Diana has a sense of humour. As we pull onto her drive she’s standing on the threshold of her Hampshire home laughing at our attempts to park. ‘Mind my rockery,’ she jokes, indicating she doesn’t give two hoots about her rockery.

Her involvement with the RNLI spans more than 40 years. At 74, she is a committee member at Portsmouth lifeboat station but it was in 1978 that she came face to face with what the charity is prepared to do for a beloved but terminally ill spouse.

Diana met her husband Paul in 1960 while performing in amateur theatre. She was told that, being Spanish, he probably didn’t have much English: could she look after him? ‘I made a complete idiot of myself, speaking to him with incredibly accurate diction: he was too embarrassed to tell me his English was perfect!’ laughs Diana.

Within 6 months they were married, went on to have four children and made their home at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. Paul’s ‘other love’, as Diana chuckles, was the sea. ‘His great passion was sailing. He adored it. After travelling so much on business, he loved the freedom and the challenge.’

But in 1975 Paul was diagnosed with lung cancer. During the last year of his life, as he tried to accept the constraints of his illness, Paul sold his beloved boat. Yet, after only 3 weeks, he began to search for a replacement. Eventually he bought a junk-rigged sloop which he named Djong. Its self-steering vane meant he could manage the boat from the cockpit with no need to climb on deck to manoeuvre heavy sails.

Diana took Paul to collect the boat in Poole, expecting to meet the crew who would sail with him back to Bembridge. ‘Of course there was no crew. He was about to cast off alone.’ Diana panicked and rang Mike Attrill at the destination boatyard.‘Mike rang the Coastguard, who rang the RNLI, explaining that Paul was dying of cancer and was never going to make the trip. He just wasn’t. The RNLI said: “Don’t worry. We’ll shadow him all the way. We won’t interfere unless we see there’s a real problem.” So, Poole lifeboat launched, handing over at Hurst to Lymington lifeboat. And Paul nearly made it. He got as far as Ryde marina and collapsed.

’One of Mike’s team brought Paul home to Bembridge where Diana met him. She wrote to the two crews thanking them. ‘What really hit me was that not one of those men said: “Oh, for goodness sake, stupid idiot, blithering fool, what’s he doing? He’s mad!” They understood what he was doing and why. I just thought that was brilliant.

’At the time Diana wanted to do more than thank the crews but her priority was to care for her family. Now, 30 years after Paul’s death, and their children grown up, she is able at last to celebrate Paul’s life, and the RNLI’s good deed, by making a small ‘in memoriam’ donation and pledging a legacy of £10,000 in her Will.

When asked how she would like the legacy spent, she is emphatic: ‘I respect and trust the RNLI implicitly. I know that whether it buys welly boots or fl ares or crew training – great! It costs about £1,200 to train one crew member so how many lives are going to be saved because of that?