Review by Liz Dexter
Then there was Dungeness itself. True to its contrary nature, slack water came around the headland a couple of hours either side of the peak or trough of the tide. It was the difference between coming ashore cleanly onto the shingle or having to be dragged through the black silt of exposed mud flats; [the coxswain] also knew what a week of easterlies would have done to the sand and who had been laying lobster pots. He knew the beach like the back of his hand, just as he did the sea. He needed to, if he was to get us home safely. His care for his crew was never in question.
Dungeness is a strange place, right on the edge, with people’s mobile signal flicking between England and France. The book opens strikingly with author Gregory being pursued along the beach by a journalist demanding to know whether all lives are worth saving. Because, while most of the book relates Gregory’s career path: from applying to sign up and attending training right the way through to helming the lifeboat through the Channel on rescues, and the landscape and history that surrounds him, the latter part explores the effect of the increasing number of refugees in small boats who, exploited and abandoned, try to get across to England and need to be watched and/or rescued.
Gregory’s method for assembling the order and the content of quite a complicated and varied book made sense to me, examining Gregory’s surroundings, both the nature and the buildings, including Derek Jarman’s cottage, his colleagues and neighbours, his family and his development, fears and worries and all, and the history of the Dungeness Lifeboat itself.
You get lovely descriptions of the rather austere surroundings, and affectionate portraits of Gregory’s fellow lifeboat crew, most particularly the coxswain, Stuart Adams, mentioned in the quotation above. The community around them is lovingly described, too, from retired members of the crew – particularly the older women, who used to be responsible for launching the boat and bringing her back in – to families – his own wife more suited by temperament and practicality for the work but not keen on the sea – and the people who carefully donate biscuits and, later, jumpers and toys for those who float across from France with nothing.
There are, of course, distressing and grim scenes, coming mainly in the second part of the book; they are never gratuitous and never so detailed that you can’t face reading them. And Gregory is clear on the effect of deaths and drownings on the crew, needing time off or counselling among themselves. He explains to us that the crew are forced to make decisions on who lives and who must be allowed to die when confronted with overwhelming numbers of casualties after yet another over-filled boat is sent off from France to its doom; and that then, when he has struggled ashore, helped people get changed and dry, and sealed some into body bags, he must remove traces of RNLI uniform to prevent those who seek to criticise him for helping from seeing he is one of the helpers, something I think is absolutely dreadful.
A wonderful, timely, humane and honest book which is a powerful and moving read. I made a donation to the RNLI upon finishing it.
Liz Dexter grew up in Kent herself and remembers clearly being able to get French radio, helping with her O- and A-level work. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Dominic Gregory, Lifeboat at the End of the World: A Volunteer’s Story (William Collins, 2026) 978-0008736781, 336 pp., hardback.
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