from full speed of eight and a half knots to a cruising speed of about six and a half, and began the methodical zigzagging pattern of reconnaissance.

  Macready screwed up his eyes against the glitter of the morning sun on the sea. He noticed with a grunt of satisfaction that the crew had taken up their positions. Phil Davis, bowman, in the bows, and Pete Donaldson, radio/telephone operator, had squeezed himself into the narrow seat and was hunc
hed over the small radar screen which crackled and blipped. He was speaking now to the Coastal Rescue Headquarters at Breymouth on the Norfolk coast on Macready’s direction.

  ‘Breymouth coastguard, this is Saltershaven lifeboat. We have reached the suggested area of search. Proceeding on a southerly course adjacent to Dolan’s Sand and Haven Flats. Over.’

  ‘Saltershaven lifeboat, this is Breymouth coastguard. Message received and understood. Out.’

  Jack Hansard’s voice came on to the radio/telephone. ‘Saltershaven lifeboat, this is Saltershaven mobile. Message copied. Out.’

  ‘Pete,’ Macready butted in. ‘Ask Jack if he’s seen any more flares or received any further reports.’

  ‘Right, Mac’ Pete repeated Macready’s questions but the coastguard’s response was negative.

  The other members of the crew had stationed themselves at various points around the boat—each facing a different direction, each scanning his particular expanse of sea as the boat turned and turned again. All of them settled themselves for a time of concentrated vigil.

  Macready’s hands rested easily on the wheel, sure and steady, as he guided the Mary Martha Clamp through the maze of sand banks on the western coast of the Wash. He knew this area so well now, better than the place of his birth.

  Iain Macready had been born on Clydeside in the early nineteen-twenties, the son of a shipyard worker and a gentle-eyed kitchen maid. His father had been killed in an accident at work and his mother had died of influenza. So it had been left to his paternal grandmother to bring up young Iain. They had lived in a two-up, two-down terrace house, a street away from the docks, and dockland had been young Macready’s playground. His memory of his grandmother Macready, widowed by the First World War, was of a small, thin woman, dressed in an ankle-length black dress, with bright ebony buttons down the front of the bodice. Black ebony earrings dangled from her pierced ears and her grey hair was always stretched tightly back from her face into a bun at the back of her head. Her normal expression had been one of severity, but her lively sense of humour had often softened the lines of her face and made her dark eyes twinkle and her thin mouth quirk with amusement.