Lifeboat at the End of the World

This is a personal account of the being a lifeboat volunteer and an insight into the crews who keep it afloat. Lifeboat at the End of the World is an astonishing lyrical and literary book about the experience of being a lifeboat volunteer, migration, the sea, Dungeness and more. Rather than offering a political opinion, Dominic Gregory writes about the reality of the RNLI, of saving lives. He details the smells of the station, the emotions when the call to ‘a shout’ comes, how they are trained, the ethos of the service, and what it’s really like to sail out in the middle of the night. He introduces us to the people he’s met in small boats, but also the crews, their families, and people they have met when bringing casualties ashore: the police officers, the Border Force officials, and the those who call the crew traitors for what they are doing. In focusing on the people of Dungeness, on people who have lived their for time immemorial, Gregory also sheds light on what it’s like to live in this south eastern extremity, on Derick Jarman and the nuclear power station nearby. He explores the idea of Dungeness being a liminal place: a place of migration for birds, insects and humans. It is a small place at the centre of one of the biggest political stories of modern times.