Lifeboat! Read Free

forthcoming.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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