Lifeboat! (3 page)

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 grown 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.

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 hunched 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.

It had been a strict up-bringing for the boy, yet a happy one. It was not until years later that he realised just how hard his grandmother had had to work as a housekeeper in a smarter part of the town to give him the security he had then taken for granted. Her pride would not let her accept charity and that same stiff-necked pride had kept the young Iain in ignorance of the long hours she must have worked, for her own home had been spotless and her own person always neat.

The sea had called to Iain Macready from an early age. It was in his blood. His grandfather Macready—the descendant of an Irish emigrant in the potato famine of the eighteen-forties—had been drowned serving in the Navy in the Great War. It was in the air young Iain breathed, the ships coming and going an ingrained part of his boyhood. There was no other life for him but the sea.

At sixteen, he had signed on as cabin-boy and sailed away from the very docks he had haunted almost from the time he could walk. His grandmother had watched him go, her face giving no sign of her inner feelings. She was a woman who never outwardly showed emotion. If she had ever shed tears, it had been done in private.

Throughout the early months of the Second World War, the time which afterwards became known as the ‘phoney war'—commercial shipping companies attempted to carry on their trading as normally as possible. Young Macready, mostly at sea, scarcely realised his country was supposed to be at war.

On Monday, the eighth of April, 1940, the ship in which Macready had signed on as cabin-boy out of Leith a few days earlier docked in a small port on the western coast of Denmark and began to offload its cargo. Captain Sinclair spent much of that first day ashore making arrangements to take on a cargo the following day. That evening, when he returned to his ship, everything seemed as usual, as it always had been whenever they had been moored in this harbour …

At dawn on the following morning, the Germans launched an offensive against neutral Denmark and Norway. By the afternoon, the whole of Denmark had been overrun and the Danish Government had capitulated to the Germans. The British sailors, caught unawares by the suddenness of the attack, watched helplessly as, at gunpoint, the German soldiers confiscated all the navigational instruments from their ship and threatened the seamen with internment for the duration of the war.

Captain Telfer Sinclair, a dour Scot with a thick Glaswegian accent, cursed and stormed and kept his men on board the ship marooned in the harbour, virtual prisoners of the Germans. Nightly the Scottish sailors hung over their ship's rail, ridiculing the Nazi soldiers who strutted up and down the harbour wall on duty. Goaded by the tone of their voices more than by actually being able to understand the words, the sentries would level their guns towards the boat, the sailors would duck down and a volley of gunshot would fly warningly over their heads. As the echoes died away into the night air the Scots would sing out, ‘ Missed again, Fritzie!'