THE LIFEBOAT

Evening Star, Issue 20985, 26 December 1931, Page 12

THE LIFEBOAT

VILLAGE EPICS OF SACRIFICE Since ‘ The Times,’ in September, 1838, reported the story of the wreck of the Forfarshire there have been thousands of rescues effected by lifeboats and fishing craft, all of them ©pics of self-sacrifice; none of them either less or greater than the exploit of Grace Darling, whose rescue of part of the Forfarshire’s crew became famed throughout our island and the girl herself honoured even to the time of her death, when the beautiful monument of her recumbent figure, with an oar clasped across her breast was set up over her grave in the little churchyard near Bamborough, writes P.H.J., in the ‘ Manchester Guardian.’ There is a quieter heroism of women that rarely creeps into the stories which loom large in our morning papers after some gallant rescue. Recently our own lifeboat was out from 5 in the evening until 10 o’clock, and the village was a place of anxious waiting. The crew is made up from the village fishermen, most of them with wives and families dependent on them, many of them with a few grey hairs in beard and hair, all of them born and bred on the sea and aware of the risks on. a coast with as deadly a record as any in these islands. When the rocket signal goes up every heart in the village gives a leap, every task is set aside, and faces peer through the windows—women’s faces. The men, wherever they are or whatever doing, drop the task and begin to run towards the lifeboat-house, which is a little distance from the village; the tiny quay empties of bluejerseyed figures that have been standing in the lee of the cottages, watching the storm, for, even on the worst day, the men find some “ lew ” corner and watch the great rollers sweeping into the bay. Within a few minutes, often in what seems a miraculously short time, we hear the purring of the engine; the boat that seems so large in the house, but so small and lone in the great seas, drives past the village and all those watching eyes, and speeds away until it disappears from view.

WAITING. After that —waiting, and inquiries from any coastguard who may be passing. In time we learn where the endangered ship is; it may be three miles away or twenty, and until the lifeboat returns there is only one topic and one concerted thought in the village, ihe women whose men are in that boat go quietly about their tasks; but their eyes constantly seek the sea; those oldfashioned (pictures so full of pathos, that artists used to paint of waiting women were painted in hours like this or while the memory of such hours was still warm in their hearts. Sometimes the lonelier women cannot bear the waiting, and seek a neighbour s house, and friends hearten them by kindly words—the weather is quietening, the seas are not as heavy as when the boat was out last time, any little thing will serve-; but it is not until that unmistakable purring of _ the lifeboat s engine is heard returning that the strained look vanishes, and then the topic changes swiftly. Are the crew saved? Has the trip been in vain? The most bitter thing our village knows is when the lifeboat returns empty or brings back only the dead. The more you live with them the more the quiet acceptance of the inevitability of risking your lives for others is borne upon your soul, In at dropping of tasks and racing to be first at the lifeboat house catches some warm thread of the imagination; they may be running to meet death, they are certainly running to play a game of chance with it. Now and then you see a woman running, too, carrying a warm garment for her man, who has not been in the house when the call dime and had no time to return for any garment other than what he stands up in, and he may have been working “ light.” There may be hours of bitter cold and drenching seas. If the call comes in the night many of the men may he at sea, as has happened, and then a scratch crew > racetj, for the boat and anxiety is higher; our own boat, in the past, has put to sea with farmers and labourers amongst her crew. But the cox and second Icox are her brains; they knew every rock and reef and dangerous current, and to watch them peering through the flying scud of blown water, giving a quiet order now and then to which the boat responds like an orchestra to a master conductor, is to feel a pride that such men are neighbours and Iriends.