Lifeboat at the End of the World

Dominic Gregory

William Collins

£18.99

Dominic Gregory says little about his day-job or personal life only that he had come to live on the bleak foreland of Dungeness where he volunteered to join the lifeboat. Nothing in his background had prepared him for this. The training was thorough and methodical, the personality of the coxswain confidence-inspiring. Eventually Dominic became part of the sea-going crew. His writing about Dungeness itself is evocative, as is his description of the Channel, particularly the watery road that is the median line between the shipping lanes.

The narrative becomes unputdownable when he describes the daily rescuing of cold, confused and traumatised people from the deliberately unseaworthy migrant boats. ‘We are there to save lives and that is what we do.’