Last winter JILLY COOPER visited {Hastings lifeboat station and recorded her impressions in her own inimitable wayI'VE ALWAYS thought the lifeboats the most romantic of charities. A lump comes to my throat when I think of the courage and gallantry of those little crews going out in nightmare conditions and literally snatching people from the jaws of death. 'It's the sort of charity', as a friend remarked, 'that you still support, even though your rich aunt has just left them all her money.' As last year the RNLI was celebrating its 150th birthday and nearly 100,000 lives saved, I went down to Hastings one winter evening to look at life on a lifeboat station.

It was a dark and stormy night... the waves boomed like 25-pounders on the harbour wall, and a force 12 hurricane howled round the houses waiting for a Christian name. I could feel it lifting my taxi off the road. Heaven knows what havoc it was wreaking on ships at sea.

Seagulls were being tossed about like pieces of rag on the jetty. Clutching on to a succession of bollards I reached the boathouse. Inside was the Hastings lifeboat's coxswain, Joe Martin—a man with bright blue eyes, bleached blond hair and a sardonic foxy face shining like copper with health. There was also a certain watchful tension about him. You felt he kept his peaked cap on even in bed.

Together we admired the lifeboat, gleaming dark blue and red and hanging from the ceiling like the whale in the Natural History Museum. She is named Fairlight, after a point on the Hastings cliff where the yellow of the gorse is so brilliant, it's a landmark ships recognise for miles around.

Her paint was immaculate. 'She gets constant touching up', said Mr Martin proudly. 'When she was new, we made the mistake of showing her off in the town carnival. All the children tried to throw pennies into her from the tall buildings—chipped more paint off her in an afternoon than the rocks do in a dozen launchings.' On the walls were photographs of seadogs and huge waves, and details of the 371 lives, including two dogs, saved by Hastings lifeboats. There were also maps of the coast with bizarre names like The Gringer, Pissy Mare and The Groyne. On the floor, a row of kinkylooking thigh boots, Mr Martin explained the procedure for a launch. 'We usually get a call from the Coastguard, saying he's seen a distress signal. The honorary secretary authorises a launch, the maroons are fired, and we all race down to the boathouse as quickly as we can. You can hear the maroons echoing tin tin tin between the hills—and if they don't wake you up, the seagulls will, screaming their heads off.' Wasn't he terrified of going out in bad weather ? 'You don't have time to think. The first hundred yards going into the water, and the last hundred yards coming back are the worst. Hastings, being shingle, is a very hard place to launch from.' There have been Martins in the Hastings lifeboat for many years. Joe's father did 40 years' service, and Joe, as a child, watched magnificent shire horses, now replaced by tractors, pulling the lifeboat into the sea. 'I remember the sparks rising in the dark, as their great hooves pounded and pounded, trying to get a grip on the shingle.' A tall, grey-haired man with very blue eyes and a smile that split his face in half came into the boathouse. He was Joe Adams, auctioneer at the local fishmarket and the lifeboat's honorary secretary. With him rests the agonising decision as to whether the lifeboat is sent out or not. 'Sometimes it's too bad for launching. I've got seven men in the crew, six of them married. I can't deliberately endanger their lives, but in the 14 years I've been honorary secretary the boat has only not gone out three times.' And if there was a distress signal tonight ? Joe Adams listened to the screaming and howling of the wind outside. 'Let's say it's a night when we hope that all's well.' Except for the coxswain, Joe Martin, all the lifeboat crew are volunteers.

Most of them are fishermen by trade.

There is never any shortage of members; people are queueing up to join. They have a really gruelling probationary period; by the time they are entitled to wear the navy blue RNLI jersey, they've really earned it.

Outside, the hurricane hurtled us past the smaller boathouse, donated by the Hastings and St Leonard's Muffin Club, and into the nearby Angling Club for a drink. Details of an annual cod festival and a forthcoming stag nite adorned the walls. I always knew you stagnited in the country.

More members of the crew joined us —nearly all with the same blond hair, ruddy faces and blue eyes. Several had rings in their ears. Good to hear, too, was the slow, measured way they talked, with an unconscious poetry—like Shakespearean sea captains. When they mentioned the sea, they lowered their voices, as though they were discussing an unpredictable boss, both loved and respected.

Some fearsome yarns were being swapped about battling through walls of water 18' high, with crews clinging like grim death to the handrails; and of the problems, once the wreck was found, of taking her people off without grinding the two boats together.

'Another problem', said Joe Martin, 'is when people want us to recover their boat as well, and refuse to leave it—like a mother clinging to her child. You can understand what they are going through.

You look at the boat and think what a tragedy to lose such a marvellous piece of equipment, but it's too rough to save it.' Were the victims always grateful ? 'Not always', said Joe Adams. 'We rescued a young girl recently. She'd been in the sea for hours. I took her home, my wife gave her a hot bath and a nightie and our bed to sleep in for 12 hours, and she walked off without a word of thanks. Ten days later she wrote us a marvellous letter.' Then with the understanding and compassion that seems to characterise lifeboat men, he went on: 'It's a combination of shame and shock— shame that they've put themselves in such a position, shock that they've been staring death in the face for hours. Then they're plucked out of the sea and find themselves in a strange world.' Hastings lifeboat averages about 12 launches a year; and sometimes it can ruin social life. The whole crew had to walk out of the Winkle Club dinner in the middle of a speech the other night', said Joe Martin.

Lifeboatmen seem to have a sixthsense which tells them when they might get called out: 'You get the feeling this is it, so you stick close to the boathouse.

Nothing to do with the weather—you'll go to bed on a wicked night like this and sleep like a child. Other days you'll be out picnicking, the sea's still as a mirror, but you'll be fidgety all afternoon, and sure enough in the evening there'll be a launch.' No summons disturbed the crew that night, and next morning the wind had blown itself out and the sea nosed against the shore as though butter wouldn't melt in its mouth.

Washed by wind, rain and spray, the town had a newly laundered look. Paint sparkled on the little red and white square houses, nets drying in the sunshine gave off a heady smell of tar, salt and fish. It had been the worst night in the area for years—40 trees had been blown down round Hastings.

Down at the Angling Club, groups of fishermen with reddish-blond curls and gold rings in their ears, looking as though they had just come out of the sea clutching a trident, sat round playing cards. Bad weather had prevented any fishing for the past two months.

I met the wives of two members of the crew in the boathouse: Christine Martin, Joe's wife, and Mary Shoesmith — her husband Bob, who runs a garage, is one of the two mechanics in the crew.

Some wives, they said, couldn't bear to come near the boathouse. Even on a calm day, the sight of the red stars of a distress signal would send them into a nervous sweat. Some, like Christine, can't keep away. 'As soon as the telephone rings, I get up and hand Joe his clothes as he dresses. I go straight down to the boathouse and wait in the op.

room to take care of the casualties when they come back.' Don't they get worried in bad weather ? 'Not really', said Mary, shrugging her shoulders. 'I'm more frightened when Bob goes out on the roads.' One felt, however, they resented their husbands spending quite so much time down at the boathouse. 'They can easily waste 24 hours a day down there, tinkering about with a boat.' And if they're not tinkering they are talking shop.

'When lifeboat men go on holiday', said Christine, 'they visit other lifeboat stations.' Seagulls were ravening and mewing outside. 'They be the souls of dead fishermen mocking us', said Joe.

Suddenly the telephone rang and Joe went to answer it.

'Could be a launch', said someone hopefully.

All round, members of the crew perked up—eyes bright. But it was a false alarm.

But what makes you so anxious to go out? 'Bob pretends he does it out of a sense of duty', said Mary. 'Actually, he likes the excitement and sense of adventure.' 'It's the exhilaration', agreed Joe.

'But most of us are fishermen, and patience is in our blood. One day you'll be battling with fog for 22 hours looking for a casualty, and just as you're frozen stiff and giving up hope, you spot them.

Just the look on their faces when they realise they are not going to die—that's enough.' In these times, it is rare to find people who are prepared to do something for nothing. Perhaps it is a lesson to all of us, that lifeboatmen derive from it such obvious satisfaction.

Reprinted by kind permission of 'The Sunday Times'..